Minute for Murder

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Title Page

  Chapter I

  Open New File

  Chapter II

  Action Here

  Chapter III

  Passed to Mr. Strangeways

  Chapter IV

  Reference: Miss N. Prince

  Chapter V

  Director: Urgent

  Chapter VI

  Mr. Squires: Your Comments Please

  Chapter VII

  From: Mr. Billson

  To: Deputy Director

  Chapter VIII

  (1) Mr. Strangeways: To See

  (2) Mr. Ingle: To Discuss

  Chapter IX

  Reference: Mrs. Lake

  Chapter X

  Major Kennington: Most Secret

  Chapter XI

  Put Away

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The Second World War has just finished and amateur detective and poet Nigel Strangeways is working at the Ministry of Morale in London, in the Visual Propaganda Division. With war over, life seems to be calm again, that is until the Director’s beautiful secretary is poisoned in full view of seven members of the division, including Nigel himself. Who could have killed her? And how?

  About the Author

  Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

  During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  A Question of Proof

  Thou Shell of Death

  There’s Trouble Brewing

  The Beast Must Die

  The Widow’s Cruise

  Malice in Wonderland

  The Case of the Abominable Snowman

  The Smiler with the Knife

  Head of a Traveller

  The Dreadful Hollow

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  End of Chapter

  The Worm of Death

  The Sad Variety

  The Morning After Death

  CHAPTER I

  OPEN NEW FILE

  THE CLEANER ROSE from her knees, collecting bucket, brush and duster, and creaked towards the door. There, as usual, she turned, beamed, said, “Ta-ta, Mr. Strangeways, be good,” before clanking off to do the Deputy Director. Mrs. Smith had been above herself ever since, two years ago, a popular actor had given a radio talk about a Mrs. Smith, a charwoman with gouty knees and a lion heart, who cleaned her Government office while the bombs whistled round her ears, and represented all the indomitable charwomanhood of Great Britain going about its task with a heartbreak in its collective bosom and a racy Cockney joke on its lips. Mrs. Smith had taken the tribute as a personal one, treating her Government gentlemen thereafter with an easy camaraderie for the higher grades and a certain hauteur for the lower.

  Nigel Strangeways, as usual, blew the dust off his desk, and emptied yesterday’s cigarette stubs out of the window. It was nine in the morning. He liked to start work early, before the telephone and his colleagues could interrupt. Until ten o’clock the Ministry of Morale would be silent, but for the clankings of the Mrs. Smiths and the furtive scurryings of a few conscientious junior officers not yet affected by the slackening of morale which had set in since V.E. Day. Nigel drew out a sheet of draft photo-captions, composed by Brian Ingle.

  Swift and inexorable as a sheaf of arrows flung from the hand of Nemesis, he read, these Spitfires are pranging German rail traffic concentrations in the Gelsenkirchen area.

  He altered “pranging” to “attacking.” He scribbled in the margin, “Arrows are not flung by hand.” He glanced at the photograph to which the caption was keyed and added, “They are Typhoons.” Good old Brian, he thought: incurably inaccurate; invincibly romantic; never at a loss for the wrong word, the muddled metaphor—what should we do without him? Poor old Brian, after five years of it still bringing to the labours of caption-writing the same luscious and uncritical enthusiasm which before the war had made him the ace novel reviewer of the Sunday Clarion. Clever of Jimmy to pick him for the job. But Jimmy was clever at picking his staff. That’s what made him a first-rate Director. “No,” he had said firmly at the start, “I don’t want advertising men for my Division. I want people who believe in what they are saying. We shan’t sell this war to the public with our tongues in our cheeks.” And how right he was. When Brian Ingle told the public that a squadron of Spitfires (or Typhoons) were a sheaf of arrows flung from the hand of Nemesis, the public believed him, the appropriate response was registered once again: a just war. Nigel took his indiarubber and rubbed out “Arrows are not flung by hand.”

