The Doors Open (7 page)

“I’ve no doubt you’re quite right,” said the Chief Inspector. Official reticence naturally prevented him from saying anything about the Staines report on his desk.

“But darling,” said Nurse Goodbody, “insurance corporations just don’t do things like that. One of my uncles – not really an uncle, but my grandmother’s sister’s eldest son, is a director of Stalagmite and he’s the most respectable person I know, he wears morning dress every morning of his life – not just for weddings – and he sends me the ‘Girls Own Annual’ for my birthday because he can’t grasp that I’m not still twelve years old.”

“Which one is that, Pat? Sir Hubert Fosdick?”

“That’s the one. Uncle Hubie.”

“But I thought he was nearly seventy and quite gaga.”

“Well, he’s not getting any younger, poor dear, and he is apt to be the tiniest bit absent-minded, but he’s certainly not a crook or anything like that.”

“I should hope not,” said Nap patiently: he found he had often to explain things quite a number of times to Patricia before she grasped them. “It isn’t the Stalagmite itself that we’re up against. Everyone knows the Stalagmite – they’re as solid as the Bank of England. What we think is that their head cashier may be up to some funny business – something to do with his accounts most probably.”

“But what has it all got to do with you, darling?”

“Nothing, really,” said Nap honestly. “Except by a fluke, or a succession of flukes. It started when Paddy happened to see this man Britten on the night he made away with himself.”

“The Junior Cashier.”

“That’s right. He thought at the time that there might have been something fishy about the very convenient way Britten fell into the river. I don’t think he does think so now. But anyway, that’s what started him off. He went and saw Mr Legate – that’s the general manager – and had a talk with him. Brandison – he’s the head cashier – happened to see him go in, and somehow he must have heard what he said. Most probably he simply listened at the door – his room’s next to Mr Legate’s and he looks the sort of person whose ears are made for keyholes. The next thing Paddy knew, he’d lost his job at Barrowbridge’s – and it’s a dime to a dollar that Brandison was the chap who wangled it.”

“Wasn’t that rather mean of Mr Brandison?”

“It was all of that, sweetheart, and it was perishing silly of him, too. You know what Paddy’s like. He’s a slow old horse, but, like the brigadier’s mule and the unexploded bomb, you can definitely kick him once too often. He’s got it in for Brandison, well and truly, and I can’t say that I should like to be in Brandison’s shoes.”

“Yes, I understand all that,” said Patricia, “But Nap, dear, where do
you
come in?”

“Oh, I’m doing it for fun,” said Nap.

“Well, I don’t think you ought to get involved,” said Patricia. “It’s really nothing to do with you, and you know how careful you’ve got to be. You’re a solicitor–”

“Really, Pat, I can look after myself,” said Lieut. Colonel Rumbold, DSO, a little irritably, and added, “if anyone ought to be worrying, it’s Brandison. We’ve already found out enough about him to put him right up Queer Street. If we so much as dropped a hint to Mr Legate about how his cashier spends his Friday evenings and the sort of crowd he’s running with – I think
he
might be looking for another job, too.”

“Then why don’t you do that,” said Patricia, “and finish off the whole business.”

“Well, it would be a sort of revenge – rather a shabby sort. But it’s not quite what we’re after. We want to find out what he’s really up to. After all,” went on Nap virtuously, “a great insurance company is almost a public undertaking. It’s surely our duty as citizens to look after the public interest.”

Whether this specious line of reasoning was entirely convincing to Nurse Goodbody is doubtful. However, being a practical girl she saw that her affianced had made his mind up, and left it at that.

2

The
Moorgate Press
does not, in actual fact, stand in Moorgate at all, but occupies two tall buildings in the no man’s land where Finsbury Pavement becomes the City Road.

Life in the offices of a financial weekly paper is not lived at quite the startling rate that it is on the great national dailies; but Paddy was finding it different enough from the white-collared starchiness of a chartered accountant’s routine. He liked the general atmosphere of shirtsleeves and strong tea: and after the training he had received from the meticulous Mr Barrowbridge it was a positive relief to enter an office where practically nothing was done in duplicate, important letters were apt to be written on sheets torn from scribbling-blocks and vital documents were always being taken home and lost.

