Murder Gone Mad

Sir Montague seemed somehow less portly than usual and certainly less sure of himself and his own greatness as he looked round the table. There was something not without pathos in the anxiously out-thrust face; something almost pitiful in the man’s pallor and uncertainty; something certainly admirable in his earnestness. There were murmurs of assent.

‘You needn’t worry about my end,’ said young Heatherstone heartily. ‘Bayford’ll lend you all his men. If he doesn’t, I’ll send ’em along without asking him.’

‘I’ll get a rush edition out before noon, if I can, Sir Montague,’ said Miss Finch, and rose and fumbled beneath her chair for the perpetual umbrella.

‘I’ll get permission for the Specials all right and enroll a devil of a lot more.’ This in a growl from Grayling.

‘Thank you. Thank you,’ said Flushing. ‘Well, gentlemen, I’m sorry to have kept you so long.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I see it’s already well past a normal dinner time …’

There was a general shuffling as chairs scraped back over the thick carpet and a sudden muddled hum of many small conversations as men struggled into their coats.

Steele threw open the double doors leading from the Board Room to the hallway. Thirty-eight feet clattered along the hall and so to the main doors and the flight of steps leading down to the pavement. The porter, expectant of tips, flung open the doors. The first rank shivered a little as the cold air struck their faces. The night was dark, but stars blazed in a black and moonless sky. The frost had held and there was a chill wind from somewhere in the north-east. Light, broken into a hundred little shafts by the bodies of the small crowd, flooded out from the hall and stabbed fingers at the darkness. Twenty-five yards away, straight opposite, the red and yellow signs across the face of the theatre winked cheerfully and a yellow rectangle of light poured through the glass doors of the portico.

Young Heatherstone tightened his muffler and turned up the collar of his ulster. He said to Grayling beside him:

‘Looks pretty cheerful, what? Hardly as if there was a … Jumping Gabriel, what’s up!’ The sudden change in his tone from one of idle pleasantness to one of urgent and vehement wonder brought a dozen eyes to peer in the direction of his pointing arm. From out of the theatre’s portico there had rushed suddenly a man in the theatre’s green and gold and scarlet uniform; a man hatless and to judge by his manner distraught; a man who, arrived upon the pavement, looked with quick turnings of his whole body to his right and to his left, and then, standing half crouched, put to his lips a whistle whose shriek throbbed across the cold, dark air.

‘What the devil!’ said Heatherstone, and was gone, crossing the roadway in four strides. He took the railings to the grass in a leap and arrived by the side of the man who whistled before any of his companions had moved a foot. The first few of them to cross the road and the grass saw him, after urgent and gesticulating talk with the commissionaire, disappear at a run into the portico. The commissionaire, turning suddenly, made off to his right at a long, loping run.

Grayling was the first to reach the theatre. He pushed open the heavy swing door which still vibrated with Heatherstone’s entry. In the vestibule he found the beginnings of a white-faced and gaping crowd. From this he singled out a face—a face whiter even than those which surrounded it, but a face beneath the cap of green lace worn as part of their uniform by the women who serve in the theatre. A man of sixty-five, but a man, Grayling, who knew both what he wanted and how to get it. He cut the girl out from the swelling crowd—they were pouring now in gusty lumps from the exits—as a skilled sheep dog a desired ewe.

‘Where?’ barked Grayling. ‘What is it?’

The girl gasped something, pointing. He dropped her arm. He jumped for the arch upon his right which framed the stairs leading up to the Royal Circle and Balcony. Despite his years and weight, he went up the stairs three steps at a time and came, after thirty of them, to the first floor vestibule where was the Tea Lounge and the chocolate counter and main door to the Royal Circle. That door was closed and before it there stood white-faced but determined, the short and ungainly bulk of Rippon, the theatre’s manager. The tall, broad, heavy-coated figure of Heatherstone was leaning, his hands flat upon the front of the chocolate counter, peering over it. At the sound of Grayling’s footsteps he looked up, twisting over his right shoulder a face whose tight clenched mouth, out-thrust jaw and fierce pallor brought the newcomer to his side quicker than would have any words.

‘Look!’ said Heatherstone.

Grayling stood beside him, and now himself peered over the counter and down.

