Flowers For the Judge (6 page)

Mr Campion caught himself glancing at the polished side tables and supposing that the silver had gone to be
cleaned
. Apart from a few early editions in a locked glass and wire-fronted cupboard there was not a book in the place.

A portrait of Jacoby Barnabas, the uncle of the present directors, hung over the mantelpiece in a grand baroque frame. Head and shoulders were life-size, and it was evident from a certain overpainting in the work that the artist had striven with some difficulty for a likeness.

It showed a strong, heavily-boned man of sixty-odd with the beard and curling white hair of a Victorian philanthropist, but the light eyes set deeply in the fine square head were imperious and very cold, and the small mouth was pursed and narrow amid the beautiful fleecy whiteness of the beard. A grim old boy, thought Mr Campion, and turned his attention to the other visitor, who stood stiffly on the other side of a centre table which ought to have had a silver epergne upon it.

He was a fat young man with a red face, who looked less as though he had a secret sorrow than a grievance which was not going to be a secret very long. He regarded Mr Campion with what appeared to be suppressed hatred, but as soon as the other ventured to remark inanely that it was a nice foggy day he burst out into the spasmodic but more than eager conversation of one who has been in solitary confinement.

Mr Campion, who thought privately that all young persons who voluntarily shut themselves up half their lives alone, scribbling down lies in the pathetic hope of entertaining or instructing their fellows, must necessarily be the victims of some sort of phobia, was duly sympathetic. Moreover, his curiosity concerning the business downstairs was fast becoming unbearable and he was glad to have something to crowd it out of his mind.

The fat young man flung himself down in a chair.

‘I’m waiting to see Mr Widdowson,’ he said abruptly. ‘I usually see Brande, but to-day I’ve got to go to the Headmaster. They’re all infernally casual, aren’t they? I’ve been here half an hour.’

In view of all the circumstances Mr Campion did not
know
quite what to say, but his silence did not worry the other man, if indeed he noticed it at all.

‘I expect Brande will be down in a moment,’ he went on explosively. ‘Do you know him? A nice chap. Very enthusiastic. Gets all het-up about things. He’s made a lot of difference to this place since he left the army. He was in the States for a bit, you know, and then came back and started putting a bit of pep into this mausoleum.’

He paused again but only for breath. Since neither of them even so much as knew the other’s name Mr Campion found him quite extraordinarily indiscreet, but he recognized the symptoms and understood that people who are forced to spend long periods alone can rarely chat noncommittally. The fat young man’s tongue was running away with him again.

‘Brande married an American, you know,’ he said accusingly. ‘Extraordinarily pretty girl, I believe. It seems a pity they don’t…’ He broke off hastily and rose to his feet again, glaring at Campion this time as if he had discovered him trying to surprise him into a confidence.

Mr Campion looked comfortingly blank and as the other retired to a corner, crimson with rage and confusion, he rose himself and, wandering across to the heavily-curtained windows peered through them into the fog.

‘I wonder where Brande is,’ said the plaintive voice behind him after a pause.

Mr Campion stiffened and controlled the insane impulse to say, ‘There goes his body, anyway. Looks a fishy little procession, doesn’t it?’ and turned back into the room just as the door opened and a girl came in.

She was neither particularly good to look at nor possessed of an arresting personality, but she caught Mr Campion’s interest at once. She was small and very dark and affected the coiffure of a medieval page and a small straight blue serge dress with a white collar and cuffs. The effect aimed at was a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, but the result was ruined by the maturity of her face, hands and neck. She smiled at the fat young man.

‘Oh, Mr Tooth,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been kept
waiting
. I’m afraid Mr Widdowson won’t be here to-day. He’s been called away. Would you mind very much if we wrote you?’

Mr Tooth grew red and then pale with indignation and Mr Campion was inclined to sympathize with him.

‘I’ll go in and see Mr Brande, then,’ said Mr Tooth with dignity. ‘He’s not engaged, is he?’

