Plain Murder Read online

  ‘And I usually come for a walk here with my young son,’ said Morris. ‘John, Molly, say “How do you do” to Mr Reddy. And this is your Uncle John. That’s your name, isn’t it, Reddy?’

  The children smiled shyly at the two strange men.

  ‘And how old are you, Molly?’ asked Mr Reddy.

  ‘I’m nearly five,’ whispered Molly.

  The conversation followed stereotyped lines, with Reddy, rather pale and uneasy, in the background.

  ‘Well, I must be moving on, I think,’ announced Morris at length.

  ‘Perhaps Mr Morris would come and have a cup of tea at home with us this afternoon, Johnny?’ suggested Mr Reddy, still carefully cultivating a friendly attitude towards his son’s official superior.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Morris; ‘but I always spend Sunday afternoon with the wife and kiddies. Why don’t you come over to tea, Reddy? Run over on the little mo’bike?’

  Reddy did not specially want to; at the same time he had already learned by experience that an idle afternoon was terribly hard on his nerves. He hesitated visibly.

  ‘You haven’t got anything else to do, have you, Johnny?’ asked Mr Reddy.

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Then of course you had better go.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Morris. ‘About four, old man?’

  ‘All right,’ said Reddy with an ill grace.

  The party separated at the park gate, the children waving goodbye to the two Reddys. Then Morris directed his way homeward again, striding out with the old vigour, Molly panting along at his side, and his pose as a kindly father completely vanished once more. He could picture the conversation going on at that moment between Reddy’s father and Reddy; the old man accentuating the need for Reddy to be on the best of terms with Morris, and Reddy sulkily agreeing. The essential preliminaries of the plan had been accomplished marvellously well; now – there was roast mutton at home, and Morris was hungry. He did not even pause to leave the children outside a public-house while he went in for an appetizer. He hurried the children back along the side streets, over the main road and up the steep hill again to his home. A man of Morris’s calculating and obstinate mind did not feel the stress of waiting very much. He ate his dinner with considerable appetite.

  Mrs Morris was perfectly delighted with everything: with her husband’s appetite, with the good food she had bought for her children and with the news that Reddy was coming to tea. He had paid flying visits once or twice before, and she was very struck with his nice gentlemanly manners and his cultivated accent. Mrs Morris did not know many men who would offer her a chair before sitting down themselves.

  After dinner Morris was even able to doze for a time in his armchair, digesting his mutton and cabbage and baked potatoes, and stewed apples and synthetic custard. It was not merely that he was a man of steady nerve; it was largely because of a self-confidence amounting to vanity that he was able to await a crisis so calmly. But even he, once digestion was completed, grew just a little uneasy and restless and paced about the house for a while just before four o’clock. Then a motor-bicycle came roaring up the hill and stopped with a popping of the exhaust outside the gate, and Molly came running to her daddy with the announcement, ‘He’s come, Daddy.’ Visitors to Morris’s home were sufficiently rare to be exciting.

  ‘Come on in, old man,’ said Morris at the door. ‘What about the old bus? Better not leave it in the road with all these kids about. That’s the idea, stick it inside the gate. Here we are, then. You know Mrs Morris, don’t you, old man?’

  Morris’s sham-bluff garrulity was not due to any nervous qualms about the immediate future. It was merely evidence of a conscious lack of good breeding. Reddy was brought into the sitting-room and the best chair was pushed forward for him, with Morris talking effusively, Mrs Morris wearing her best blouse, all of a pleased flutter, and the children, rather shy, standing near the door solemnly watching it all. All this fuss about a single visitor left Reddy rather bored and uncomfortable. He tried not to be snobbish, but he could not help noticing more than usual the traces of Morris’s council school accent, and the unconsciously deferential tone in Mrs Morris’s voice, and the awkward bad manners of the children. Tea, sitting up at the table, with thick bread and butter, and whispered reproofs darted at the children, who were reverting, as children will, from shyness to rowdiness, was more of an ordeal still. And when after tea Morris led him again to the fireside with the obvious intention of making further polite conversation Reddy was very bored and uncomfortable indeed.

