Read Online The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page B

appeared and was proposing to conduct him to the manager. The slinky young man contrived to insinuate that this was a privilege. Cadover, smouldering, marched forward still. Banks of flowers floated past him, gilt and scarlet chairs on which no one had ever sat, little fountains playing beneath changing coloured lights. Hectically tinted photographs as big as tablecloths, each with a disconcerting tilt to its picture-plane, presented curly-headed young men with butterfly ties, sleek-haired not-so-young men with smeared moustaches, a Negro in a straw hat, a nude girl knock-kneed and simpering behind a muff, the members of an entire symphony orchestra dressed like circus clowns… A door was opened and Cadover was aware of bare boards and a good rug, of bare walls and Dürer’s Apollo and Diana . This was the manager’s room. Its conscious superiority to the wares peddled outside was very nasty. Cadover’s gloom increased.
    The manager was sitting at a Chippendale table lightly scattered with objects suggesting administrative cares. On a couch at the far end of the room lay what was evidently a human body, covered with a sheet. By the window stood a glum, uniformed sergeant of police, staring out over London.
    The manager rose. His manner appeared to aim at that of somebody very high up in a bank, and he received Cadover as if he came from among the middle reaches of his more substantial clients. ‘An unpleasant thing, this,’ he said. ‘But if we must show a film of which the highlight is a holocaust what can we honestly say of a mere solitary killing in the Grand Circle? “Irony,” I said to myself at once when they told me about it. “It’s like cheap irony.” And then I had them bring the body straight in here. Now we shall have nothing but standing room for a fortnight. The cinema industry, my dear Inspector, is nothing but a great whore. And you might call this the tart’s supreme achievement to date.’
    The slinky young man giggled deferentially. Cadover, who did not care for this cynical travesty of his own responses, looked round the room. ‘The tart,’ he said, ‘would appear to treat her doorkeepers handsomely enough.’ There was a brief silence. The slinky young man giggled on another and an abruptly checked note. Cadover walked over to the body and twitched away the sheet. ‘Unknown?’ he asked.
    The sergeant had come up beside him. ‘No identification yet, sir. It’s been made deliberately difficult.’
    ‘This happened in the auditorium?’ Cadover turned to the manager. ‘And you had the body hauled out on your own responsibility?’
    ‘Certainly. There was nothing else to do. And it wasn’t known that the fellow was dead until they had him out in the upper foyer.’ The manager returned to his desk and consulted a note. ‘Lights went up at the end of Plutonium Blonde , the time being three minutes past four. One of the girls we call usherettes’ – and the manager made a fastidious face over this barbarism – ‘saw the fellow slumped in his seat and went up to have a look at him. He didn’t look right, so she called the floor manager. That was the regular procedure. The floor manager gave him a shake, and then saw the blood. By that time there was a bit of a fuss round about, so he sent one of the girls for a couple of commissionaires and to call up a doctor. He supposed, you know, that the fellow had suffered a haemorrhage, or something like that. By this time the lights were due to go down, and he didn’t stop them, since he didn’t want more disturbance than need be. But as the body was lifted out he saw that it was a body – that the fellow was dead – and he tells me that the notion of foul play did enter his mind. He called two firemen to stand by where the thing had happened – fortunately it was right in the back row – and then he came straight up to me. I gave instructions for the body to be brought in here and for the police to be called up at once. Then I went in