Minute for Murder Read online

  “Precisely. But after a bit this person to whom I have alluded came back with a request for another class of photograph. Photographs showing detail of secret apparatus—radar devices on aircraft, for example. I protested vigorously. I pointed out that, if such photographs got into the hands of enemy agents, they might reveal vital information. You will appreciate, gentlemen, when I tell you who this person was, why it had not yet dawned upon me that he was an enemy agent himself.”

  “Oh, do let’s stop all this circumlocution,” said Nigel impatiently. “It’s quite obvious that the ‘certain person’ is our esteemed Deputy Director.”

  The Sergeant taking down Billson’s evidence snapped the point of his pencil and swore under his breath. Blount bounced in his chair, as if a small charge had exploded beneath it. Billson showed his teeth in a rat-like grimace and nodded. Harker Fortescue, his face still grimy from the fire-fighting, gazed coldly at Billson, saying:

  “Don’t be a prize ass. Look here, Superintendent, I’d better explain——”

  “We’ll come to you later,” said Blount grimly . “And I must warn you now that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence. Now, Billson, will you be prepared to swear on oath that Harker Fortescue was the person to whom you supplied negatives of the Q photographs?”

  “Yes. With pleasure.”

  “Never mind about the pleasure. Get on with your story.”

  When Fortescue had asked for a second selection of security-censored negatives, Billson continued, he began to entertain the gravest suspicions of him. But he himself was now in the toils. Having already supplied one set, he had laid himself open to the charge of complicity in a very serious offence. Besides, he was still badly in debt, and his creditors were putting on pressure—and, in short, he succumbed to the temptation. Imagine his consternation when Fortescue told him, the next day, that four of these negatives had been ruined: a V.2 had fallen in the vicinity of Fortescue’s house, and the concussion had spilt a bottle of acid over them in his dark room. Fortescue, he asserted, had made no further requests for negatives thereafter: Billson imagined he had been frightened off. Transactions between them had then ceased and no mention of the secret photographs was made.

  “Until you started trying to blackmail me about them,” interrupted the Deputy Director.

  “I object to that term,” said Billson.

  “Now, at last, we know what you and he were quarrelling about in his room, at lunch-time, three weeks ago,” said Nigel.

  “My financial position had become—h’rrm—somewhat embarrassing again. I decided to ask the Deputy Director for a loan.”

  “‘Ask for a loan’ is good,” drawled Fortescue. “You threatened me with exposure, and I pointed out that if I went to the Tower, you’d certainly go with me. You were in a cleft stick, my poor Billson, and you knew it. Even if it hadn’t got as far as a trial for high treason— and it wouldn’t have—your conduct would certainly have had you shot out of the Civil Service. I was not a Permanent Civil Servant, so why should I worry?”

  “You——! “Billson came out with a string of abuse more fitted to the race track than the Conference room. “You dragged me into this! Why didn’t you take the negatives yourself? It’d have been simple enough. You have a key to the Q annexe.”

  Nigel leant forward eagerly. Much depended upon the answer to this hysterical question.

  “There are a number of possible reasons,” Harker Fortescue drawled, his fishy eyes dispassionately fixed upon Billson. “Perhaps I was afraid you might catch me borrowing the negatives. Perhaps I wished to test the integrity of one of my subordinate officers. Perhaps I was just pulling your leg.”

  Billson swore at him again, foully. Blount, who had astutely decided to let the pair rip, now interposed.

  “This is all vairy instructive. But I think you had better get on with your evidence, Billson. When did you first plan to get rid of Mr. Lake? Was Fortescue your accomplice in that, too?”

  From the back of the building they could hear the occasional shout of a fireman, and the rattle of the appliances. The fire had been under control when they entered the Conference room, and it should not be long now before it was extinguished.

