Copyright & Information

A Man Called Jones

 

First published in 1479

© Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1947-2011

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

 

Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

	EAN		ISBN		Edition
	1842329138		9781842329139		Print
	075512894X		9780755128945		Kindle
	0755128958		9780755128952		Epub

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

 

www.houseofstratus.com

About the Author

Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons’ works have been filmed for television.

Julian Symons died in 1994.

Introduction

The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death’s Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in Critical Occasions, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

H R F Keating

London, 2001

Dedication

For My Mother

Characters in the Story

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15

Chapter One 6.15 to 6.45 p.m.

Charles Sinclair paused for a moment on the steps of the house in Redfern Square, and looked at his watch. A fine mist of rain blurred the dial, and he had to hold it close to his face before he saw that the time was 6.15. He shivered involuntarily as he hesitated, for some reason that he could not have named, before the open door of the house; as he turned, with a second decisive shiver, to go in he heard his name called and the figure of Jack Bond, jaunty and overdressed, appeared through the drizzling rain. Bond’s dark face was rich with malice, and he tapped the steps with the silver-headed cane which he used, a little unnecessarily Sinclair thought, to conceal a slight limp. His voice, like his manner, was unsympathetic, harsh and grating and curiously unfriendly.

‘I hope you feel it an honour to enter these portals, Sinclair? To step upon rich carpets that have been trod by all the advertising talents of Great Britain?’ Sinclair grunted. ‘As our American friends say, a pretty nifty joint.’ Bond bent down to examine with comical carefulness the plain red hair carpet. ‘But the old man’s been practising economy in the hall. The pile carpets are kept for the places where they matter.’

Sinclair found himself annoyed, as he frequently found himself annoyed, by Bond’s facetiousness. ‘What sort of carpet do you expect to find in a hall?’

‘My dear chap,’ Bond protested, ‘here I expect flunkeys on every side, bearing salvers of beaten gold on which we shall drop the cards we haven’t got, so that we may be announced suitably. And here comes the flunkey. But no salver. Very disappointing. My hat, certainly,’ he said, giving to the man a hat with a small red feather in it, ‘and my stick and case.’ He passed over a small brown leather attaché-case. ‘And here we are,’ he said, as another servant opened a large white panelled door, ‘entering the scene of revelry. How delightful – by which I mean, of course, how dull – to see the old familiar faces we saw an hour ago.’

The scene was hardly one of revelry. The room they entered was fully forty feet long, and some sixty people were standing in it, looking rather depressed than gay. In front of a pair of folding doors there was an improvised bar, with two bartenders. An enormous iced birthday cake with twenty-five candles stood on a buhl table: this cake commemorated the twenty-fifth birthday of the nationally-famous Hargreaves Advertising Agency. And when people thought of this Agency with admiration, distaste or envy, they did not think of it as Hargreaves & Hargreaves, which was its established name now that Edward Hargreaves had taken his eldest son into partnership; they thought of the Agency in terms of the initials EH, which stood for Edward Hargreaves.

Among these thousands EH was in a small way a legend. He never spoke of his past life, but it was known, or at least said with all the familiarity of truth, that he had been a newspaperboy, an invoice clerk, a gravedigger’s mate and a maker of model aeroplanes, before he was twenty-one: and he had not merely held those jobs, but had been dismissed from all of them. The steps by which he had started his climb to wealth and success were hidden: but when at the age of forty he came from America to his native country he brought a few thousand pounds and some unexpected ideas with him. It was said that these ideas were not always what the conventional might call respectable; that Edward Hargreaves, in those early days, was not only a little smarter than any of his competitors, but that his smartness might, in any more tediously ethical occupation, have put him in some very awkward situations. But those stories were all of the past and lent, in a way, a flavour of romance to the name of Edward Hargreaves. Nobody could deny that now, at sixty-five, EH had become conservative, traditional, a Grand Old Man of advertising. His knighthood was expected yearly by his staff. He had married twice; the first thin, faded woman who had borne him two sons, and whose presence in the household had become less and less noticeable until at last she seemed less to have died than simply to have vanished from a scene where her presence was no longer required. A year after her death, when he was sixty-two years of age, EH had married a girl of twenty-two, who met her death in a yachting accident within six months of their marriage. Such was Edward Hargreaves, the owner of the Hargreaves Agency. On the Agency’s twenty-fifth birthday a party was being given, a cake was being cut, and a speech was being made; dancing was to follow the speech.