  It was even worse when Morris went out of the room and left him with Mrs Morris, who had no conversation at all. Morris was gone for quite ten minutes, and the interval seemed like hours to Reddy, while Mrs Morris sat opposite him painstakingly trying to make conversation and failing utterly. Some years of housekeeping on a four pounds ten a week income make a very poor training for acting as hostess to a good-looking young man twenty-one years of age and of good family. Mrs Morris was thoroughly uncomfortable as well by the time Morris came back into the sitting-room.

  ‘You’ve been away a long time,’ said Mrs Morris fretfully. ‘What on earth have you been up to?’

  ‘Oh, just looking after one or two things,’ answered Morris, and the answer was deemed satisfactory, although anyone who paid serious consideration to the matter would have found it hard to have named any ‘things’ Morris might want to ‘look after’, or any particular reason why he should want to look after them just then. But Mrs Morris had long ago abandoned any attempt to account for her husband’s actions.

  Young Reddy rose to go, and Mrs Morris made no effort to detain him. Although the prospect of a visit from a nice young man was always so stimulating, Mrs Morris found the actual event rather exhausting, and was glad when it came to an end. Morris himself was a little more pressing.

  ‘Have you got to go, old man?’ he said. ‘That’s a pity. I was looking forward to a long evening with you. It’s a girl, I suppose, who demands your presence? No? We have to take your word for it, I suppose. Molly! John! Uncle John is going now.’

  The two children came hurrying down the stairs; they were anxious not to miss the starting of that massive motor-bicycle which stood in the front garden and which savoured of hot oil in the most heavenly fashion.

  It had fallen dark a little before. Reddy turned on his acetylene lamps and wheeled the machine out into the road at the corner, facing down the terrible slope. A new and delightful smell of acetylene came to the children’s noses before Reddy struck a match and lighted his lamps. Everyone regarded him solemnly. Anyone who could have spared a glance for Morris might have seen hard lines round his tight-shut lips, giving him the same expression of savage resolution as he had worn at the moment when Harrison was shot.

  Reddy said his farewells to the group; he shook hands with Mrs Morris, and he chucked Molly under the chin in the awkward fashion to be expected of a young man with no experience of children. He sought out John’s hand and shook it.

  ‘Goodbye, John,’ he said.

  ‘Goodbye,’ piped John.

  ‘Goodbye, old man,’ said Morris. There was a flat kind of tone in his voice.

  Reddy jerked up the stand to its catch, straddled the machine and thrust at the kick-starter. The engine broke into a roar. Reddy thrust once or twice with his feet, and as the bicycle began to run down the slope he put in his clutch. The clutch engaged for two or three yards while he adjusted the throttle controls, and then suddenly the note of the engine rose to a loud clamour which indicated that it was running free. Reddy’s hand went automatically to the clutch. It hung curiously loose in its notch. It was a full two seconds before Reddy could realize that the drive to the back wheel was out of order. Actually the spring link of the driving chain had been weakened in some fashion – perhaps by unscrewing the nuts retaining it – and the chain now lay in the road fifty yards behind him. Reddy switched off the engine.
He was already flying down that fearful hill; the manner in which the bicycle leaped at a bump in the road told him how fast he was travelling. He stretched out his fingers and gripped his brakes, first the rear one and then the front. And first the one lever and then the other came up at his touch without any show of resistance. The rods were pulling through the nuts at the points of adjustment; those nuts, too, must have worked loose somehow. By this time the bicycle was only a hundred yards from the main road, a hundred yards of steep hill in which to gather further velocity; and the main road across the foot of the hill was thronged with motor-cars returning from a Sunday in the country, and with motor-buses, and with charabancs, and with tramcars. The bicycle covered that hundred yards in four seconds; just long enough for Reddy to realize with a gasp of fear the fate that lay before him. He felt icy cold; perhaps the strain of the last ten days had its effect on his nerve, too. He was sitting dazed and inert in the saddle as the motor-bicycle dashed silently and without warning into the mass of cross traffic. There was no possible hope for him; perhaps there would have been none had he kept his nerve. The bicycle rebounded with a crash from the side of a tramcar and a motor-car, although travelling at quite a moderate speed, pulled up too late. Several drivers had shouted in the flurry of the moment. They were silent now as they pulled up and got out to discover what damage had been done. A glance at the tangled mass of wreckage and the crumpled figure in the road told them that, almost instantly. But the rear wheel of the motor-bicycle, which somehow had escaped damage, stuck up grotesquely in the air and still revolved slowly.

