Minute for Murder Read online

  “So Hark’ee told him not long ago. Funny how one always takes things metaphorically nowadays. When Miss Finlay overheard Hark’ee telling him he could go to the dogs for all Hark’ee cared, I never thought of the literal meaning. Hark’ee must have known about Billson’s passion for gambling.”

  “Aye, that’s how it started, no doubt. Billson got badly into debt, and one of his race-track friends was a bad lot—in touch with enemy agents, and Billson began selling them prints of those secret photographs of yours. I suspect that he must have accidentally destroyed the negative of the one you’ve been fussing about, while making a print from it: others, too, maybe: he’d never be fool enough to let the Germans have the negatives, when he might be called on to produce them here any time. Well, we’ll get it out of him all right.”

  “If he hasn’t taken fright.”

  “Not he. Our little act this afternoon was bound to put him off his guard.”

  “And what about our visit to his home this morning?”

  “Oh, I talked to him about that earlier to-day. As I expected, he told the same story as his wife. Said he’d been at the Stadium last night, and didn’t want it to get round the Ministry. Gave me the names of one or two witnesses. No doubt he did go there earlier in the evening, and slipped out. I pretended to swallow it. Said I’d have to check up on his story, of course. Apologised for the tale I spun his wife about the wallet—aye, the fellow had the audacity to tell me he’d a good mind to have an official inquiry launched into my methods. He’s got some nerve, under that pasty face of his.”

  “Well, I wonder what he’s going to do with his nerve to-night. If he comes.”

  “He’s going to try and rig those Q files so that M.I.5 don’t find anything wrong with ’em.”

  The telephone rang again. It was the mobile patrol following Billson, to say that he had stopped at the house of one Solly Hawks: Solly, Blount explained to Nigel, was an unamiable character, well known to the police, who had been boss of a racecourse gang, served a sentence for gravely injuring a bookie, and was now believed to be mixed up with Black Market activities.

  “What exceedingly low friends our Edgar has got,” said Nigel. Then presently, “You know, Blount, there’s one thing that’s been puzzling me. That Secret file. Secret files are always circulated under cover: in an envelope, that is, with a red tab on them. How on earth could Billson know that the envelope in Jimmy’s In-tray contained the file he wanted to get rid of?”

  “Yes, I thought of that, when I was having a chat this afternoon with your Investigations Officer. In fact, he told me that no one else had called for the file that day, which is a bit awkward.”

  “It is indeed,” said Nigel. “The only way Billson could have known the file was on its way to the Director, was if he had rung up the Registry to ask for it himself.”

  “Oh, well, it’ll all come out in the wash, no doubt,” said Blount.

  They continued a desultory, whispered conversation in the dark. Nigel felt his nerves strung tighter. Any moment now. Would their trap be sprung, though? If Billson did enter it, he wouldn’t escape as he had escaped the previous night, anyway: the exits from the Ministry were well covered, this time—Blount had seen to that.

  Suddenly, without warning, like the blink of an eye, the passage lights went out. Someone had come up the stairs, in uncanny silence. Blount was at the barely-open door. Nigel could just hear the faintest pad of footsteps outside. They passed the door. And then the first unexpected thing of that very surprising night happened. A door further down the passage opened, and they heard the intruder moving about, not in the Photographs Library, but in the Deputy Director’s room. There followed a sound like that of a drawer being opened.

  “Did you see who?” whispered Nigel in Blount’s ear.

  “No.”

  A minute later, they heard the footsteps moving back through the ante-room, into the passage again; the sound of a key turning, another door opening. Yes, he had gone into the Photographs Library now, by the door opposite the ante-room. Acting on their preconceived plan, Blount and Nigel stole out. There was a second door to the Photographs Library, at the other end of the passage: Blount had a key to it, and had taken the precaution of oiling the lock earlier that night. Nigel crept towards the door by which the intruder had entered the Library and put his ear to it. He heard, as he had expected, an inner door closing. The intruder had entered the Library annexe where the Q photographs were stored. Nigel moved back along the passage very slowly, step by step; felt for Blount; gripped his elbow. Very. very slowly, Blount inserted his key in the door, turned it, and silently, inch by inch, pushed the door open.

