by Ellery Queen
“Head bashed in with a blunt instrument. However”—Inspector York leaned forward so as to deliver his bonne bouche with maximum effect—“before that he’d been knocked down by a car. The doctor’s absolutely sure about it. Bailey was severely bruised all down the left side, though it’s unlikely the car was damaged. Still, you see what it means, Sergeant?”
“Oh, I think so,” said MacGregor with a patronizing smile, the local bobby not having yet been born who could catch him napping. “It means that Bailey was probably knocked down by a car which was coming from the housing estate.” He flapped a languid hand. “If Bailey got off the bus at that stop, he’d walk down there and cross this road here at the crossing with his left-hand side towards the housing estate. Interesting.”
Inspector York suppressed an unworthy longing to sink his fist up to the wrist in a certain smug young face, then reminded himself that it was his job to be helpful. He got a couple of sheets of paper out of his pocket. “Luckily,” he said, “there aren’t many people on the estate who can afford to run a car these days. It takes some of ’em all they can manage to pay the bus fares. Anyhow”—he passed one sheet of paper over—“there’s a list of those who have got cars. And here”—he held out the second sheet—“is a real bonus!”
“You don’t say!”
Inspector York gritted his teeth. Much more of this and he’d leave the pair of ’em to stew in their own juice! “It’s the name and address of an old lady who may narrow the field down even further. My lads had a chat with her earlier on and she seems bright enough. However, she’s no chicken, so you’ll have to use your own judgment.”
“Your lads seem to have been very busy,” said MacGregor as he accepted the second sheet.
Inspector York let some of the bitterness show through. “My lads,” he muttered angrily, “could have had this case tied up a couple of hours ago if they hadn’t been told to hang back and wait for you lot.”
Mrs. Alice Golightly was 84 years old and still fighting back in spite of the fact that she had been sentenced to virtual solitary confinement by a caring community. The sheltered housing, into which she had been moved, was miles away from all her friends and relations and consisted of a drab row of two-roomed units built halfway up a steepish hill and fronting onto a block of communal garages.
“Bloody motor cars!” quavered Mrs. Golightly. “I’d ban ’em if I was prime minister, straight I would.” She leaned across and gave Dover a poke in the paunch to gain his attention. “Nasty stinking things! They’re more bloomin’ bother than they’re worth.”
MacGregor smiled a kindly smile.
Mrs. Golightly leered back. It had been a long time since she’d had two fine chaps like this hanging on her every word. “There’s that young punk up at the back,” she went on. “You know—What’s-his-name.” She rummaged around in her memory. “Miller—that’s him! Woke me up at ten past seven this morning trying to start his car—grind, grind, grind! Well, that meant I had to go to the toilet, didn’t it? I’d hardly got sat down when—damn me!—he finally gets it going and all these stinking, smelly petrol fumes come pouring in through the bathroom window where there’s gaps you could drive a corporation bus through. It’s a public scandal! There isn’t a bloody window in this whole bloody row that fits proper.”
Dover roused himself to recall his hostess to a sense of what was fitting and proper. “Don’t you,” he bellowed at her, “usually have a cup of coffee about this time, missus? And a butt and a few biscuits?”
Mrs. Golightly was not amused and MacGregor rushed in before she could start expressing her opinion of those who attempted to sponge on old-age pensioners. “Er—does this Mr. Miller often wake you up starting his car?”
“He’d better not! Next time I’ll have the law on him. Bloody motor cars!” She looked up. “I remember when it was all horses,” she boasted. “Not but what they hadn’t got some disgusting habits, but at least they didn’t go messing your telly up!”
“Ah,” said MacGregor with heaven-sent inspiration, “your television, Mrs. Golightly! Is that how you know when the cars use the garages opposite?”
Mrs. Golightly nodded grimly. “They break my picture up something cruel,” she grumbled. “Every last one of ’em! And don’t talk to me about suppressors! They’ve all had ’em fitted and it doesn’t make a ha’porth of difference. I’ve had them Post Office engineers round here,” she went on savagely. “Endless. Nothing but kids, most of ’em, and about as much use as my old boot. I have to keep a bloody record for ’em now, you know.” She snatched a small writing pad off the table and waved it contemptuously. “Like I told her from the Welfare—it’s coming to something when a lady’s word isn’t good enough!”