All the members of the staff had been invited, from the other directors down to the girls in the Accounts Department, who giggled whenever anyone over the age of thirty spoke to them; only the messenger-boys had been given a pound note each, and told to go out and enjoy themselves. The invitation was an order: but there would in any event have been little inclination to refuse, since all the women on the staff were anxious to show how delightful they looked away from the office and in evening dress, and almost all the men thought it might improve their standing if it were known that they had been to a party at the old man’s house in Redfern Square. ‘Evening Dress – Optional’ had been marked clearly on the cards which, in order to give the occasion importance, had been sent by post to each member of the staff: but very few, Sinclair saw, had decided to avail themselves of the option. He got a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and sipped the sherry reflectively, while he looked round.

The party, he thought, could hardly be called a success at the moment. Little departmental groups had gathered together, and were talking almost in whispers. The four Accounts girls, quite overcome by the occasion, were giggling together over their gin and grapefruit. Onslow and Mudge, two young copywriters, were standing firmly together in front of the buffet, and drinking hard and fast. Mrs Rodgers, who looked after copy from what everyone except Sinclair, who had charge of the Copy Department, called the woman’s angle, was talking to Tracy, the Creative Director, and Bond. Lionel, the other Hargreaves in the name, was standing at the side of the room, near the windows, fiddling with a small box on a table. There was no sign of EH or his youngest son, Richard. Sinclair was debating which of the several little groups he should join, when Lionel Hargreaves beckoned to him. Lionel was a well-built, fair man of thirty-five, with a weakly handsome, sensual face, an amiably supercilious manner, and, Sinclair had always thought, very little aptitude for advertising. He greeted Sinclair with the friendly condescension of a duke who is being pleasant to a baronet.

‘Looking lost over there, Sinclair. Devilish bore these things, aren’t they?’ The question was almost rhetorical, and Sinclair did not answer it. ‘You know what the old man’s like, though – loves that touch of ceremonial.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Sinclair said. EH couldn’t do without the ceremonial.’

Lionel ran a finger round his collar. He was wearing a dinner-jacket. ‘I could do without it myself, and without these damned monkey jackets, too.’ There was a particularly loud giggle from one of the Account girls, and Lionel’s eye strayed towards them. ‘That girl – what’s her name – Miss Gardner. Got a fine figure, hasn’t she? Pity she giggles so much.’

Sinclair was rather short. ‘She’s engaged to be married.’

‘Is she now. Hell of a thing, marriage – can land you in a devil of a mess. Certainly has me.’ Lionel suddenly looked alarmed, as if he had said something he had not intended. ‘This buhl furniture and these Aubusson carpets now – I don’t like that kind of thing, do you? Ornate.’

‘It helps with the ceremonial – and it must have cost a mint of money.’

‘Money, oh ah, yes.’ Lionel’s attention had wandered. With an almost visible effort he pulled it back to Sinclair and laid his hand on the box which stood on the table by his side. ‘Never been here before, have you?’ he asked, and although it could not be said that his tone was offensive, it was too noticeably that of the lord of the manor congratulating one of his retainers on a step up in the world to be agreeable to Sinclair, whose ‘No’ was rather stiff. ‘You won’t have seen any of the old man’s musical-boxes, then.’ He lifted the rosewood lid of the box on the table, and Sinclair saw a long brass cylinder with small spikes sticking out of it, which impinged on a steel comb. At the back of the box sat three little figures with drumsticks in their hands and drums in front of them. Sinclair, although he was annoyed by Lionel’s manner, was too interested to be sulky. He bent close to look at the box and said, ‘Charming.’ Lionel moved a switch at one side of the box, and stood back with a slightly self-satisfied smile. The cylinder revolved, the figures beat on their drums, and the box gave a pleasant. tinkling rendering of ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland.’ Heads in the room turned towards them, talking stopped for the necessary and polite few seconds and then recommenced. Bond left Tracy and Mrs Rogers, and joined them in looking at the musical-box. ‘My word,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine box – one of the best forte-pianos I’ve seen. I didn’t know the old man went in for such things.’

Lionel affected a faint surprise. ‘You know about these things, do you, Bond? Shouldn’t have thought they were your line of country.’

Bond’s laugh was loud. ‘Precious few things that aren’t my line of country. Always been interested in mechanical devices, and these musical-boxes are damned ingenious things. Does the old man collect them?’ Lionel did not answer, and it was plain that his abstraction was such that he really had not heard what was said. ‘Where is the old man, by the way?’