  They were in their stockinged feet. They crept into the Photographs Library, feeling their way along the nearest filing cabinet in the pitch darkness. These steel cabinets, their sliding trays each containing sets of photographs in foolscap envelopes, were arranged transversally across the long room, with aisles between them. Peering round the end of their cabinet, Blount and Nigel were looking down the central aisle, the door of the Q annexe directly opposite them, at the far end. They could see a sliver of light now underneath this door.

  They paused there. And then the second unexpected thing happened: which was, that nothing happened at all. The partition wall between the annexe and the Library proper was so thin that any movement in the annexe could not fail to have been heard by them. Yet the anticipated sounds, of metal drawers sliding open, of feet shuffling around the annexe, simply did not occur. The intruder appeared to be sitting in there, doing nothing at all; or maybe he was reading an improving book, or going into a trance, thought Nigel irritably.

  Blount touched his arm. They began to creep towards the annexe, one on each side of the aisle, feeling their way cautiously across the gaps between the ends of the ranks of steel cabinets, in case any stools had been left lying about in their way. After what seemed to Nigel a large segment of eternity, they had got half-way down the long room. It was like some game of musical chairs in slow motion: at any moment the annexe door might open, a torch flash into the Library; and they must be hidden behind one of the ranks of filing cabinets if that happened.

  But still nothing happened. The person in the annexe might have been dead, for all the sounds of activity that could be heard. The pair began to creep forward again, only to dodge back behind the cabinets the next moment, for the whine of the lift came to them through the silent building, and then the noise of the lift doors opening, and then footsteps advancing firmly up the passage at a normal gait—the new-comer must have switched the passage lights on—and entering the ante-room; and a door was banged shut, either Jimmy’s door or Hark’ee’s.

  It was extremely disconcerting—this altogether unfurtive new arrival. It seemed to make nonsense, to make farcical melodrama of their present proceedings, thought Nigel. But now, as if those inappropriate footsteps had lifted a spell, the light in the annexe went out, the annexe door opened and feet whispered through the darkness, moving towards the Library door, which was very quietly opened. Nigel cursed the steel cabinet, which cut off his view; for, in the light from the passage, he could otherwise have seen who it was. After about thirty seconds, the Library door as gently closed again, then the annexe door, and beneath it the sliver of light reappeared. Billson, Nigel assumed, must have crept out for a moment to assure himself who it was that had just entered the Director’s ante-room. Cautious bloke, Billson. No, he wasn’t being so cautious now. At last, from the annexe, the long-expected sound was heard of metal trays sliding open, and, with it, a noise half-way between a rustle and a crackle. Negatives, said Nigel to himself, advancing more rapidly now, under cover of that noise, towards the annexe door, keeping pace with Blount on the other side of the aisle.

  They had reached the last of the rows of cabinets between them and the annexe, and Blount was about to cross the intervening space, when a new noise came to them—a sort of plop and hiss, startling and somehow venomous—and the light beneath the annexe door
suddenly intensified so that it resembled a rod of white-hot steel. The next instant there came a violent whishing and crackling, and at the same moment the annexe door flew open and a figure appeared there, outlined against an inferno.

  “Edgar Billson! I——”

  Blount dodged back behind a steel cabinet just in time. The figure, now at the Library door, had whipped out a revolver and fired. The bullet, with the sound of a steel wire breaking under high tension, twanged diagonally across the room and slammed into a cabinet behind Nigel. The Library door banged shut.

  “Get this fire out! I’ll follow him,” shouted Blount, darting to the door, turning on the switches, then disappearing into the passage. Nigel could hear the blasts of his police whistle, and footsteps pounding down the emergency staircase to his right, where so often the staff had hurried downstairs on the approach of a flying bomb.

  He raced for the Deputy Director’s room, cannoned into Harker Fortescue in the doorway.

  “What the devil? Who’s been shooting?”

