Flowers For the Judge by Margery Allingham Read Free Book Online Page B

have discussed.
    ‘Miss Netley, is there anything wrong?’ Mr Tooth had caught the savour of unrest in the air and Campion watched the girl. She did not look in the least confused.
    ‘Well, he won’t be here to-day,’ she said, not so much evasively as tantalizingly. ‘I’m so sorry.’
    A great desire to get to the heart of the trouble downstairs passed over Mr Campion and unobtrusively he moved to the door. Mr Tooth he dismissed from his mind. Their interests, he felt, did not meet. But there was something very curious about Miss Netley, something about her personality which was peculiar. He made a mental note of her name.
    The wide entrance hall at Twenty-three was of a very simple plan and Mr Campion had no trouble in locating the basement stairs. He sauntered through the gloomy shadows and stepped slowly down the first flight. He did not move furtively, and at the first sound of his shoes upon the stone there was a warning cough from below and three men in packers’ aprons slid out of a doorway below him and made for their own domain. The first two walked with their faces averted and the third glanced sharply but ineffectually at the young man’s grey figure in the fog.
    ‘Door not even locked, and plenty of visitors. The police will be pleased,’ murmured Mr Campion as he wandered on towards the scene of the trouble which had been so neatly pointed out to him.
    In the entrance to the strong-room he paused. The retreating packers had not thought to switch off the light, and the whole scene lay before him, inviting him to examine it. It was not difficult to see where the body had lain, especially as he had Miss Curley’s telephoned description of its discovery firmly fixed in his mind.
    The bare table puzzled him at first, but it did not take a very acute mind to reconstruct roughly what had happened after the body had been found.
    As Mr Campion glanced at the heterogeneous collection of books and papers which Mike had heaped upon the floor his sympathy for any police detective who might come after him grew more intense. Since so much damage had already been done he had no hesitation in entering the room. One more set of footprints in the dust, he decided, could do little harm.
    The construction of the place interested him immensely. It was clear that it had at one time been part of the kitchens of the house and its subsequent alterations had done something to enhance the dungeon-like qualities of the domestic offices of the eighteenth century.
    The walls appeared to be lined first with some sort of metal and then with asbestos, while the window which had been immediately on the right of the doorway had been bricked up and covered by the shelves which ran all round the walls.
    Mr Campion sniffed the air. It was still stuffy, in spite of the open door, yet, as it seemed impossible that a room of the size could have been left entirely without ventilation, he took the opportunity of examining the outside wall.
    Yet fog had penetrated even here and he could not understand it at first until his search was rewarded by the discovery of a tiny iron grating let into the wall directly beneath one of the lower shelves, where a brick had been displaced. The two centre bars of the grating had been broken , leaving a ragged hole some two inches in diameter.
    At this hole Mr Campion looked very thoughtfully. By squatting down on his heels he found that he could peer through the broken ventilator into some half-lit chamber beyond, which he erroneously decided was the loading shed.
    He spent some time considering the shelf below the ventilator and restrained with difficulty his impulse to touch the papers thereon.
    When at last he straightened his back and continued round the room his face was much graver than usual and narrow vertical lines had appeared between his eyebrows.
    At the far end of the room, between the safe and the table, the chaos was indescribable, but, looking at it, Campion was inclined to think that it was