‘He’ll be along,’ Lionel said vaguely. ‘Had to go to some meeting or other. But he wouldn’t miss this for worlds – gives him a chance to perform you know.’

‘My word,’ Bond said, ‘look at Tracy and Mrs Rogers over there – they are going it, aren’t they? I left them because I thought they’d like to be al-o-o-ne.’ He exaggerated the last word comically. Sinclair looked across the room and saw that Tracy and Mrs Rogers were certainly engaged in what seemed to be earnest conversation.

‘Don’t know what you’re damned well talking about,’ Lionel said.

‘Well, I do think it’s a bit scandalous. Jean Rogers is all very well, but, after all, Tracy is supposed to hold a certain position in the firm. I don’t know what EH would say if he knew about it.’

Sinclair did not much like Lionel, but he liked Bond less, and he could not help feeling pleased when Lionel said shortly, ‘Should keep that sort of gossip to yourself if I were you, Bond. Ah – there’s Dick. You’re a bit late, Dick, old man. Haven’t seen you since lunch.’

Richard Hargreaves was two years younger than his brother, but he looked less than his age. His face was smooth and unlined; it showed, like Lionel’s, marks of weakness round the mouth and chin, but he had willowy handsomeness emphasised by his choice of clothes. He was one of the few men not in evening dress. He was wearing a dark double-breasted lounge suit slightly tapered at the waist, with a red carnation in his buttonhole, and dark brogue shoes. He said in a gentle, rather high-pitched voice, ‘I’m sorry. I got held up. Haven’t even had time to change yet. I’ll slip upstairs in a minute or two.’

‘Been hitting the highspots?’

Richard Hargreaves said in the friendliest possible tone, ‘I think you can give me lessons on that, Lionel. I’ve been out with Eve – Marchant – we went back and had coffee in her flat.’

‘Eve Marchant!’ A flush mounted slowly from Lionel’s neck to his face. “You’re a bloody fool if you mix yourself up with Eve – she’s poison.’

Richard took a cigarette from a thin silver case, and tapped it deliberately, and a little theatrically, before he said with a faint smile, ‘Didn’t I hear something once about one man’s meat…?’

Lionel’s face was alarmingly red as he said, ‘My God, Dick, you’re a bloody fool. I must talk to you about this.’ It was at this point that Sinclair pressed Bond’s arm gently, and led him away. Bond went unwillingly, and with a slight leer on his face. ‘What do you know about that?’ he said.

‘I know it’s time I had another sherry, and I know if some of us don’t fraternise a bit with the juniors this party’s going to be a flop.’

‘Damn the party. They shouldn’t wash their dirty linen in public if they don’t want anyone to watch them doing it.’

Sinclair had had enough of Bond. ‘I should put on a false beard and do some eavesdropping, since you’re so interested. I’m going to liven up the lads from the Studio.’ He made his way over to where half a dozen young men and women were talking in whispers and looking rather gloomily at the floor.

“Look, George,’…Rogers said, ‘there’s Sinclair gone over to talk to the Studio boys. You should go and cheer them up – they do look pathetic. After all, they are your department, aren’t they?’

‘Hell with the Studio,’ George Tracy said, ‘and to hell with it all, and to hell with this party. I’ve had enough. I’ve a good mind to throw in my hand altogether.’ He made an eloquent gesture, a throwing out of his hand as it were, in the air. He was full of eloquent gestures.

Jean Rogers sighed. ‘Yes, George.’

‘God preserve me from advertising men,’ Tracy said, by no means in an undertone, ‘but God preserve me most from top-class advertising men. If there’s a lower species of life, I don’t know it.’ He made another eloquent gesture in the direction of Lionel and Richard Hargreaves. ‘One of them without the faintest knowledge of advertising or, indeed, of any other subject that requires the application of intelligence, the other a stuffed, tailor-made dummy who should be in the window of a multiple clothes store as an example of natty dressing.’

‘George, I think we’ve been standing and talking long enough. We agreed it wasn’t a good thing. I think I should–’

‘A good advertising man, Jean, is nothing less than a creative artist. He has a soul. You and I have souls – and souls are delicate things. The treatment they get from these insensitive idiots is enough to drive any creative man mad.’ He ran his hand through the black hair that stood up like pins on his head. Jean Rogers, looking at him, thought again that he was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen. She said placatingly, ‘Richard’s not bad. He’s rather sweet in a way. I think I–’

‘Rather sweet?’ Tracy snorted, and made no further comment on Richard. ‘And as for EH – you know what I think of EH.’

