Off the Record (25 page)

Jack recalled himself to his social duties. ‘I won’t give anything away,’ he said with a smile, taking the cocktail Stephen Lewis offered him. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

The music came to an end. The flat was solidly built and he could hear nothing from the next room. Maybe the quarrel would come to his aid. He wanted that talk with Ragnall and, if things went badly, Ragnall would probably be looking to enlist sympathy. Not tonight, not with Lewis there and – if things were patched up – Carrington as well, but tomorrow, perhaps. Bill said that he was sure Ragnall was holding something back. Not only that, but Ragnall thought Carrington was guilty. Real or imagined, Ragnall might have some actual knowledge. If it had got to Carrington’s ears, it would account for his furious letter.

‘Put another record, on, Ferguson,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ve had a half a dozen new pressings from the factory today. They’re in the box by the side of the machine.’

‘New records, Captain Lewis?’ said Babs Soames-Pensford. She sighed wistfully. ‘What an exciting life you have. I expect you know all the band-leaders, don’t you?’

‘Some of them,’ said Lewis. ‘Why don’t you help Ferguson choose a record?’ he added gallantly, to her obvious pleasure.

‘There’s not a bad selection here,’ said Ferguson, opening the box and looking through the records with Babs Soames-Pensford. ‘All single-sided, I see.’

‘Yes, they’re new,’ said Lewis in an abstracted way. He was clearly thinking about what was happening in the next room, too. ‘Just play one, Ferguson, will you?’

‘Now this is the stuff to give the troops!’ Ferguson drew a record from its paper sleeve. ‘Jack Hylton.
Mama’s Doing It Now!
’

‘I do like Jack Hylton,’ said Babs Soames-Pensford happily. ‘He’s too shattering for words.’

Ferguson jerked
That’s My Hotsy Totsy Bon Bon
from the turntable and put it on the piano. Jack winced. For someone who was so positive about the joys of recorded music, Ferguson was horribly heavy-handed with the disks.

‘Jack Hylton,’ said Ferguson knowledgeably over the music, ‘knows how to get a true jazz sound. It’s all a question of technique. What it needs is the singer to stand close to the microphone and sing into it, rather than bellowing away like someone at a Sunday concert, trying to get his voice to carry to the back of a hall—’

He stopped short as a loud crack rang out. The Soames-Pensfords gave a squeal of surprise. Jack Hylton played on, loud in the listening silence.

Molly Lewis made a little noise in the back of her throat. She looked at Lewis, her eyes wide and her face suddenly pale. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing, I expect,’ said Lewis, in a blustering let’s-pretend-everything’s-fine way that was more alarming than any amount of honest concern. ‘It must have been a backfire from a car. I’ll just take a look and see how old Gerry’s getting on.’ Jack made to follow him to the door but Lewis stopped him. ‘Keep an eye on things in here, old man,’ he muttered.

‘These
dreadful
cars,’ said Mrs Soames-Pensford to Molly Lewis. ‘It sounded exactly like a gunshot, didn’t it? Why, you look quite upset, my dear. It’s too bad. Something really should be done. Only the other day, I was crossing Piccadilly and a car made such a
frightful
bang I honestly thought my last moments had come. I was so shaken the policeman on point duty had to catch hold of my arm to steady me.’

Jack strained to hear the voices in the hall. Gerard Carrington, indignant, Stephen Lewis a brief, indistinguishable low rumble.

‘Actually hold my arm!’ continued Mrs Soames-Pensford. ‘I was so grateful, because I’m sure I would have fallen without his aid. I said, “My good man . . .” She carried on speaking but Jack wasn’t listening. The drawing room was at the back of the flat and looked out on to gardens. He supposed it could have been a backfire, but . . .

Lewis put his head round the door. ‘Haldean, can you come here? Ferguson, you too.’

There was a shout from the next room. Lewis spun round and ran, followed by Jack, Hector Ferguson and Molly Lewis.

In the study, Gerard Carrington knelt by the sprawled body of Hugo Ragnall.

It was like a bad dream. It was only a second or perhaps part of a second but Jack saw the scene as if there had been a flash of lightning. Gerard Carrington’s ghost-white face, Hugo Ragnall’s outstretched hand, loosely holding a gun, the absolute knowledge that Hugo Ragnall was dead. And in the hall, unable to see into the study, Mrs Soames-Pensford, kept up a steady flow of complaint about cars.

‘Gerry,’ said Lewis, his voice hoarse.