  “Fire in the annexe, Hark’ee! Get those fire buckets at the end of the passage! Got to telephone! With you in a minute!”

  Nigel plunged for Harker’s telephone. . .

  “A.R.P. Control! Jump to it! . . . Lewis? Strangeways here. Fire on the sixth floor. Bad one. Send some Messengers up to help with the buckets—there’s only two of us. Send for the fire brigade. And get that mobile pump out into the back courtyard—play the hose up—you’ll see the blaze all right, don’t worry. O.K! Get cracking then!”

  He ran back into the Photographs Library. Harker Fortescue was in the act of hurling a bucket of water into the heart of the flames: as he did so, the magnesium-white centre seemed to burst open and send feelers out in every direction.

  “My God!” exclaimed Hark’ee, reeling back from the doorway, “that’s an incendiary in there, I’ll swear. Water’s no good. Get the sand buckets.”

  They raced to the end of the passage and fetched them. But the heat from the blazing piles of negatives prevented them from emptying the sand over the fire’s centre, and the flames were now dribbling out everywhere, leaping on to furniture and black-out curtains, fanned by the draught between door and open window.

  “It’s no good,” panted Nigel, drawing Hark’ee back. “Lewis is sending up some chaps to help with the buckets. Stay here and direct ’em, will you? Stop it spreading into the Library, if you can. That’s the best we can do, till the Fire Brigade comes.”

  Nigel knew he could safely leave it to Hark’ee, who had been a part-time A.R.P. instructor during the early blitzes. He tore down the passage, reached the lift just as Lewis’ reinforcements were coming out of it at a sedate jog-trot—the fastest gait at which he had ever seen a Ministry Messenger proceed, and took the lift down to the ground floor.

  In the lobby by the Reception Desk, a small mob of Ministry staff was collecting, talking excitedly, and getting in the way of the fire-pump team Lewis had gathered, who were trying to ram their way out into the back courtyard where the mobile pump was housed. A policeman recognised Nigel and forced his way to him through the crowd, shouting “Stand aside, please! Stand aside! Break it up!”

  “Have you seen the Superintendent?”

  “No, sir. Heard his whistle, though. All our men are on the alert. We’ve got the exits covered, and the patrol car is shining its headlights along the front of the building.”

  “Good-oh. Don’t let any one out.”

  Nigel leapt on to the Reception Desk, bawling for silence.

  “Any ex-fire-watchers here? Ministry ones?”

  Six or seven men stepped forward.

  “Follow me.”

  Nigel led them swiftly downstairs to the basement floor, along the catacomb-like passages, till they reached the foot of the emergency staircase. They were now at the back of the building.

  “Two of you stop here. Nab any one who tries to go up or come down. If it’s Mr. Billson—know him? Right—watch out. He’s armed. Come along, the rest!”

  Blount’s whistle was blowing again. Nigel ran towards the sound. He found Blount, panting, dishevelled, but intact, at the entrance of the basement sleeping quarters, fifty yards away.

  “I’ve got him cornered in here. He ran this way. We’ll beat him out now.”

  These sleeping quarters, where many of the Ministry staff had slept during the blitzes, were a series of rooms, divided up by blast-baffle walls so that they formed a kind of underground maze. The walls were still lined with two-tier wooden bunks, and a few of these were still occupied by old habitués who had not grasped that the German War was over—or else their own houses were in ruins and they had nowhere else to sleep. Here and there a face looked out from under the blankets, muttering bilious curses against the disturbers of the night’s rest, as Nigel’s party, reinforced now by a couple of policemen who had come in response to Blount’s whistle, proceeded methodically to comb the labyrinth, two men having been left at the entrance to stop Billson’s retreat if he tried to double back.

  It was easy to see how Blount could have lost his man here. The blast-walls made these underground rooms as intricate as the wards of a key. One man could dodge another here till Kingdom Come. But he couldn’t dodge a whole search-party, sweeping cautiously yet inexorably forward, examining every bunk, scrutinising each occupant to make sure that their quarry was not foxing under the blankets, switching on the lights in each successive compartment so that in the glare of the unshaded bulbs the whitewashed walls more than ever resembled the walls of some labyrinthine catacomb.