‘Oh no, he’s not engaged, but I’m afraid you can’t see him.’ There was a quality in the girl’s voice which was hard to define. She was enjoying the situation, certainly, but she was not bursting to come out with the news. Rather, she was being unduly secretive about it. Mr Campion was interested. Why should the staff of Barnabas Limited have decided to try to keep Paul’s death a secret? The death of a man is a hopeless thing to hide from his friends; after all, it is no little peccadillo or temporary embarrassment from which he may be expected to recover and afterwards prefer not to have discussed.

‘Miss Netley, is there anything wrong?’ Mr Tooth had caught the savour of unrest in the air and Campion watched the girl. She did not look in the least confused.

‘Well, he won’t be here to-day,’ she said, not so much evasively as tantalizingly. ‘I’m so sorry.’

A great desire to get to the heart of the trouble downstairs passed over Mr Campion and unobtrusively he moved to the door. Mr Tooth he dismissed from his mind. Their interests, he felt, did not meet. But there was something very curious about Miss Netley, something about her personality which was peculiar. He made a mental note of her name.

The wide entrance hall at Twenty-three was of a very simple plan and Mr Campion had no trouble in locating the basement stairs. He sauntered through the gloomy shadows and stepped slowly down the first flight. He did not move furtively, and at the first sound of his shoes upon the stone there was a warning cough from below and three men in packers’ aprons slid out of a doorway below him and made for their own domain. The first two walked with their faces averted and the third glanced sharply but ineffectually at the young man’s grey figure in the fog.

‘Door not even locked, and plenty of visitors. The police will be pleased,’ murmured Mr Campion as he wandered on towards the scene of the trouble which had been so neatly pointed out to him.

In the entrance to the strong-room he paused. The retreating packers had not thought to switch off the light, and the whole scene lay before him, inviting him to examine it. It was not difficult to see where the body had lain, especially as he had Miss Curley’s telephoned description of its discovery firmly fixed in his mind.

The bare table puzzled him at first, but it did not take a very acute mind to reconstruct roughly what had happened after the body had been found.

As Mr Campion glanced at the heterogeneous collection of books and papers which Mike had heaped upon the floor his sympathy for any police detective who might come after him grew more intense. Since so much damage had already been done he had no hesitation in entering the room. One more set of footprints in the dust, he decided, could do little harm.

The construction of the place interested him immensely. It was clear that it had at one time been part of the kitchens of the house and its subsequent alterations had done something to enhance the dungeon-like qualities of the domestic offices of the eighteenth century.

The walls appeared to be lined first with some sort of metal and then with asbestos, while the window which had been immediately on the right of the doorway had been bricked up and covered by the shelves which ran all round the walls.

Mr Campion sniffed the air. It was still stuffy, in spite of the open door, yet, as it seemed impossible that a room of the size could have been left entirely without ventilation, he took the opportunity of examining the outside wall.

Yet fog had penetrated even here and he could not understand it at first until his search was rewarded by the discovery of a tiny iron grating let into the wall directly beneath one of the lower shelves, where a brick had been displaced. The two centre bars of the grating had been
broken
, leaving a ragged hole some two inches in diameter.

At this hole Mr Campion looked very thoughtfully. By squatting down on his heels he found that he could peer through the broken ventilator into some half-lit chamber beyond, which he erroneously decided was the loading shed.

He spent some time considering the shelf below the ventilator and restrained with difficulty his impulse to touch the papers thereon.

When at last he straightened his back and continued round the room his face was much graver than usual and narrow vertical lines had appeared between his eyebrows.

At the far end of the room, between the safe and the table, the chaos was indescribable, but, looking at it, Campion was inclined to think that it was the outcome of years of untidiness rather than the result of one frenzied five minutes indulged in by any hasty or excitable person.

It passed through his mind that the term ‘business-like’ rarely applied to business people. There are degrees of muddle to be found in the offices of old-established firms which transcend anything ever achieved in a schoolboy’s locker.

The strong-room at Twenty-three seemed to have become simply one of those useful places where nothing is ever cleaned up, so that anything deposited therein may reasonably expect to remain in safety until it is again needed.