MacGregor tried to unravel things, just in case Dover was still listening. “You keep a note of every time there’s interference with your television picture,” he said, “and that means every time a car enters or leaves those garages opposite.”
Mrs. Golightly’s sniff acknowledged that this was so.
“And you watch television all evening?”
“I watch it all day,” came the forthright answer. “And so will you when you’re my age, sonny! I’d have it on now if you lot weren’t here putting me through the third degree.”
“And last night?”
“None of them went in or out after six o’clock. Well, they never do on a Thursday, do they?”
“Don’t they?”
“Everybody’s skint on a Thursday.” Mrs. Golightly appreciated a bit of company but you could have too much of a good thing. “Friday’s payday. Nobody’s got any money left to go gallivanting on a Thursday. I should have thought even you’d know that.”
Dover heaved himself to his feet. Although, to the untutored eye, his role in the interview may have appeared completely passive, some information had evidently filtered through. “I’ll just go and have a look at that toilet,” he said.
MacGregor tried to pass the time in small talk, but Mrs. Golightly’s aged ears didn’t miss a thing. Eventually she raised her voice over the sound of rushing water. “That fellow who’s been killed—”
“Malcolm Bailey?” asked MacGregor.
“I saw him when he arrived,” said Mrs. Golightly. “A fine figure of a man.” She paused spitefully to underline her point. “What I call a real policeman!”
So, if old Mrs. Golightly’s evidence was to be believed, none of the cars habitually kept in the block of garages could have been involved in the murder.
“And that, actually, sir, leaves us with only three suspects.” MacGregor gazed unhappily around at the wilderness of builders’ rubbish and half finished houses. “The people who own cars but who leave them parked out on the road. Always assuming, of course, that Bailey was killed by whoever knocked him down. I wonder what the motive was. It can’t be anything to do with his past life, surely. He’s been retired for ages and he doesn’t seem to have been exactly a ball of fire when he was in the Force. On the other hand, he’s hardly been down here long enough to make enemies. Less then twenty-four hours and this was his first visit.” MacGregor sighed. “I think we’ll have to have a good long look at this daughter and her husband.”
Dover was not the man for idle speculation. “For God’s sake, let’s get out of the bloody wind!” he growled. “It’s enough to freeze a brass monkey!”
MacGregor, being MacGregor, knew where he was going. “Azalea Crescent, sir,” he said as he led the way into a slightly curving, potholed stretch of road. “Mr. Jarrow lives here. And that, I imagine, is his car.” Ever mindful that Dover’s eyesight was something less than keen, MacGregor indicated an enormous black Humber parked by the curb and sparkling magnificently in the pale sunlight.
Sparkling?
“Stop that!” MacGregor leaped forward and screamed like a banshee.
The man with the soft duster jumped back as though stung. “Eh?”
“You’re destroying evidence!”
“What?”
“Didn’
t the police tell you we might want to examine that car?”
The unfortunate perfectionist shook his head. “A couple of ’em had a good look at it earlier on,” he said lamely.
“Didn’t they tell you not to touch it?”
Bill Jarrow gesticulated feebly with his duster. “I was just passing the time, like.”
It was Dover—he of the aching feet and the rumbling stomach—who moved the proceedings indoors. Bill Jarrow put his duster away and called to his wife to put the coffee on. He thus insured that, unless the evidence was very strong to the contrary, he’d be able to get away with murder where Dover was concerned. He further endeared himself by keeping his answers short and to the point, seemingly knowing by instinct that Dover valued brevity well above truthfulness.
Mr. Jarrow proved to be a taxi driver and the car he had been polishing belonged to the company for whom he worked. Most weekday evenings, when business was slack, he was allowed to bring the car home with him and answer any calls from his house. “It saves ’em keeping the office open,” he explained.