  The crisis had come, said Billson, when Strangeways put in an order for several prints, amongst which was a Secret photograph whose negative was one of the four destroyed in Fortescue’s dark room. Billson had stalled as long as he could. But, when the Director sent a peremptory order that the prints in question must be supplied within twenty-four hours, he was in a most dangerous predicament. He could probably explain away the disappearance of one negative—it might have been mislaid or lost. But the search for it would inevitably reveal that three others were missing. M.I.5 would certainly be brought in, and Billson admitted he was in a panic lest the investigation should then disclose the treasonable purposes to which these negatives had been put.

  His first thought had been to destroy the PHQ file without which a check of these particular photographs would be at least seriously hampered. But he found that this file had already disappeared.

  “What’s that?” exclaimed Blount. “You did not take the file yourself?”

  Billson strenuously denied it, and Blount failed to shake him on this point. Nigel felt sure Billson must be telling the truth: having confessed so much, it was inconceivable he could be lying about the file. And it was after the murder of Nita Prince that the Director’s hue and cry about the missing file had started. Nigel had not time to pursue this thought further, for Billson was now accusing Fortescue of having made away with the file.

  “Of course he must have. He stood to lose as much as I did, if the whole business came out.”

  On the afternoon of Miss Prince’s death, Billson continued, he began to fear that the Director was hot on the track of the missing negatives. Jimmy Lake was kicking up a great fuss about the file, throughout the Division; and that he should do so only a few hours after his secretary had been murdered, at a time when so terrible an event might have been expected to drive everything else out of his mind, seemed to argue that his gravest suspicions had been aroused in the matter of the Q photographs. But the Director, as far as Billson knew, was the only person in the Division who could have any inkling of the real truth. His confidential secretary was dead: the Deputy Director—the only man whom he would consult at this stage—was not likely to give anything away. If the Director were silenced, investigation into the Q prints would go no further: would go no further, at any rate, provided that his death could be thrown upon someone else.

  Billson accordingly laid his plans to implicate Merrion Squires. His discovery of Squires some time back, in the act of slashing Miss Prince’s coat, put the idea into his head. He typed the note to Merrion, signing it with Nigel’s initials, to ensure that he should be on the Ministry premises that night; took Merrion’s knife and white coat: the Director had already told him he was going to work late, and it was generally known in the Division that, when the Deputy Director worked late, he took a break in the canteen about eleven o’clock. Billson said he had first intended to wear the coat when attacking the Director. But then he feared that, even in the pitch-dark room, it might show up. So he left it outside the door. When he realised that the knife had not done the job instantly, having heard Jimmy Lake stir and seen a strip of light appear beneath the door, he did not dare enter again. Listening at the door, he heard Jimmy telephone. He then picked up the coat, raced for the lift, pressed all the buttons to delay those who were coming up, ran downstairs into the lavatory a floor below, made a cut in his leg and let some blood fall on to the sleeve of the coat, which he then hid where he hoped it would soon be found. He knew that his own blood was of the same group as the Director’s, both having volunteered for the Ministry’s blood-transfusion scheme. He had finally walked down to the ground floor, entered one of the rooms on the front of the building, and jumped into the street through a window. As he walked away, he had seen the Messengers pouring out to
form a cordon: it had been a narrow escape for him.

  During this stage of Billson’s confession, there were points where Blount had to press him pretty hard. But on the whole it flowed freely. And Nigel imagined this was so because, Jimmy Lake now being out of danger, Billson had no murder charge to fear, while in the matter of the photographs he had aimed to turn King’s Evidence, and thus receive a more lenient sentence. Presumably he had a fair chance of this, for without his evidence a treason charge against Fortescue could not possibly stand. But, if Billson confessed to the attack on Jimmy simply because it had been unsuccessful, he must logically be innocent of the murder of Miss Prince, if the poison she drank had been intended for Jimmy. The last thing Billson would do, had it been he who poisoned the coffee, would be to confess so readily to a second attack on the Director.

