by Alex Pavesi
Mr Cavendish looked up at Laurie from under his crimson, swollen eyelids. ‘I see where you’re going with this. Why are you suggesting such a thing? I was at my desk the whole time.’
‘Then let me ask your advice: if I told you that we’d found the killer’s left glove, that we’d turned it inside out and noticed that the fabric was scratched about a third of the way along the second finger from the end, what should we do next? My deduction is that the killer was wearing a wedding ring, one with a protrusion. A simple jewel perhaps, like yours. Let’s say that only one of our suspects is a married man. Well, what would you have us do?’
Mr Cavendish swallowed, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know, I assure you.’
‘Don’t worry then, this won’t hurt a bit.’ Laurie bent down and took Mr Cavendish’s hand. Meeting no resistance, he pushed the sleeve of his jacket up towards the elbow, then undid the buttons of his cuff. He rolled the shirt up and examined the hand and wrist, then did the same with the other arm. He found nothing worthy of note and dropped the arm as if it was nothing more than a rolled-up newspaper, not a part of a man’s body; it hit the floor with the same slap.
He got up and left, signalling Bulmer to follow him.
‘Not guilty?’ said Bulmer, when they had closed the door behind them.
‘He was never likely to be. I was just being thorough. But there are no scratches on his arms or signs of a struggle; I can’t see any way he could have killed her. Frankly, I’ve never seen such a well-kept pair of hands.’
Bulmer nodded. ‘And that stuff about the wedding ring and the glove?’
Laurie shook his head. ‘There were no marks on the glove. I was just trying to frighten him.’
‘I thought as much.’
The house had begun to feel like a dreary old cupboard, full of forgotten objects; with relief, the two detectives stepped outside into the perfectly temperate afternoon. They approached a policeman, one they knew called Cooper, who had been knocking on doors along the street. ‘Found anything?’
Cooper shook his head. ‘Very few people have even been outside today. It seems like they hide from the sun around here. The florist’s has been closed since this morning. The greengrocer thinks he saw a man in a long black coat hanging around at lunchtime, but he couldn’t describe him.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘He only saw him from the back. Just said he wore a hat and was of average height.’
Laurie looked over at the park, where the two girls were still playing. ‘What about the sister? Has anyone spoken to her?’
‘Not yet. We’ve been keeping an eye on her, of course. But we didn’t think it was our place to tell her what has happened.’
‘She must be wondering where her lunch is.’
‘I gave her an apple; I got the impression she’s used to this.’
Laurie frowned. ‘Well, they’re younger than I’d like, but we have to talk to them. If they’ve been playing here all day they may have witnessed something.’
He began to walk over to them.
A kind of intoxication had come over Maggie and Rose with the lack of parental attention, and they were now pulling up flowers and rearranging them to their tastes. Rose noticed Laurie and Bulmer walking towards them and nudged her friend; they dropped their flowers and pretended innocence.
‘Girls,’ Laurie called, as he drew near. ‘What game is that you’re playing?’
‘I’m the florist,’ said Rose, pointing at the shop over the road that was still closed.
‘And I’m the customer,’ said Maggie.
Both were so tired they’d entered a sort of daydreaming state and the edges of everything seemed soft to them. ‘Well, girls, I’m Inspector Laurie.’
‘And I’m Sergeant Bulmer.’
‘And why don’t we play a game of being police detectives for a few minutes? You see that house over there, the one with the red door? I believe one of you lives in that house?’
‘She does,’ said Rose, and Maggie sat down on the grass, her heart beating quickly.
‘What’s the matter with it?’ she asked.
‘Nothing is the matter, we just need to ask some questions. Have you seen anyone that you don’t know go into your house today? While you’ve been out here playing?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘Not today. Why?’
Rose put her hands on her hips. ‘No, we have not. It has been very quiet around here.’
‘Well, have you seen anyone at all hanging about the square? Someone suspicious, perhaps?’
