paper’s dealings with its public were suspended for the night. Purbright waved back. At last the thin man grudgingly unlocked the door. Yes, Mr Lintz might be upstairs still, but didn’t anyone know that newspaper offices had works entrances at the bottoms of alleyways for after-hours contingencies?
Purbright, who did know but had no intention of imperilling his limbs by groping in the dark past bicycles, empty crates and spent paper reels, soothed the man and led Love to the editor’s room.
Lintz no longer sat at his desk as though driving an infinitely costly and responsive car. He sat athwart it, surrounded untidily by galley and page proofs.
Love stared at him with innocent admiration. This, he divined, was journalism.
It was, after a fashion, and Lintz was rather tired. Unsmilingly he greeted the two policemen and scrambled down from the sea of council deliberations, smart fines, organs presided at, lucky horseshoes handed, and Dear Sir I hope this catches the eye of...
“My, you are busy,” Purbright superfluously informed him. “You must think it terribly ungracious of us to come worrying you in the middle of all this. Perhaps you’d prefer us to go away until tomorrow?”
“Heavens, no!” said Lintz. “Let’s get it over with now.” He sat down.
“The fact is, there’s something here you might be able to help us with.” Purbright beckoned Love, who handed him one of the books. “It doesn’t make much sense to me.”
The editor turned over a couple of pages and looked up quickly. “This is my uncle’s, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes. You recognize it?”
“I’ve seen it in his office at the house. Why have you taken it?”
Purbright gave him a pained look. “Things have turned out rather unpleasantly, sir; not at all as I would have wished myself. You’ll be sorry to learn that we now think Mr Gwill met his death by violence. It will have to be looked into. Probed, you know.”
“Probe” was a word never employed in the generously explicit headlines of the
Purbright gazed gravely down. “Oh, yes, I am, Mr Lintz. Very!”
“This is rather dreadful.” There was silence except for the distant clacking of a solitary linotype machine. Lintz turned over the pages of the book of cuttings. “Why do you think this might have any bearing on what you say has happened?” Caution controlled Lintz’s manner like hair oil.
“It may not. I’m only asking your opinion, sir.”
Lintz put on his unilateral smile. “It so happens that I’ve been rather puzzled about these myself. I came across them some months ago.”
“Didn’t you ask your uncle at the time what they meant?”
“Gracious, no. I knew better than to ask him outright about anything. It’s obvious what they are, of course. They’re small ads from my own paper” (‘my own’ already, thought Purbright), “but why he’d collected them is another matter. By the way, does the list of names and addresses at the back of the book mean anything to you?”
“At the back? I saw no list.”
“Yes, here...” Lintz shut the book and turned over the back coverboard. The page beneath was blank. “My mistake. He must have torn it out. That’s where it was.”
“You can’t remember any of the names, I suppose?”
“No, I only glanced at them once when I was waiting for the old man. I vaguely remember noticing that several of the addresses were down in the Sharms and Haven area.”
“And the advertisements themselves: is there anything peculiar about them?”
Lintz turned back to the clippings. “They’re not exactly common or garden offers. Antiques aren’t in my line, though.”
“Were they in Mr Gwill’s?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“But they might have been?”
“Look,” said Lintz. “I think we’d better have House up here. He handles the advertising. Perhaps he knows something about these.”
He left the room and the others heard him call down the staircase. A few moments later he returned with the thin man from the front office.
House scrutinized the cuttings.
“These are all ‘for sales’ that Mr Gwill brought in himself,” he announced. He pointed to the final line of one advertisement. “You see that box number. It has the letters C.S. in front of it. You’ll notice the others have as well. None of the ordinary ads have anything but figures as box references. We used to sort out the replies with C.S. numbers and put them through directly to the boss.”
“Were those his instructions?” Lintz asked.
“They were,” affirmed House, with the air of having settled the matter once and for all.
But Lintz remained inquisitive. “Where did the copy come from?” he asked.
“From Mr Gwill.”
“Had he prepared it himself, do you know?”