She sighed again. ‘Yes, darling.’ Then: ‘Here he is.’

Onslow and Mudge from the Copy Department had arrived early. They had each drunk six cocktails and eaten three biscuits, and they were feeling cheerful. Onslow was in his late twenties, and Mudge was a year or two younger. Both of them had taken advantage of the option on dress; they were wearing corduroy trousers and sports jackets and knitted woollen ties. Their opinions of their seniors were not more favourable than the views Tracy had expressed on the Hargreaves family.

‘Do you know what I think of advertising agencies, old boy?’ Onslow said. ‘I think they stink.’

‘Right you are,’ said Mudge.

‘But what stinks worst in them is the executive class – the managerial class.’ Onslow tapped Mudge’s chest with one finger and enunciated clearly. ‘An advertising agency can only exist in full perfection in a capitalist system which is showing the – the iridescence of decay. It thrives in an atmosphere of commercial competition–’

‘Right you are,’ said Mudge.

‘–and exists to sell people goods they don’t want at prices higher than they can afford to pay. Its owners are sharks and its personnel are rats.’

‘I say, old boy.’

‘Yes?’

‘What about us? After all, we’re personnel of an advertising agency, aren’t we?’

‘Until the overthow of the capitalist system,’ said Onslow, scoring points rapidly on Mudge’s chest. ‘After that we shan’t be. In the meantime, what do you want us to do, starve? But if you ask me what I think of EH and his bloody birthday cake, I think he’s a–’

‘He’s here,’ said Mudge.

Edward Hargreaves was standing in the doorway.

Chapter Two 4.00 to 4.15 p.m.

The person who used the name of Jones put down a book called The Abbotsford Murders and crossed to the window. The clock outside the optician’s shop opposite said two minutes past four. There was plenty of time. Mr Jones (that was the name given when the room was booked) thought back again over the things already done, and the things that were still to do. Up to the present, at any rate, there had been no mistakes. ‘And there won’t be any mistakes,’ Mr Jones said to himself. ‘There won’t be any mistakes.’ From a battered suitcase Mr Jones took out a Smith and Wesson revolver, rather clumsily because he was wearing a pair of lemon-yellow gloves. Mr Jones put the revolver in his overcoat pocket, relocked the suitcase, and opened the door of the first-floor room. On the ground floor, down a flight of narrow dark stairs, was a telephone. Mr Jones called down the stairs in a curiously deep and harsh voice, ‘Mrs Lacey.’ The landlady’s head, in a mob cap, appeared at the foot of the stairs, peering up into the shadows where her lodger was standing.

‘What is it you’re wanting?’

Mr Jones said in the same harsh voice, ‘I have to go out in a few minutes Mrs Lacey, and I am not sure when I shall return. May I make a telephone call before I go?’

‘Sure you can, Mr Jones. Just so long as you put in your two-pence, otherwise you won’t get your number.’ She laughed at her joke, but there was no answering laugh from the lodger. ‘Thank you,’ Mr Jones said – and then, instead of coming down to telephone, returned to the room and closed the door.

Chapter Three 6.45 to 7.30 p.m.

Edward Hargreaves was rather above medium height; he had a florid complexion and a fine head of white hair, and although he was now in his middle sixties, his walk was as brisk and his back as upright as it had been twenty years ago. There was a weight and portentousness about his words and gestures which fitted well with the part of Grand Old Man of advertising which he constantly played (‘EH passes you the salt,’ a friend had said, ‘as if he were giving you a five-pound note.’) Sometimes the pomp spilled over into geniality: but the heavy brows, the flaring nostrils and the downward curve of the thin mouth, told a story easily read. One did not have to know Edward Hargreaves well to know that beneath the surface of pomp and geniality lay a ruthlessness which was not the more pleasant because it was concealed. His first sight of that mouth convinced Sinclair that most of the stories he had heard about Edward Hargreaves’ early life had not been exaggerated. At the present time, however, the corners of the mouth were curved upwards into a smile of palpable falsity. There was hardly a person in the room at that moment, including his sons, who liked EH or would have felt any sorrow if they had been told of his death; and yet such is the power of money and convention that when he smiled and said, ‘Good evening. I am very sorry to be late,’ every one of the faces that greeted him smiled in return.

