Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(56)

He gave three knocks on the table by his side—the three knocks that usher in the judge in Central Criminal Court Number One at the Old Bailey. ‘We’ll take first the evidence of the police.’

Inspector Block, paying lip service to all this foolishness, was interested nevertheless to see the outcome. ‘May it please your lordship, members of the jury. Twelve years and six months ago, almost to this very day, the police were shown an anonymous letter which had been received by the famous stage magician, Mr. Mysterioso. It was the first of a dozen or so, over the next six months. They were composed of words cut out from the national dailies, and enclosed in cheap envelopes, varying in size and shape, posted from widely differing parts of the country. I may add here that no one concerned with the case appeared to have had the opportunity to post them, unless of course it was done for the sender by different persons. At any rate, the letters were untraceable. They were all abusive and threatening and evidently from the same person; they were all signed ‘Her Husband’.

‘Mr. Mysterioso made no secret of having received them, and there was a good deal of excitement as each new one arrived. The police gave him what protection they could, and when in June he came down to Thrushford in Kent to lay a cornerstone, it was our turn—I was a young constable then and didn’t know very much about it, but it was rather anxious work for my superiors, because he had done a brief season at the theatre there a couple of years before.

‘It was arranged, therefore, to cover certain points round the site of the ceremony. The cornerstone was for a new wing. A second wing, completed on the outside but not on the inside, lay between the cornerstone and the main hospital building.’ He drew a plan in the air, a circular movement with the fiat palm of the right hand for the main building of the hospital, a stab with the forefinger of the left hand for the cornerstone, and a sharp slash with the edge of the hand for the unfinished wing lying midway between them. ‘It was from a middle window on the top floor of this wing that the shot was fired.’



And he described the unfinished wing. A simple oblong; ground floor and two storeys, with its main entrance at one end. This entrance had no door as yet, was only a gap leading into a little hall out of which the stairs curled round the still-empty lift shaft. A sloping roof of slate surrounded by a ledge with a low parapet.

‘It was an easy matter to search it. Except on the top floor there were no interior walls, and up there only half a row of rooms was completed—each floor was designed to have a central corridor with small rooms leading off both sides. There was a lot of stuff about, planks and tools and shavings and so on, but literally nowhere big enough for a man to hide. It was searched very thoroughly the night before the ceremony and less thoroughly the next morning, and a constable was placed at the main entrance with orders not to move away from it.’

‘And he didn’t move away from it,’ said the boy. ‘That was my father.’

Inspector Block ignored him. ‘The order of events is as follows: one hour before the ceremony, Mr. Mysterioso arrived, and the Superintendent explained the arrangements to him. Their way to the main hospital building, where the reception committee awaited him, led past the entrance of the unfinished wing. Just outside it a man was speaking to the policeman on duty.’

‘The murderer was speaking to the policeman on duty,’ said the boy.

‘This person was well known to the police,’ said the Inspector, ignoring the young man again, ‘as a press photographer—not yet calling himself Mr. Photoze. He wanted permission to go up on the roof and take pictures of the ceremony from there.’

‘Always one for the interesting angle,’ said Mr. Photoze archly.

‘The Super was about to refuse him, but Mr. Mysterioso recognised the man and said he should be permitted to go up. So he was carefully searched for any weapons, and it ended in all of them going up to the top floor together. Mr. Mysterioso, of course, had his man, Tom, to help him.’

‘We’d been together so long,’ said Mysterioso, ‘that really in the end we moved like a single person, always running a sort of three-legged race. I had no pain from this thing, it was only a total lack of strength. A couple of flights of stairs was nothing to us.’

You couldn’t get on with it, with these people, thought the Inspector. They all wanted to exhibit. ‘At any rate, they went up,’ he proceeded, letting a little of his irritability show. ‘There was a trap door, the only exit to the roof, and Mr. Photoze, as we now call him, was helped up through it with his gear. At that moment Tom came down the corridor, having left his master standing propped up against the window-sill in one of the little rooms, looking down with interest at the site. Tom said he didn’t like it, that he felt uneasy about the whole thing; the man shouldn’t have been allowed up. Someone—I think in fact it was P.C. Robbins, the man on the door, this young man’s father—suggested that there was a bolt which could be shot from the inside, locking the photographer out on the roof. So this was done. Mysterioso was waiting for them at the door of the little room, and they went on to the cornerstone.