  Blount was now taking Billson through the events of to-day. The Director’s instructions that the Q files were to be checked did not come as a surprise to him. It was inevitable, since Jimmy was still alive. But the pretended arrest of Merrion Squires for the attack on Jimmy, and the withdrawal of the police from the building, had persuaded him that he was under no immediate suspicion in the matter of the Q photographs. Moreover, the Deputy Director had said that the PHQ file had been found again, and a check of the photographs would be easy. He decided that the Q files must be destroyed—he did not think he could rig them to stand investigation by M.I.5. An accidental fire? The idea of fire put a whole scheme into his head. He knew that Harker Fortescue had a practice incendiary bomb in his cupboard—a souvenir of his A.R.P. instruction days. He was burning to get his own back on Fortescue; determined that, if he himself had to be ruined, he would drag Fortescue down with him.

  He called at the house of Solly Hawks, to arrange that an alibi should be set up for the night’s work, and to borrow a revolver in case Fortescue should try to interfere. He had previously made sure that Fortescue would be sleeping, as in fact he usually did, at the Ministry. He had gone into Fortescue’s room, taken the incendiary bomb, and also taken a small fountain-pen-size torch from one of Fortescue’s desk drawers, intending to drop it in the Photographs Library as a faked clue against the Director. Then he had gone into the annexe and waited. This accounted for the period of inactivity which had surprised Nigel. It was essential to Billson’s plan that the fire should not break out before Fortescue arrived in his room; otherwise he might have an alibi for it. Billson had waited till he heard footsteps in the passage, crept into the ante-room to make sure Fortescue was in position, then returned and set off the bomb in a heap of the Q negatives. At one stroke he hoped thus to destroy the evidence of the treason against himself, and to throw the guilt of the arson on the Deputy Director. If an investigation into the Q photographs could get anywhere, with the evidence destroyed, it would only be Fortescue’s word against his own. And it would be Fortescue who had incriminated himself by setting fire to the negatives, while Billson would have an alibi for the night supplied by some accommodating friend of Solly Hawks.

  “I was only obeying his instructions, after all,” Billson concluded. “He had told me to get rid of the evidence.”

  “What the devil is he talking about now? This gets crazier and crazier,” said Fortescue calmly.

  “You know well enough,” replied Billson, glowering at him. “During the Progress Meeting, just after you’d announced there was to be an examination of the Q files, you turned to Commissions Pending. You repeated the phrase and then said the police would be withdrawn from the building this afternoon. And you added that those of us who were left could get on with our work in peace. I suppose you’ll deny this was your subtle way of conveying to me that I could set to work at once on destroying the Q file evidence.”

  “I certainly do deny it. Never heard such nonsense in all my life.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Blount, “it seems to me you have a good deal of explaining to do. You are at liberty, of course, to refuse to answer questions before obtaining legal advice.”

  The Deputy Director looked steadily at Blount, at Nigel, at the venomous face of Edgar Billson, in turn. When he spoke, it was in the trenchant, almost autocratic manner with which he was wont to address his subordinates on the more official occasions.

  “It would be perfectly open to me to deny the whole thing. It is Billson’s word against mine; and one is not likely to give much credit to the word of a self-confessed murderer—or would-be murderer. Apart from this, there is not a shred of evidence against me. Nor would you ever find it. You and M.I.5 could work yourselves black in the face trying to discover any contacts of mine with the enemy, any evidence that I passed on secret information to them. You’d never find it. Because I didn’t However, I do not propose to deny the whole of Billson’s statement. What I would like to know”—Hark’ee’s eye twinkled for a moment—“is how Strangeways picked on me as the sinister Mr. X whom Billson kept hinting at.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Nigel appeared to be studying a chart on the opposite wall, which illustrated the public response to the Eat More Potatoes campaign. His eye still fastened upon it, he said.

  “It’s probably as true as any other generalisation that every collector is a potential criminal. No doubt a great number of them are actual criminals. I wouldn’t know. Blount, you’d better ask the Deputy Director to say a few words about his collection of filthy pictures.”

  If a Superintendent of the C.I.D. could ever be said to gibber, Blount gibbered now. Hark’ee stroked his bald head, grimy from fire-fighting still: his thin mouth twitched.

