And So To Murder (25 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Yes: but if somebody had slipped a poisoned cigarette in there, there would have been fifty-one in the box. Wouldn’t there? So when you took a cigarette away from the store, that would have left fifty. Shouldn’t it? Yes. But when we counted ’em there were only forty-nine. Which means, my good fathead, that what you took out of the box was a perfectly harmless, ordinary Player’s cigarette; and that somebody deftly exchanged it for a poisoned one after you walked back into your office.’

‘Boloney!’ shrilled Tilly.

She was in wild earnest about this. She held up her hand.

‘Listen, Ancient Mariner,’ she said. ‘I’ll string along with you on the other things, but not there. Judas, I’m the victim! I ought to know, oughtn’t I? And the cigarette with that dope in it was the same cigarette I got out of the box in the other room.’

‘No, it wasn’t, my wench.’

‘But I was
smoking
the blooming thing! Can you tell me it could have been changed on me when I was smoking it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well?’

H.M. sniffed. He regarded his fingers disconsolately. Then he eyed Tilly.

‘You drink a lot of coffee, don’t you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Keep the kettle boilin’ all day? Forget about it and never notice until it starts to shoot out geysers of steam?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what do you do when you notice the place gettin’ full of steam?’

‘Why,’ said Tilly, ‘I go into the cloak-room and turn it off. I put down my cigarette on the edge of the standing ash-tray, and walk into the cloak-room, and …’ Tilly stopped. Her eyes widened, and grew fixed. ‘Sweet, suffering Moses!’ she whispered.

H.M. nodded.

‘Leaving the cigarette on the edge of the ash-tray,’ he agreed. ‘I knew you did by all the burns on the edge of it; and people here tell me they’ve often seen you do it.

‘Whereupon crafty Joe Gagern, who’s already pinched most of your Chesterfields when you walked out to the front door with Hackett and Fisk, simply walks in by the corridor-door. In his hand he’s got another lighted cigarette. That’s the whole trick – that one
lighted
cigarette looks exactly like another.

‘He switches the cigarettes and walks out again. They can’t see him in the communicating room because the door (as usual) is closed. You can’t hear him because the floor is brick covered with linoleum. You come back; and, seein’ a lighted cigarette, naturally think it’s the one you put down. The beauty of that scheme bein’ that the very victim herself thinks it’s a cigarette she got from the other room.’

Tilly seemed hypnotized.

Again she made a gesture of protest.

‘But all that,’ she insisted, ‘depends on getting me out of the office and into the cloak-room? Doesn’t it?’

‘Sure.’

‘It depends on the kettle boiling over,’ demanded Tilly. ‘But how could he know the kettle would boil over just as soon as I came back with my cigarette?’

‘Because,’ returned H.M., ‘all he had to do was reach through the service-hatch and turn up the gas.’

H.M. glared at them.

‘I hope you people haven’t forgotten that, in the wall of the cloak-room, just over the gas-ring and communicating with the corridor outside, there’s an old service-hatch.’ He peered at Monica, who did remember it very vividly. ‘Don’t under any circumstances forget it. It’s the key to Joe Gagern’s scheme. It was his observation-post and his listening-post. From that hatch-window he could hear every word his victim said and follow every move she made.’

There was a silence, after which Bill Cartwright swore with such comprehensiveness that Monica shushed him.

‘Of course,’ pursued H.M. drowsily, ‘Joe had been plannin’ it for days or even weeks. He’d been goin’ about with that cigarette in his pocket, waiting for the proper time.

‘On Wednesday afternoon, Joe and Bill Cartwright left my office at half-past four – we’ve established that. We’ve later been able to check up on his movements. He excused himself to Cartwright, saying he was goin’ to meet his wife. He didn’t; he left a message for her at the Excelsior Club, and came straight out here.

‘He hadn’t necessarily established that he was goin’ to act on that night. He was goin’ to hang about and see whether the right opportunity might not bob up. And then he had to act. Why? Because, lurking as usual, he discovered that Tilly was winding up her last sequence and was going back to America. Whereupon Joe Collins Gagern von Elbe made his last, worse bloomer. He couldn’t let her go, and shudder back into safety again. He’d become just a little loony on the subject of the woman who was ruining his peace of mind. So the fool had to go and do it. He let the trap spring, he switched the cigarettes, and he walked straight into my lovin’ arms.’

Again there was a silence. Mr Hackett automatically handed round fresh drinks; and the spirits of the company, damped for a time, began to rise again. Tilly Parsons chuckled. She surveyed H.M. with real interest.

‘You know,’ she observed, ‘you are a crafty old son of a so-and-so, Ancient Mariner.’

‘I’m the old man,’ said H.M., drawing himself up with dignity. ‘And anybody who tries to pull the wool over my eyes because he thinks I’m shakin’ and dodderin’ my way down into the House of Lords … cor! I could chew nails every time I think of it. Still, I expect’ – he peered at them over his spectacles – ‘I expect you’re all feeling a little better, aren’t you?’

‘Ever so much better,’ said Monica, fervently and happily.

‘What about you, son?’

For answer Bill again set Monica on his lap, squared his shoulders, accepted a drink, and prepared to talk. For fully an hour he had been obliged to keep more or less silent, and he was now ready to give his eloquence a really satisfactory gallop.

‘Relief,’ he said, ‘I confess to be the second most dominant feeling in my life at the current time. The first and most dominant feeling I need not mention, since it will be obvious to all right-minded people. At the same time, sir, I confess that as yet I am far from thoroughly satisfied –’

‘Bill!’

‘Light of my life,’ he said, putting his finger on her ear and tracing the line of it, ‘you have got the wires crossed. That too I admit; but, curiously enough, I was not referring to it. I mean that at least one point in the evidence has not been satisfactorily cleared up. What in blazes happened to that film?’