In the uncarpeted semi-circle of floor between the blank back of the counter and the shelves, gaudy with sweatmeat boxes, there lay, like a crumpled life-size doll, the body of a young woman. Her face was pressed to the floor. Her arms were doubled beneath her. Her legs were ungainly asprawl in a position impossible, it seemed, for a living person …

And upon her back, between slight shoulders and waist, there lay like a square yellow lake, a piece of paper.

And out from the paper, staring up at Grayling’s eyes, printed in black ink, were four words:

WITH THE BUTCHER’S COMPLIMENTS.

CHAPTER IV

I

SUPERINTENDENT ARNOLD PIKE of the Criminal Investigation Department was talking with his immediate chief. Pike was saying:

‘Very well, sir, but you realise that I shall have to drop the Brandon business?’

Lucas shrugged. ‘Of course you will. But Broxburn can take that on. Anybody could do that, Pike, but this Holmdale job isn’t anybody’s meat.’

‘If you asked my opinion, sir,’ Pike said, with a wry smile, ‘I’d tell you that the Holmdale job isn’t really doable!’

‘Oh, rubbish!’ said Lucas. ‘Take two men and get off there by car as quick as you like. Get down there by lunch time. Who do you want with you?’

Pike considered a moment. He looked among the pages of a small notebook pulled from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Blaine,’ he said, ‘and Curtis. They’re not on anything special at the moment, sir.’

Lucas nodded. ‘Right! Take them and for God’s sake catch this lunatic or whatever it is before we get any more questions in the House. If only these County Police would ask us in at once instead of waiting until they’ve made a mess of everything, life might be easier.’

Pike nodded. ‘By jing, sir,’ he said, ‘I echo that wish!’ He turned towards the door.

Lucas recalled him. ‘Oh, Pike. You’d better stay down there, I think. And the men.’

Pike nodded. ‘It’s the only way, sir, to get at the thing properly.’ Once more he started for the door. Once more he was halted, but this time by himself. With his fingers on the door knob he turned. ‘By the way, sir,’ he said, ‘heard anything of Colonel Gethryn? How he is, I mean, sir?’

Lucas grinned and shook his head. ‘No. Beyond the fact that he’s going to be in bed for another three weeks with that thigh, nothing.’ He smiled at Pike with some slyness. ‘Why? Want help already?’ Pike laughed. ‘I’m not proud, sir, you know. I was just wondering whether, if he wasn’t doing anything, he might like to come down.’

‘Well, he can’t go down,’ said Lucas and laughed again. ‘And anyhow it’s not his line and you know it. This isn’t a job for a man so much as a job for an organisation. When you can’t find a motive, in fact when there isn’t a motive, you’re dealing with some form or other of lust-killing and to pick a lust-killer—who may be, on the surface, a most ordinary, respectable citizen—out of a crowd of six thousand citizens, isn’t a job which can be done by deduction. It’s got to be done by massed police work, cleverly directed … You get along, Pike, and don’t forget to show the world how the Düsseldorf business ought to have been handled.’

II

Three rooms in the Holmdale Company’s Offices had been placed at the disposal of the police. In the largest of these, at three o’clock in the afternoon of his first day there, Pike sat in talk with the Chief Constable of the County and County Inspectors Davis and Farrow. There was, to begin with, constraint. The Chief Constable had overruled his subordinates and asked the aid of Scotland Yard. But his subordinates were not, as perhaps was natural, pleased with the decision. They were, officially, ready both to help and to take their orders from Scotland Yard. Unofficially, they were anxious to show that left alone, as in their own opinions they ought to have been, they could probably have done the job more quickly, more neatly and with greater efficiency.

The Chief Constable, burly, red-faced and even at this time genial, sat at the head of the table. Upon his left, side by side, each as stiffly erect as his fellow, both in plain clothes, sat Inspectors Davis and Farrow. Davis was tall and lean, with a Sergeant-Major’s blue eye and waxed moustache. His face was hard and wooden and always, if he had any feelings, a mask for those feelings. Farrow was tall and thick, with the shoulders and round head of a pugilist. His face, unlike Davis’s, was a battleground for his inner emotions. At the moment he frankly scowled. His hot, reddish-brown eye regarded the trimly lounging figure of Superintendent Pike, who faced him across the table, with belligerent disfavour.

