Free The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes Page B

paused and, getting no response to this, sighed again. ‘To begin with, something emerges from the box-office. They have been showing to full houses, but when the lights went up and the body was noticed there was one empty seat on its left and three on its right. Four people had left before the end of Plutonium Blonde – before the end, that is to say, of its first showing of the day. So there was no question of those people leaving when the film reached the point at which they had come in. Moreover, for that showing those seats could be booked – and they had been booked. So I thought at once of quite a little gang on the job. They had their victim nicely isolated, and after killing him they all cleared out. But there is a point that is pretty conclusively against that.’
    ‘The booking?’
    ‘Exactly. When you book, the girl in the box-office hands you the numbered tickets and makes a blue cross on the correspondingly numbered seats on a plan. And here we come upon the blessings of industrial psychology. How to make blue-pencil crosses on a plan with most speed and least fatigue. Pushing up production per man-hour – or girl-hour, in this case.’
    ‘Ah.’ Cadover’s expression indicated no appreciation of this embroidery.
    ‘Two seats is zig-zag, zig-zag . Three seats is zig-zag-zig, zig-zag-zig. In other words, you can study the line of crosses and distinguish the number of seats booked at a time. Of the five seats in question, three were booked at one go, and two at another. There can have been no concerted booking of all five.’
    ‘Does that follow? The bookings may have been successive. One fellow comes immediately behind the other and simply says he’ll have the next three.’
    Morton shook his head. ‘In this case, I think not. The block of three has been crossed off with a much more recently sharpened pencil than the block of two. And if one wanted to make sure of all five seats one would scarcely–’
    ‘Quite. But does the girl in the box-office remember anything about the people concerned?’
    ‘Definitely not. It couldn’t be expected. The job is purely mechanical and she must have lost all interest in the faces peering in on her long ago. But it’s a different matter when we come upstairs to the usherettes. We get far more than we might hope for from them… Look here, I’ll draw a plan. It will explain the situation until you can see for yourself.’ And Morton reached for a pencil. ‘The seats in question we’ll call ABCDE , and you can see that A comes next to a gangway. It’s the back row, remember, so there’s nobody behind. From the people in front and to the right we may get something, though I doubt it now. The body was in B . And it was ABC that were booked together in a block of three, and DE that were booked together in a block of two… I think we may say that something of a picture begins to emerge.’ And Morton tapped his pencil with some complacency on the table before him.
    Cadover grunted. ‘What about those usherettes?’
    ‘Ah! Well, there’s a girl who remembers showing the dead man to his seat. But he didn’t bring three tickets; he brought two. And there was already someone – a woman – in A . Nobody remembers the woman arriving. She may just have had her counterfoil taken at the entrance and found her way to her seat herself. You can see it was an easy one to find. But her ticket, mind you, had been bought along with B and C .’
    Cadover committed himself to his first judgement. ‘Good,’ he said.
    ‘And this girl remembers who came with the dead man. It was a boy. He might have been about fifteen. Now, of course, that’s pretty queer. It suggests that the crime was perpetrated by a woman and a lad. Not but what the woman’s function isn’t clear.’
    ‘It is at least conjecturable.’
    Morton nodded. ‘Put it that way, if you like. The dead man believed that on his left there was a stranger having no interest in him. Actually, the woman may have