With the smile fixed firmly in place EH walked round among his staff, giving them words of welcome. A dispassionate observer, if one had been present, would have noticed that although all the words he spoke to his staff were in appearance friendly, most of them looked more relieved than happy when he had passed on: and the conversation, which had been flowing a little more easily, was checked again to whispers. He stopped before Tracy and Mrs Rogers, and said amiably to Tracy, ‘I’m so glad you’re looking after Mrs Rogers, George. But we can’t have any conspiracies between copywriters and artists tonight. Time off from business this evening, you know, time off from business.’ If Bond had been within earshot he might not have said so confidently that EH knew nothing of an affair between Tracy and Mrs Rogers.

Tracy was foolish to rise to this palpable bait. ‘We weren’t talking business.’

EH was almost arch in reply. “I thought you looked so much as if you were – I do apologise.’

By the time EH had sympathised with Onslow and Mudge on their lack of dinner-jackets, congratulated Bond on his wit in making the Accounts girls giggle, asked Sinclair anxiously whether he thought the boys in his department could stand so much strong drink, and made similar observations to the heads of the Research and Space Departments, he was looking almost benign in his cheerfulness. But as he walked across the room to where his two sons were standing the smile was cut quite suddenly and sharply off his face. The mouth turned down and the heavy brows contracted: the effect was not pleasant. Lionel and Richard awaited him with the air of two soldiers who are about to be inspected by their Commanding Officer, and are guiltily aware of spots on their tunics. They said in unison, ‘good evening, EH’ EH looked at a point somewhere between them and said, ‘Good evening. Lionel, I shall want to talk to you for a few minutes after the dancing has begun. I hope you can find it convenient to make yourself available. Richard, I shall be glad if you can make arrangements to change into appropriate clothing as soon as possible.’ He turned, a Commanding Officer who had found the inspection even less satisfactory than he had expected, and marched away leaving Richard looking dejected and Lionel looking alarmed.

Chapter Four 4.15 to 4.25 p.m.

Mr Jones opened the door of his room. Feet clattered uneasily on the uncarpeted stairs. At the bottom of the stairs stood the telephone; the door of the room down the passage that Mrs Lacey called her parlour was slightly open, and a thin gleam of electric light shone through to the hall. Mr Jones carefully placed his old suitcase on the floor, and took out from his pocket two pennies which he regarded for a moment with a purposeful look. He picked up the telephone receiver, inserted the two pennies, and dialled a number. The shaft of light coming through into the hall grew almost imperceptibly wider as the two pennies dropped to the bottom of the box. Mr Jones had pressed Button A.

He spoke for a couple of minutes and then hung up the receiver with an inaudible exclamation of annoyance. He called out suddenly, ‘Good-bye, Mrs Lacey,’ picked up his suitcase, turned the round knob of the Yale lock and was out in the street. He was still wearing the lemon-yellow gloves.

Outside in the street Mr Jones’ shoulders were raised and lowered almost imperceptibly in a sigh. ‘Well, thank God that’s over,’ he thought, and began to walk briskly towards the main road, which led to the Elephant and Castle. Just once he patted the left pocket of the big raglan overcoat he was wearing, and the corners of his mouth moved in the ghost of a smile.

Chapter Five 8.10 to 8.30 p.m.

EH had been speaking for twenty minutes, and had the appearance of a batsman who after a shaky start is settling down to a good solid knock, when his serene expression changed suddenly to a look of lowering concentration. His eyes searched among the audience as though he were looking for someone, and he noticeably quickened the pace of his speech. He slowed down, however, as he came to the crucial point:

‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that this brief history of the Agency’s past activities and successes will have been of some interest to you. H’rm. All of you have shared in these successes, I do not hesitate to say that you have been in large part responsible for them. On this silver anniversary of the Agency’s birth I propose to show some concrete appreciation of the long service rendered by you all. This appreciation will take the practical form of a 10 per cent rise in salary for the whole of the staff present here tonight, from our valued directors, to the stenographers, receptionist and switchboard operator whose work is equally valuable in its own sphere’ (here there was a slight rustle among the audience). ‘I hope that this step will meet with your approval. And now, without making any further call on your interest or time, I propose to cut this cake.’ And EH was as good as his word: but he cut the cake with a look which showed that his mind was on other things. Suddenly he called on his son Richard, who, now wearing full evening dress, was standing looking rather moodily at his feet.