  10

  Sometimes one sees in the Press complaints about the centralization of police affairs in too few hands. Those complaints are usually justifiable, but at the same time it is possible to produce arguments in favour of police methods by which every kind of event calling for police attention should be examined by the same central office. This could not be done, of course, without a system causing considerable inconvenience to individuals, as in Germany, where every citizen with any notable event in his life history has that history filed at police headquarters and continually brought up to date – an objectionable system in practice, as it happens, because of its necessary consequences of police dictatorialism, and ‘personal papers’, and other encroachments upon individual liberty.

  But in the particular case under review some such system might have had its advantages. It is just possible that Morris’s dossier at police headquarters (did such a system prevail in England) might have borne the endorsements that his departmental superior had been killed by an unknown hand, and that his departmental junior had been killed in a motor-bicycle accident immediately after leaving Morris’s house. In that case official curiosity might have been aroused and an interesting inquiry initiated. Yet even then it is hardly likely that any correct deductions would be drawn.

  As affairs actually turned out in Morris’s case, nothing of the sort happened at all, as was only to be expected. Accidents to young men on motor-bicycles are far too common to cause much comment or inquiry, and the police officials who sorted out the facts regarding Reddy’s death for the purposes of the inquest had nothing to do at all with those others who had already begun to shelve the mystery of Harrison’s death as unsolvable.

  It only called for a very stupid constable to collect the names and addresses of half a dozen drivers and other eye-witnesses of the event; and the discovery of the driving chain of Reddy’s motor-bicycle high up on the hill was looked upon as the completion of the inquiry into the cause of the failure of the control of the machine, not as a very interesting first clue. Without his driving chain Reddy could not put the engine into bottom gear, and so use it as a brake, and with that point cleared up no one troubled to inquire very closely into why the two hand-brakes should have failed. A motor-bicycle which has collided with a tram, the one travelling at forty-five miles an hour, and the other at twenty, is sufficiently damaged for a couple of loose nuts not to be very remarkable. No breath of rumour came to the coroner (there was no rumour anywhere) as to anyone who would have found it to his interest to loosen those nuts; and it is rumour, with its concomitant anonymous letters, which usually provides a coroner with the initial line of thought on which to base an inquiry. Faulty motor-bicycle brakes are common enough, too. Morris was not even called upon to give evidence at the inquest, although he had been warned, in a routine fashion, that he might be called upon.

  A coroner’s jury heard a very rapid and perfunctory giving of evidence. They had read much in the newspapers regarding the unreliability of motor-bicycles, and they had frequently shaken their heads when helmeted young men had gone roaring past them with open exhausts. They had no hesitation at all in bringing in a verdict of accidental death, and in exonerating everyone concerned (except, by implication, the unfortunate victim) from all blame.

  And that coroner’s inquest was a counterpart of dozens of others being held all over the country. It meant next to nothing in the way of news to the newspapers, and consequently was hardly noticed in the Press; certainly not enough to attract the attention of the police who were dealing with Harrison’s death; and, as has already been pointed out, it is extremely doubtful whether those police would have been interested, or would have made any correct deductions, had their attention been drawn to the coincidence. They would have been extremely clever men if they had read the scanty facts aright. Even a sorrowing father and a heartbroken mother had no suspicion at all, attributing the disaster to the natural failure of a machine which they had always regarded with a rather jealous and conservative dislike.

