Box Forty-One

Sleet came at the lodge window all evening in handfuls, like somebody throwing grit at the glass. At two minutes past eleven the presses had still not started. That does not happen. A morning paper starts its machines at eleven the way a clock strikes.

Then the fire door went back against the wall and Walter Strang came through it without his apron on.

Lodge. Get the lodge. Get anybody.

After that everybody in the building was in the corridor at once. Hugh Ledbetter was on the composing-room floor beside the stone, which is the long iron table the pages are made up on. He was forty-six. He was our night editor, and one of the three trustees who decide what happens to this paper; the three of them had sat at the Assembly Rooms that evening over an offer to buy us. The overseer's mallet lay by his hand and the back of his head was broken in. His collar was still wet from the sleet he had walked home in, and across the back of that collar, where a hand had taken hold of him, was a smear of strong violet-blue four fingers wide.

My name is Clem Oakden. I am twenty-two, and from eight o'clock until the papers go out I sit the switchboard in the lodge, which is the glass box inside the front door. Whatever comes over the wire I take down. A football result. A chimney fire at Ossett. Four lines of a court case from a man in a call box with his coppers running out. At 10.38 the board buzzed from upstairs, which it does twenty times a night.

Ledbetter. Is that you, Oakden?

It is, sir.

Then answer me something. Who comes to the counter for the letters that are left there for Box 41?

I couldn't say, sir. Nobody has ever asked for that box by name where I could see them do it.

No. No, they wouldn't.

Hugh Ledbetter put the receiver down without another word, and that was the last call he made in his life. At 10.44 he went through to pass the last page himself, and nobody heard him speak again.

The borough police had a man in the building inside a quarter of an hour. Detective Sergeant Nuttall was forty-odd and wet to the knees, and by his own account he had never been inside a newspaper office in his life. He stood over the collar with his hands behind his back for a long time.

That's printing ink.

It looks like it, sir.

Who puts blue on paper in this building?

Only the stop-press, sir. It is a little machine that prints the late racing results into a blank corner of the front page after the rest of it is set. That blue is the only blue ink we have.

And who loads it?

Ned Halloran.

Then I'll have Ned Halloran first.

He was back out of the machine room in nine minutes with nothing written down.

He says there was a lad in the doorway the whole while and he'll not give me the name. Sandy fellow, ink to the elbow, temper on him like a kettle. What is he, then?

Thirty-three, sir. Never still. He has been on that cylinder since he was nineteen and he was on the machine floor the whole of that half-hour.

And what's this that's standing in type with his name in it?

A story, sir. A back-street betting office getting our racing results before the papers reach the street. It was set this afternoon and it has not been passed yet. He is named in the fourth paragraph of it.

Is he.

He took out a notebook with a rubber band round it, wrote three more names off the night list, and then went down the list with me, because he had been in the building twenty minutes and I have been in it four years.

Pettifer.

Mrs Constance Pettifer, sir. She has kept the advertisement counter nineteen years. Fifty-two, grey, with a pencil driven through the bun at the back of her head. If the Ainsworth chain buys us it brings a contract with it that she spent a year building.

And was the dead man for the chain or against it?

He wrote to her on Monday to say he meant to vote the offer down on Thursday.

Where was she?

At her counter. The whole half-hour that matters.

With who?

She says the counter's business is the counter's.

He wrote that down in full and put a line under it.

Dacre.

Miss Isobel Dacre. Twenty-nine. She writes the court column — every name, every charge and every fine out of the Quarter Sessions up the road. She writes it, marks it and passes it herself.

On her own? Nobody reads it after her?

No other hand in this office touches a line of it, sir.

Where was she?

Up the editorial stair. She came down somewhere inside that half-hour and she cannot fix the minute. She keeps a pencil behind her ear, like every reporter in the place.

They all do that, do they.

They all do that.

And the one who came out shouting. Strang.

Sixty-one, and he has stood at that stone thirty-one years. It is his bench. The mallet is his too.

Does he lose by the sale as well?

The chain prints in Leeds, sir. If they buy us, his room goes, and every man in it goes with it.

And where was he at a quarter to eleven?

He won't say.

Nuttall shut the notebook on his finger and looked down the corridor at the fire door for a while.

One dead man with blue on his collar. One of you with his name in a story, one with a contract, one with a pencil and no minute, and one who'll not say. And not a clock among the lot of you.

Then he sat me back on my own stool and put my pad in front of me.

You have the only clock in this building that anybody wrote anything down by, lad. Sit at it.