Carrington stood up and backed away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I’m not doing this. I’m not. Not prison. Not again.’

With an explosion of movement, Carrington hurled himself forward and snatched the gun from Ragnall’s hand. He was shaking, Jack noted mechanically. Carrington’s fear was so strong he could almost smell it. Holding the gun in a trembling hand, Carrington pointed it at them. ‘Let me out.’

‘Gerry, you can’t do this,’ said Lewis in a bewildered way.

Sudden fury transformed Carrington’s face. ‘Can’t I?’

Jack moved forward and the gun pointed waveringly at his stomach.

‘I’ll do it!’ Carrington’s voice was sharp with terror. ‘Steve, stay where you are!’ The muzzle of the gun suddenly seemed huge. Stephen Lewis moved again and Jack saw Carrington’s knuckles whiten.

‘Stop!’ he yelled.

Lewis froze and Carrington’s knuckles relaxed.

‘Let me out,’ Carrington repeated. With his back to the bookshelves that lined the wall, he inched his way towards the door, the gun fixed on the men opposite.

‘Stand away from the door,’ Jack shouted to the women crowding the entrance. ‘He’s got a gun. Stand right away.’ He knew just how dangerous a gun in the hands of a badly frightened man was. ‘Let him
through
,’ he snarled, his voice savage.

There was surprisingly little noise from the girls as they fell back. A whimper, a cry abruptly cut off, and a series of choking gasps.

Carrington, his eyes fixed on them and the gun at the ready, backed his way down the hall.

‘Gerry,’ pleaded Molly Lewis. ‘Come back.’

His face twisted. ‘I can’t,’ he said, his voice nearly a sob.

Steve Lewis saw his chance and sprang. Carrington jerked the gun up and fired in a thunderous, ear-shattering roar. Lewis was hurled backwards and the bullet ploughed through the ceiling.

A few things happened simultaneously. Molly screamed and flung herself to the floor beside her husband as, with a series of ominous creaks and with ghastly inevitability, the plaster on the ceiling crazed into fragments and fell in a soft whumph of blinding, choking lumps.

It was like an explosion in a flour mill. It was impossible to see and nearly impossible to breath. Through streaming eyes, Jack could see a white haze appear as the front door opened, then it slammed shut once more, plunging the hall back into shifting, dusty darkness.

Everyone seemed to be coughing, then shouting, then coughing again. Beside him, Babs Soames-Pensford kept repeating, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead,’ in a bewildered monotone. He heard Ferguson yelling but his voice was lost in the uproar.

Jack, stuck at the back of the group, tried groping his way towards Lewis through the panicking group in the hall, guided by Molly’s screams. From behind the green baize door at the end of the hall, the three womenservants pushed their way into the jostling crowd.

He scrambled past Mrs Soames-Pensford and found Steve Lewis more by touch than sight. He was sitting up, supported by Molly, shaking his head blearily. He clutched his arm and his hand came away red. ‘Blood!’ yelped Mrs Soames-Pensford and crumpled to the floor.

‘It’s my arm,’ Lewis managed to say. ‘The devil got my arm.’ He closed his eyes and fell against Molly.

Covered in plaster-dust and with his ears ringing from the shot, Jack made his way as best he could to where he thought the front door should be. Eventually his hands closed on the handle and he wrenched it open. He staggered down the steps, holding on to the railings and taking great gulps of fresh air.

A kitchen maid from the opposite flats, who had just stepped out to enjoy a cigarette on the steps down to the area, gazed at him in as much horror as if he were the demon king in a pantomime. She threw back her head and screamed at the top of her voice. A postman and a woman walking a dog stopped in their tracks, open mouthed, as Ferguson and the Soames-Pensford girls, covered in white dust, spilled down the steps behind him. More passers-by, drawn by the shouts and the promise of something utterly remarkable on this quiet, tree-lined street stopped to look and then the housemaid, Connie, her eyes bulging with excitement, elbowed her way to the front, threw back her head and yelled, ‘Murder!’

It was incredible how quickly the crowd gathered. The shout of ‘Murder!’ was taken up, carried down the street and suddenly a ring of densely packed people gathered round the steps, preserving, with an odd sense of propriety, a clear half-circle round the front door. Errand-boys, a postman, respectably dressed clerks, all the servants from the other flats, newspaper sellers, fashionable women, men in flat caps, men in greasy overalls, women in aprons with their hair in nets, dozens of children and innumerable barking dogs. Two taxis squealed to a halt and what seemed to be scores of top-hatted, exquisitely dressed young men leapt out, and took up, in penetrating, high-pitched voices, the cry of, ‘Murder! I say, murder!’ The taxi drivers got out, took one look and, as one man, yelled, ‘Murder!’ in a stentorian Cockney bellow.