‘Where is Lionel?’

‘Eh? Isn’t he here? I suppose he must have slipped out.’

EH’s look of concentration became converted to a frown. It was obvious that he did not approve of people slipping out while he was talking. He cut several slices of cake in a perfunctory manner, and then said, ‘Look after things for me, my boy. I’m going to find Lionel.’ Richard Hargreaves shrugged his shoulders as his father strode out of the door from the dining-room to the hall. Then he made a faintly comic deprecatory gesture to the assembled members of the staff, and they all crowded round the cake. There were mixed feelings about the 10 per cent rise. What would happen, Bond asked Sinclair, when next they asked for a rise in the usual way? They would be told they had had one recently. ‘And, my lad,’ Bond finished up with the dogmatic tone which many people found offensive, ‘it so happens that a rise is just about due to me. Now – I’ve had it.’

‘There may be something in what you say. I wonder where Lionel’s got to. I haven’t seen him for some time.’

‘Here he is. No he isn’t – it’s EH alone. I say, he looks as if he’d picked up sixpence and lost a ten-bob note, doesn’t he?’

EH’s face was mottled, and his cheeks were puffed out with anger. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I insist on knowing where Lionel is. Jackson who is on the door, says he went outside at about half-past seven. If that’s so, he wasn’t in here while I was talking.’

Richard Hargreaves shrugged his shoulders again. ‘It’s no use asking me. Maybe he’s gone out.’

‘Nonsense. He knew that I wished to speak to him.’

‘Maybe he’s in the –’ Richard made a gesture, and EH seemed momentarily disconcerted. ‘Oh.’ His cheeks puffed out again. ‘Well, let’s see.’ He slammed the door as he went out. Richard went on cutting slices of cake.

‘When the old man gets on the warpath, the sparks certainly fly,’ Bond said with a grin. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Sinclair was about to take another piece of cake when the door to the hall opened again. EH was standing there, an expression on his face was one of such shocked ferocity as no one in that room had ever seen. He looked from face to face and then, without speaking to anyone, crossed the room to the telephone, and dialled a number. They were all staring at him openly now.

‘Scotland Yard,’ EH said. His voice had a thick, choked quality. ‘My name is Edward Hargreaves. I wish to report a murder.’

Chapter Six 8.50 to 10.00 p.m.

The cake lay untouched on the plates, the drinks stood half-empty on the tables. Nobody spoke. One of the girls from Accounts had hysterics and was taken outside by the bartenders. No one else left the room. Richard Hargreaves sat well away from his father, turning over idly in his hands the knife with which he had been cutting the cake. Tracy leaned against the wall and stared at the door: he did not look at Mrs Rogers. Other people sat uncomfortably on the edge of their chairs. Occasionally somebody coughed. EH himself sat on a stiff chair near the single door in the room, that led out into the hall, rather as if he were on guard. He had not spoken to anyone since making the telephone call. It was a relief to all of them when the police arrived.

They came in the person of a man of middle height, about thirty-five years old, wearing a light fawn raincoat spotted with rain, and a snap-brimmed trilby hat which he held in his hand. He had a fresh complexion, well-brushed fair hair and a round, smooth face; the curious innocence of his expression was contradicted by the watchful look in a pair of blue eyes which were not unfriendly but impersonal. He paused in the doorway and looked at them, and probably there was nobody in the room who did not feel a little disturbed by that look. It was not unsympathetic, but it was detached: it seemed to say, ‘I can well understand that you are all upset, and that you may behave oddly. At the same time I am bearing in mind the fact that you may be behaving oddly because you have recently committed a murder. I am here to understand everything, but what I am most concerned to understand is a murderer’s mind.’

As he stepped into the room the man said in a voice which was pleasant enough, but was curiously flat and expressionless, ‘Mr Hargreaves, Mr Edward Hargreaves? I am Detective-Inspector Bland from Scotland Yard.’

EH said ‘Yes,’ in a hoarse voice. ‘My son Lionel has been killed. This is my house. His body is in the library.’

Bland looked at his watch. ‘Were these ladies and gentlemen present when he was killed?’

‘They were all here. It – happened some time between half-past seven and half-past eight.’

‘Oh.’ Bland looked again at the rest of the people in the room. ‘I shall be glad if you will remain here. I may have some questions to ask you.’ As EH and Bland moved towards the door Richard Hargreaves said to his father, ‘May I come too, sir? I may be able to help.’ EH merely inclined his head.