However, he had not been there long before he discovered that the
Moorgate Press
had a business morality of its own quite as strict as that of any professional firm.

“That comes out – all of it,” said McAndrews, his copy chief. “Every word. It’s nothing but guessing. Intelligent guessing, maybe.”

“I got the figures from the secretary,” protested Paddy. He liked the old man, and was sorry to have upset him.

“Feegures,” said McAndrews, managing to invest this innocent word with quite a remarkable degree of contempt and loathing. “How can you have accurate feegures of future profits? Tell me that. Feegures relate to transactions which have already taken place. Forbye they’re not always very credible, even then.”

In common with most City firms at that period the
Moorgate Press
was hideously overcrowded and the two men shared a tiny room on the first floor. Nominally their duty was to produce the weekly column entitled ‘Tips to Investors’, to which reference has already been made: but actually they kept their eyes on a whole group of insurance and production companies.

McAndrews, who had been in the game for nearly forty years, pulled in a four-figure salary and earned every penny of it. It is conceivable that he knew more about the stock market than any man in London, yet he had never in his working life made an investment in anything more exciting than a trustee security. He seemed to understand by a blend of instinct and experience the whims and fancies of that intensely female creature, the public financial conscience. He could differentiate between those events which would cause her illogical extremes of terror and those, equally alarming, which she would ignore. He could sense when the old creature was going to draw her skirts tightly around her, and could even forecast those rarer occasions when she would fling her cap over the moon.

“Give the public the facts,” he said to Paddy. “There are few enough papers do that in all conscience. If you draw a legitimate deduction, present it as a deduction. That’s our rule. That’s why we’ve a big name in our own line.”

This last remark Paddy found to be true.

In his fortnight with the
Moorgate Press
he had already had occasion to visit dozens of firms of stockbrokers, accountants and financial agents of every sort and degree, and he had been received civilly by all, though a doubt existed in his mind as to whether this was due to his own personality, the good name of the paper he worked for, or the fact that McAndrews had in every case given him a personal introduction to the one person who mattered.

“They’re a job lot this morning,” said the old man, indicating a file of letters which the sorting room had stamped ‘Investment Enquiry’. “I can do the greater part of them without stirring myself. There’s one here though – would you ever have heard of ‘Factory Fitments’?”

The question was purely rhetorical and he went on without waiting for an answer.

“They’re an odd concern. I canna quite get the hang of them. For a public company, I’d say they were being just a wee bit coy. I’m told that Moody and Van Bright worked in the flotation. Ask for Philip Van Bright – he’ll tell you what he can.”

Paddy found the offices of Moody and Van Bright at the top of a large block in Basinghall Street. He had had no previous dealings with them and was interested to see what sort of firm they might be. Experience was already teaching him the little signs which mattered. He was beginning to be able to distinguish between the firm with no work at all (and a terrific air of industry), the firm with a good flow of business and a staff which could cope with it, and a third type of firm – not uncommon in those post-war days – which had inherited a body of custom which it was rapidly dissipating by a mixture of incompetence and optimism.

His first impressions were entirely favourable. His ears told him that the many typists were both busy and efficient, and as he was shown through the outer office he noted the two operators dealing faithfully with a ten-line exchange.

Young Philip Van Bright received him cheerfully, asked after McAndrews’ Persian cat – an almost legendary creature, reputed to read the daily financial columns in
The Times
– and asked what he could do for the
Moorgate Press.

“As a matter of fact,” said Paddy, “I want some dope about ‘Factory Fitments’.”

He was not looking for any particular reaction and was therefore considerably surprised at the result of the simple remark.

It was as if a blind had shut down, suddenly excluding the sun.

(Or was he, perhaps, being oversensitive?)

Van Bright’s voice was still courteous, if a little wary, “I’m afraid,” he said, “that we don’t – that is, what exactly do you want to know?”