‘Eh, son?’

‘The missing film. The exterior shots that have been causing half the row here. Where are they? Who took them? Did Gagern do it, to lend colour to his story? Or what happened?’

Mr Hackett drew himself up.

‘The matter,’ he said rather grandly, ‘has been satisfactorily adjusted. We have them back, I am glad to say.’

‘Yes, I gathered that. But where were they? What happened to them? Doesn’t anybody know?’

‘Efficiency,’ said Mr Hackett, ‘by which I mean real, true efficiency, has always been the watchword of Albion Films. That’s what I told Mr Marshlake; and it will, I know –’

‘Tom, come off it.
What happened to that film
?’

Mr Hackett told him.

4

And so the shortening evening drew in across Pineham asleep, and a wind rustled among yellowing trees, and a brilliant moon rose over the sound-stages.

Monica Stanton and Bill Cartwright, at a restaurant in town, were deciding that in these days there was no reason why Cornwall shouldn’t do just as well as Capri for a honeymoon. Frances Fleur was at another party, drinking orange-juice and talking to a Scandinavian tenor whose top-notes could break a window at twenty yards. Thomas Hackett was happily in the cutting-room. Howard Fisk was explaining the finer points of tacting to his new find. Tilly Parsons was packing her bags at the Merefield Country Club; and, it is to be feared, crying a little.

But, though quiet, Pineham was not altogether silent. As the great moon rose in majesty above the sound-stages, its benevolent rays illuminated the heads of two men who were standing in the main drive.

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. ‘It’s a knock-out! It’s stupendous! It’s gigantic! It’s colossal! Jeez, it’ll knock every box-office for a loop from here to South Bend, Indiana.’

‘I am gratified to hear you say so, Mr Aaronson.’

‘Boy,’ said the fat man, ‘you ain’t heard the half of it. Lookit. Did you see the final rushes yesterday?’

‘No, Mr Aaronson.’

‘Lookit. It’s the end of the Battle of Waterloo, see?’

‘Yes, Mr Aaronson.’

‘And the Duke of Wellington is lying wounded on his camp-bed, see? And Sam McFiggis, see, he writes us a swell poem to go with it. It starts, “For I slipped into the future, far as human eye could see –”’

‘“Dipped,” Mr Aaronson.’

‘What do you mean, “dipped”?’

‘“Dipped”, Mr Aaronson, not “slipped”. I fear Mr McFiggis is not the author of the lines. They are from Tennyson’s
Locksley Hall
. The text runs:

‘For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that
would be,
Saw the heavens –’

‘O.K., O.K., if you say so. But lookit. Here’s the Duke of Wellington, see? Close-up, and slow fade-out. I thought that was the end of the rushes. Only it wasn’t. It fades in a big picture of Portsmouth navy yard.’

‘Of what, Mr Aaronson?’

‘Ain’t I telling you? Of Portsmouth navy yard. Then a close-up of Winston Churchill, with a derby hat on, smoking a cigar. Everybody in the projection room, see, starts to cheer and applaud and holler –’

‘But, Mr Aaronson –’

‘I’m telling you. Then some of the swellest action-shots you ever saw. Battleships in action; close-ups of guns; planes diving; boats laying mines across some funny-looking harbour. Boy, was it a honey, or wasn’t it?’

‘But, Mr. Aaronson –’

‘Well, when we’d been watching it about ten minutes, I leans over to Oakeshott Harrison and says, “Lookit,” I said, “it’s swell. It’s stupendous! It’s colossal! But there’s too much of it. Can’t you cut it down a little bit?” And he says, “Mr. Aaronson, I will not tell you a lie.
I
didn’t shoot them scenes.” I said, “You didn’t?” He says, “Mr Aaronson, to be perfectly frank with you, I don’t know what they’re doing in the picture at all.” – Can you imagine that?’

‘Yes, Mr Aaronson.’

‘And, then, see, in the middle of it, in comes Tom Hackett of Albion Films. And he starts to jump up and down and holler, “You stole my exteriors; you stole my exteriors.”’

‘And had you, Mr Aaronson?’

‘Jeez, no! But lookit. I’ll be a son of a gun if they didn’t turn out to be his after all. Can you tie that?’

‘Yes, Mr Aaronson.’

‘You think maybe there must have been maybe a mistake somewhere?’

‘I consider it extremely probable, Mr Aaronson.’

‘Well, it’s all right. Because it gives us the idea, see? We’ll get our own shots, and we’ll put ’em straight in the picture, see, and, boy, will it be a honey or won’t it? But lookit. I don’t get this. How do you suppose the shots got into our picture, anyway?’

‘I dare not venture a guess, Mr Aaronson. I should say that it was just one of those things that happen in the film business.’

The fat man drew a deep and happy sigh. Radiant was the moonlight; radiant was the future; radiant was the world.

‘Boy,’ he said, ‘you sure said it. You sure got something there. It’s just one of those things that happen in the film business.’

A SIR HENRY MERRIVALE MYSTERY

‘Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but
Mr Carr’s always do’

Agatha Christie

No one expected a clergyman’s daughter from East Roystead to author a scandalous bestseller, but when Monica Stanton published
Desire
she quickly got hired at Albion Films. Expecting to adapt her own work, she is instead assigned to help scriptwriter William Cartwright adapt his latest detective novel. Almost immediately, a series of mysterious attempts on her life begin, and the flamboyant Sir Henry Merrivale is called in to investigate. But can he see through the intrigue to seek out the perpetrator before it’s too late?

T H E   L A N G T A I L   P R E S S

w w w . l a n g t a i l p r e s s . c o m