“Well, now,” said Hazlerigg. “Perhaps you can tell me one or two things. When did you see Miss Chittering last?”
“Last Saturday. She used to come up from Dulwich every Saturday. When she wasn’t working at the office she’d come in, and we’d have a talk—I’m in charge of the campers’ department, you know.” (He said this with all the pride of a colonel announcing his first command.) “Then she’d go out and get a cup of coffee and wait till I was finished—we shut up at half-past twelve on Saturdays—and we’d have lunch and go somewhere in the afternoon; we were both very fond of pictures.”
“You went to the cinema?”
“No, no,” said Mr. Hayman. “Real pictures. The National Gallery or the Tate. Hours we spent there—we were both very partial to the Dutch School. On Sundays I would usually go over to see her at Dulwich, after lunch, and we’d go for a hike.”
It seemed an innocuous courtship. Hazlerigg could not say what he felt—that no marriage with a woman six years one’s senior would be likely to thrive on a sole bond of intellectual admiration. That was not the sort of thing you said to witnesses. Therefore he contented himself with the usual formula.
“Well, Mr. Hayman. It was very good of you to come forward. If there’s any way in which you can help us, I’ll be certain to let you know. We have your address, haven’t we?”
“There’s one thing,” said Mr. Hayman diffidently. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to say this. But I think she was afraid of the man she worked for. What was his name—Birley. She didn’t say so in so many words, you know.”
“I think he bullied her,” said Hazlerigg gently. “But, of course, that’s no proof that he—”
“No, of course not,” said Mr. Hayman. “I just thought I ought to mention it.”
He departed, and Hazlerigg sat, for a long time after he had gone, quite motionless. Only the blinking of his eyes showed that he was alive. Curiously enough he was not thinking about Mr. Hayman at all. He was searching for something. A single, tiny, unrelated fact, in the storehouse of his memory.
It was almost eight o’clock, and quite dark, before he got back to Lincoln’s Inn. He found Mason, the porter, in his lodge.
When he had introduced himself, and broken the ice by admiring Mason’s collection of pewter jugs, he said: “I wanted to hear again from you, if you wouldn’t mind, exactly what happened last night. It might be easiest if we went outside and walked over the ground.”
Mason was agreeable. As they went out the Chapel clock started striking.
“There, now,” said Mason. “That’s just how it was—only seven o’clock, not eight. I’d just finished locking the library and I came out in front of Stone Buildings here as Mr. Cockerill came in the gate. He and I walked together, down towards the Square. I can’t remember what we talked about. We didn’t hurry—but we didn’t dawdle either. The lights were all out in the office—like it is now…” He pointed. The premises of Horniman, Birley and Craine were as dark as the tomb.
“I see,” said Hazlerigg. He stared at the blind façade. “Then Cockerill went in, and you walked on.”
“That’s right. No, of course, I forgot. That was when I saw the cat.”
He explained about Chancery and the pigeon.
“Was that before Cockerill went in?”
“No,” said Mason. “After. Just when I was walking off.”
“Then you were looking at the dead bird, and prodding about in the flower-bed—and then you heard Sergeant Cockerill cry out?”
“That’s right.”
“And that would have been—how much later?”
“Oh. Not very long.”
“Two or three minutes?”
“Yes. I expect so. What’s it all about, Inspector?”
“Just a matter of routine,” said Hazlerigg. He looked at his watch before he put it back in his pocket. It showed seven minutes past eight.
IX
When Hazlerigg got to bed that night he did not go to sleep immediately. Ordinarily, he had the professional’s ability to shutter his thoughts: he left his work and his worries behind him at his desk. If it had been otherwise, he could hardly have slept at all.
Tonight, however, a current of thought got through the insulation.
It started with this proposition. “The murderer could not have anticipated the electricity failure.” The first deduction from this was that the murderer had to be a person whose late arrival home could cause no comment. Someone who lived alone. Or someone who was dining out. But was that a sound deduction? Had the murderer not very possibly prepared an ingenious alibi, some watertight excuse for being home late, which they had never had to use. The heaven-sent and unexpected gift of the electricity failure had served instead.
Having disposed of that one, Hazlerigg turned over once more in his search for sleep.
But at the back of his mind, like the particle of sand in the oyster, lay one hard grain of fact. It was a fact which he had learnt in his talk with Herbert Hayman, Miss Chittering’s fiancé. And it matched up with something he had heard: something, he rather thought, that Bohun had once told him.
The street lamps outside formed patterns on the white ceiling. They would be turned out soon after midnight.
“I’ll go on thinking about it till the lights go out,” he said to himself. “If I haven’t got it by then I’ll give it up.”
The next thing he was aware of was the clamour of his alarm-clock calling him to another day.
Chapter Eleven —Thursday A.M.— Capital Appreciation
Years passed and he sat in the same place, wrote out the same documents, and thought of one thing, how to get back to the country. And little by little his distress became a definite disorder, a fixed idea—to buy a small farm somewhere by the bank of a river or a lake.
Chekhov: Gooseberries
I
“I say,” said John Cove, “have you heard?”
“No. What?”
“Eric’s going.”
“Then you did—”
“No,” said John. “I didn’t. That’s the scrumptious part about it. My conscience is absolutely clear. But Eric was so convinced that I should split on him—judging others by his own shocking standards—that he came to the conclusion it would be more dignified and grown-up if he got his own say in first. So he demanded an interview with Bill Birley and handed in his resignation all gentlemanly-like.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, I only got this part from Charlie—you know what those basement stairs are like—so you mustn’t take it for gospel. But apparently Bill Birley was suffering from a number-nine hangover from this Chittering business and the police and what with one thing and another he definitely wasn’t at his mental best. When Eric stalked in and said: ‘I wish to resign,’ Birley just gazed at him in a suffering way for a moment and said, ‘All right, when?’ and the whole scene fell a bit flat. Eric, apparently, in an endeavour to waken a flicker of interest, said, ‘And I don’t mind about notice. If it’s all the same to you I shall leave tomorrow.’ However, even this didn’t stir the great man, who simply moaned and said—Oh, hello, Eric. We were just talking about you.”
“I expect you were,” said Eric Duxford. He was obviously in that uncomfortable state of mind when one is spoiling for a row without knowing quite who to have it with. “I hear you called round at my office on Tuesday night.”
“Well, I didn’t actually know it was your office,” said John, tilting back his chair to a dangerous angle. “It seemed, from the information painted on the door, to belong jointly to a Mr. Smith and a Mr. Selverman.”
“Smith’s retired,” said Eric shortly. “Henry Selverman’s my partner. And a damned good business man.”