The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  “We’ll stop them,” Norman said without confidence. “We’ll give you a guard.”

  She sneered. “Thank you for nothing. What happens when you take him away? I tell you, I should have to leave this place.”

  “Why not?”

  She stared at him in surprise, her mouth slightly open. “Why not?”

  “You belong in London.” Norman felt a warmth in his stomach as he said it. How old are you now, Miss Willard? he silently asked. Twenty-one? Let Gipsy Norman tell your future in the crystal ball. I see you going to London, strip-teasing in a club, finding yourself a ponce and working hard for him, ending as a madam if you’re lucky, and it’s an end that won’t be so very far from your beginning in point of time. Oh yes, you belong in London, Miss Willard. “What is there for you down here? What sort of place is this? What money do you make? I don’t see why you want to stay.”

  “There was King.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “We’d been going together for six months. He’s nice. Well, you know, exciting. All the boys looked up to him, it really was something to go around with him.”

  “He looks a big boy here, he’d be a tadpole where the big fish swim.”

  She had stopped chewing. Now she began again. “You don’t talk much like a copper.”

  “We’re like anybody else only more so. We know the score. I could help you get out of here.” Norman’s exophthalmic eyes met her withdrawn, dark, beady look. I bet she’s a wonderful lay, he thought. “You can look after yourself, but I’ll look after you too.”

  “I like whisky.” She pushed forward her glass with a hand bony, slightly dirty, tipped blood red. Norman half-filled it and poured the same amount in his own.

  “It tastes all the better because it’s freemans. Freemans from the Greek.”

  “That little bastard. There’s only one thing he wants from the girls. And he gets it from some of them. Not me, though.”

  “You’re too smart.”

  “I’m too smart.”

  She had finished that drink and started another before she began to talk. Norman had nothing more to do than sit in Nicholas’s body-absorbent chair, a chair in a subdued, delicious blue that matched exactly the blue of his desk-top, nothing more to do than sit and listen. She talked in spurts, as water comes out of a hose that is intermittently blocked.

  “Something was wrong, I could see that the moment they came in. King didn’t look much different from the way he always does, mind you, went over and talked to that dough-faced Susie, but I saw from the way Ernie and Taffy went on that something was up. They’re milky, those two, haven’t got what it takes. The other one, Les Gardner, he’s King’s boy. I don’t mean he’s that way, you know, but King treats him as if he’s sort of a kid brother. He’s got a stuck-up bitch of a sister, Les, I mean, but he’s all right himself, one of the boys.

  “Now since King and I packed up—I told you we packed up?” Norman nodded, not wanting to interrupt her. “It was mutual, you understand that. Since then Ernie Bogan has been trying to make me. As though I’d look at that snotty-nosed kid after King. So he comes up and starts talking about something they’ve done out at Far Wether, not saying exactly what, talking as though it was something smart. Then King comes over, he hasn’t said a word to me since coming in the place, mind you, but now he comes across and asks what Ernie’s talking about.

  “‘He was telling me you went to the Guy Fawkes show at Far Wether,’ I said.

  “I’ve never seen King that angry. You know King?”

  “I know King,” Norman agreed.

  “You know what he’s like, cool as a cuke. Now he says to Ernie, ‘I told you to keep your trap shut,’ and Ernie says what about Rocky and the Pole, they’re not here, and King says, ‘Any bastard who says anything won’t last long after this is over because I’ll do him. You got that, Ernie?’”

  The girl stopped suddenly, and looked at her almost empty glass. Her tongue came out, pink, and licked the red of her lipstick. “He could do it to me,” she said in a voice from which the assumed Americanism had quite gone.

  Now Norman felt the whisky he had drunk drain away, leaving him perfectly sober, and also felt himself becoming again, quite consciously, a detective-sergeant, aware of his responsibilities towards society and even towards this errant girl. This was something that had happened to him before, as though he had been playing some monstrous game of “Let’s pretend” that was now over; or as though he had gone deliberately to the edge, the very crumbling edge of a cliff, and felt his foot slipping as the ground gave way, yet knew simultaneously that at any time he wished he could return to firm land. Now Detective-Sergeant Norman, the lusts of the flesh and errors of the spirit put away, spoke with avuncular composure.

  “He won’t do it to you, girl. I can tell you one thing that’s certain. At the end of all this we’re going to put King Garney where he can’t do anything to anybody for a long time. Now, what else did he say?”

  “He didn’t say much else, he didn’t have to, Ernie was wetting his pants with fright. And then Taffy Edwards comes up and they’re talking, but you know, kind of giggling too, saying it was fun. And I asked them what it was exactly that had happened, and Taffy said, ‘King and Les did it. Ernie and me were there, but we never had knives.’

  “‘Did what?’ I asked. ‘Have you robbed a bank or something?’ And then Taffy says they went out to have some fun with this bloke who chucked them out of a dance or something, and how they took a lot of fireworks to throw at him, but he got cut up. King and Les were the ones that had knives, Taffy says again.

  “Then Ernie says, ‘What about Rocky?’ Maybe Rocky too, Taffy says, and Ernie says, ‘You were flashing a knife before we went, Taffy,’ and Taffy says he wasn’t. So then I asked how bad they cut him, and Taffy giggles and Ernie says, ‘Bad.’

  “‘How bad?’ I said again, and Ernie says that King thinks he croaked.”

  Her glass was empty. She looked up. “Want another drink.”

  “You’ve had enough,” said Norman, with a solicitude that had no more than a faint snail-smear of lechery left in it. “You come along with me.”

  She took his arm. “You’ll look after me?”

  “I’ll look after you.”

