The Silent World Of Nicholas Quinn

The door opened and a man came in. 'What the hell?' His voice had the lash of a whip, and his eyes shone with a primitive, blazing madness. 'What's that fucking man Roope been telling you, you snooping bastard?' He advanced on Morse, and lashed out wildly, whilst Mrs. Martin rushed from the room with a piercing scream.

'You should get yourself into better shape, Morse. You're pretty flabby, you know.'

'It's the beer,' mumbled Morse. 'Ouch!'

'That's the last one. See me in a week's time, and we'll take 'em out. You're all right'

'Bloody good job I had Lewis with me! Otherwise you'd have had another corpse.'

'Good, was he?'

Morse smiled crookedly and nodded. 'Christ, you should have seen him, doc!'

In Morse's office the next morning it was Lewis's turn to grin. 'Must be a bit tricky talking, sir — with all those stitches round your mouth.'

'Mm.'

Well? Tell me, then.'

'What do you want to know?'

'What finally put you on to Martin?'

'Well, it's what I said before, though I didn't really have a clue what I was talking about I told you the key to this case lay in the fact that Quinn was deaf. And so it was. But I kept on thinking what a marvel he must have become at lip-reading, and I overlooked the most obvious thing of all: that even the best lip-reader in the world is sometimes going to make a few mistakes; and Quinn did just that. He saw Roope talking to the sheik, and he read a name wrongly on his lips. I learned from the lip-reading class that the commonest difficulty for the deaf is between the consonants "p", "b" and "m", and if you mouth the words "Bartlett" and "Martin", there's very little difference on the lips. The "B" and the "M" are absolutely identical, and the second part of each of the names gets swallowed up in the mouth somewhere. But that's not all. It was Doctor Bartlett, and Donald Martin. Just try them again. Very little difference to see; and if you put the two names together, there's every excuse for a deaf person mixing them up. You see, Roope would never have called the Secretary "Tom", would he? He'd never been on Christian name terms with him, and he never would be. He'd have called him "Bartlett" or "Doctor Bartlett". And the sheik would almost certainly have given him his full title. But Martin — well, he was one of them; one of the boys. He was Donald Martin.'

'Bit of a jump in the dark, if you ask me.'

'No, it wasn't. Not really. There were one or two loose ends that somehow refused to tuck themselves away, and I had an uneasy feeling that I might have got it all wrong. As you yourself said, it was so much out of character. Bartlett's spent so much of his life building up the work of the Syndicate that it's very difficult to see him stooping to the sort of corruption we've got in this case — let alone murder. But I still couldn't see in what other direction the facts were pointing. Not, that is, until I suddenly saw the light as we sat in Bartlett's office, and then all the loose ends seemed to tidy themselves up automatically. Just think. Quinn discovered — or so he believed — that Bartlett was crooked, and he rang him up. Rang him up, Lewis! You can guess how Quinn dreaded ringing anyone up. The fact of the matter was that he couldn't face Bartlett with it any other way, because he just couldn't believe that he was guilty.'

'Did Quinn tell Bartlett that he suspected Roope as well?'

'I should think so. Quinn must have been a man remarkably free from any deception, and he probably told both Bartlett and Roope everything he suspected.'

'But why didn't Bartlett do something about it?'

'He must have thought that Quinn had got everything cockeyed, mustn't he? Quinn was accusing him — the Secretary! — of swindling the Syndicate; and if Quinn was totally wrong about himself, why should he think that Quinn was right about Roope?'

Lewis shook his head slowly. 'All a bit thin, if you ask me, sir.'

'In itself, yes. But let's turn to Monica Height. How on earth are we to account for the bundle of lies she was prepared to tell? It's fairly easy now to see why Martin must have been happy to agree to the lies they cooked up together after Monica told him she'd seen Bartlett coming out of the cinema. In fact I should think that he almost certainly instigated them himself, because it was going to suit his book very well not to have himself associated with Studio 2 in any way. And later, after Monica learned that Quinn himself might have been in Studio 2 that same afternoon she immediately realized that things would look pretty black for Bartlett if she said anything about seeing him there. And so she continued to conceal the truth. Why, Lewis? For the very same reason that Quinn couldn't face Bartlett: because she just couldn't believe that he was guilty.'

Lewis nodded. Perhaps it was all adding up slightly better now.