It was with heartfelt relief that Jack heard the shrill blast of a policeman’s whistle. Two constables converged and made their stately way through the crowd which fell back in a wave to let them through. ‘It’s murder!’ yelled a knot of small boys, whooping as if they were at a football match. ‘Murder! ’E done it,’ added a bristle-headed youth, pointing to Jack. ‘That toff in filfy clothes! ’E done it! Murder!’

A policeman’s hand descended on Jack’s collar. ‘What’s all this?’ he said. ‘Wot’s ’e mean, murder?’ He looked up at the open door of the flat, still hazy with dust. Stephen Lewis emerged on to the steps. His evening dress was dishevelled and dirty, the ripped fabric of his sleeve was hanging loose and he had blood smeared on his cheek from where he had rubbed his face with his hands.

The crowd gasped and the bristle-headed boy jumped up and down in a paroxysm of delight. ‘Cor! That’s the bloke ’e murdered!’

‘Don’t be daft, you silly young shaver,’ grunted the policeman, catching the boy a clip on the head with the edge of his cape. ‘Get out of it!’ He raised his voice to an official bellow. ‘Everyone, clear away!’

‘I think,’ said Jack, wearily, to the policeman still clutching his collar, ‘you’d better come inside.’

It was nearly two hours later and Rackham and Jack were in the study together. Rackham was intent on a meticulous analysis of the murder, including a word-for-word account of Carrington’s entry into the house, the conversation in the drawing room and the scene in the hall. Rackham even played the records they had listened to. He would never, thought Jack, shrinking from the urbane jollity of the song, be able to listen to Jack Hylton again. The breezy tune and the witty lyrics now seemed jeeringly, unbearably sinister.

Stephen Lewis was with Sergeant Hawley in the drawing room. The crowd had reluctantly dispersed, Molly Lewis had retired to bed, Hector Ferguson had gone home and the Soames-Pensfords had returned to their flat. The doctor and the photographer had been, statements had been taken, and Hugo Ragnall’s body had been removed to the mortuary.

‘Carrington was furious when he walked into the flat, you say?’ said Rackham, prowling round the filing-cases in the study.

‘Absolutely blistering, Bill. Hugo Ragnall, poor devil, was pretty worked up, too, about this letter Carrington had written to him.’

‘I can’t find the letter. Carrington probably took it with him. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea what was in it, have you?’

‘Stephen Lewis knows. He was trying to calm Ragnall down before Carrington arrived and, from what he said, he knew what Carrington had written.’

‘Does he, by jingo? He didn’t tell me that.’

‘I can guess what’s in it though,’ said Jack. ‘I bet you can, too.’

Rackham let out his breath in a long sigh, then, lighting a cigarette, sat down on the study chair. ‘It’s not very hard to guess, is it? I
knew
Ragnall was holding something back, the idiot. How about this for an idea? We know Ragnall arrived at the Marchmont Hotel the day Dunbar was murdered. He said he didn’t see Carrington. What if that was a lie?’

‘That’s exactly what I was thinking,’ said Jack.

‘Because if he
did
see Carrington he’d be in a position either to back up his story or to deny it. And, although Carrington was officially in the clear, Hugo Ragnall might have tried a bit of blackmail. Knowing that Carrington was due to attend this party this evening, I bet Ragnall wrote to him, asking for a private word. Carrington, who’s not a man to push around, certainly took violent exception to something Ragnall had said, done or hinted. I bet Carrington dashed off a note, denying everything, and came round in person to settle the matter. We know he’s got a foul temper and, with both men spoiling for a fight, things got out of hand and Carrington pulled a gun.’ He cocked an eyebrow at his friend. ‘How’s that for a reconstruction?’

‘I’ve always liked Carrington, but it sounds fairly likely to me,’ said Jack heavily. ‘I know what I heard and saw, and if Ragnall really did know Carrington was lying about the time he left the Marchmont, that’d carry a lot more weight than my inference about the letter and the post-boy and so on.’

‘The evidence of the post-boy bothers me, though,’ said Bill. ‘He wasn’t lying, I’d swear to it. Why the devil should he? Unless Carrington had bribed him, of course,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘But he was taking a dickens of a risk if he did, placing himself at the mercy of a lad like that. I can’t see it, Jack.’