“Which—” said Sergeant Plumptree.
“It wasn’t as if he didn’t warn me straight out. ‘I’m a collector, Mrs. Tasker,’ he said. ‘Pots and pans there’ll be in my room a-plenty. And if it’s extra trouble for you to dust we’ll come to an understanding.’ And another thing he said: ‘I’ll come and go as I like.’ And so he did. ‘Expect me when you see me.’ That was the rule. Last year he was in Italy, at his house in Florence. The address is on his card. You can see it for yourself. Three months he was away, and one morning back he came, without a word, with a carpet-bag full of flower-pots.”
“How—” persevered Sergeant Plumptree.
“And then this February he goes away again. The twelfth of February. I’ve marked it in the rent-book—see, Friday the twelfth of February. I’m going down to Kent, he said. I didn’t catch the name. Stanton, I thought he said. It may have been Stancomb.”
“I thought—” said Sergeant Plumptree.
“I know what you’re going to say,” said Mrs. Tasker. “But wait. He went away on the Friday. I’m going down to Kent, he said. And if I find what I’m looking for, that’ll be the beginning of great things, Mrs. Tasker. Great things. I’ll be back tonight, he said.”
“And he never came back?”
“Certainly he did. That night, as he said. Then the next day he went out again. No luggage. Nothing. That was always his way. ‘Ah,’ I thought. ‘He’ll be off to Italy. He’s found what he’s looking for.’ And when one week went by and then another, I knew I was right.”
“You knew he—?”
“I knew he was in Italy, where he is now,” concluded Mrs. Tasker triumphantly. “Enjoying the hot weather.”
With a discretion beyond his years Sergeant Plumptree refrained from any comment on this interesting speculation.
III
“It’s the question of access which is worrying me,” said Hazlerigg, “and that’s the sort of thing where you can help.”
“Access to what?” asked Bohun.
“Access to that deed box in which we found the body,” said Hazlerigg. He added as an afterthought: “Access to this room, access to the office building, access to Lincoln’s Inn.”
“Well,” said Bohun. “Anyone can get into any of the public parts of Lincoln’s Inn at any time by day. If you came in very late or very early—or on Saturday afternoon or Sunday—then you’d probably be noticed.”
“Particularly if you were a prominent resident like Abel Horniman.”
“Yes. The porters certainly knew him by sight. At any time during office hours you can get into the Inn by at least six routes and there’s no check of any sort.”
“Right,” said Hazlerigg. “Now the office.”
“That’s more difficult,” said Bohun. “I haven’t been here long, and perhaps this week hasn’t been exactly a typical one, but I really have been surprised at the number of people who wander through these offices without question. Not only the staff, but outsiders, too. On our side of the office we’ve got the reception-room—where the junior typists sit. All visitors to the office are supposed to look in there first—clients, messengers, clerks from other offices, people examining deeds, people selling office accessories, and even the friends and relatives of the staff. The other side is a bit more select. There are only these three partners’ offices and the partners’ secretaries’ room. But even so, a lot of people who know the ropes short-circuit the system by going straight in to see the secretary of the partner they’re interested in—or to bring messages—or collect mail—or wind up the clocks, or spray the telephones or clean the typewriters.”
“In short,” said Hazlerigg, “anyone who looked as if they had some business to transact could walk into either side of the office during business hours whenever they liked without anyone stopping them, and probably without anyone noticing them. After business hours no one could get into the Inn without a strong probability of being noticed—or into the offices?”
“Certainly not into the offices,” said Bohun. “Sergeant Cockerill locks the two doors at night. He leaves about seven. He’s the last to go.”
“Who has keys?”
“No one has keys except him, I understand. If he’s away he hands them over to someone else. He’s the locker-upper in chief. He looks after the strong-room as well.”
“Supposing one of the partners wanted to get in after hours?”
“I’m not sure,” said Bohun. “I asked John Cove and he said that no partner in a fashionable firm of solicitors ever did work after hours—that sort of thing being left, one gathers, to the shirt-sleeves brigade in the City. If a partner wanted to work late I suppose he would get the door keys from Sergeant Cockerill and do the locking up himself.”
“Even Abel Horniman didn’t have the keys?”
“Not of the outer doors.”
“I see,” said Hazlerigg. “Well, that would seem to dispose of that. Not forgetting that any key can be copied—these big heavy door-keys easier than most. Now what about Horniman’s room.”
“In office hours,” said Bohun slowly, “there is one very serious obstacle. If you look at the lay-out you’ll see that the partners’ secretaries’ room is really designed to control the entrance to all three of the partners’ rooms. And at least one of the three secretaries—Miss Cornel, Miss Chittering or Miss Mildmay—had always to be in it.”
“You say they have to be in it,” said the inspector doubtfully. “How well was the rule observed?”
“Pretty well, I imagine,” said Bohun. “First of all, this was a Horniman office and system’s the watchword. But apart from that, the partners’ telephone exchange was in the secretaries’ room. It was all part of the system for keeping irritating or unwanted clients at arm’s length—which is a fairly important thing in any solicitor’s office. The actual telephone exchange—the one that connects up with the outside world—is in the basement and is looked after by Sergeant Cockerill or his young stand-in, Charlie. When a call comes for one of the partners it is plugged through first to the partners’ secretaries’ room and vetted there before being put through to the partner concerned. It really does mean that one of the secretaries has to be there the whole time.”
“I see,” said the inspector. “And they’d have noticed at once if Mr. Smallbone had gone into Mr. Horniman’s office?…”
“Not only would they have noticed it,” said Bohun, with a smile, “but they’d have made a note of it in the journal, and, when Smallbone finally left, the secretary concerned—Miss Cornel in this case—would have noted the length of time he’d been there—with a view to typing out an ‘attendance’ on the subject later. How do you think we poor solicitors live?”
Hazlerigg thought about all this for some time, but made no comment. Finally, he said: “Well, then—that box.”
“That’s more difficult still,” said Bohun. “You can see that it’s a good lock—a five-lever—more like a strong box than a deed box. It can be forced, as Sergeant Cockerill demonstrated—but it wouldn’t be easy to pick, I should think—not without leaving traces.”
“Right,” said Hazlerigg. “And the keys.”
“The boxes were in sets. Each partner’s room had a set. There was a master-key for each set, with a ‘single variant’ key for each box in the set. But no key of one set would fit another set. The partner concerned kept the ring of keys for his boxes, and the master-key, in case he lost an individual key.”