  The door opened. A Messenger shambled in, his arms heaped with files and letters. As usual, he looked helplessly about him, then moved with the compulsive gait of a sleep-walker to Nigel’s desk, placed a selection from his burden in the Out-tray and remarked dismally that it was a beautiful morning for the time of year. As usual, Nigel moved the pile of documents from the Out-tray to the In-tray. Yes, it was a beautiful morning, he agreed, glancing at the rent in the opaque material which the Office of Works had pasted over the window frame when the glass was shattered by a flying bomb.

  “We’ve not seen the half of it yet,” said the Messenger darkly.

  “The half of what?”

  “You mark my words, sir. When peace comes, as you might say real peace, there’ll be chay-oh in this country. Proper chay-oh.”

  Nigel translated rapidly to “chaos.”

  “What makes you think that?” he asked.

  “Stands to reason. Millions of young men trained to kill—proper artful too; look at these here Commandos and such, unarmed combat my eye, plug ’em in the tripes with a tommy-gun more like—well, they comes back, and what do they find?”

  “Chay-oh,” replied Nigel involuntarily. “That is to say——”

  “You said it. Missus gone off with a chap, couple of extra nippers in the house, some embuskay sitting on his fanny in your job—what do you do? Stands to reason. Start shooting. Violence begets violence—see Aldous bleedin’ ’Uxley. Millions of ’em. Now after my war,” continued the Messenger, indicating the 1914–18 medal ribbons on his dark-blue uniform, “it was different. All killed off we was. What come back, we’d ’ad enough: anything for a quiet life. Cowed, that’s what we were. You may think it a ’arsh saying of mine, sir, but this war hasn’t killed off enough, not on your bleedin’ puff it ain’t. Now take this ’ere demob scheme.”

  After ten minutes of social analysis, the Messenger nodded morosely to Nigel and ambled out, dropping in the doorway a large envelope marked with a red “Most Secret” tab, two files and a pink letter addressed to James Lake, Esq., C.B.E., and giving off an unofficial perfume. Calling back the oblivious Messenger, Nigel restored the large envelope and the files into his arm
s. The letter he decided to deliver himself: it would give him an excuse for a chat with Our Blonde.

  Our Blonde, as the Director’s personal secretary, Nita Prince, was called throughout the length and breadth of the Visual Propaganda Division, represented visual propaganda at its full range and dizziest peak. She combined, as Merrion Squires, the art-work Specialist, put it, the crude appeal of the poster, the mystery of the isotype, the glamour of the glossy studio portrait, the golden mediocrity of Brian Ingle’s captions. In the tradition of the Visual Propaganda Division, she concealed high efficiency beneath a studied vagueness, amateurishness, insouciance. When Nigel entered, she was pecking helplessly at an In-tray brimming with documents, her bright hair tumbling over her face.

  “Hallo, Nita.”

  She straightened up from bending over the desk, a tall, smooth-limbed creature, and gave Nigel the full benefit of her morning make-up.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Look at this In-tray. I sometimes wonder why we go on at all.”

  “We go on because the British people, having unsheathed the sword, will not lightly sheathe it until, shoulder by shoulder with our gallant allies, we have slashed off the last hydra-head of the totalitarian aggressor.”

  “If you ask me, we don’t sheathe it because a sword is a damned sight more difficult to sheathe than to unsheathe—you watch ’em trying to do it on the stage. What’ve you got there?”

  Nigel held up the pink, perfumed envelope.

  “Another love-letter for the boss. Old Kirby dropped it in my room.”

  Nita Prince’s ravishing face gave no hint of emotion, not even that faintest smirk of self-satisfaction which reveals the woman confident in her own power against all competitors. She was reaching out for the letter when the telephone on her desk rang.

  “Hallo. This is V.P.D. Yes? . . . No, the Director is in conference, I’m afraid. I’m his secretary. Can I help you? . . . Oh, Mr. Snaith. Good-morning.” Nita Prince rolled up her eyes in a look of mute long-suffering at Nigel, and holding the receiver away from her ear, fished in her bag for a cigarette. Nigel lit it. The telephone crackled and gobbled.

