The Paper Chase (7 page)

“When I said this to Johnny he just laughed, and said that was Rigby’s headache. Then we argued about how the profit was to be split, and finally settled it should be forty per cent to Rigby, thirty each to Johnny and to me. Johnny suggested twenty for me and I fought him up to thirty, which would have meant just over twenty-five thousand pounds. It was like Johnny to fight about the percentages when there was no percentage in it for anybody except himself. The next week I met Rigby. Johnny warned me in advance to discuss things generally but not in detail, and particularly not to mention what we were each getting out of it. I had the strong impression that Johnny was getting a larger percentage than he’d told me. That was clever too, a good bit of camouflage.”

“I suppose Rigby was another out-of-work actor.”

“Of course not.” Jenks sounded quite indignant. “Johnny never played the same trick twice on the same person. Rigby was absolutely genuine. We had lunch at one of Johnny’s respectable clubs and talked about the plant at Wrixford. Johnny said I was a good friend of his, and that I would handle all the necessary improvements and extensions. He and I reckoned that when it was all done the total cost to Flitzens would be about a hundred thousand pounds. Without batting an eyelid Rigby said that a hundred thousand was a very fair sum on the figures Johnny had given him. I wanted to get things absolutely clear, and I told Rigby I should want to see something official from him before going ahead. Johnny looked annoyed, but said it should be possible to arrange it. A few days later he showed me a letter from Flitzens agreeing to buy the Wrixford Paper Mills from me at a figure of one hundred thousand pounds after certain improvements, which were put down in general terms, had been effected. ‘Are you happy now?’ Johnny asked. ‘If you want to duck out there’s still time.’

“I should have ducked out, or I should at least have insisted on holding that letter. But instead, we went ahead. I was seeing Johnny every day at that time, and so was Nora too, of course. I couldn’t tell you all the MPs and businessmen I talked to. I let Johnny persuade me not to go to my bank manager for a loan to buy the mills, because the bank would ask too many awkward questions. I paid Martin a cheque for forty-seven thousand five hundred pounds, which I’d scraped together by putting Nora’s and my own savings into the firm’s account. It also included a sum of seven thousand five hundred borrowed from the bank with the deeds of the mill as security. As Johnny said, they didn’t query a loan of that size, because it was just about what the mill was worth. Anyway, the loan would be only for a few weeks, until we got our money from Flitzens.

“The money was paid to Martin and as I learnt later, went straight into Johnny’s account. Three days later I saw him at the Hundreds and Thousands and he gave me a little crooked smile. ‘How does it feel to own a paper mill, Henry?’ he asked. I said it would feel better to have sold one, and asked when that would be. ‘Never, I should think,’ he said casually. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, put a match to it and used the spill to light his cigarette. ‘Shan’t need this any more.’ You can guess what the paper was.”

“The letter from Rigby,” said Applegate.

“Yes. It was a moment or two before I realised what he was doing. Then I jumped up to try to save it, but Johnny ran across the room and threw it in the fire. His face as he turned round to me was terrible – the lip curled up over his white teeth. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he asked. What could I do? I’d paid nearly fifty thousand pounds for something which, when it came to be sold, proved to be worth seven.”

“I still don’t see how it was worked. You say Rigby was genuine, but he must have been in the plot.”

“No. It was very simple.” Applegate noticed again Jenks’ reluctant pride. “The whole thing depended on a verbal trick. When I met Rigby at lunch we talked about the Wrixford plant. Johnny started off that way and we followed him. We never put an exact name to the plant, and we never discussed details. We were talking about different things. Rigby thought he was buying the Wrixford Printing and Binding Works. Johnny had started negotiations with the owners, and then got in touch with Rigby, but Rigby would have wanted to know much more before being seriously interested. The letter was typed by Johnny on a bit of the firm’s paper which he’d got hold of.”

“Couldn’t you see Rigby?”

“What evidence had I got, without that forged letter? I couldn’t have called Rigby without saying I thought I’d been his partner in a plan to get money – well –”

“By fraud.”

