Pattern of Murder. John Russell Fearn
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and shout your prices!” Helen called after him.
“You’d better take care he doesn’t hit you as hard as be did me, Helen,” added another voice.
Helen and Terry looked across the foyer. Vera Holdsworth had been standing behind a fall-length cutout of Rock Hudson, as he would appear in a forthcoming feature. Presumably Vera had been dusting the cutout. Certainly she must have heard everything.
“Depends if I deserve hitting, doesn’t it?” Helen asked pointedly.
“I’ll see you tonight,” Terry muttered.
He went on his way and then up the second flight of steps, which led to the Circle. He wanted the chance to think by himself, and this seemed as good a place as any. But he was not alone, after all. Against the left hand wall, perched on a ladder, was Sid. He was working on a high wooden structure in-banded as a still picture frame.
Ignoring him, Terry sat down on the second seat of Row A.
“Two hundred pounds,” he muttered to himself. “There’s only one way in which that can vanish without implicating me, and that’s by a faked burglary. We’ve been burgled twice before—the lavatory window each time. Can’t use the office window now those bars are there. I’ve a passkey to the building, which makes the thing dead easy. Mmm...anyway, the boss can afford it and I’ve got to tip up to Naylor or I’ll be in a spot—”
Violent hammering made him jump. Sid was at work. The still frame was one of the manager’s ideas. For two reasons it had to be perched above the head of anybody passing it. Stills had a habit of vanishing if they were within reach, and the law demanded a certain head clearance. Electrical work was not Sid’s only accomplishment. He was a passably good joiner, too....
* * * * * * *
Sid made a point of catching up with Vera Holdsworth when she left the cinema for lunch. She did not reveal any particular surprise as his fast running footsteps caught up with hers.
“Well, did I do it right?” he questioned.
“Oh you mean about Terry?” Vera glanced at his big, eager face. “Yes, I suppose so, but I’d have liked something a bit more—er—persuasive. You know! A fellow who hits a girl across the face wants more than just a ticking off. I’ll bet you’re as thick with him now as you ever were.”
“Well—yes,” Sid admitted uncomfortably. “But look, Vera, it isn’t because I think any the less about you. You don’t know how it is in the projection room. You’re on top of each other and you’ve got to maintain a certain air of peace.”
They both walked on in silence for a while as Vera appeared to be thinking matters over. Then she said slowly,
“You think I’m vindictive, Sid, don’t you?”
“No,” Sid answered simply. “I can quite understand how you feel. If I were a girl and had suffered the same sort of insult I think I’d be every bit as sore. Just the same, I’d be much happier if you didn’t go out with Terry again.”
“You needn’t worry. I won’t—under any circumstances!”
Silence again. They had reached the road where the girl’s home stood before Sid spoke again.
“Listen, Vera, you know how I feel about you,” he said seriously. “Why can’t we take a risk and get tied up? I mean—I’ll try and get another job somewhere with better pay. As a chief. I’m experienced enough.”
Vera reflected. “I don’t like taking a risk of that sort, Sid. Not as far as marriage is concerned. There’s no guarantee that you’d ever get a better job, and if you didn’t what sort of pinching and scraping would we have to endure? Start trying to find something, by all means—then let’s talk again. Safest, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Sid sighed. “I feel now, more than ever, that we ought to get married, if only to protect you. Things would be different with me as your husband.... And it’s me you should have, you know, he added urgently. “I’m about the only one who really understands you.”
* * * * * * *
Terry was fairly cheerful during the matinee, and by the time the night performance began he was apparently his old, carefree self. Neither Sid nor Billy had any more complaints to register against him. They even found they could joke with him without him taking offence. What neither of them knew was that his cheerfulness was occasioned by the fact that his plan was complete. He knew how be was going to get the £200 from the safe. So simple, too....
Terry had just finished lacing up his machine with film. As a matter of habit he gazed through the porthole on to the Circle. It was filling rapidly.
“Pretty as a picture, isn’t she?” Sid asked in admiration.
“Pretty?” Terry repeated, frowning. “Who?”
“Vera, of course. Or shouldn’t I bring up the subject?”
Terry did not answer. He could see Vera clearly enough. The auditorium was brightly lighted now with six three-hundred watt lamps, three on each side of the ceiling. Each lamp was inside a massive heavy opal globe fitting. Terry did not like those globes. They had tremendous weight. More than once he had had the uneasy fear that one of them might come down one day.
Down in the Circle, Vera was in charge of tickets, and she was not exerting herself either. She rarely did. Now she had become the head usherette—mainly because the preceding usherette had departed to get married—she seemed to think she could be as lazy as she wished. She merely indicated the seats to the patrons and left it at that. In the quiet spells she sat on the spring tip-up seat fixed to the panelling at the side of the staircase. From this position she could see people approaching up the second half of the stairs. The tip-up seat was there by law, conforming to the regulation that no usherette must stand above a certain length of time. But for the handrail, which came just about the middle of her back, Vera would no doubt have lolled comfortably. As it was she had to sit erect, whether she liked it or not.
“You can have her,” Terry said at length, shrugging.
Sid gave him a look and then walked into the tiny adjoining steel-lined room where lay the turntables and slide lantern. In a moment or two a Sousa march was rattling noisily from the monitor-speaker in the projection room ceiling. The reverberation of the bass notes in the cinema itself struck against the glass of the portholes and made it quiver slightly. Sound vibrations were always strongest at this point in the building, coming in a straight line from the huge speakers at the back of the screen.
Terry glanced at the electric clock in the cinema. It was 7:10. He lounged across to the sound equipment and examined it perfunctorily. Everything was in order for the show. The triple button marked ‘Non-sync—Projector—Output’ was in the correct first position. The second position was for film sound, and the third for microphone announcements made from the box over the public address system. It was not often used. The last time had been when Johnny Brown had got lost and Turner had been asked to locate him in the cinema.
“Two hundred pounds....” Terry’s thoughts reverted to it as he mused. He smiled to himself.
For ten minutes longer he waited, then he walked down the projection room to an open doorway and went out on to the exterior grating platform where the fire escape began its final descent. It was a habit of his to check that the escape was always in order.
“Twenty-five past,” Sid sang out, changing a record.
Terry climbed back to the projection room again and concentrated his mind on the job. He pressed the switches that flooded the proscenium curtains with multicolour. The Circle was more or less full now.
As usual Vera Holdsworth was on the tip-up seat, her back against the handrail, her head lolling slightly forward and her face turned towards the curtains. In the lap of her uniform lay the gleaming length of her torch.
The fingers of the electric clock had moved on to 7:30. Terry pressed the button that