Paul Temple and the Tyler Mystery

Steve had worked with Temple too often to ignore that tone of voice. Without question she turned away. Temple went into the room and with the toe of his foot pushed the door until it was almost shut. Then he stood his ground and devoted a couple of minutes to what the police call ‘giving your eyes a chance’.

The room was a small bed-sitter. It was badly proportioned and too high for its size. The wallpaper and furnishings supplied by Mrs Hobson were ugly and shabby but here and there a few defiant gestures showed where Jane Dallas had tried to create a gayer, more feminine atmosphere. A flower-patterned curtain hung across one corner, obscuring the wash-stand, there was a vase of daffodils on the mantelshelf and a framed colour photo of Capri above it. The divan bed was covered with a striped blanket of many colours which might have come from North Africa, Persia or Birmingham.

The room was scrupulously tidy. Temple guessed that Jane Dallas had not had time to change her dress that evening.

She lay sprawled across the divan bed as if she had been flung there by violent hands. Her face was turned upwards towards the light and it was not possible to tell now whether she had been plain or pretty. Without moving from where he stood Temple was able to recognise the handiwork of a strangler. Though it was practically uncreased he never doubted that the girl had been killed with the silk picture scarf which lay near her on the divan. It had fallen in such a way that he could pick out on its shiny surface the Place de la Concorde, a portion of the Palais de Chaillot and Notre Dame de Paris.

Behind him a voice, growing rapidly in volume, announced: ‘And now, in answer to many requests, Al Jacobs will sing that popular number “Lonely is the Night”.’ An unseen multitude applauded and the brass section of an orchestra went into the key of E minor.

Temple calculated that Jane Dallas’s radio took just about two minutes to warm up. He hooked his toe round the door again to pull it open, and went downstairs to telephone the police.

‘I wish to God we could get a drink,’ Sir Graham grumbled, scowling round the dark empty lounge of the Black Lion. Some time earlier the waiter had politely pointed out that unless they were residents they could not be served with alcoholic refreshment. As a great favour he had brought them lukewarm liquid in a coffee jug; it tasted as if it had been distilled from acorns. Their still half-full cups stood on the table round which Steve, Forbes and Temple were sitting on cold, slippery leather chairs.

‘Well,’ Temple reminded him. ‘It’s your people who enforce the laws.’

‘They’d better not try and turn me out,’ the older man said in his bass-drum voice. ‘As a bona fide traveller I’m entitled to call for glasses of water till the cows come home.’

It had taken Sir Graham exactly one hour from Temple’s phone call to pick up Vosper and bring him down to Guildford. The Inspector had joined the Guildford C.I.D. men at 17 Charlotte Street; Forbes and the Temples cast themselves upon the mercy of the Black Lion. While they waited for Vosper to bring back the latest information Temple briefed Sir Graham about the visit to Sonning, Jane Dallas’s telephone call and his macabre discovery at Charlotte Street.

‘She was killed, of course, to prevent her giving you this information, whatever it was.’

Sir Graham picked up his coffee cup, examined its contents and then decided against drinking any more. Temple did not feel that any comment was required from him.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Forbes went on, ‘is why this strangler should leave his visiting card each time.’

‘The picture scarf of Paris? It didn’t really tell us any more than we knew already. The link between Jane Dallas and Betty Tyler was established. We cannot assume, though, that Jane Dallas was killed because she knew something which pointed to the identity of the other girl’s murderer. She may have been killed for the same reason as Betty Tyler.’

‘That reason being?’

‘Sir Graham, when we know that we’ll be within sight of our murderer.’

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