Rose put her finger to her mouth and thought about it. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. Maggie was sitting silently now, picking at the grass.
‘A man? Can you describe him to me?’
Rose considered the question. ‘He was a normal-looking man, but he had a large moustache. And he was wearing a dark blue suit.’
‘But he didn’t go into the house with the red door?’
‘I don’t think so. He just walked along the street and waved to us.’
Maggie looked up, as if about to add something, but Rose spoke first. ‘That’s all, and then he left.’
‘I see. Well, girls, thank you for your help.’
Laurie turned to Bulmer and shook his head, then together they left the gardens. They stopped just outside the gate, and Bulmer spoke: ‘A man in blue and a man in black.’
‘And you in grey and me in brown: what a rainbow of men’s fashion this case contains.’
‘You joke, Laurie, but this is serious. Isn’t it? We’ve no tangible suspects, and time is passing. What do we do next?’
‘We take it one step at a time, that’s all. I would say that next we should pay a visit to,’ he took the note he’d scribbled earlier from one of his pockets, ‘a Mr Andrew Sullivan, in Hampstead.’
Bulmer grunted. ‘The childhood sweetheart.’
They took a cab to the address in North London, where Andrew Sullivan lived with his widowed mother in a house at the top of a hill. They asked the driver to wait for them.
It was a modern house, opposite a church: all white walls and large windows, with a flat roof. The garden in front was overgrown with bushes, which concealed a number of sculptures: large, twisted lumps of rock in various shades of grey. It was the end of the afternoon and the light was beginning to fade.
Laurie knocked on the door. Thirty seconds passed, then a towering German maid opened it; they asked to see Mr Sullivan. ‘I am afraid not,’ she said, in a frayed accent. ‘Mrs Sullivan and Mr Sullivan are not in the country.’
They got the story out of her: young Mr Sullivan had fallen into a black mood about a month or two before, and his mother had suggested a trip to Europe to take his mind off whatever was bothering him. He’d reluctantly agreed, and they’d left ten days ago.
They confirmed this with the neighbours; no one had seen the Sullivans for more than a week. Disappointed, they returned to the cab. ‘Well then, where now?’
Laurie sighed. ‘Scotland Yard, I suppose. We can look through our notes and see if we’ve missed anything.’
‘It feels like a long shot.’
Laurie gave him a look. ‘God wants justice, remember that.’
The next morning, after knocking on every door along Colchester Terrace, they met back at the crime scene: it had become a kind of centre of operations, quiet and confidential. The body had been removed by the police doctor, late the previous night.
Bulmer was looking out of the window. ‘The greengrocer was not forthcoming about the man in the black coat. He couldn’t tell me anything more, except that he also wore a black hat and black gloves.’
Laurie sat with his back against the wall, his eyes closed. ‘Do you think he’s lying?’
‘He has no cause to do so, I think he just sees a lot of people. The reason he remembers this particular man is because he was inside the gardens themselves – they ought to be reserved for residents only – but the man wasn’t familiar to him.’
‘I see. Well, bla
ck gloves are hardly uncommon. Does the greengrocer have an alibi himself?’
‘Only his customers, but there seem to be enough of them.’ Bulmer looked at the street below. ‘Do you think this could have been done by a stranger? If she were standing here, preparing for her bath, someone could have seen her from outside.’
‘Opportunistic, you mean? A frenzied fit of madness? It’s possible, but that kind of thing is unusual. Normally it takes longer than that to form the desire to kill.’
‘But if they were watching the house and saw the maid leave, they might have concluded it was safe.’
Laurie shrugged. Bulmer didn’t see him; he was still looking out of the window and now his eyes had drifted to the gardens, as if they were the heart of this whole affair. Laurie stood up and joined him. The effect was of two shutters being closed over the window, leaving the room behind them in darkness: a brown suit and a grey suit blocking the light. Laurie spoke: ‘One question that we haven’t answered is why she took a bath in the first place.’
‘The mother said her hands were dirty from picking flowers.’