Pike had been in similar situations not once but a hundred times. He had his own methods. He was not truculent. He was not oleaginous. He was very pleasant. His brown, lantern-shaped face smiled unpartially at the other three. Not a permanent smile, but a smile, when answered, both friendly and, at the same time, individual.

They were talking of what had happened and of what might happen, and of what steps should be taken to prevent such happenings. They dealt, with Davis as spokesman, with the Colby murder and came to the conclusion that everything up to this stage which could have been done had been done. They dealt, then, with the truculent Farrow as spokesman, with the murder of Pamela Richards, and came to the same conclusion. They dealt, now with the Chief Constable as main spokesman, and both Inspectors as chorus, with the murder of Amy Adams, the waitress at the Holmdale Theatre chocolate counter. And here Pike found more to say after the others had finished.

‘This girl Adams …’ said Pike. ‘There’s one or two points about her case. You’re sure to have noticed, gentlemen, that this case is different from the other two at almost every point. First, while the others are killed by a wound in the stomach, which is ripped up—all untidy as you might say—Amy Adams is killed by a single thrust through the stomach which isn’t anything but tidy. Second, third and fourth, while Lionel Colby and Pamela Richards are killed at night and in the dark and in the open, this Adams girl is killed in the evening, and in a well-lighted public place and under a roof. Fifth, that while the first two had no … well, trademark of the murderer’s on ’em when they were found, Amy Adams did. Sixth, that while Lionel Colby and Pamela Richards had parents at least in comfortable enough circumstances, the Adamses are really poor folk living in a small cottage with the father actually out of work and on the dole.’

Pike sat back in his chair and looked, with his brown, bright eyes, at the Chief Constable.

The Chief Constable pondered, stabbing at the blotting-pad before him with a tortured pen nib. He raised his eyes at last to look at his two henchmen. ‘Thought of that?’ he said.

Davis nodded. ‘Of course, sir,’ he said, ‘we’ve seen all that.’ His voice was, as usual, a flat monotone, but there was in it also a rasping of bitter and elephantine irony. ‘We couldn’t help ourselves but see all that. It was us, you see, who did all the work and found out these facts.’

‘What I asked,’ said the Chief Constable mildly, ‘was whether you’d thought about it?’ He looked now at Farrow.

Farrow could not, as had the more controlled Davis, keep his eyes off Pike as he answered.

‘Thought about it!’ Farrow exploded. ‘Thought about it!’—And then, with sudden realisation of his company—‘Beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure. But if we haven’t been thinking, and thinking hard, about the whole bl——about the whole business for these past seventy-two hours and more, I’d like to know what we have been doing.’

‘Yes. Yes.’ The Chief Constable was soothing. ‘Yes. Quite; quite!’ He turned to Pike and said: ‘And what was your thought, Superintendent, when you put this “difference” point to us?’

Pike shook his head. A faint smile twisted his wide mouth. He said:

‘Nothing … I’ll have to explain myself a bit, sir. It’s always been my way not to think at the beginning of a job. I’ve found it pays me very well. I just turn myself—or try to turn myself—into a machine for recording facts without theorising. I don’t worry about whys and hows and whats and ifs. I just try to collect facts whether they appear to have any bearing on the case or not. Then, suddenly, when I’ve been digging round long enough and hard enough, I maybe dig up something which seems to click in my mind and become a good starting-off place for a think … I hope you follow what I mean, sir.’

‘Chacun,’ said the Chief Constable with a most un-Gallic accent, ‘à son gout.’ Kindly he translated: ‘Each man his own way … I gather then, Superintendent, that you had no particular reason for drawing our attention to the differences which exist between the circumstances of Colby’s and Pamela Richards’s murders and Amy Adams’s murder?’

Pike smiled at the Chief Constable. ‘That’s right, sir. No particular reason except that, as the cleverest man I know is always saying, in this sort of job, if one collects eddities one sometimes—very often, in fact—gets somewhere.’

Inspector Davis coughed, breaking the little silence which had followed Pike’s speech.