“Just your opinion of them,” said Paddy easily, “I’m not asking for any breach of professional confidence, of course–” Stick to the usual lines of sales talk, he thought, I believe there’s something fishy here – “I’m told you have had most of the dealing in their ordinary shares–”

“Preference shares,” said Van Bright automatically. “Yes, we’ve done a certain amount.”

“I understand they deal in all sorts of interior fitting for the normal production job – benches, lathes, machine tools, jigs, overhead transporters and so on.”

“That’s right.”

“Obviously a sound line in these days,” said Paddy, “if you can get the necessary permits. What was the public response like?”

“Well–” the stockbroker seemed to be picking his words carefully and his fingers fiddled ceaselessly with a pencil. “Actually, it’s difficult to say. They’ve been fully subscribed of course. With Latham’s Steel behind them they were bound to be that–”

“In the present state of the stock market,” agreed Paddy, “you’d get full subscription for a company to sell refrigerators to Esquimaux. But I wondered what your experience had been of dealings–”

“There haven’t been any dealings,” said Van Bright slowly. Sensing Paddy’s astonishment he added, “That’s what I was telling you. All the shares were taken up by two or three big buyers.”

“I see,” said Paddy. He knew better than to invite a blank refusal by asking who the buyers were. “Well, that rather accounts for it, doesn’t it.”

When he reported the gist of this to McAndrews, the Scotsman said, “Much what I thought. They were bought out before the public list opened.”

“Is that unusual?” said Paddy. “I mean – there must be lots of nominally public companies which are collared like that. The Bank of England itself couldn’t buy preference shares in–” he named two well-known concerns.

“Not now,” agreed McAndrews, “all the same, it’s not quite as straightforward as you think. Mph’m. We’ll see what the gutter press has got to say about them.”

He referred in these disrespectful terms to a rival publication, called
Market News
which was not quite so scrupulous as the
Moorgate Press
in its differentiation between fact and surmise, and had therefore a correspondingly wider if less respectable circulation.

At the conclusion of a ten minutes’ telephone call which consisted, on his side, largely of “hmps”, McAndrews replaced the receiver and said: “So they’re back-pedalling, too. If anyone knows anything about ‘Factory Fitments’, they ought to. They were the people who put me on to Moody and Van Bright–”

3

It was a Friday evening some ten days later and Nap, alone, was dozing in front of the fire. Paddy was out at one of his hearty regimental reunions and unlikely to be home before midnight.

Half of Nap’s mind was pursuing the head cashier of an important insurance corporation down the paths of conjecture; the other half was trying to decide whether he loved Patricia well enough to marry her.

Did anybody really love anybody else well enough to want to spend all the rest of their days with them; and was that a thing which you could possibly be certain about before marriage itself? How much of it was reason and how much instinct; or was the whole thing a racket? Was the institution of monogamy just the plain reproductive urge confined to a strait jacket – the bitter pill of necessity coated by layers of saccharine?

The Frenchman in him posed these questions coherently and the Englishman tried to answer them impersonally. Since they remained, naturally, unanswerable, he diverted his attention to more immediate matters.

The difference, as he told himself irritably, between a story-book adventure and a real-life adventure was a matter of focus and selection. In a story everything which happened, mattered: everything was significant. That man who tapped the girl on the shoulder in the crowded street was a friend – or a dark and deadly enemy. His object was to save her or serve her, or even to seduce her. Whereas in real life he would turn out to be a complete stranger whose one desire was to borrow a match or ask the way to Peckham.

Nap had compressed into his four months in occupied France the bits and pieces, the beginning and ends of a dozen adventure stories. He remembered the time that he had saved his life by buying a third-class railway ticket at the last moment instead of a second-class one; the nightmare evening which he had spent giving lessons in English syntax to the Chief of the SS in Besançon; he recalled the occasion on which he had been buried with full military honours and according to the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. And the people he had met. Odd, illogical, incomprehensible characters. The woman who had stood up to six hours of Gestapo questioning and screamed at the sight of a field mouse. The men who were reliable when they were sober, and the men who were only safe when they were drunk, and the glorious blacksmith of Toul who had sworn never again to be sober until the last German had left the Franche Comté (when Nap met him he had been on a fair way to redeeming his vow).