‘And yet she brought no flowers inside with her; there are empty vases everywhere.’
Bulmer looked at his colleague, thought about it, and concluded he was right. Then nodded, disappointed with himself. Deduction, the detective’s art form, was a skill he could never grasp, and yet every time he saw it happen it seemed so simple. Just a case of making self-evident statements, the right one for each occasion. He looked at his swollen fists self-consciously. ‘How else might she have got her hands dirty?’
‘That’s just the thing: we have to explain her dirty hands, but we also have to explain the fact that she lied to her mother. Maybe she was hiding something in the gardens.’
The big man nodded. ‘Let’s go and look, then.’
They spent the next hour searching the gardens, carefully bending flowers and bushes over with gloved hands, stepping on untidy patches of grass and probing the bases of trees. They had the gardens to themselves for the duration of this work, though an audience of curious children formed along the edge of the fence furthest from Colchester Terrace. None of them were permitted to use the park, though they lived nearby, and this solemn spectacle seemed to rectify that injustice slightly; they’d already passed the gossipy details of the girl’s death between themselves like a rare and valuable marble.
Bulmer ignored them: he was staring in puzzlement at the garish paper plane caught in the branches above his head, wondering both what it was and whether some deduction was possible here, resisting the urge just to shake the tree with his huge fists and see what fell out, when he heard Laurie calling his name.
‘Bulmer, over here. I’ve found something.’ Laurie was crouched in a close gathering of plane trees; three of them forming a sort of natural tent. It was dark inside; Bulmer approached and saw that Laurie was scratching at the ground with his fingers. ‘The grass is flattened, someone has been sitting here. See where it’s all torn up? And the bark peeled off the base of this tree? That might be how she got her hands dirty.’ He pushed the soil around in circles. ‘But what was she doing here? Something that made her feel anxious, clearly.’
But Bulmer was following a hunch and looking upwards at the three trees; he saw what his shorter colleague had missed. There was an old, damp envelope slotted between two branches of the tree to Laurie’s right, just above head height. It was pushed right in. He leaned over and took it; Laurie had stopped digging and stood up. Bulmer opened the envelope, took out a sheet of paper and read. His eyes lit up with secret pride: ‘It’s a love letter. From a Richard Parker. To Alice Cavendish. There’s no date on it.’
‘Does it have an address?’
‘It does indeed.’
‘Then I would call that a clue.’
Richard Parker lived in his family home at the foot of the Surrey Hills. The two detectives travelled there together. The house came into view as the car crawled haltingly through fields of lavender, like a bead of water trickling down a window pane. Behind the house – a modest palace – the hills sat on the landscape like a crown. It was early in the morning and they could see their breath on the air.
Bulmer was driving; he’d begun the day with great enthusiasm, but was now having doubts about the outcome of this trip. Laurie was right: the letter was a clue. It was so obviously a clue that it seemed it had to be a coincidence, a red herring. Besides, he’d been over it from all angles and there was nothing to be inferred from it: the man was in love with her, that was all. And that gave them nothing, not even a motive.
They parked at the edge of the grounds and decided to walk the rest of the way; you can’t observe anything through the window of a motorcar, said Laurie. Yew trees had been carefully placed along the gravel drive so as to form no discernible pattern; it was supposed to give the approaching visitor a sense of delight but the effect was disorientating. They looked like the carriages of a derailed train.
‘This reminds me of something,’ said Laurie. But Bulmer didn’t reply; he had grown sulky, feeling this was all a waste of time. So far out of London he couldn’t even use his hands, they wouldn’t stand for such things out here. Or better not to risk it, at least. ‘I can’t for the life of me think what it is,’ Laurie continued.
The whole episode seemed staged, from finding the letter to approaching the estate: an impression compounded when the first figure they came across – a man in oil-stained overalls, fixing a motorbike, with a towel spread over the gravel and a selection of tools laid across it, like a dentist’s tray – turned out to be the person they were looking for.
