Photo Finish

“Bartholomew,” explained Mr. Reece in his flattened way, “is Madame’s secretary.” He stood back and motioned Rupert to examine the page.

Rupert, who had a tendency to change color whenever Mr. Reece paid him any attention, did so now. He stooped over the paper.

“No,” he said, “it’s not our — I mean my — machine. The letter p is out of alignment in ours. And anyway it’s not the same type.”

“And the signature? That looks convincing enough, doesn’t it?” Alleyn asked his host.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s Bella’s signature.”

“Can any of you think of any cause Madame Sommita may have had to put her signature at the foot of a blank sheet of letter paper?”

Nobody spoke.

“Can she type?”

“No,” they all said, and Ben Ruby added irritably, “Ah, for Chrissake, what’s the point of laboring at it? There’ve been no rumors about her bosom, pardon my candor, and, hell, she never wrote that bloody letter. It’s got to be a forgery and, by God, in my book it’s got to be that sodding photographer at the bottom of it.”

The two young men made sounds of profound agreement.

Mr. Reece raised his hand and they were silenced. “We are fortunate enough,” he a

He might have been addressing a board meeting. He turned to Alleyn and made a slight inclination. “Will you—?” he invited.

Alleyn said: “Of course, if you think I can be of use. But I expect I ought just to mention that if there’s any idea of calling in the police, it will have to be the New Zealand police. I’m sure you will understand that.”

“Oh, quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Reece. “Let us say we will value, immensely, your unofficial expertise.”

“Very well. But it won’t be at all startling.”

The men took chairs round the table, as if, Alleyn thought, they were resigning themselves to some damned lecture. The whole scene, he thought, was out of joint. They might have arranged between themselves how it should be played but were not quite sure of their lines.

He remembered his instructions from the A.C. He was to observe, act with extreme discretion, fall in with the terms of his invitation, and treat the riddle of the naughty photographer as he would any case to which he had been consigned in the ordinary course of his duties.

He said: “Here goes, then. First of all: if this was a police job, one of the first things to be done would be to make an exhaustive examination of the letter, which seems to be a reproduction print of an original document. We would get it blown up on a screen, search the result for any signs of fingerprints or indications of what sort of paper the original might be. Same treatment for the photograph, with particular attention to the rather clumsy faking of surgical scars.

“At the same time, someone would be sent to the offices of the Watchman to find out everything available about when the original letter was received and whether by post or pushed into the correspondence box at the entrance or wherever of the Watchman’s office. And also who dealt with it. The Watchman, almost certainly, would be extremely cagey about this and would, when asked to produce the original, say it had not been kept, which might or might not be true. Obviously,” Alleyn said, “they didn’t ask for any authorization of the letter or take any steps to assure themselves that it was genuine.”

“It’s not that sort of paper,” said Ben Ruby. “Well, look at it. If we sued for libel it’d be nothing new to the Watchman. The scoop would be worth it.”

“Didn’t I hear,” Alleyn asked, “that on one occasion the photographer—‘Strix’ isn’t it? — dressed as a woman, asked for her autograph, and then fired his camera at point-blank range and ducked out?”

Mr. Ruby slammed the table. “By God, you’re right,” he shouted, “and he got it. She signed. He got her signature.”

“It’s too much, I suppose, to ask if she remembers any particular book or whether she ever signed at the bottom of a blank page or how big the page was.”

“She remembers! Too right she remembers!” Mr. Ruby shouted. “That one was an outsize book. Looked like something special for famous names. She remembers it on account it was not the usual job. As for the signature she’s most likely to have made it extra big to fill out the whole space. She does that.”

“Were any of you with her? She was leaving the theatre, wasn’t she? At the time?”

“I was with her,” Mr. Reece offered. “So were you, Ben. We always escort her from the stage door to her car. I didn’t actually see the book. I was looking to make sure the car was in the usual place. There was a big crowd.”

“I was behind her,” said Mr. Ruby. “I couldn’t see anything. The first thing I knew was the flash and the rumpus. She was yelling out for somebody to stop the photographer. Somebody else was screaming, ‘Stop that woman’ and fighting to get through. And it turned out afterwards, the screamer was the woman herself, who was the photographer Strix, if you can follow me.”

“Just,” said Alleyn.

“He’s made monkeys out of the lot of us; all along the line he’s made us look like monkeys,” Mr. Ruby complained.

“What does he look like? Surely someone must have noticed something about him?”

But, no, it appeared. Nobody had come forward with a reliable description. He operated always in a crowd where everyone’s attention was focused on his victim and cameramen abounded. Or unexpectedly he would pop round a corner with his camera held in both hands before his face, or from a car that shot off before any action could be taken. There had been one or two uncertain impressions — he was bearded, he had a scarf pulled over his mouth, he was dark. Mr. Ruby had a theory that he never wore the same clothes twice and always went in for elaborate makeups, but there was nothing to support this idea.

“What action,” Mr. Reece asked Alleyn, “would you advise?”

‘To begin with: not an action for libel. Can she be persuaded against it, do you think?”

“She may be all against it in the morning. You never know,” said Hanley, and then with an uneasy appeal to his employer: “I beg your pardon, sir, but I mean to say you don’t, do you? Actually?”

Mr. Reece, with no change of expression in his face, merely looked at his secretary, who subsided nervously.

Alleyn had returned to the Watchman. He tilted the paper this way and that under the table lamp. “I think,” he said, “I’m not sure, but I think the original paper was probably glossy.”

“I’ll arrange for someone to deal with the Watchman end,” said Mr. Reece, and to Hanley: “Get through to Sir Simon Marks in Sydney,” he ordered. “Or wherever he is. Get him.”

Hanley retreated to a distant telephone and huddled over it in soundless communication.

Alleyn said: “If I were doing this as a conscientious copper, I would now ask you all if you have any further ideas about the perpetrator of these ugly tricks — assuming for the moment that the photographer and the concocter of the letter are one and the same person. Is there anybody you can think of who bears a grudge deep enough to inspire such persistent and malicious attacks? Has she an enemy, in fact?”

“Has she a hundred bloody enemies?” Mr. Ruby heatedly returned. “Of course she has. Like the home-grown baritone she insulted in Perth or the top hostess in Los Angeles who threw a high-quality party for her and asked visiting royalty to meet her.”

“What went wrong?”

“She didn’t go.”

“Oh dear!”

‘Took against it at the last moment because she’d heard the host’s money came from South Africa. We talked about a sudden attack of migraine, which might have answered if she hadn’t gone to supper at Angelo’s and the press hadn’t reported it with pictures the next morning.”