'He's down there. And he's dead.'
Audley squeezed past a packing case and stared down the worn wooden staircase. A single naked bulb hung from a flex at the foot of the stairs, and Morrison lay in a heap directly beneath it. One of his legs rested awkwardly on the stairway, the trouser leg rucked up to reveal a pathetic expanse of white flesh. There was a hole in the sole of his shoe. Halfway up the stairs his glasses lay, unbroken. He had been a small man in life. Now he seemed even smaller.
Audley felt a mixture of revulsion and relief. He had feared, or half-feared, a pointless suicide, for which he might have had to take some of the blame. This ridiculous accident would be less embarrassing, however inconvenient.
'He fell down these stairs?'
'Maybe.' Roskill looked at him coldly. 'And then again maybe not.'
The hair on the back of Audley's neck prickled: that 'maybe not'
was like a death sentence.
'I took a very quick look at him. Just on the off-chance that he wasn't as dead as he looked,' said Roskill. 'He had a nosebleed before he ... fell down the stairs.'
'Before?'
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'He bled down his shirt. But you don't bleed down your shirt when you're falling downstairs. And you don't go to the cellar when your nose is bleeding — not when the washroom's out in the yard.'
'Are you saying that someone killed him?'
He stared down the staircase again, taking in the ancient, flaking whitewash on the walls and the dust-laden cobwebs hanging from rusty nails. It didn't make sense. Violence was rare because it almost always stirred up more trouble than it stifled. Nor was it the present Russian style, certainly not in England, where it was capable of launching a major scandal.
But reason and instinct wouldn't raise Morrison from the dead. And there was no sweeping him under the carpet either.
'All right, Hugh. We'll go by the book. I'll phone the police first.
Then you phone the department. Tell the duty officer to warn Stocker. And when Butler phones in tell them to warn him too–if someone followed us down here they could be following him over there.'
It was like a nightmare; bad enough to be pitched into the field, out of his depth–but worse to be involved in incomprehensible violence.
'How much do you want the police to know?'
'We've got to know how he died. But either way we shall have to get them to go easy on it — you better get Stocker on that. No doubt he'll know how to do it. And go through Morrison's pockets while I'm phoning–there might be something there.'
He turned back to the faded black telephone in the untidy little dummy4
office. The important thing now was to keep the initiative, to emulate Fred, whose dealings with the Special Branch were always conducted in a manner which left no doubt as to who was calling the tune.
'. . . This is Dr D. L. Audley of the Ministry of Defence.' L'Etat, c'est moi. 'I am speaking from the Modeller's Shop in—' he stumbled for want of the address. But there it was on an old-fashioned letterhead. 'There seems to have been a fatal accident, but I'm not altogether satisfied with the circumstances.'
That was the authentic Fred note: not so much an investigation as a consultation required. Just in time he remembered the final refinement: 'Kindly send a senior officer with your squad.'
When Roskill took over the phone he went back into the shop, which was clean and cheerful compared with the stockroom. Just behind the counter was a low stool, with a small, smooth-edged hole in the linoleum below it–the hole Morrison had worn over hundreds of uneventful days, sitting waiting to sell models to small boys.
Audley's brief flicker of self-satisfaction faded. No more pocket-warmed coins would cross this counter; the supermarket next door would inevitably take over.
He'd met Morrison for five minutes and bullied the life out of him.
Whatever the cause of death was, the guilt was his, and he'd compounded his crime by feeling nothing but distaste and annoyance for the inconvenient thing in the cellar.
He looked down at the cutting Roskill had taken from the man's a dummy4
wallet: ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS FOUND. No one deserved to have his minor crimes come looking for him after half a lifetime, least of all a crime which had gained him nothing but a bad conscience. It was a poor recompense for Normandy, Arnhem and the Rhine, the days of fear and danger.
There was a peremptory rap on the door, which caught him unprepared. He had expected to hear the familiar klaxon first.
'Dr Audley? You put through an emergency call?'
'I am Audley. I put through the call. Mr Morrison appears to have fallen down the stairs into the cellar–through there. He's dead.'
He lead the party, which had shed a uniformed man at the door, through into the stockroom. Roskill, still busy on the phone, nodded to them without pausing in mid-sentence.
The leading member of the squad peered down the staircase for a moment, nodded to the other two men and turned back to Audley.
He was a large man, taller even than Audley, with a mild, quizzical expression. He looked as if he had seen everything, heard everything, believed very little of it, and could no longer be surprised by anything.
'I'm Detective Inspector Roberts, sir. Could I see your identification please?'
Audley passed the folder over.
'And this gentleman?'
'Squadron Leader Roskill, my colleague.'
'Might I ask who he is telephoning?'
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'The Ministry.'
'Are you here on official business, sir?'
'We are.'
'Might I know the nature of that business, sir?'
'Mr Morrison was helping us with some information concerning a matter we are investigating, inspector. A matter falling under the Official Secrets Act. He was only marginally concerned with it.
We spoke to him briefly early in the afternoon and arranged to see him again at 5.25, just before he closed. We found the shop locked, and Squadron Leader Roskill went round to the service entrance.
He found the body at the bottom of the stairs.'
Roberts nodded. 'You said in your message that you were not altogether satisfied with the circumstances here, sir. Could you tell me why?'
Audley repeated what Roskill had said.
'Inspector, there was no question of any proceedings against Mr Morrison. He was disturbed by our visit, but there was no reason why he should take his own life. If he wanted to, in any case, I don't think he would have used such a method. When I first saw him down there I thought it must have been an accident. I still think so.
'But if there is any question of foul play it is of the very greatest importance that this is established quickly.'
Roberts gave him an old-fashioned look.
'Can you think of any reason–any reason that you can tell me–why anyone might harm Mr Morrison, sir?'
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'Honestly, inspector–no. This sort of thing just doesn't happen. Not now–not here.'
'A lot of strange things happen now — and here, Dr Audley.'
'Not this sort of thing, inspector. But if it has, we have to know, so I'd like you to make a special effort.'
Roskill joined them, thrusting out a hand to be shaken.
'I'm to blame, inspector. Sorry about that, but when you don't like the look of a thing you can't make it look right by thinking about it.'
The inspector smiled for the first time, and it occurred to Audley that his own confidence over being able to handle the police from a lofty height was misplaced. Everything he had said had been either pompous or stilted, while Roskill had set everything in perspective and at the right level in a couple of easy sentences.
'Dr Audley's right, of course–this sort of nastiness is out of date now,' Roskill continued. 'But people don't fall downstairs when I want to talk to them either. They run away.'
He passed over a sheet of paper to the inspector.