  For that matter even people who knew Morris well (as well, that is to say, as a secret murderer can be known) had no suspicions, either; although they commented on the coincidence which had deprived the Universal Advertising Agency of two of its employees within ten days, they did so only with the same obviousness as they commented on the fact that the days were drawing in now. Mrs Morris had a splendid new event to discuss with the housewives in her street who were sweeping their steps when she set forth shopping. For a few days, until the novelty wore off, she enjoyed a delicious prestige as almost the last person to whom a man had spoken before meeting a violent death, and as the wife of a man who nearly had to give evidence at a coroner’s inquest. But she had no ideas at all regarding the cause of the event. Nor did Mr Campbell, who, after commenting on the sad way in which a promising young man had met a sudden end, fell to discussing with Morris the replacing of him in the office without further thought. The incident, indeed, served to increase the growing esteem with which Mr Campbell regarded Morris, because Mr Campbell was very impressed by the keen and unfaltering manner in which Morris went through the list of applicants and selected the best from among them. Morris’s choice of subordinates was sound, and he had at the moment no friends or relatives whom he wished to help into a job working under him. Maudie shed a sentimental tear or two over the fate of the fair-haired young man who had given her an occasional smile, but Reddy’s shyness had made the smiles sufficiently rare for Maudie not to feel his loss too acutely.

  There was only one person in the whole world who drew the correct conclusion, and that, naturally, was Oldroyd. He heard the news, as everyone else at the office did, on Monday morning; it was told him by a tearful Maudie. He received it stolidly; it was not until he heard the details of the loose nuts on the spring link of the driving chain, and of the faulty brakes, and of the fact that Reddy had just left Morris’s house, that his suspicions began to form. Morris that morning at the office was in his most driving mood. He continually deplored the loss of this one of his three assistants and he piled work upon Oldroyd and Howlett in greater quantities even than usual; more even than was necessary, because, as he announced, he himself might have to be absent next day as witness at the inquest. Somehow Oldroyd could not help feeling a flicker of admiration for the fellow who could speak about the inquest so calmly, and who could meet Oldroyd’s eye without a tremo
r.

  Oldroyd sat at his table toiling over lay-outs, while his slow brain was fitting evidence together as neatly as his fingers were fitting together advertisements. He was not the sort of man to leap instantly to a conclusion; it took time to form one. Behind him sat Morris, firing out orders and decisions like shots from a gun, supervising four men’s work, dictating letters to Maudie, and generally plunged into the rush of business which delighted him. When Oldroyd brought up completed bits of work to him, he looked them coldly over and discussed them side by side with Oldroyd as dispassionately as if there had never been any secret between them. It was his example, in fact, which enabled Oldroyd to get through that nightmare morning without giving way. Otherwise that matter-of-fact young man could never have tolerated the incongruity of working with a man who had the day before been guilty of a heartless murder.

  Unremitting work brought a breathing space at length, and Morris sent Oldroyd out to lunch. Oldroyd was a man of healthy appetite; perhaps it would have taken more than the recent news to have rendered him incapable of eating, but it was sufficient to take away enough of his interest in food to order his lunch carelessly, with hardly a glance at the menu, and to eat it without noticing whether it was well or ill-cooked. And as his jaws slowly masticated the tough stewed steak his mind was slowly chewing over the facts it had gathered from Maudie’s and Clarence’s hurried account of the event of yesterday. By the time he had finished his meal he was convinced of Morris’s guilt, and he was filled with a slow rage. His mind was not quick enough to have proceeded yet to the next stages of trying to work out how the occurrence would affect him personally, nor how, if he should wish to, he could avenge it. The only point he had reached so far was a hatred of the man who could send a boy to his death so heartlessly, and with so negative a motive. Oldroyd was fond of Reddy, but that was only a contributory factor to his anger. Mostly he was possessed with an angry loathing of the man who could plot and plan so cunningly, and who could carry out his plans so cold-heartedly. He had begun to regard Morris with the same shuddering antipathy as he would a snake; he felt that he could kill Morris as readily as he would kill a snake.