Francis Durbridge - Send for Paul Temple

But Miss Trent was not so easily evaded.

‘Please! Please, answer my question. Do you think Superintendent Harvey committed suicide?’

The words came with a rush. There was deep emotion in her voice.

Temple stared at her with surprise in his eyes. ‘By Timothy, you are a remarkable young woman! First of all you insult my…’

Miss Trent interrupted him.

‘You haven’t answered my question!’ she said firmly.

Temple had encountered many reporters in the course of his career, but this girl was something new in his experience. That she was extremely pretty, Temple had seen as soon as he set foot in the hall during Pryce’s severe efforts to restrain her. But then many girl reporters are pretty. And like the beautiful, glamorous women spies of popular fiction, they can often use that beauty with great advantage, both while extracting information from unwilling victims and coping with recalcitrant editors!

But there was something about Steve Trent that distinguished her from other women reporters in Fleet Street. Her eyes shone clear and bright, with no hard sophistication to mar them. Yet they spoke of experience, of difficulties, even dangers encountered. They were dark-blue eyes, one curiously lighter than the other, and they sparkled with the vivacity of her nature.

She was now wearing an elegant costume of dark-green tweed under which the lustrous silk stockings that emphasized the contours of two admirable legs looked slightly incongruous. A rather shapeless deerstalker type of hat crowned her luxuriant blonde hair. In every respect, as Temple and everyone else who met her thought, she was an eminently attractive young woman, in dress, appearance and character. The sort of woman for whom Elizabethan poets would have torn their hair out searching for epithets sufficiently far-fetched.

Temple took it all in, as he sat on the settee opposite her, wondering exactly what to make of this lovely young criminologist. At length he answered her question.

‘No!’ he said quietly. ‘I think Superintendent Harvey was murdered.’

‘I knew it! I knew it!’ exclaimed Steve Trent, her voice raising to a high pitch in sudden, unwonted excitement. ‘I knew they’d get him!’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Paul Temple with surprise.

‘Gerald Harvey was…a…friend of mine,’ said Steve Trent slowly.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘My man told me that you were a reporter and…’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ she interrupted. ‘I’m on the staff of The Evening Post , but that’s not why I wanted to see you.’

Again Temple looked at her queerly.

‘Why did you want to see me?’ he asked at length.

Steve Trent appeared to think for a moment.

‘Because I need your help,’ she answered suddenly, ‘because I need your help more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life before.’

Temple was obviously impressed by the urgency in her voice.

‘Was Harvey a great friend of yours?’ he asked.

Steve nodded. ‘He was my brother,’ she said softly.

‘Your brother!’ exclaimed Temple, then: ‘When I suggested that your brother might have been murdered, you said: “I knew it! I knew it! I knew they’d get him!” What did you mean by “I knew they’d get him?”’

Steve Trent, alias Louise Harvey, paused a moment, then asked him a question in return.

‘Why do you think my brother came to see you, Mr. Temple, the night he was murdered?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘I’m not at all certain that he had any particular reason.’

‘He had,’ she answered, ‘a very good reason.’

‘Well?’

‘My brother was investigating the mysterious robberies which have been occurring. He had a theory about these robberies which I believe he wanted to discuss with you.’

‘A theory?’ queried Paul Temple.

Slowly at first, then gradually gaining confidence, Steve Trent proceeded to tell him her story. It was the life history of herself and of Superintendent Gerald Harvey, the police chief. She had come to see Paul Temple, the novelist and criminologist, not as a reporter after a ‘story’, but to ask his help.

‘About eight years ago,’ she explained, ‘my brother was attached to what was then called the Service B.Y. It was a special branch of the Cape Town Constabulary. At this particular time, a very daring and successful gang of criminals were carrying out a series of raids on various jewellers within a certain area known as the Cape Town–Simonstown area. My brother and another officer, whose name I forget at the moment, were in charge of the case. After months of investigation, they discovered that the leader of the organization was a man who called himself the Knave of Diamonds, but whose real name was Max Lorraine.

‘Lorraine apparently was a well-educated man who at one time had occupied an important position at Columbia University. Eventually the organization was smashed – but the Knave had laid his plans carefully and he escaped. Two months later, the officer who had assisted my brother in the investigation was murdered. It was not a pleasant murder. This was followed almost immediately by two attempts on my brother’s life.’

She paused. Paul Temple could see the look of horror in her eyes as the recollection of those terrible days came back to her.

‘Please go on,’ he said to her at last.

Steve Trent looked up at him gratefully, then resumed her story. The circumstances of the murder of her brother’s fellow officer could never be explained.

‘A farmer came upon his lifeless body in a ditch by the roadside,’ she went on. ‘He had suddenly noticed a car by the roadside, apparently abandoned, but with its engine still running.

‘There were two bullet wounds in the head. One in the back which had evidently felled him, and one in his forehead, which might have been fired as he lay on the ground.

‘The attempts on Gerald’s life might quite well have been accidents. But somehow I don’t think they were. The first time, a large black saloon car, driven at a high speed, swerved and nearly knocked him down. That was just outside Cape Town.

‘In the other case, a large wooden crate containing a piano was being lowered from the upper floor of a house. Gerald happened to be passing: the house was only two or three doors from where he was living at the time. Suddenly, a rope slipped and the crate crashed down immediately in front of him.’

Paul Temple muttered his interest. He waited for Steve to go on with what she had to say.

‘From the very first moment when Gerald was put in charge of this Midland case,’ she continued, ‘he had an uneasy feeling at the back of his mind that he was up against Max Lorraine. I saw him a few days before he came up to see you, and he told me then that he was almost certain that Max Lorraine, alias the Knave of Diamonds, was the real influence behind the robberies which he and Inspector Dale were investigating.’

Steve paused. Then added, softly: ‘I think he was a little worried – and rather frightened.’

For a long time Temple said nothing. He realized, only too well, the value of the story Steve Trent had poured out to him.

‘Had your brother discussed with Sir Graham, or any of his colleagues, his theory regarding this man Lorraine?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Miss Trent replied. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he knew only too well that they would never believe him.’

‘Never believe him?’ repeated Temple, puzzled.

‘The Knave is hardly the sort of person one can talk about – and sound convincing,’ she answered. ‘He’s like a character snatched from the most sensational thriller and inspired with a strange, satanic intellect.’ Steve Trent spoke in a slow monotone, as if reciting a well-learned lesson. She paused and looked up at Temple curiously.