  “Well,” said Nita, when it was silent for a moment, “we’re getting on as fast as we can with your folder. We should be able to show you pulls in a fortnight’s time.” The telephone came back with an atmospheric storm. “Yes, we quite appreciate the urgency. It’s too bad your having to wait so long,” replied Nita, in a voice like molten honey, “but there was a difficulty over a canned photograph: the Censor has not yet released it . . . What? . . . No, the Naval Censor. Your Censor, Mr. Snaith”—Nita put out her tongue at the invisible Mr. Snaith, who was momentarily silenced. The atmospherics started again.

  “Oh, that’s another matter. You should really speak to the head of the Editorial Unit about that.”

  Nigel made for the door.

  “An incompetent bungler? Oh, come, Mr. Snaith! Perhaps you’d like to have a word with him now; he happens to be in the room . . . No? . . . Well, I’m afraid the Director is very busy to-day. Let me see”—without referring to her engagement book, Nita reeled off a list of the Director’s commitments. “To-day doesn’t seem possible. And to-morrow . . . oh, you can’t manage to-morrow? Well, perhaps we’d better leave it then. You can rely on us to fulfil our dates . . . Yes, it’s going very nicely. The wholesalers have ordered just over 700,000 copies already, and it’s being translated into six, no eight foreign languages, I believe. . . . Yes, we’ll keep you informed. Good-bye, Mr. Snaith.”

  “The human calculating machine,” said Nigel. Then, obscurely feeling the remark to be a shade off-colour, “I just don’t know how you keep all those statistics at your finger-tips.”

  “Oh, I forget nothing. Born that way.”

  “What’s Snaith fussing about now?”

  “That new job in the Pacific series. Silly old hen. These Public Relations Officers ought to be blotted out. And Snaith’s the worst of the whole bunch. A flea in your ear on the telephone, and a pinch on the bottom when he pays a personal visit.”

  “If I was a naval rating in the Pacific,” said Nigel dreamily, “I shouldn’t want a folder full of pictures of bamboo huts and potted Melanesian history, and how to be tactful with the natives; I should want a folder full of huge great pictures of whopping great pin-up girls. Like yourself.”

  “You’d better discuss your change of policy with Jimmy, then,” replied Nita, smiling faintly. “And I wish you’d go away. Haven’t you any work to do? Let’s have that letter first.”

  Nigel flipped it on to her desk. At the door, he turned round. Nita was staring at the letter, where it lay, with a frozen look, as though it were some venomous tropical spider suddenly appeared on her desk. She quite noticeably refrained from touching it. Her fingers were locked rigidly in her lap.

  “It won’t bite,” said Nigel from the door.

  Nita Prince started. “Oh, damn you, Nigel! Do get out or come in properly. I can’t bear people standing in doorways. . . . Sorry, I’m fussed this morning. That pestilent Snaith.”

  Oh, no, thought Nigel, you’ve been dealing with Snaiths for nearly six years and not turned a hair. It’s the letter. And as you haven’t opened the letter, it’s the handwriting on the envelope. Someone has written to Jimmy who shouldn’t be writing to Jimmy. Someone out of your past life, perhaps? Well, let it go. It’s not my business.

  But Nigel’s inveterate curiosity about other people’s lives would not let it go. It was the first time he had seen the ravishing and all-conquering Miss Prince thoroughly shaken. Even during the summer of the previous year, when flying bombs passed as frequently as a suburban train service over the Ministry of Morale, and the top storey of the building jerked and swayed with their explosions, she had remained at her desk, taking down minutes, soothing ruffled telephone-callers, enclosed in her usual aura of invulnerability. “Any sensitive bomb,” Merrion Squires had remarked, “would think twice before making a date with Our Blonde.” But Squires, as he was the first to admit, did not believe in blondes, on principle.