‘Richard Parker. How do you do?’ He was implausibly good-looking, Bulmer noticed.
He wore a leather glove on his left hand; he showed them his uncovered right hand, filthy with engine oil, to illustrate why he couldn’t greet them properly. ‘Forgive me, I would shake hands otherwise.’
‘But you are Richard Parker?’ asked Laurie.
‘I am indeed. How can I help you?’
‘You weren’t what we’d pictured.’
The young man smiled. ‘This machine is a hobby of mine. I can change before we talk, if it makes you feel more comfortable.’
‘That won’t be necessary.’
‘Well then, how can I help you?’
‘We need to talk to you about Miss Alice Cavendish.’
Richard nodded. ‘What about her?’
‘She’s dead,’ said Laurie.
Richard Parker fell to his knees. ‘Oh god. That can’t be true.’
Was it just an act? ‘She was murdered yesterday afternoon.’
The fallen man let out a cry and brought his hands up to his face. Bulmer and Laurie both noticed something that seemed incomprehensible at first: the glove on his left hand seemed to crumple against his head, as if the hand had passed into his skull. Laurie saw the truth at once: not unkindly, he took the man’s arm and pulled the glove from it. He was missing three fingers and a thumb. ‘What happened to your hand?’
The shock of the question, coming out of nowhere, brought Richard back to himself. ‘The war, of course.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist.
Laurie and Bulmer looked at each other; they were both thinking of the row of intricate bruises along the arm of Alice Cavendish, where her assailant had pinned her down. This man was innocent.
They spent another forty minutes answering his questions and taking notes on his relationship with Alice and other related matters. Then they left, just as it was starting to rain.
They were both wet when they reached the car. Bulmer fumbled the keys from his pocket and let them in. Laurie took off his hat and shook the water from it onto the floor of the vehicle. ‘It struck me, as we were talking to him, that there is one relative of Alice’s we haven’t been very thorough with. The sister.’
‘The little girl?’ Bulmer looked at him. ‘But we spoke to her.’
‘We tried,’ said Laurie, ‘but her friend did all the t
alking. I think she was keeping something secret. Perhaps if we talk to her alone?’
‘Don’t ask me to use my fists on a child.’
Laurie shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
They drove back to London in silence.
At two in the afternoon they returned once again to Colchester Terrace, where the cream-coloured house welcomed them like an old friend. They found Maggie lying in bed with her sickly mother, the two of them sleeping peacefully.
Bulmer picked up the child and carried her gently into another room – an unused bedroom, next to her mother’s, where the two men could be alone with her – and propped her up in a corner.
Laurie knelt in front of her. ‘Maggie, it’s very important that you concentrate on helping us. We are going to find the person that hurt your sister. But we need to know if you can tell us any more about the man you saw in the square yesterday. Was he wearing a long black coat?’
She was crying already, half from sadness and half from the feeling that she’d done something wrong. ‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘his clothes were dark blue.’
‘Dark blue? You’re sure?’
‘Yes. And brown shoes. And the left leg was wet where he’d stepped in a puddle.’
Laurie glanced back at Bulmer. ‘You watched him quite closely, then?’
She answered in a barely audible whisper, the sound of raindrops in flight. ‘He was a nasty man. He wanted to look at us and ask us horrible questions. That’s why he helped Rose fix the aeroplane.’
‘The aeroplane?’ asked Laurie; she nodded again.
‘That aeroplane?’ asked Bulmer, softly. He was looking out of the window at the pointed purple shape that was still stuck in one of the trees.
Maggie went to the window to join him. ‘Yes, that one. He put something inside it.’
Laurie turned her towards him, and took out a pen and paper. ‘Tell me anything else you know about him.’
Twenty minutes later the purple aeroplane dropped artlessly to the ground. Bulmer had tried shaking the whole tree, but in the end Laurie had climbed along a branch, proving himself to be surprisingly nimble for such a serious-looking man.