“Did you get called out last night?”
“No. Me and the missus sat watching telly till it was time for bed.”
“So your wife is the only witness?”
Bill Jarrow didn’t seem unduly perturbed that his alibi was being questioned. “You can check the mileage if you like. They’ll have a note at the office of what it was yesterday evening when I left. You can soon see if it doesn’t tally.”
Since Dover had got his National Health Service dentures inextricably sunk in Mrs. Jarrow’s homemade treacle cake, MacGregor carried on with the questioning. “There’s no meter on the taxi?”
“Not this one. We use this one for funerals, you see,” said Mr. Jarrow, passing Dover’s cup through the kitchen hatch for a refill. “Folk don’t like to see a meter clicking away when they’re following their loved ones to the crematorium.”
MacGregor examined Bill Jarrow thoughtfully. “Anything to stop you getting a call, doing the job, altering the mileage reading, and pocketing the fare?” he asked pleasantly.
For the first time, Mr. Jarrow’s occupational antipathy to the police showed through. “Trust you bloody cops!” he said disgustedly. “Look, mate, I’ve been a taxi driver for twenty years. I wouldn’t last five minutes if I started pulling tricks like that. What do you think my boss is, stupid or something? Petrol consumption alone’d be a dead giveaway. And suppose I had a smashup? Or somebody saw me?”
Bill Jarrow continued to wax indignant for some time, but eventually he recovered his equilibrium sufficiently to direct MacGregor to Japonica Mount, their next port of call. It was so close at hand that even Dover didn’t think it was worth demanding a police car. . .
“That chap might have run us there in his taxi,” Dover observed sourly as he and MacGregor proceeded slowly on their way back past Mrs. Golightly’s humble abode, “if you hadn’t been so bloody rude to him. What got into you? Any fool could see he’s too thick to be anything but honest.”
MacGregor didn’t agree. “You don’t need much intelligence, sir, to alter a mileage reading. And he was giving that car a thorough cleaning. He could have been removing traces of incriminating evidence.”
“Stuff!” puffed Dover, already finding the going hard. “Besides, where’s the motive? He’d never even met What’s-his-name.”
“Bailey, sir.” MacGregor was well used to Dover’s inability to remember any name (including probably his own) for more than five minutes. “Besides, I don’t think we’re looking for that kind of motive.”
“Oh, don’t you?” sneered Dover in a poor imitation of MacGregor’s refined accent. “Well, what kind of motive are we looking for, Smartie-boots?”
“I think the murder is tied up with the car accident, sir.”
Dover paused to contemplate the young mountain which had suddenly loomed up in front of them. ’Strewth, if he’d realized that the “couple of hundred yards” was going to be straight up. . .“Of course it’s tied up with the car accident,” he growled, once he’d got his breath back. “The killer runs Whatd’yecall’im down and immobilizes him, and then gets out to finish him off with a tire lever or something. Gangsters in America are doing it all the time.”
“It’ll be just by that small red car, sir,” said MacGregor, cringing as Dover grabbed his arm and hung on. As a 240-pound weakling, the Chief Inspector wasn’t fussy about who shared the burden. “I was thinking of a slight variation, actually,” MacGregor went on, failing to appreciate that aching feet were now looming larger in Dover’s mind than violent death. “I was wondering if the murder had to be committed because of the accident. That would fit Jarrow, you see.
“Suppose he had been doing a job without his employer’s knowledge, and during the course of it accidentally knocked Mr. Bailey down. Well, to report the accident in the normal way would expose what he’d been doing and he’d get the sack. So”—even MacGregor was beginning to sound unconvinced—“he finished Bailey off. I admit it sounds a bit thin, sir, but”—MacGregor cheered up—“plenty of murders have been done for less.”
“This it?”
They had climbed almost to the top of the steep incline that was Japonica Mount and were now level with the small red car. According to its number plate it was fourteen years old and it was obvious why its owner wasn’t paying out good money to rent a garage for it.