‘It seems to me, sir,’ said Davis, ‘that we might get down, as it were, to brass tacks; might get down, that is, to deciding what steps we’re going to take to prevent any more of these murders …’

Farrow grunted assent. ‘Ah, that’s right! That’s right, sir! And I’d like to add, what steps ’re we going to take to ensure that we watch this blasted lunatic.’ He turned to his colleague. ‘There’s only one way, Davis, to make sure of stopping these murders and that’s to catch the man that’s doing ’em.’

‘What,’ put in Pike mildly, ‘are the arrangements so far?’

The faces of Davis and Farrow, which had been turned each towards the other, turned now, outwards, towards the interloper. The interloper remained unmoved. He was not smiling any longer, but his lantern face was placid like a child’s. The Chief Constable—a man, perhaps, of more sensibility than sense—felt strain in the air. He hurried in with his stubby oar. He said quickly:

‘What are we doing? I’ll tell you, Superintendent.’ He fumbled among the papers stacked to one side of the blotting-pad before him and produced at last some pinned together foolscap sheets. ‘Here’s a copy of the present arrangements. I’ll just go through them in brief for you and then let you have the papers.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Pike’s tone was diplomatically grateful.

The Chief Constable cleared his throat. ‘First,’ he said, ‘as from four o’clock this afternoon, every main thoroughfare and every secondary thoroughfare in this place will be patrolled by regular police drafted in from other areas of the county. The patrols will be in pairs and will be on throughout the night, coming off duty an hour after dawn. These patrols will be supplemented in regard to the secondary thoroughfares by volunteer patrols, composed of special constables, under the control of Colonel Grayling, who acts under my directions, and other volunteers under the control of the Holmdale Company, who also hold themselves at my directions. Further volunteers will be posted to cover the various cul-de-sacs, squares, keeps and other non-thoroughfare ways. Further, as from five o’clock this afternoon, specially authorised guards (they will all be enrolled tomorrow as special constables to give them further powers) will be posted at all the entrances and exits of Holmdale. These men are being supplied, Superintendent, by the courtesy of Lord Bayford. An elaborate code of signals, in the case of any discoveries being made or any assistance being required, has been evolved. You will find full details of the whole scheme in the papers. Further, a reward of five hundred pounds has been offered by the Holmdale Company for information leading to the arrest of the murderer … What’s that, Superintendent?’

Pike shook his head. ‘Nothing, sir, nothing. I was only thinking what trouble you’re going to have. I’m not sure that I believe in these advertised rewards.’

‘We couldn’t,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘stop the Holmdale Company from offering the reward or the Holmdale Clarion from publishing the offer. And also, Superintendent, I’m not sure that the course isn’t justified.

Pike shrugged. ‘Very likely you’re right, sir!’

‘It seems to me,’ said the Chief Constable, folding up the foolscap sheets and handing them across the table to Pike, ‘that this lunatic who calls himself The Butcher will be hard put to it to try another of his games without getting caught. Eh? What? Don’t you agree?’

Once more Pike’s wide mouth twisted into a little smile; a smile doubting, but by no means offensive. ‘Couldn’t say, sir,’ said Pike. ‘I’m afraid I must stick to my own way. And that, as I’ve told you, is not to let myself form opinions in the early stages. I’m sure I hope you’re right though. The arrangements seem fairly complete. The danger is, of course, that they’ll frighten this Butcher into stopping his games. And then what’ll happen?’

The Chief Constable stared. ‘Well? … I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you.’

‘What’ll happen,’ said Pike, ‘is that nothing will happen and then, when after a month or six months, or a year or six years, when all supervision is removed—when all your arrangements that is, are, so to speak, cancelled—well, then, this butcher gentleman will just start his games all over again.’

The Chief Constable frowned. ‘Something in that, I suppose.’ He looked hard at Pike. ‘Meaning, Superintendent, that that’s what you think is going to happen.’

Pike shook his head. ‘I’m not thinking as I told you, sir … There’s no doubt that it’s what may happen. All we can hope is that it won’t.’

Inspector Davis muttered beneath his breath.

The Chief Constable turned upon him irritably. ‘What is it, Davis? What is it? Speak up, man!’

Davis flushed. ‘I was going to say, sir, that in my opinion, we didn’t ought to be talking about hoping. We ought to be talking about doing.’

The Chief Constable glared. He opened his mouth to speak, but Pike was before him.

