Flowers For the Judge Read online

  ‘Oh, Mr Tooth,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been kept waiting. I’m afraid Mr Widdowson won’t be here to-day. He’s been called away. Would you mind very much if we wrote you?’

  Mr Tooth grew red and then pale with indignation and Mr Campion was inclined to sympathize with him.

  ‘I’ll go in and see Mr Brande, then,’ said Mr Tooth with dignity. ‘He’s not engaged, is he?’

  ‘Oh no, he’s not engaged, but I’m afraid you can’t see him.’ There was a quality in the girl’s voice which was hard to define. She was enjoying the situation, certainly, but she was not bursting to come out with the news. Rather, she was being unduly secretive about it. Mr Campion was interested. Why should the staff of Barnabas Limited have decided to try to keep Paul’s death a secret? The death of a man is a hopeless thing to hide from his friends; after all, it is no little peccadillo or temporary embarrassment from which he may be expected to recover and afterwards prefer not to have discussed.

  ‘Miss Netley, is there anything wrong?’ Mr Tooth had caught the savour of unrest in the air and Campion watched the girl. She did not look in the least confused.

  ‘Well, he won’t be here to-day,’ she said, not so much evasively as tantalizingly. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  A great desire to get to the heart of the trouble downstairs passed over Mr Campion and unobtrusively he moved to the door. Mr Tooth he dismissed from his mind. Their interests, he felt, did not meet. But there was something very curious about Miss Netley, something about her personality which was peculiar. He made a mental note of her name.

  The wide entrance hall at Twenty-three was of a very simple plan and Mr Campion had no trouble in locating the basement stairs. He sauntered through the gloomy shadows and stepped slowly down the first flight. He did not move furtively, and at the first sound of his shoes upon the stone there was a warning cough from below and three men in packers’ aprons slid out of a doorway below him and made for their own domain. The first two walked with their faces averted and the third glanced sharply but ineffectually at the young man’s grey figure in the fog.

  ‘Door not even locked, and plenty of visitors. The police will be pleased,’ murmured Mr Campion as he wandered on towards the scene of the trouble which had been so neatly pointed out to him.

  In the entrance to the strong-room he paused. The retreating packers had not thought to switch off the light, and the whole scene lay before him, inviting him to examine it. It was not difficult to see where the body had lain, especially as he had Miss Curley’s telephoned description of its discovery firmly fixed in his mind.

  The bare table puzzled him at first, but it did not take a very acute mind to reconstruct roughly what had happened after the body had been found.

  As Mr Campion glanced at the heterogeneous collection of books and papers which Mike had heaped upon the floor his sympathy for any police detective who might come after him grew more intense. Since so much damage had already been done he had no hesitation in entering the room. One more set of footprints in the dust, he decided, could do little harm.

  The construction of the place interested him immensely. It was clear that it had at one time been part of the kitchens of the house and its subsequent alterations had done something to enhance the dungeon-like qualities of the domestic offices of the eighteenth century.

  The walls appeared to be lined first with some sort of metal and then with asbestos, while the window which had been immediately on the right of the doorway had been bricked up and covered by the shelves which ran all round the walls.

  Mr Campion sniffed the air. It was still stuffy, in spite of the open door, yet, as it seemed impossible that a room of the size could have been left entirely without ventilation, he took the opportunity of examining the outside wall.

  Yet fog had penetrated even here and he could not understand it at first until his search was rewarded by the discovery of a tiny iron grating let into the wall directly beneath one of the lower shelves, where a brick had been displaced. The two centre bars of the grating had been broken, leaving a ragged hole some two inches in diameter.

  At this hole Mr Campion looked very thoughtfully. By squatting down on his heels he found that he could peer through the broken ventilator into some half-lit chamber beyond, which he erroneously decided was the loading shed.

  He spent some time considering the shelf below the ventilator and restrained with difficulty his impulse to touch the papers thereon.