  Sitting in his own room again, mechanically glancing through a MS. entitled The War Story of our Four-Legged Friends, which had been sent to the Minister by an optimistic animal-lover with the request that it should be published at the Government’s expense, fully illustrated (“I have some perfectly sweet snaps of my own doggie, Mopkins, who has been on Active Service throughout the blitzes, always barking to warn me when the sirens went”), Nigel reflected how little he really knew about his colleagues. From 1940 till a few months ago, they had all been working their heads off—anything from ten to fourteen hours a day—all, that is to say, but Edgar Billson, one of the permanent Civil Servants on the staff, who knew his rights and departed, bowler hat, umbrella and brief-case (empty) sharp at five every evening. But, slogging away like that, year after year, though your fellow-sloggers became as familiar as the face of your watch, their private lives, like the works of the watch when it is in perfect running order, were not disclosed. One knew that Merrion Squires disbelieved in blondes; that Brian Ingle had a weak heart; that Edgar Billson lived at Pinner; that Jimmy Lake was married to a nice quiet girl who gave him his head. But, now that the worst was over, such scraps of information were not enough for Nigel’s inquiring turn of mind.

  For instance, was Nita Prince Jimmy’s lover? The Division, for the most part, assumed that she was. But Nigel had been much too busy to find out, and too tired to care. And had Brian Ingle, who treated her like the Holy Grail, any conception of the human being she really was? Had Nigel himself, for that matter? And why did Harker Fortescue, normally an uncompromising, rough-tongued man, fail to discipline Merrion Squires, who so often spoke to him disrespectfully in the presence of junior officers? And was Edgar Billson as pompous at home as in the Ministry?

  I shall start a new file, said Nigel to himself: a Most Secret file; a dossier on the Division. I shall see how much, during the few remaining months I have to stay in Government service
, I can find out about my colleagues. And I shall put it all down in my Most Secret file. And, the day I go, I shall burn it. It will get my hand into practice again. The hour may yet strike when I shall be dabbling once more in crime. Though God forbid!

  To him, at this auspicious moment, entered Brian Ingle. A smallish, fattish, fairish man, he gave the impression of always going through life at a trot. He trotted up to Nigel’s desk and all but wagged his tail.

  “Oh, yes, your captions,” said Nigel. Ingle’s brown eyes began to sparkle with a dotty kind of enthusiasm. “I’ve suggested one or two alterations. Those aircraft are surely Typhoons? And——”

  “Of course, of course,” interrupted Brian Ingle breathlessly. “But you like them? On the whole? Up to standard, you think? Not just a leetle too, ah, rhetorical?”

  “No, they’ll do very well. With the alterations I’ve suggested,” added Nigel firmly.

  Brian Ingle, he knew by experience, was in love with his own words. All of them. For ever and ever. He was quite capable of putting them back at final proof stage. It was quite a game between him and Nigel: Nigel had, in fact, invented an elaborate procedure for counter-checking final proofs, largely in order to block this manœuvre of Ingle’s.

  “What amazes me is how you keep it up.”

  Ingle perched himself on the edge of Nigel’s desk.

  “Keep it up?”

  “Yes. The German War over, and you turn out captions about it still with all the sacred fire of 1940.”

  “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

  “No. What I mean is, no one’s going to be interested in this D-Day to V-Day production. The subject is dead. The public are sick of stories, photographs, exhibitions, films about the war. We’re only going on with the production because the Service Departments can’t fight down their lust for publicity—a lust we ourselves, I admit, were first responsible for provoking in them; or rather, they can’t bear the thought of another few hundred tons of paper not being wasted in the good old Service way, and—where was I?”

  “You’d better not let Jimmy hear you talking like that.” Brian giggled. “But seriously, if you mean why do I go on putting my best into this show, when there’s nothing but paper in the house—I say, rather an appropriate metaphor that! . . . Well, I suppose the answer is that I enjoy writing. Writing anything.”