Dover turned thankfully through the little wrought-iron gate and waddled up the path. The curtains in the front room had twitched but he stuck his finger in the bell-push and rested his weight on it.
A woman opened the door and Dover was halfway inside before he discovered, to his undisguised chagrin, that it was the wrong house.
“No,” said the woman, “I’m Mrs. Jedryschowski. The Millers live the next house down.” She moved forward fractionally and pointed.
Dover’s fury mounted as he realized that the Miller house was one they had already passed.
“You’ll not find her there, of course,” said Mrs. Jedryschowski, “but he’s in. The police turned him back when he was going to work.”
Dover wasn’t prepared to let the matter rest there. It was MacGregor’s fault for dragging him to the wrong address, of course, but this Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was must take some of the blame. “That his car?” he demanded, with menace.
“Mr. Miller’s?” Mrs. Jedryschowski eyed Dover with some suspicion. “Yes, it’s his car.”
“Then why is it parked outside your house?”
Not for the first time MacGregor marveled at Dover’s unerring ability to grasp at the inessential.
It was all one to Mrs. Jedryschowski, of course. “You might well ask,” she said, leaning forward to stare at the vehicle in question. “He always leaves it there. We have spoken to him about it but it makes no difference. He says it’s something to do with saving his battery.”
MacGregor, of course, understood perfectly. “Oh, you mean he starts it by letting it run down the hill.”
Mrs. Jedryschowski, something of an ignoramus where the internal combustion engine was concerned, nodded. “Something like that. If he leaves it outside his own front door, he doesn’t get a long enough run or something.” She watched her visitors go back halfway down the path before closing the door on them.
Henry Miller was a livelier character than his next-door neighbor, though not by much. He welcomed Dover and MacGregor into a house that was clearly lacking a woman’s touch. Dover realized there was a fat chance of being offered any decent light refreshments here. He shoved a bundle of old socks out of the most comfortable-looking armchair and flopped down. This was going to be a bloody short interview.
Mr. Miller cleared a couple of dirty plates off another chair for MacGregor. “Bit of a mess,” he mumbled in apology. “What with the wife being away—”
“Not ill, I hope?” asked MacGregor politely as he got his notebook out.
“Not exactly.” Mr. Miller perched himself on the arm of the sett
ee and looked hunted. Like everybody else on the housing estate, he knew all about the murder. He didn’t, however, know Mr. Bailey or his daughter and her husband. “People keep themselves to themselves round here,” he explained. “We don’t want to impose. And this time of year you don’t want to leave your own fireside, do you?”
Mr. Miller paused in the hope that somebody else might like to say something, but they didn’t. “I work as a groundsman,” he volunteered. “At Bridchurch Central Junior School. The police stopped me when I was driving off to work this morning and said I was to stay at home till somebody came and took a statement off me or something. They had a look at my car, too.”
There was another pause. Mr. Miller mopped his brow. This time, however, MacGregor took pity on him and tossed a question.
Mr. Miller was grateful but unhelpful. “No, I didn’t. I got back from work about four o’clock and I didn’t leave the house again till this morning.”
Even MacGregor was obliged to swallow a yawn. Dover, of course, wasn’t even pretending to listen and was now resting his eyes against the light.
“You’re alone in the house?”
Mr. Miller blinked. “Yes. With the wife being away like.”
MacGregor looked at the layer of burnt crumbs which covered one corner of the table. “Has she been away long, sir?”
Mr. Miller sighed. “Only three days. I’m afraid I’ve been, letting the housework slip a bit.”
Having been given MacGregor’s solemn word that the home of the last car owner could be reached in three minutes and that it was downhill all the way, Dover reluctantly consented to walk.
Since it really was downhill, the Great Detective had breath to spare for an in-depth discussion of the case so far. “That milksop?” he questioned incredulously. “You must have lost your marbles! He couldn’t say boo to a goose!”
“He hasn’t got an alibi, sir.”
“Innocent people never have alibis,” retorted Dover, generously imparting the fruits of his many years of experience. “Besides, where’s his motive? What’s-his-name could hardly get him into trouble for driving his own blooming car.”