“You are very harsh. I had trusted Johnny – and how was my trust repaid? He not only took my money, he took Nora. She was a true Eve, and he a serpent. When Nora learned what had happened, she left me. Johnny put her in a flat. I have often wondered how much she knew about the trick he played on me. When he went to prison in 1931 she waited for him. He came out eighteen months later, but by that time Johnny had done with her. I think the most important thing about her for him was that she belonged to somebody else. Johnny was like that. He really only had time for one woman, Eileen, and that was because she never bothered him. Eileen was there when Johnny finally told Nora he wanted nothing more to do with her. Nora went back to her fourth-floor flat, jumped out of the window and broke her back.” Jenks wriggled, his fingers played ineffectively in the air.

“What did Bogue go to prison for?”

“He got money out of an old man named Keeble to start a lot of new night clubs, and then simply used the money. He spent a lot, Johnny, but he salted a lot more away.”

Applegate put down his long-empty metal cup. “All very interesting. It doesn’t tell me what Montague was doing down here, or what you’re doing.”

“You remember Martin, who was supposed to own the mill? He was Johnny’s right-hand man, right up to the war. He helped with the New Radical Party, which Johnny founded when he came out. He organised the distribution of drugs – the party was used as a cover for that. During the war the New Radicals were stopped, but the dope ring still operated. Johnny was being used on all sorts of unofficial missions, and I don’t know whether he still had any connection with the drug ring then. Johnny was on some hush-hush mission and his plane was shot down somewhere over Spain or Portugal. No survivors. Well, just a few weeks after Johnny died the drug ring was broken up and Martin got ten years in prison. I saw Martin while the case was still going on, and I asked what had happened to Johnny’s money. ‘That boy cached away a fortune,’ he said. ‘And you bet your sweet life I’m going to put my hands on it.’ Now, listen to me, Charles. Martin came out of prison five weeks ago. Within a fortnight he had come down here.”

From an envelope in his pocket Jenks extracted a newspaper cutting. Applegate took it and read about Tragic Death of ex-Convict at Kent Resort. Martin had come to stay at the Grand Marine Hotel. Two days after his disappearance from there his body had been washed up a few miles along the coast. He had been drowned, but bruises on his head had been caused by some hard object. Martin had last been seen near the village of Heartley, two miles from Murdstone, and it was suggested that he might have fallen off the slippery jetty at Heartley and struck his head in falling. The verdict was Death by Misadventure.

“You suggest that Martin was killed.”

“I
know
Martin was killed.” Jenks’ manner now was furtive as that of a bad conjuror. “He had the secret, he knew where Johnny had hidden his fortune.”

“Who killed him? And aren’t you feeling a little nervous yourself?”

“I don’t know who killed him. Johnny had a lot of associates. There was a Fascist tough named Barney Craigen, and a Eurasian named Max Degrine and O’Neill and Frankie Johnston the band leader. Then of course there was Eileen. You say you’ve never come across her. She’s a remarkable woman.”

“What do you hope to get out of this yourself?”

Jenks’ voice rose to shrillness. “Forty thousand pounds. He robbed me of it, isn’t that so? Forty thousand pounds,
plus interest.
I think I’m within my rights in asking for that, don’t you, Charles?”

“Somebody evidently doesn’t agree with you.”

“I only want my rights,” Jenks said, with no decrease in shrillness. “And now, my dear Charles, I don’t want to hurry you, but I have an engagement. What do you say, are we to be partners? A co-operative enterprise.”

“I don’t know.”

“You keep in touch with me, tell me anything you hear. On the word of Henry Jenks you won’t be the loser by it.” The white hand touched Applegate’s, the bedroom door closed.

The hotel had evidently not been dead but hibernating. There were now distinct signs of life. A decrepit waiter stood at the door of the lounge, a snub-nosed girl sat in the office. There was a slight but distinct smell of food. Voices could be heard, distantly. A neon lighted sign showed an arrow pointing downwards and the words MERICAN AR. Applegate went down half a dozen stairs and found himself in a small and unexpectedly well-lighted bar. A man in a hacking-jacket sat on a barstool talking to the barman. Hedda Pont was at a table reading a Penguin thriller.

Applegate ordered two whisky sours and took them over to Hedda. “I feel bound to forestall the words I see on your lips by saying that I’m not late. I said seven-thirty and it’s now twenty-five past.”

“That’s all right. I always get to places too soon. What’s this drink?”