  “Strangeways is an extremely useful member of my staff,” he said: “it is fortunate that he has such a good memory. This isn’t the first time I have profited by it.” He then proceeded to relate his version of Billson’s story.

  After explaining to the Superintendent the nature of his collection of “feelthy peectures”—that gallery of the Great in unguarded moments and ill-considered postures, which he had described to Nigel one night in the canteen—he went on to tell how it had occurred to him to adorn this gallery with selections from the policy-censored Q photographs. He had been far too busy himself to examine them for suitable material; so he had thought, why not put Billson on to it? At the outset, it was a pure fantasy thought. But the idea of the correct and rigid Billson searching his files for photographs of the Great in, so to speak, undress—this idea so tickled Hark’ee that he did approach Billson, “just to see what he’d say, really.” To his surprise, Billson consented, demanding to be paid a certain sum for each print; he, Billson, would make the prints himself, as he did not care to let the negatives out of his possession. Harker had not told Billson why he wanted the photographs. After a bit of haggling the bargain was sealed.

  Hark’ee, thinking it over, found his suspicions aroused by Billson’s ready consent, no less than by his demand for money. He made a few tactful enquiries, and learnt that Billson was an habitué of the race tracks. Now, strictly speaking, what his officers did in their spare time was no business of the Deputy Director’s, provided there was nothing illegal about it. But it occurred to him that an officer of the Ministry, whose conduct suggested that he might be in debt, and who was responsible for the safe-keeping of secret photographs, might conceivably be a source of disquietude. So he decided to test Billson’s integrity by asking him to supply a set of security-censored photographs, showing certain secret apparatus. Billson had at first refused, with a great show of righteous indignation. But presently he gave way, stipulating that he would not make the prints himself but only “lend” Hark’ee the negatives, and that a high price must be paid for the loan.

  At this point, said Hark’ee, he had suddenly realised that Billson had suspected him of being an enemy agent from the start of the transactions. He now agreed to Billson’s terms. Two sets of negatives were “loaned” to him. When some of the second set were accidentally destroyed, he perceived that things had gone too far. What had begun as a joke, and continued as a test of Billson’s
integrity, might now, if the facts came out, put Hark’ee himself in an awkward position. “The mists of collector’s mania cleared away for a moment, and I saw how very odd the whole thing would look to an outside observer,” was how he put it to Blount.

  He had at once called off the transactions. He had not paid, and had no intention of paying, the high sums demanded by Billson for the two last sets of negatives. And it was this refusal that was the subject of the quarrel between them, overheard by Miss Finlay. On the other hand, knowing that his own share in the transactions would be difficult and embarrassing to explain, and feeling that—unreliable though they had proved Billson to be—it would be “a bit low” to expose Billson now on this account, he had not passed on the facts to the Director.

  “Ah,” Blount interrupted. “That’s a crucial point. You divulged the facts to no one else.”

  “No one. I told Billson—that was the day after Miss Finlay overheard our little dispute—told him the truth, why I’d asked him for the pictures, and made it clear to him that he’d have to watch his step in future. And the silly ass didn’t believe a word of it——”

  “Bluff! Who’d believe a cock-and-bull story like that?” exclaimed Billson viciously.

  “You see? He still doesn’t believe it. He’s got it into his thick head that I’m a male Mata Hari, and nothing’ll ever get it out now.”

  “You have no means of proving your story, I take it?” asked Blount.

  “None at all. Except that I can show you the prints in my private collection. But no doubt you’ll tell me this might only be my shop window, and I’d been passing other copies under the counter to our late-lamented enemy.”

  The Superintendent faced him formidably.

  “You are not well advised to treat the matter lightly, Mr. Fortescue. You may be telling us the truth. You may not. You can be sure that if there have been any contacts between yourself and enemy agents, it will be brought to light now. There will be a most stringent investigation into your movements throughout the war, and before it. But, if you are proved innocent in this respect, you must still realise that your actions have been indirectly responsible for an attempted murder, for the destruction by fire of Crown property—and, it may be, for the death of Miss Prince.”