All the same, it occurred to him as he looked round that the amount of odds and ends which three generations of Barnabas directors had considered worth keeping was distressing when viewed in the bulk.

The safe, he decided, could well be the centre-piece in any museum which an enterprising burglars’ guild might establish for the edification of junior members. It was massive enough in all conscience and looked as if it had been built to withstand shell-fire, but it opened with a key, a large key if the size of the highly decorated hole could be taken as a guide.

He was still looking at it when hasty footsteps pattered
down
the passage and the door leading out into the yard banged. Feeling a little guilty but not really deterred, Mr Campion continued his tour.

Lying on a dusty parcel of manuscript on the shelf nearest the table he came upon an anachronism. It was a bowler hat, nearly new and only very slightly dusty. Turning it over gingerly he saw the initials ‘P.R.B.’ inside, and on the floor below was a neatly rolled umbrella.

Mr Campion’s frown deepened. The problem as he saw it had certainly a great technical interest, apart from its personal side. A man, dressed for the street, found dead in his own strong-room, the door locked on the outside, four days after he had disappeared, presented a situation provoking thought.

Campion took another look at the ventilator and wished he might see the body.

A few minutes later he was examining the door of the room and had just decided that at no time had the lock been forced or picked when the pattering feet returned, this time from the courtyard. There was a rush of bitter air as the door swung open and next moment somebody paused and looked in at him.

Mr Rigget and Mr Campion exchanged glances.

For some seconds Mr Rigget hesitated, torn between a desire to see what was going on upstairs and an inclination to investigate Mr Campion’s unexpected presence. He took stock of the stranger carefully, his eyes round and excited behind his glittering pince-nez.

He decided almost immediately that Mr Campion was not a detective. Mr Rigget’s knowledge of detectives was small and his opinion bigoted. A thrilling alternative occurred to him and he came forward ingratiatingly.

‘Could
I
help, I wonder?’ he suggested, lending the offer a tinge of the underhand. ‘I shouldn’t want my name mentioned at first, of course, but if there’s anything you want to know…?’

He broke off promisingly, adding a moment later as Campion’s expression did not change:

‘You’re a journalist, of course?’

‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ said Mr Campion. ‘What’s on the other side of this wall?’

‘A – a garage,’ said Mr Rigget, startled into speech.

Mr Campion’s eyebrows seemed in danger of disappearing.

‘How many cars?’

‘Only one. Mr Wedgwood keeps his Fiat there. Why?’

Mr Campion ignored the question. Instead he snapped out another.

‘Who are you?’

Neither his tone nor manner fitted in with Mr Rigget’s idea of the jolly, hard-boiled journalist he had seen so often on the films. He grew crimson.

‘I have a position here,’ he said stiffly.

‘Fine,’ said Mr Campion heartily. ‘Toddle along and keep it up.’

‘You are a journalist, aren’t you?’ said Mr Rigget, now considerably alarmed.

‘Certainly not.’ Campion looked astonished by the suggestion.

‘But you’re not a detective. It wasn’t you who came in with the Coroner’s Officer just now.’

‘Ah! he’s here at last, is he?’ said the pale young man with interest. ‘Splendid! Good morning.’

‘Shall I tell him you’re waiting?’ Mr Rigget’s slender pink nose quivered as he caught a glimpse of this exciting chance to visit, if only for a moment, the heart of the inquiry.

‘No,’ said Mr Campion. ‘It wouldn’t be true.’ And, brushing past his would-be informant, he moved quietly out of the room and mounted the stairs.

Mr Rigget stood irresolute. Some instinct told him that it would not be wise to follow immediately. Moreover, the sense of mingled shame and apprehension, inevitable aftermath of a too hastily seized conclusion, was upon him. The scene of the trouble, on the other hand, was not a healthy spot in which to linger with the police in the house. In default of any other retreat Mr Rigget shut himself up in the wash-room.

Mr Campion hurried up the stairs. His face was unusually blank and there was a strained expression in his pale eyes. He had made a discovery, or at least he had unearthed a possibility which, if it should prove to be substantiated by other facts, was going to lead to serious trouble.