Murder in the Telephone Exchange. June Wright

and mysterious way the lift began to move again. By the dim red light, I opened my hand to disclose a small stone wrapped roughly in paper. Two words written in pencil caught my eye, and made me turn to Compton.

      “Look what someone has been throwing through the roof at us! A letter! It has your name on it, so I suppose that it is meant for you.”

      We were descending very jerkily, as I pondered on the childish trick. I thought that that sort of thing went out with one’s school-days. Compton was standing quite close to me trying to read her note by the light from the indicator board. I was forced to quell a most unladylike impulse to share it over her shoulder. Oddly enough I was to know what it contained very soon, but I did not dream of that possibility then.

      The lift had stopped again, and I made a mental vow never to ride in one again. I was badly shaken. Rather strangely, Compton seemed quite calm. Her very placidness disturbed me. I wanted to break the unnatural silence.

      “Miss Compton,” I began, but broke off as she lifted her face towards me. It was clear enough to make my heart jump with a sickening fright, as I saw her lips drawn back from teeth that appeared bloody in that red glow. Her eyes were staring and horrible to look into as she crouched there like an animal about to spring.

      I don’t know how long I stood there, watching her. I felt like a bird fascinated by a snake, paralysed and numb. Then an instinct as old as time asserted itself. The instinct of flight. A voice seemed to shriek in my brain: “Run! Run for your life!”

      But how? Where? Dragging my fascinated gaze away from that bestial form, I saw a white light shining through the lift windows. The lift must have been at a floor landing for some time; precious moments, when I could have been far away from this mad, fearful thing that was hunched beside me. My fingers bruised dragging at the doors. I pulled them to behind me to give myself a chance to escape down the long passage outside. I had no idea where I was. The corridor was deserted and dimly lit. I hurried on with the vague hope of finding someone sane and solid and sensible. But the doors along the passage remained unopened to my knocking. The whole floor appeared to be empty. My only plan would be to make for the back stairs and chance my speed against Compton’s. Then the sound of footsteps, light and running, made me stop and press against a door in the wall. My throat was parched by my panting breath.

      ‘I’d love a drink of water’, I thought idiotically. The door handle turned under my fingers but did not move inwards. Locked! The footsteps came nearer. Round that bend in the corridor, and she’ll see you in that light frock. Run, you fool!

      But where? My senses seemed distraught and unreliable. ‘This is a dream!’ I told myself, starting to edge along the wall. ‘Soon I’ll come to a precipice, and then I’ll wake up.’

      I screamed lightly, once, as a dark figure loomed up in front of me. A hand closed tightly on my arm.

      “What on earth are you up to, Margaret?” asked a familiar voice in my ear sharply. This was better than the back stairs; even better than someone sane, solid and sensible. My fingers gripped the lapels of Clark’s coat. One arm crept round me protectively, drawing me closer until I could feel his heart racing against my temple.

      “What are you doing on this floor?” he demanded.

      “The lift—it got stuck,” I explained in jerks, “and that horrible woman—”

      “What woman?” he asked quickly.

      “Sarah Compton. She—she looked evil. She’s insane. I’m certain she’s insane.”

      Man-like, Clark patted my back without speaking. I became calmer. Meeting Clark like that made me feel as if I had exaggerated the whole affair.

      “Someone threw a note down the emergency exit in the lift.”

      I went on. “It had Compton’s name on it. She read it and then—then her face changed. She looked like an animal.” I shuddered involuntarily. “I got out at once and started to run, but I didn’t know where I was. What floor is this, anyway? Then there were footsteps, running”—I raised my head to look into his face, wonderingly—“but that must have been you.”

      The suspicion of a frown gathered between his brows. His arm slackened, and I moved back shyly.

      “I must go. I’ll be terribly late.”

      I could see Clark smiling. It did things to you, that smile; reducing the younger telephonists into simpering idiots, and making even Sarah Compton come all over girlish. Having reminded myself thus of my last encounter with that woman, I said resolutely: “I’m not going back by that damned lift, John Clarkson, and don’t you think it for one minute. I suppose the back stairs are just around the corner? Anyway, it will look better if we don’t enter the trunkroom together.”

      He caught me by the shoulders and pulled me towards him again, laughing, “Why, Maggie?”

      “Because—you know quite well what I mean.”

      “Right you are, little prudence. On your way.” He bent his head swiftly and kissed my cheek as I passed. “That might satisfy the scandalmongers.”

      “You revolt me!” I declared over my shoulder, as calmly as I was able. On top of my unnerving experience with Sarah Compton I felt doubly shaken by that careless kiss. I kept thinking about Clark as I started to climb the concrete stairway, and incidentally to regret my decision about the lift. He had taken me to a few shows in the city, and had entertained me several times at an exclusive and expensive golf club of which he was a member. As he kept a very comfortable bachelor flat in South Yarra, I concluded that his parents, whom I knew were dead, must have had money. In fact, Clark seemed to have everything the praying maiden could wish for. I knew several lasses in the Exchange who were pursuing him hopefully.

      After some solid climbing, I arrived at the glass doors that opened into the trunkroom, slightly breathless and with the backs of my knees aching. Although every floor in the Exchange is architecturally the same, there is something unforgettably familiar about the sixth. You can feel a unique atmosphere, one of telephones and telephonists working flat out to serve a public, which for the most part remains ungrateful. Just as a ‘wowser’ seeing an intoxicated person thinks that everyone who drinks is a drunkard, so the person who, by chance, gives the responsibility of their call to a careless telephonist considers that all Exchange employees are rude and haphazard.

      I have seen girls, beaded with perspiration from hot apparatus, putting calls through every minute for hours on end during bad bush-fires and crises in Europe and the Pacific, until they collapsed from sheer nervous exhaustion. I know that strained concentration which is needed to complete connections, with half a dozen lines under your tense fingers, that must not make mistakes.

      I can honestly say that the greater majority of telephonists endeavour conscientiously to answer the oftentimes outrageous demands of the public. Here is an excellent example, when an unnamed man was located in one of our larger country towns for a very urgent call. He was a traveller for an engineering firm in the city, but for some inexplicable reason his name could not be supplied. He was tracked down through thirteen hotels, half a dozen garages and hardware shops and three clubs. I know this for a fact, because I found him myself!

      However, we to whom the Exchange means our bread take the romance of the telephone very casually. So it was that buckling on my apparatus in obedience to the rule before entering the trunkroom, I resigned myself to a hot and tiring night.

      The trunkroom is a T-shaped room covering the whole of the sixth floor, except for the front and back stair landings and a telephonists’ toilet and washroom. Gone are the days of the plugs and cords more familiar to others than telephone employees. In their place are highly polished rows of boards about three feet in height, and worked by keys, lights and automatic dials. These boards occupy the larger part of the room together with booking, inquiry and information desks, and the Senior Traffic Officer’s table. In one arm of the T-shape stands the sortagraph, which brings dockets to the operator from the boards by means of air-pressure tubes under the floor. In the other is an immense delay board, another marvel of this mechanical age, which manifests the waiting time