They walked out of the large drawing-room into the hall, where the two footmen who had received the guests were standing together. ‘These men say my son left the drawing-room – God knows why – about half-past seven. They also say nobody came out after ten to eight.’

‘That was about the time when you started speaking,’ Richard said. In answer to Bland’s unasked question he said, ‘It was a special occasion, and my father made a short speech.’

Bland looked at the elder of the two servants. His voice was hard as he said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Jackson, sir,’ the man said. He was a man of about fifty, with grey hair and a hooked nose. He looked rather like the popular conception of an Ambassador, but his voice was soft with years of deference. ‘And this is Williams.’ He indicated a young and perky man with bright black eyes who stood beside him.

‘Were both of you on duty here in the hall?’

‘That’s right sir. We were on duty all evening. We haven’t had very much to do so far, but we were to be on hand all the evening to give any assistance required.’

‘Have you been here long?’

There was a touch of reproachful dignity in Jackson’s voice. ‘Ten years, sir. And Williams has been with us for five.’

‘And you were on duty here in the hall, both of you, after Mr Lionel Hargreaves left the drawing-room? Neither of you left the hall for any reason?’

‘That is correct, sir. As a matter of fact, neither of us left the hall during the whole evening, from six o’clock onwards, for more than two or three minutes.’ There was almost a touch of acidity in Jackson’s gentle voice as he said, ‘This is our place of duty, sir!’

‘And you are absolutely sure of the time when Mr Lionel Hargreaves came out of the drawing-room?’

‘Within a minute or two, sir,’ Jackson said, and Williams nodded agreement.

‘What makes you so sure?’

Jackson coughed. ‘A moment or two before, sir, Williams had looked at the clock and remarked that it was nearly half-past seven, and we should be late for our supper. It had been tentatively arranged that the dancing should start at eight and that we should go off for supper in turn after that time. Very soon after that, Mr Lionel came out of the drawing-room and walked down that passage.’ He indicated a passage that ran along the side of the drawing-room.

‘Do you confirm all this, Williams?’

‘All absolutely right, sir,’ Williams said emphatically. Both of them, Bland thought, looked more curious than distressed. ‘The passage leads to the lavatories and through the library out into the garden. And it leads to the dining-room, too.’

‘Did you see which way Mr Hargreaves went? Which door he entered?’

‘Oh, no sir. You can’t see that from the hall. Of course, we thought he’d gone to the lavatory.’

‘And did you notice that he had not returned?’

Jackson spoke again. ‘We noticed it, sir, but we did not remark it specially. We thought that perhaps Mr Lionel had gone to smoke a cigar in the library. And of course, sir, it was not for us to enquire into Mr Lionel’s actions.’

‘I realise that. Now, think carefully, before you answer this. Are you able to remember who came out after Mr Lionel Hargreaves – that is between the time Mr Lionel Hargreaves came out and his father went to look for him?’

Jackson bowed his head slightly. The gesture was impressive. ‘Williams and I have discussed that point already, sir. We realised that it might be important. And the most we can say’ – Jackson included Williams with a wave of the hand – ‘is that we think we could pick them out. We knew Mr Lionel. We don’t know most of the other gentlemen here, and so we couldn’t be absolutely sure of identifying them.’ He hesitated, and Richard said quickly, ‘I came out for a couple of minutes. Don’t be afraid to mention that Jackson.’ Jackson did not reply, but merely bowed his head again.

Bland’s face showed neither pleasure nor annoyance. ‘You mentioned gentlemen. What about the ladies?’

‘On that point, sir, Williams and I are positive. No lady came out of the drawing-room between the time Mr Lionel went down the passage and Mr Hargreaves came out to look for him.’

EH had listened to this dialogue with growing impatience. ‘I can’t see the point of all this.’

‘It has a point,’ Bland assured him. ‘One of my men will come along and ask you both some questions about the people who came out of the drawing-room. Answer them as fully as you can. You’ve been very clear so far. Thank you.’ They walked down the corridor, and came to two doors on the left-hand side, and two on the right. Richard acted as guide. He pointed to the two doors on the left. ‘Men’s washroom and lavatory, ladies’ washroom and lavatory. On the right, dining-room and then library, with an interconnecting door between them.’

Bland nodded. They were standing outside the library door. He said to EH, ‘You turned the handle of this door, I suppose?’

‘Why, yes, man. It was closed.’

‘Did you enter the dining-room?