Superintendent Pike smiled at Inspector Davis. ‘I’m not at all sure,’ said Pike, ‘that Inspector Davis isn’t right.’ He turned his head to look once more at the Chief Constable. ‘These arrangements of yours, sir,’ he said, ‘they seem to me to be very good and there’s nothing more that I’d like to suggest—at the moment … After all, you gentlemen know this place and what can be done with it. I’ve only just got here and want to look round before I say anything … About the question of quarters for me, sir? …’

The meeting broke up in a spirit almost of amity.

CHAPTER V

I

PARALLEL with the long platforms of Holmdale station, upon The Other Side of the railway line, runs, for two hundred yards, the thousand-windowed, green-and-white-painted back of the Breakfast Barlies Factory. At the southern end of the building there shoot into the sky, sudden and massive, the four great grain-elevators. These terrific towers are considered, by many of Holmdale’s citizens, to be the one blot upon Holmdale’s beauty. Actually they are the strongest claim to beauty which Holmdale has—their grouping; their smooth, sleek, immutable strength; their unbroken and unvarying shape; their almost brutal utilitarianism: all these—and something else; some indefinable and inner meaning not to be understood even by their makers—make them worthy to succeed the great trees which once stood where now the towers stand, but which, if still they grew, would seem shrubs clustered untidily about the towers’ feet.

They stood now, these towers, a black mass against the bloodshot sky of a winter sunset. The thousand-and-one windows of the factory sprang from blackness into golden life. Behind them the work went on. Good honest grain, ton upon ton of it, was being beaten and thrashed, roasted and split, drenched and besugared until, behind the gleaming windows at the northern end of the building, its final and tasteless distortions were packed, by white-clad females, into blue-and-white cardboard boxes, bearing all, in letters of red and gold, the words Breakfast Barlies. Under the splendid insignia was a picture of the factory, the grain-towers omitted. Under the picture were the words: ‘Breakfast Barlies beat the band, with cream and sugar they are grand; Dad likes them, so does little Pete, no meal without them is complete.’

There were seven hundred and seventeen day-workers in the factory. They were all well paid, well tended and worked under conditions almost painfully hygienic. They started work—girl-packers, men-machinists, roasters, clerks, porters, managers; everyone—at eight a.m., and they finished work—again all of them—at five p.m. Save upon most unusual occasions, and then only when armed with an official permit, signed and countersigned and franked again, was a worker seen to leave the factory before the proper time. But it was only ten minutes past four when Albert Calvin Rogers, second electrician in the belt-room, came up the stairs from the belt-room whistling, with hands in his overall-pockets and cap over one ear.

Albert Rogers was a competent working electrician hating electricity. Albert Rogers was a brilliant player of Association Football, loving the game with a devouring love. And in a pocket of the trousers beneath his overalls there lay a letter signed ‘Yours faithfully, F. T. Lovelace.’ This letter had come by the previous morning’s post and had been in the pocket or his hand ever since. Thirty-six hours and more he had had it; but it had taken every minute of those hours and all the assurances of the many to whom the letter had been shown, to convince him that the letter was fact and no imagining.

But now he did believe it. Hence the small scene, most dramatic, which had taken place in the belt-room ten minutes before. He had, as most workers, often mentally dramatised the visionary occasion upon which he would tell his immediate superior what he thought of him, but never—not at least, until just now—had it occurred to him that such an occasion would ever befall him in reality.

Yet it had. And down there was Masters, the foreman, with a flea in his ear and the other ear beginning already to thicken. And here was he, an hour before knocking-off time, coming up, by the forbidden stairs, a free and melodious man.

Sergeant Stelch, the Commissionaire, came out of his cubby-hole in resplendent wrath. In all the five-year history of Breakfast Barlies, Stelch had never before seen any one of the belt-room staff come up the Directors’ stairs nor heard an electrician whistle. The sight of the one added, in the same person, to the sound of the other, had at first amazed Sergeant Stelch and then infuriated him.

‘Oy!’ bellowed Sergeant Stelch.

Albert Rogers halted. He turned and his wide smile added fuel to the other’s wrath. ‘If you speak a little louder,’ said Albert Rogers, ‘a fellow might be able to ’ear you.’