“Whisky sour.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Oh, come now, a girl like you who went to a reefer party every night.” He saw a certain corrugation of her brow. “I’m not doubting your word in what you said about them of course.”

“The trouble with you, Charles, is that you’re too logical in a crackpot sort of way. That’s a thing about men. You think because a girl hasn’t heard of whisky sours it proves she can’t have smoked reefers. Not so at all. It just shows that the kind of men I smoked reefers with didn’t drink whisky sours.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Apply the same technique to you. How much did these drinks cost?”

“Three and six.”

“Each?”

“Each.”

“Right. Charles Applegate buys expensive drinks. Where does the money come from? Not from Bramley Hall, that’s a cinch. Private income? Somehow I doubt it. Question: what is Charles Applegate doing at Bramley Hall? Answer: He’s there under some kind of false pretence.”

Applegate looked virtuously down his nose. “There is such a thing as a sense of vocation.”

“But you haven’t got it. I’m not really asking questions, though, just showing you the technique.” She offered him a cigarette and lit one herself. “Three or four people seemed interested to know that you’d come in to Murdstone.”

“Who were they?”

“The Inspector for one. Uncle Jeremy for another – he seemed to think it was rather like leaving your post under fire. And Maureen Gardner, who I think is getting a crush on you, and John Deverell who I hope isn’t. In a school like ours it’s important to keep things heterosexual. They’re difficult enough in other ways.”

Applegate sipped his drink, and wondered how much he should say to her. “Have you ever heard of a man named Johnny Bogue?”

“Wasn’t he the man who owned Bramley before the war? Added the two wings and carved his initials over the front door. Is that the one?”

“That’s the one.”

“Had a pretty murky past, by all accounts, and died in the war.”

“That’s right.” Applegate finished his drink, got two more, and decided that he was going to trust Hedda Pont. He felt like a man who has stepped through a looking glass and wishes to be assured, not of the reality of the world on the other side, but rather of his own reality. Applegate was a young man with what he would himself have called a strong sense of reality, meaning by this that he felt both indignant and disbelieving when confronted by aspects of life outside bourgeois convention. He had felt such indignation and disbelief; rather than grief, after the deaths of his mother and father, and he felt them now. He was gratified, but in a way irritated, to find that Hedda listened to his narrative with interest certainly, but without a trace of incredulity.

“I hope you’re not going to the police,” she said.

“The
police.
” Applegate was quite disconcerted. “Do you know, that never occurred to me. I should have rather a lot of explaining to do.”

“That’s wonderful. Let’s do some investigating on our own.” Her blue eyes were bright as tinsel. Was it significant, Applegate wondered, that this should be the simile that occurred to him?

“What sort of investigation?”

She ticked off points on her fingers. “One, find out about Bogue. There must be something about him in old directories,
Who Was Who,
that sort of thing. Two, find somebody in Bramley who remembers him, and discover what they’ve got to say. I can easily do that.” She hesitated. “Three – how much of what Jenks told you do you suppose was true?”

“I don’t know. He sounded much more convincing about the past than about the present.”

“Has it occurred to you that the logical place for Bogue’s fortune to be hidden is at Bramley? Eileen Delaney sends an agent to Bramley, Jenks sends an agent to Bramley. Why? Because something’s hidden there. The agent who killed Montague can’t know where it is, or if he knows can’t get at it for some reason.”

“What kind of reason?”

She waved an impatient hand. “I don’t know. Suppose there’s a secret panel in the Ponts’ bedroom. Aunt Janine hardly ever leaves those two rooms of theirs. Suppose the fortune is hidden in the cellars – nobody ever goes down there.”

Applegate shook his head. “Too romantic. I’m not convinced that any fortune exists. I believe Jenks was making up all that part. My word, this place is looking up.”

A man and a woman had come into the bar. The man was immensely tall, perhaps six feet five inches in height, and his body was thick. When he smiled he showed a mouthful of gold teeth. The woman was about fifty, and had a face like a parrot’s. A beaky nose curved down to a mouth that was bent downwards in a bow. There was a multiplicity of wrinkles round her eyes. Her cheeks were bright with rouge. Above magenta hair was placed a plum-coloured hat decorated with a spray of flowers, and her coat also was plum-coloured.