  When at last he straightened his back and continued round the room his face was much graver than usual and narrow vertical lines had appeared between his eyebrows.

  At the far end of the room, between the safe and the table, the chaos was indescribable, but, looking at it, Campion was inclined to think that it was the outcome of years of untidiness rather than the result of one frenzied five minutes indulged in by any hasty or excitable person.

  It passed through his mind that the term ‘business-like’ rarely applied to business people. There are degrees of muddle to be found in the offices of old-established firms which transcend anything ever achieved in a schoolboy’s locker.

  The strong-room at Twenty-three seemed to have become simply one of those useful places where nothing is ever cleaned up, so that anything deposited therein may reasonably expect to remain in safety until it is again needed.

  All the same, it occurred to him as he looked round that the amount of odds and ends which three generations of Barnabas directors had considered worth keeping was distressing when viewed in the bulk.

  The safe, he decided, could well be the centre-piece in any museum which an enterprising burglars’ guild might establish for the edification of junior members. It was massive enough in all conscience and looked as if it had been built to withstand shell-fire, but it opened with a key, a large key if the size of the highly decorated hole could be taken as a guide.

  He was still looking at it when hasty footsteps pattered down the passage and the door leading out into the yard banged. Feeling a little guilty but not really deterred, Mr Campion continued his tour.

  Lying on a dusty parcel of manuscript on the shelf nearest the table he came upon an anachronism. It was a bowler hat, nearly new and only very slightly dusty. Turning it over gingerly he saw the initials ‘P.R.B.’ inside, and on the floor below was a neatly rolled umbrella.

  Mr Campion’s frown deepened. The problem as he saw it had certainly a great technical interest, apart from its personal side. A man, dressed for the street, found dead in his own strong-room, the door locked on the outside, four days after he had disappeared, presented a situation provoking thought.

  Campion took another look at the ventilator and wished he might see the body.

  A few minutes later he was examining the door of the room and had just decided that at no time had the lock been forced or picked when the pattering feet returned, this time from the courtyard. There was a rush of bitter air as the door swung open and next moment somebody paused and looked in at him.

  Mr Rigget and Mr Campion exchanged glances.

  For some seconds Mr Rigget hesitated, torn between a desire to see what was going on upstairs and an inclination to investigate Mr Campion’s unexpected presence. He took stock of the stranger carefully, his eyes round and excited behind his glittering pince-nez.

  He decided almost immediately that Mr Campion was not a detective. Mr Rigget’s knowledge of detectives was small and his opinion bigoted. A thrilling alternative occurred to him and he came forward ingratiatingly.

  ‘Could I help, I wonder?’ he suggested, lending the offer a tinge of the underhand. ‘I shouldn’t want my name mentioned at first, of course, but if there’s anything you want to know…?’

  He broke off promisingly, adding a moment later as Campion’s expression did not change:

  ‘You’re a journalist, of course?’

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ said Mr Campion. ‘What’s on the other side of this wall?’

  ‘A – a gar
age,’ said Mr Rigget, startled into speech.

  Mr Campion’s eyebrows seemed in danger of disappearing.

  ‘How many cars?’

  ‘Only one. Mr Wedgwood keeps his Fiat there. Why?’

  Mr Campion ignored the question. Instead he snapped out another.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Neither his tone nor manner fitted in with Mr Rigget’s idea of the jolly, hard-boiled journalist he had seen so often on the films. He grew crimson.

  ‘I have a position here,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘Fine,’ said Mr Campion heartily. ‘Toddle along and keep it up.’

  ‘You are a journalist, aren’t you?’ said Mr Rigget, now considerably alarmed.

  ‘Certainly not.’ Campion looked astonished by the suggestion.

  ‘But you’re not a detective. It wasn’t you who came in with the Coroner’s Officer just now.’

  ‘Ah! he’s here at last, is he?’ said the pale young man with interest. ‘Splendid! Good morning.’

