The Witness Of The Telegraph Clerk
The Bloomsbury Telegraph Exchange occupied the upper two floors of a building in Southampton Row that had once been an attorney's chambers, and still smelt faintly of the tallow candles by which the attorneys had read their briefs. The ground floor was let to a stationer's. One ascended to the exchange by a staircase of narrow, worn oak, and at the top one found a wooden counter and, beyond it, a long room in which eight clerks sat at eight small tables with eight instruments before them, and the air was full of the small, continuous clicking that, to Wren, resembled nothing so much as the sound of a dozen clocks determined not to agree.
The chief clerk, a Mr. Ballard, received him in an office off the landing and was disposed, after Wren had produced his card and his purpose, to be cautiously helpful. The exchange kept its copies, Mr. Ballard said, for the statutory period. A request from the Yard would, of course, be attended to. Did the Inspector know the date of the message he sought?
Wren said that he did not know that any message had been sent. He was interested in whether any had been sent by Miss Phoebe Latham, or to her, or concerning her, in the ten days preceding the twenty-ninth of March. He was also interested in whether Mr. Joseph Pendleton, of Henrietta Street, had sent any messages in that period.
Mr. Ballard sighed, as a man sighs who foresees a morning's