And So To Murder (17 page)

Monica Stanton bought a box of fifty Player’s at the station tobacconist’s, and put it into her handbag without opening it.

Three-forty. Ten minutes to four. The hour itself. She was through the platform barrier the instant it was opened, and waited ten more mortal minutes before the departure of the train. At five o’clock she was put down, aching, in the stillness and cool at Pineham Station.

‘Punctuality,’ Mr Thomas Hackett had once said, ‘has been called the politeness of kings. It’s more than that: it’s plain good business. Now, I’m always punctual myself, and I can’t tolerate unpunctuality in other people. When I find it –’

The usual station taxi, which took you to Pineham Studios for the modest sum of one and sixpence, was missing. Monica set out on foot along the well-worn path over the open fields.

By the time she reached the grounds she was running. The shortest way down to the Old Building, she calculated, was to take the path behind the main building and go down over the lawns. She was hurrying along this path, which had the sound-stages on the left of it and a rail-fence on the right, when, abruptly, she solved one of the small mysteries which had been perplexing her since the start.

On the rail-fence sat a venerable-looking old gentleman, with grey side-whiskers and a cocked hat; he wore the scarlet-and-gold court-dress of the early nineteenth century, and was smoking a pipe. Beside him sat the Archbishop of Canterbury, reading the
Daily Express
. Three or four officers of the Scots Greys kept a respectful distance from them, and from two other men who stood in the middle of the path.

One was a short fat man with a cigar, the other a tall spectacled young man with an ultra-refined accent.

‘Lookit,’ said the fat man. ‘They can’t do this to me. What do you mean, we can’t shoot the Battle of Waterloo? We
got
to shoot the Battle of Waterloo. All we got to do is shoot the Battle of Waterloo, and the picture is finished.’

‘I am sorry, Mr Aaronson, but I am afraid it will be impossible. The British Army has been called up.’

‘I still don’t get it. What do you mean, “called up”?’

‘The British Army were real soldiers, Mr Aaronson, lent to us by the authorities. They have been called up for active service.’

‘What about the French Army?’

‘The French Army, Mr Aaronson, has enlisted for Home Defence. Napoleon is now serving as an Air Raid Warden.’

‘Well, Jeez, we got to do something! Get extras to do it.’

‘It would be difficult to train them at such short notice, Mr Aaronson.’

‘I don’t want ’em trained. I want ’em to fight the Battle of Waterloo. Lookit, though. Wait a minute. I got an idea. Do you think, maybe, we could finish the picture and just leave the Battle of Waterloo out of it?’

‘I fear it will be imperative, Mr Aaronson.’

‘Then here’s how we do it,’ said the fat man. ‘We do it symbolically, see? The Duke of Wellington is lying wounded on his camp-bed, see? He hears cannon. Biff! Bam! Zowie!’

‘Yes, Mr Aaronson?’

‘The tears are streaming down his face, see? He says: “There are the brave boys mixing it out there, and I can’t help ’em.” Maybe in his delirium he sees a vision of the future, see? Jeez, look! This’ll be artistic as hell. The Duke of Wellington –’

Monica Stanton stopped dead.

She only partly heard the fat man’s inspired words, just as she only saw him in connexion with another person. Along the path was coming the page-boy, Jimmy, who guarded the door to sound-stage number three. He was released from duty, and eating a chocolate-bar. Monica knew now where she had seen him before.

She manoeuvred him into a corner.

‘Jimmy,’ she said.

‘Yes, miss?’

‘Jimmy, do you know what my name is?’

‘Sure, miss. You’re Miss Stanton.’

‘Yes, Jimmy,’ said Monica. ‘But how did you know who I was three weeks ago, when I first came here? You were supposed to give a message to “the lady who came in with Mr Cartwright”: that was what it said on the blackboard. How did you know I was the lady who came in with Mr Cartwright?’

‘’Cos I sawyer come into the sound-stage with Mr Cartwright, miss.’

‘No, you didn’t, Jimmy.’

‘Miss?’

‘You weren’t in the sound-stage then,’ said Monica. ‘I know where I saw you. When Mr Cartwright and I got to the main building, you were just coming out of the canteen, eating a chocolate-bar.’

‘I dunno whatcher mean, miss. S’helpme, I don’t.’

‘Yes, you do. I remember now. You didn’t see us, because your back was towards us, and we went straight through. You couldn’t have seen us. So how did you know I was the lady who came in with Mr Cartwright, and how did you know what my name was?’