  ‘Shall I tell him you’re waiting?’ Mr Rigget’s slender pink nose quivered as he caught a glimpse of this exciting chance to visit, if only for a moment, the heart of the inquiry.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Campion. ‘It wouldn’t be true.’ And, brushing past his would-be informant, he moved quietly out of the room and mounted the stairs.

  Mr Rigget stood irresolute. Some instinct told him that it would not be wise to follow immediately. Moreover, the sense of mingled shame and apprehension, inevitable aftermath of a too hastily seized conclusion, was upon him. The scene of the trouble, on the other hand, was not a healthy spot in which to linger with the police in the house. In default of any other retreat Mr Rigget shut himself up in the wash-room.

  Mr Campion hurried up the stairs. His face was unusually blank and there was a strained expression in his pale eyes. He had made a discovery, or at least he had unearthed a possibility which, if it should prove to be substantiated by other facts, was going to lead to serious trouble.

  At the top of the stairs he hesitated. His next step presented difficulties. He was not at all sure of his own place in the proceedings. Miss Curley had invited him to the house presumably on her own initiative; therefore he was not working with the police but in the interests of his friends. In view of everything Mr Campion was inclined to wonder what their interests would prove to be.

  However, his curiosity overrode his caution and he considered the best means of getting the information he needed.

  He was still hesitating in the fog-laden hall, wondering if he should take the bull by the horns and go up to Gina’s flat, when he caught sight of a shadowy figure drifting down the stairs from the floor above. Ritchie, of course; Mr Campion had forgotten him. He stepped forward, his hand outstretched.

  ‘Mr Barnabas,’ he began, ‘I don’t know if you remember me –’

  The tall, loosely-built man paused abruptly and a pair of astonishingly mild blue eyes peered into Campion’s own.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do. You’re a friend of Mike’s, aren’t you? Albert Campion. You’re the man we want. You’ve heard, of course?’

  Campion nodded. The sense of shock and regret which he had missed in the office was here very apparent. Ritchie looked haggard and the bony hand he thrust into Campion’s own shook.

  ‘They’ve only just told me,’ he said. ‘One of the secretaries came up to my room. I was reading. I didn’t dream… Mike went down there last night, you know.’

  He paused and passed his hand through his tufty grey hair.

  ‘Twenty years ago …’ he added unexpectedly. ‘But it was May then … none of this awful fog about.’

  Mr Campion blinked. He remembered now the other’s habit of flitting from subject to subject, linked only by some erratic thought process at which one could only guess. However, he had no time to study Ritchie Barnabas’s eccentricities at the moment. There was something very important that he had to find out at once.

  ‘Look here,’ he said impulsively, ‘I’m at a great disadvantage. I really haven’t any business here at all, but I do want a few words with someone who has seen the body. Do you think – I mean, could you possibly …?’

  Ritchie hesitated. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said at last, adding abruptly, his eyes fixed anxiously upon Campion’s like a dog who is attempting to talk: ‘The body … that was the terrible part of it then … Nothing … not a sign. Poor young Paul!’ And afterwards, in an entirely different tone: ‘A mild day it was, inclined to be misty. But no fog like this.’

  He turned away and had gone half-way up the stairs again when he paused and finally returned.

  ‘Go upstairs to my room,’ he said. ‘It’s right at the top of the house. Forgive me for not thinking of it before.’

  He went off again, only to turn at the landing to look back.

  ‘I’ll meet you there,’ he said. ‘Come up now.’

  Mr Campion found his way to Ritchie’s office with some difficulty. It lay at the very top of the house and was approached by a small staircase set behind the panelling of a larger room. Campion discovered it only by accident, having caught a glimpse of the swinging door as he put his head into the last room on what had at first appeared to be the top floor.

