Smallbone Deceased

This was typical of Inspector Colley who was elderly, soured by lack of promotion, and extremely methodical. He knew the necessary moves to a hair, and made them all. His reports were models of conciseness and monuments to a staggering lack of imagination.

However, he was a worker.

In the short time at his disposal he had taken statements from everyone in the office, set his photographers in motion, commissioned a detailed drawing of Bob Horniman’s room and an outline sketch of the whole office, set his finger-print men to work on the room, its walls, its door, its fittings, its approaches and its very varied contents; had taken check sets of prints from all other members of the staff; had dispatched a man to Smallbone’s lodging to obtain prints from there, together with a check set from his landlady; had, in due course, sanctioned the removal of the body for pathological examination and on the strength of the doctor’s preliminary report had divided the personnel into two lists. List One, those who had been with the firm less than a month: Mr. Bohun, Mr. Prince, Mr. Waugh (the cashier), Mrs. Porter and Mr. Flower. Mr. Flower, it might be explained, was none other than Charlie the office-boy. He kept his surname a secret in the office, having suffered from it at school. List Two, the remainder.

He had also contrived to make everyone on both lists feel thoroughly uncomfortable.

“It’s not what he says or does,” as Miss Cornel observed to Anne Mildmay; “it’s his general frightful air of ‘You’re all presumed guilty until you’re proved innocent’.”

Bohun walked quietly home in the dusk, across New Square.

He was thinking of the extraordinary events of the day. He was thinking that shock revealed the oddest traits and flaws in the human character. He was thinking that he was glad he was on List One.

He stepped into Malvern Rents, which is a passage off a turning off Chancery Lane, and turned in at the Rising Sun Restaurant, which, in spite of its pretentious name, was a tiny eating-house, the total furnishing of which consisted of four small tables, a few chairs and a wooden counter with an urn on it. The room, as was usual at this hour of the day, was empty. Bohun paused for a moment at the half-open door behind the counter to shout: “I’m back.”

A muffled echo from the depths seemed to amount to some sort of acknowledgment.

He then pushed on through the second doorway, covered by an army blanket, up two flights of the narrow stairs, and through a second door. He was home.

It was an unexpected room to find in such a house. Originally, no doubt, it had been a large loft or storeroom, belonging perhaps to some scrivener at a time when the focus of the legal world had centred on the east rather than the west of Chancery Lane. It was a big room—quite thirty feet long and about half as wide, and looking surprisingly attractive with its grey fitted carpet, its stripped wooden walls and its carefully arranged lighting. The wall on the right as you came in from the landing, the inner of the long walls, was all books, covered with books, from floor to ceiling and from end to end. There was nothing esoteric about them, no tall folios, no first editions swathed in wash-leather—rather the well-handled tools of a reading man’s trade. Poets, essayists, historians, sets of novels, textbooks, even school books; there must have been more than a thousand of them.

Two formal steel engravings of battle scenes filled the space between the tiny uncurtained windows of the long outer wall. At the far end of the room stood a large electric log fire (there was, of course, no fireplace). Over it hung a portrait in oils of a severe-looking lady. In front of it stood a single leather arm-chair.

Bohun whistled softly to himself as he walked through the room and disappeared into the small annexe which opened off it and which was his sleeping quarters.

When he reappeared he was dressed in corduroy trousers and a khaki shirt, and had a white muffler round his neck. With his plain, serious, rather white face, he looked like some mechanic with a bent for self-improvement, a student of Kant and Schopenhauer, who tended his lathe by day and sharpened his wits of an evening on dead dialecticians.

“Well, Mr. Bohun,” said Mrs. Magoli, descendant of Florentines, owner of the Rising Sun Restaurant, and Bohun’s landlady. “And how are you finding your new office?”

“Thank you,” said Bohun. “I’m liking it very much.”

“Dry as dust, I expect.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Bohun. “We found a trustee in one of the deed boxes today.”

“Lor!” said Mrs. Magoli, who clearly had no idea what a trustee was. “What will you lawyers get up to next? Now what could you fancy for your afters?”

Bohun inspected the table in the middle of the room which Mrs. Magoli had spread with a fair cloth and covered with a number of dishes, backed by a promising looking wicker-covered flask.