‘S’helpme, miss –’

Jimmy addressed the sky so passionately that the present chocolate-bar flew out of his hand. He regarded it with consternation; then he pounced on it and dusted it off. This, he felt, was the heaping measure of injustice. To bring up something that happened three weeks ago, which was as a thousand years into the dim past and which he himself had forgotten, was the sort of unfair trick they were always playing on you.

‘Jimmy, I’m not going to tell on you,’ urged Monica. ‘I know you aren’t supposed to leave the sound-stage, but I’m not going to tell anybody.’

‘I told Mr Cartwright the day afterwards –’

‘Never mind what you told Mr Cartwright. Come on, Jimmy. Tell me. I’m not going to tell anybody.’

‘Criss-cross and hope to die?’

‘Criss-cross.’

‘Well,’ said Jimmy, licking clean one corner of the chocolate-bar, and sullenly starting afresh, ‘I asked Miss Fleur. Crumbs, miss, I didn’t mean anything! I wasn’t gone more’n a minute or two. I came back, and there was the message, and how was I to know who you were? So I ast Miss Fleur. I met her over by Eighteen-eighty-two, and I ast her. She told me. She was drinking beer.’

‘She was drinking
what
?’

‘Well, she had a beer-bottle in her hand,’ Jimmy defended himself, ‘and she looked funny. I ast Corky O’Brien, did he think she was a secret drinker? He said he expected she took dope, more like. His old man’s a hop-head, so he ought to know.’

‘Jimmy!’

‘O.K., miss; skip it.’

The Rev. Canon Stanton had once preached a powerful sermon on the insidious influence of American talking pictures on the youth of Great Britain. Monica evidently did not share these views: she crossed Jimmy’s palm with silver.

Anyway, she had undoubtedly missed Messrs Hackett and Fisk now. She stood at the top of the hill, looking down towards the Old Building in the shallow green valley, and her feelings were bitter. She could not understand why it had seemed so very important to find out where she had seen that page-boy before. It had seemed so; for three weeks it had nagged at her subconscious mind; but why? After all, she did not suspect Jimmy of –

Of having poured fiery acid into her face, or fired a bullet at that face from a few feet away.

It was twenty minutes past five o’clock. Though the sky to the west was still clear and mellow, the Old Building had begun to retreat into shadow. Birds bickered in the vines outside it. This was the first time, it occurred to Monica, she had been at Pineham without having Bill Cartwright within call in case she needed help.

But there was Tilly: Tilly was a host in herself.

Descending the hill, Monica went into the Old Building. The writers’ rooms were in a corridor branching off immediately to your right as you entered the front door. You went up three indoor steps; and the corridor, brown linoleum and white walls, stretched away to an elm-shaded window at the far end. First there was Tilly’s room, then Monica’s, and then Bill’s.

Monica met nobody: the porter on duty in the lobby had gone. In passing she tapped at Tilly’s door, but she got no reply.

Her own office was also empty. It lay neat and swept and dusky in the afternoon light, with the gleam of the lake beyond the windows. The rubber cover was on the typewriter; manuscript lay in a trim sheaf held down by a book.

Monica glanced instinctively in the direction of the bullet-hole in the wall, which she had covered with a calendar. Then her eyes, deceived for the first time, flew back towards the typewriter.

There was something lying on top of the rubber. It was a squarish envelope, pink in colour, addressed with blue-black ink in a handwriting which was only too familiar. Evil, breathing malice as clearly as though someone had whispered aloud in the room, was another anonymous letter.

3

If Monica had been asked how she really felt about the persecution of the past weeks, she would have answered that she refused to think about it. And this in a sense was true. She did not think about it: she only fought it. Just as Miss Flossie Stanton could not have prevented her from writing the book she wanted to write, so her anonymous friend at Pineham could not drive her away from here.

But in her heart she was frightened of Miss Flossie. And she was a hundred times more frightened of the person who used sulphuric acid.

She went over to her desk, tore open the envelope, and read the letter.

Who was sending these things? What difference did that make? Somebody was; and the very feel of the letters to the touch was unpleasant. This particular one was no better or no worse than the first two, except for the last two lines.

It’s all up now. You will be seeing me soon in the flesh, Bright-eyes. And will you be surprised
?