  It was only a matter of time now. And a question whether, coming round one of the blast-walls, you might not be picked off by a bullet. Billson’s revolver presumably had at least five left, thought Nigel queasily. But the party reached the last compartment, after Blount had peered very cautiously indeed round the end of the blast-wall. And the compartment was empty.

  “Damn it, it’s impossible. He must be here. This is a dead end.”

  “No, sir,” said one of the fire-watchers. “Emergency exit in the wall. Behind that bunk.”

  Blount plunged for it. The bunk was dragged aside, revealing a metal plate, rather like an oven door, in the whitewashed wall. Blount depressed its handle, pulled, then pushed: the door swung outwards into darkness.

  “What’s outside?”

  “Back courtyard,” replied the fire-watcher.

  Blount struggled through the hole in the wall. Nigel came behind him, and in a moment was gazing at a remarkable scene. In the centre of the courtyard stood the Ministry’s mobile fire-pump. Lewis, at the branch, was directing a jet of water at a sixth-floor window: it was as though the flames were trying to climb out of the window, and the steely arm of water to push them back. At the same time a clanging could be heard from the street at the far end of the courtyard; and a policeman unlocked the gate in the ten-foot-high iron railing which separated the courtyard from the street. The gate swung open to admit the approaching fire engines. And, as it did so, Nigel realised that this was what Billson must have been banking on if he had come out through the emergency exit. The air was full of shouting and clanging, the drumming of the mobile pump’s engine, the hissing of the hose. The eyes of Lewis’s men and of the approaching firemen were fixed on the blaze overhead. Then, in the sudden glare of the fire-engine’s headlights as it turned in from the street, Nigel saw a figure slinking along by the railings towards the open gate. Blount saw it in the same instant, yelled, and ran towards the gate to shut it. But it was nearly a hundred yards away, and Billson was only twenty yards from it, and Blount had not yet, in all this clamour, attracted the attention of the policeman at the gate.

  Nigel snatched the branch of the hose from Lewis, leant all his weight on it as the pressure of the water tried to buck him off the hose, and swung the jet down and round in a streaming arc. Billson was now ten yards from the open gate, silhouetted against the fire-engine’s headlights. The jet seemed to feel for him, to waver, then to leap at him. Bi
llson was dashed against the railings by the jet’s pressure, and pinned there, spread-eagled and impaled on a quivering spear of water.

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in a Conference room on the ground floor of the Ministry. Edgar Billson’s pallid face emerged from a chrysalis of blankets: the fight had been knocked out of him by the hosing which had saturated his clothes: his eyes, watery enough at normal times, seemed to be swimming now with exhaustion and self-pity. Nigel had asked Blount that the Deputy Director should be present at the questioning of Billson, ostensibly on the grounds that a senior Ministry official should hold a watching brief in the matter of the Q photograph files.

  Blount had charged his prisoner with arson, and given him the official caution. Edgar Billson—the old Billson so familiar as a champion obstructionist, an arguer of every toss, a professional splitter of the hairs of procedure—was hardly recognisable in this shivering creature before them. He did not even claim his right to legal advice. He was evidently determined to make a full confession. And he announced this determination with a vicious look at Harker Fortescue which confirmed the theory that had taken shape in Nigel’s mind.

  Rather more than a year ago, said Billson, he had sustained a series of gambling losses and fallen heavily into debt. Not long afterwards he had been approached by a certain person, with the suggestion that he should “lend” this person from time to time the negatives of any particularly interesting photographs in the Q files. Small sums were to be paid in cash, for the loan of each negative, and the negatives to be returned on the following day.

  “The name and address of this person?” asked Blount.

  “I shall come to that later,” replied Billson in a voice which almost seemed to gloat. At first, he continued, he had not suspected anything wrong, for the negatives requested had been of the type censored on policy grounds, not on security.

  “You mean, an official photographer snapped some Allied Leader with his pants down? That sort of thing?” asked Nigel.