  The office itself was a fitting place for its owner. It was very small and was built round an old-fashioned brick chimney, to which it seemed to cling for support. Apart from two dilapidated chairs huddled close to the minute fireplace, the whole place was a mass of manuscripts. They jostled and sat upon each other in tall unsteady piles rising up to meet the sloping ceiling.

  A little window through which the fog now looked like a saffron blanket held up to the light filled one alcove, and, save for this and the glow from the fire, the place was in darkness.

  Campion found the switch and a dusty reading lamp on the mantelpiece shot into prominence.

  He sat down to wait. After the chill downstairs the room felt warm and musty, the air spiced with the smell of paper. It was a very personal place, he decided; like an old coat slipped off for a moment regretfully.

  He had barely time to let its unexpected charm take hold of him when Ritchie returned. He came scrambling up the staircase like some overgrown spider, his long thin arms and legs barking themselves recklessly on the wooden walls.

  ‘She’s coming,’ he said. ‘Won’t be a moment. Had to powder her face. Too bad … a child, Campion … only eighteen. Very pretty … typist or something. Good family … been crying … making statement.’

  He sat down.

  Mr Campion, who had deduced that he was not talking about Miss Curley, had an inspiration.

  ‘You’ve got hold of the girl who found him?’

  Ritchie nodded. ‘Terrible experience. Glad to get away from them all. Nice girl.’

  He brought a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one thoughtfully. He had replaced the package when, with a word of apology, he produced it again and forced a rather battered cigarette upon Campion.

  ‘You knew Paul well?’ he said. ‘Poor fellow! Poor fellow! You didn’t? Oh, I see … Well, it’s a shock for everybody. It must be … Dead three days, they say. Can’t have been. Mike was there last night. Doctors don’t know, do they?’

  Mr Campion was slowly getting used to this somewhat extraordinary method of conversation. He had experienced this jerky chatter before, but in Ritchie’s case the man had a disconcerting way of fixing one with his gentle blue eyes with an earnestness which was somehow pathetic. It was evident that he wanted to be understood, but found speech very difficult.

  In spite of his preoccupation with the pressing matter on hand, Campion noticed that the elder man used long sweeping gestures, completely meaningless in themselves, and he began to understand why the intolerant Jacoby Barnabas of the portrait in the waiting-room had found this particular nephew so unsatisfactory.

  Although he was still obviously very shaken, Ritchie seemed more at ease now that he was back in his own little room. He glance
d about it, caught Mr Campion’s eye and smiled shyly.

  ‘Been here twenty years, reading,’ he said.

  Campion was taken off his guard.

  ‘No remission for good conduct?’ he said involuntarily.

  Ritchie looked away, and for the first time the younger man was aware of something not quite frank about him.

  ‘Get away sometimes,’ he said. ‘Week or two now and again. Why not…? Must live.’

  His tone was so nearly angry that Campion almost apologized. He had the uncomfortable impression that the man was hiding something.

  He put the idea from him as absurd, but the impression remained.

  Ritchie was puffing furiously at his cigarette, his long thin fingers with their enormous knuckles gripping the little flattened tube clumsily.

  ‘Strong personality,’ he said, his blue eyes once again fixed on Campion’s face. ‘Moved very quickly … did foolish things. But to be found dead … terrible! Have you ever been in love?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Mr Campion, completely taken aback.

  ‘Don’t understand it,’ said Ritchie with a wave of a long bony arm. ‘Never did. Paul didn’t love Gina. Extraordinary. Mike’s a good boy.’

  Campion was sorting out the possible relations between these disjointed ramblings when there was a movement on the stairs below and Ritchie got up.

  ‘Miss Marchant,’ he said.

  He disappeared for a moment, to return almost at once with a very pretty girl. She had been crying, and was still near tears. As he caught sight of her Mr Campion was inclined to agree with Ritchie’s sympathetic outburst. It certainly did seem a shame that this little yellow-haired girl with the big frightened eyes and demure, intelligent face should have been subjected to what must have been a very unpleasant experience.