For a time Monica did not move. Her cheeks felt hot and her heart had begun to beat with slow, heavy rhythm.

‘Tilly!’ she called out.

There was no reply.

‘Tilly!’ stormed Monica.

Still clutching her handbag under her arm, she went to the communicating door, tapped on it, and opened it. The other office was empty, but Tilly could not be far away.

A hissing, bumping noise of steam in a kettle issued from the partly open door of the cloak-room in the far right-hand corner of Tilly’s office. Tilly, as usual, was boiling water for one of her eternal pots of coffee. As usual, she had forgotten it: which she did on an average of half a dozen times a day, until a denser and more acrid cloud of steam warned her that she was burning the bottom of the kettle.

Monica went to the cloakroom, and turned off the gas-ring. The bottom of the kettle was not burnt through, though its metal, white-hot, had a powdery flakiness. Not a pleasant sight.

‘Tilly!’ Monica cried amid the steam.

She burnt her fingers on the kettle, and pushed it aside. In the wall over the gas-ring was a panel, once a service-hatch in the days when the Old Building had been a country house. Monica thought she heard a step outside it. She drew back the panel and glanced out, but there was nothing except the darkening corridor.

Monica left the cloakroom. This must stop. She must go up straight away to Mr Hackett’s office on the floor above (if he were still there) and apologize. This must
stop
. She walked back past Tilly’s desk in the middle of the room, and in doing so she bumped against the standing ash-tray which got in your way beside the desk. The ash-tray tilted and spun; its glass dish clattered; Monica caught it as it fell; and, in that flash of revelation, her heart jumped into her throat.

She was looking down at the half-open drawer of Tilly’s desk. Setting right the ash-tray, Monica first took a quick glance round, and then dragged open the drawer. There were some untidy typed sheets of manuscript inside, scored and interlined with corrections in blue pencil. One line of writing curved up and ran clear along the side of the paper.

Monica stared at that sheet of manuscript.

Then she picked up the sheet, and ran with it into the other room. Dumping her handbag on the desk, she put the sheet of manuscript on the typewriter. She held the anonymous letter beside it.

They were the same.

Tilly’s handwriting.

Very quietly, rather dazedly, Monica drew out the chair and sat down. She felt that she had to do something, to act somehow, against the nightmare that was closing in. She acted in a mechanical way to keep herself from thinking. Opening her handbag to get a handkerchief, her fingers slid over the cellophane wrapper of the box of cigarettes she had bought at the station.

Her eye next fell on the red-leather needlework-box, in which she kept cigarettes, beside the typewriter. She opened it. It was empty, and she turned it upside down to shake out a few loose crumbs of tobacco. She tore off the cellophane wrapping of the fifty Player’s, emptied them into the needlework-box, and, with prickling fingers, began to arrange them in neat rows.

Tilly Parsons.

She felt a slight shudder: the thing which is known as the sensation of someone walking over your grave. It might have been a real grave. Maybe it still would be. It had never once occurred to her to suspect Tilly. And, she thought with hot-and-cold satisfaction, it had never occurred to Bill Cartwright either. Even if he tried to get specimens of handwriting from everybody at Pineham, he would never even think of looking at Tilly’s.

It was growing darker in the room. She must get out of here. She must go somewhere.

‘Hello, dearie,’ cried Tilly in the flesh, suddenly flinging the door open with a crash, and bursting into the room. ‘Did you have a good time in London?’

4

Tilly, bright and alert as usual, gave evidence of having had her bobbed hair permanently waved that afternoon. Her wrinkled face beamed guilelessly at Monica.

‘Just hopped upstairs for a minute,’ she said. ‘I thought I put the kettle on before I left, but blessed if I can remember whether I did or not. I’ve been –’ She stopped. ‘Here, honey, what’s the matter with you? You’re as white as a ghost.’

‘Go away,’ said Monica. ‘Don’t come near me.’

She got up, knocking over her chair with a noise which sounded louder in her ears than it really was. Tilly’s voice went up a note.

‘What’s happened, honey? What’s wrong?’

‘You know what’s wrong.’

‘I swear I don’t, honey! Here, let me –’

‘Go
away
!’

Monica, moving slowly, had backed across the room until her hands behind her touched the sill of the window. The hoarseness of Tilly’s voice had reached a pitch which in her ears sounded horrible. Tilly waddled forward. Her eye fell on the two sheets of paper across the typewriter, and she stopped.