“Yes. There may be something there. Bland did the autopsy. Have a word with him and see what he says. Incidentally, I can set your mind at rest on one point. There’s no doubt it was Smallbone. We’ve got very good prints which match up a dozen test samples from his lodgings. The man was a sort of pottery collector, bless him, and has left hundreds of beautiful prints. Colley will tell you about that.”
“Right,” said Hazlerigg. He replaced the photographs and gathered the typewritten sheets of Divisional Detective-Inspector Colley’s report, patting them into a neat bundle, then rose to go.
“There is one thing,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “You may need a bit of expert help. It doesn’t need me to point out to you that there is an obvious line here, and the obvious line is often the right line. On the face of it, there’s only one man who could have done this job. And his motive, when you get to it, is almost certain to be tied up in some legal jiggery-pokery. That’s the logical supposition, anyway. Now would you like me to lend you one of our legal fellows to help you. Just say the word…”
Hazlerigg hesitated. The offer, he knew, was helpfully meant: and yet it had a faint suggestion of dual control which was hateful. However, it was no doubt the sensible course and he had actually opened his mouth to say “Yes” when his eye caught a name on the top of the typescript report.
“May I take it that the offer will be kept open,” he said. “I’d like to start this in the ordinary routine way. I may find myself out of my depth. Quite likely I shall. If so—”
“Certainly,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “Just say the word. By the way,” he added shrewdly, “what was it on that paper that made you change your mind?”
Hazlerigg smiled.
“I saw a name I recognised,” he said. “Here—in the list of recent arrivals at the office.”
“Henry Winegarden Bohun,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “Never heard of him. What is he?”
“Presumably he is a solicitor. He was a statistician. Before that, I believe, an actuary. And at one time almost a doctor.”
“I don’t believe,” said the Assistant Commissioner, “that any normal man could find the time to train for all those professions.”
“Quite so, sir,” said the chief inspector. “No normal man could. Bohun’s not normal. I’ll tell you how I know about him. He happened to be in the same battalion as Sergeant Pollock—you may remember him—”
“The man the Garret crowd killed. He worked with you, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Well, he was a friend of Bohun’s. They were in the same company in North Africa. He told me about Bohun’s peculiarity. If this is the same chap—and heaven knows it’s not a common name—then he might be useful. Particularly if we can be certain that he wasn’t involved—I’ll check on that first, of course.”
“A friend in the enemy’s camp,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “It’s quite a good idea. Only for heaven’s sake don’t be like that mug in the detective story who confides all his best ideas to a friendly sort of character who turns out to be the murderer in Chapter Sixteen.”
II
Bohun was one of the first to leave the office that evening. In view of the fact that he had only joined the firm two days before, and had had no previous ascertainable connection with any member of it, if we except a very distant schoolboy acquaintanceship with Bob Horniman, he had occupied only a few minutes of Inspector Colley’s time.
In common with all the other members of the staff he had had his finger-prints taken.
This was typical of Inspector Colley who was elderly, soured by lack of promotion, and extremely methodical. He knew the necessary moves to a hair, and made them all. His reports were models of conciseness and monuments to a staggering lack of imagination.
However, he was a worker.
In the short time at his disposal he had taken statements from everyone in the office, set his photographers in motion, commissioned a detailed drawing of Bob Horniman’s room and an outline sketch of the whole office, set his finger-print men to work on the room, its walls, its door, its fittings, its approaches and its very varied contents; had taken check sets of prints from all other members of the staff; had dispatched a man to Smallbone’s lodging to obtain prints from there, together with a check set from his landlady; had, in due course, sanctioned the removal of the body for pathological examination and on the strength of the doctor’s preliminary report had divided the personnel into two lists. List One, those who had been with the firm less than a month: Mr. Bohun, Mr. Prince, Mr. Waugh (the cashier), Mrs. Porter and Mr. Flower. Mr. Flower, it might be explained, was none other than Charlie the office-boy. He kept his surname a secret in the office, having suffered from it at school. List Two, the remainder.
He had also contrived to make everyone on both lists feel thoroughly uncomfortable.
“It’s not what he says or does,” as Miss Cornel observed to Anne Mildmay; “it’s his general frightful air of ‘You’re all presumed guilty until you’re proved innocent’.”
Bohun walked quietly home in the dusk, across New Square.
He was thinking of the extraordinary events of the day. He was thinking that shock revealed the oddest traits and flaws in the human character. He was thinking that he was glad he was on List One.
He stepped into Malvern Rents, which is a passage off a turning off Chancery Lane, and turned in at the Rising Sun Restaurant, which, in spite of its pretentious name, was a tiny eating-house, the total furnishing of which consisted of four small tables, a few chairs and a wooden counter with an urn on it. The room, as was usual at this hour of the day, was empty. Bohun paused for a moment at the half-open door behind the counter to shout: “I’m back.”
A muffled echo from the depths seemed to amount to some sort of acknowledgment.
He then pushed on through the second doorway, covered by an army blanket, up two flights of the narrow stairs, and through a second door. He was home.
It was an unexpected room to find in such a house. Originally, no doubt, it had been a large loft or storeroom, belonging perhaps to some scrivener at a time when the focus of the legal world had centred on the east rather than the west of Chancery Lane. It was a big room—quite thirty feet long and about half as wide, and looking surprisingly attractive with its grey fitted carpet, its stripped wooden walls and its carefully arranged lighting. The wall on the right as you came in from the landing, the inner of the long walls, was all books, covered with books, from floor to ceiling and from end to end. There was nothing esoteric about them, no tall folios, no first editions swathed in wash-leather—rather the well-handled tools of a reading man’s trade. Poets, essayists, historians, sets of novels, textbooks, even school books; there must have been more than a thousand of them.
Two formal steel engravings of battle scenes filled the space between the tiny uncurtained windows of the long outer wall. At the far end of the room stood a large electric log fire (there was, of course, no fireplace). Over it hung a portrait in oils of a severe-looking lady. In front of it stood a single leather arm-chair.
Bohun whistled softly to himself as he walked through the room and disappeared into the small annexe which opened off it and which was his sleeping quarters.
When he reappeared he was dressed in corduroy trousers and a khaki shirt, and had a white muffler round his neck. With his plain, serious, rather white face, he looked like some mechanic with a bent for self-improvement, a student of Kant and Schopenhauer, who tended his lathe by day and sharpened his wits of an evening on dead dialecticians.
“Well, Mr. Bohun,” said Mrs. Magoli, descendant of Florentines, owner of the Rising Sun Restaurant, and Bohun’s landlady. “And how are you finding your new office?”