  They went down to the station, and there she made her statement.

  15

  On Monday morning Hugh said, “I’ve got to go along to the station.”

  When Lane was in a good temper he smoked cigars. At times of annoyance he chewed cigarettes. His method of chewing was to light a cigarette, allow it to go out, roll it in his mouth until it was wet, and then chew the damp cylinder. He found the taste disgusting, and this exacerbated his bad temper. He was chewing a cigarette now.

  “It’s an identification parade. You know I was out at Far Wether on Thursday.”

  “Could I forget it?” Lane asked sweetly. “When you’re not reading the Banner under the desk or writing stories for the other nationals which none of ’em are going to use, you’re nipping out to have a cuppa with your friend Mr. Fairfield. Shall I tell you something? If you don’t pull your finger out and get cracking on a few little jobs for this paper instead of spending your time brown-nosing Mr. Fairfield, you might not be coming back from one of those cups of coffee. Do I make myself clear to your great intellect?”

  “Have I missed anything?”

  “Did I say you’d missed something?” Lane spat out the shreds of his cigarette, dumped the mess in his ash-tray, and filled one of the pipes on his desk. A pipe was his emotional half-way house between cigarette and cigar. “This is Monday morning, boy. The arrests have been made, we’ve reported them, all right. Magistrate’s court, trial, they’re news and we’ll report them when the time comes. But we don’t want a Gazette reporter crawling round looking under every stone to see what’s hidden. See what I mean?”

&n
bsp; Michael stopped typing. “After all, there’s the Savington Legion skittle meeting to-day. I mean to say, first things first.”

  “Very amusing,” Lane said. “Extraordinarily humorous. And the funny thing is, our humorist is right. We’re a local paper, and our readers come to us for local stories they won’t find anywhere else. For a local story that makes national news they read the national Press. Got it? All right. Now sod off and get your identification parade done and be back here by two o’clock.”

  A thin rain, soft and almost warm, dropped on him as he walked down the High Street towards the police station. He was the last to arrive. The lopsided Joe Pickett, the lugubrious Dr. Mackintosh, and the girl whose fireworks he had lighted, with a man who was presumably her father, sat on chairs in a waiting-room. There they were joined by Twicker, Langton, and a bulky, fleshily handsome man who was not known to Hugh, but whose name he gathered to be Norman. It was Langton, red-faced and slow-spoken, who talked to them.

  “This is an identification parade. You four are going outside, one by one, and there you’ll see several people. Look at them all—take your time, there’ll be no hurry—and then tell us if you saw any of them on the green at Far Wether on the night of November fifth. We don’t want anybody you saw before or afterwards, you understand that. We’re just interested in any of them who were on the green that night. Do you understand?” There was a murmur of assent. Langton bent down to Maureen Dyer. “Do you understand, my dear?”

  She whispered something. Her father said heartily, “Maureen understands. She’ll do it, don’t worry.” Langton fumbled in his pocket and drew out a packet of fruit pastilles. He offered one to Maureen, who shook her head. Langton looked disappointed.

  Now the three men left them and were replaced by Bob Pickering. They left the waiting-room in turn on being called by Norman, Dr. Mackintosh first, then Maureen Dyer and her father. Joe Pickett said, “Seen you before. You’re the reporter chap came out that night, aren’t you?”

  In a heavy voice Pickering said, “No talking, please.” A minute later it was Pickett’s turn, and a couple of minutes after that Norman looked in and said, “Mr. Bennett.”

  They walked down the corridor together. In a rather loud, self-confident voice Norman said, “You’re on the Gazette?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You had a nose for news last Thursday night. See how many of the boys you can pick out to-day.”

  They went out into a small courtyard. There twelve youths stood, all of them wearing raincoats or mackintoshes, all looking miserable. He walked slowly down the line and back again, but really the pretence at serious examination was a farce. Yet the farce had its disturbing aspect, for Gardner was his pigeon, and, curiously, he was now a little less certain about his identification of Gardner than when he had first suffered the shock of recognition on Saturday morning. It was upon that first shock, really, that he now relied, for, after all, what had he seen last Thursday night, what could he have seen in those seconds by the bonfire when his senses were not directed towards a particular identification? What could it have been, more than a momentary impression that might have been mistaken? For an instant the face of Leslie Gardner was overlaid completely by that of his sister, the snub nose and the short, appealing upper lip which were somehow not pathetic but expressive of determination, replacing the immature good looks of the youth who stood moving from one foot to the other uneasily, in acknowledgment of the journalist’s prolonged scrutiny. It’s all nonsense, Hugh told himself, of course I recognised him, it was absolutely instantaneous.

  Twicker was by his side. The superintendent said formally, “Do you recognise any of them? Do you want to go down the line again?”

  “No.” Gardner flinched away from his nod. “This one.”

  Norman was making a note. “Yes?” Twicker prompted.

  “He’s the one I struggled with last Thursday. Then he broke away from me and went over towards Corby.”

  “Right. Say something,” he said to Gardner.

  The youth opened his mouth. “My name is Leslie Gardner,” came out.

  “Now say, ‘Get him, King.’”

  There was a flash of some emotion in Gardner’s eyes. In the same blank voice he said, “Get him, King.”

  Twicker looked at Hugh, who shrugged. “I just couldn’t say. Remember, these were only three words and I wasn’t paying particular attention.”

  “Right,” Twicker said. Norman put away his notebook. Hugh walked out of the courtyard.

  16

  The Chief Constable had lunched well, and was feeling cheerful. “What have we got?” he asked.

  Twicker spoke, his voice dry yet not dull, a current of passion running clearly beneath it. Langton sat, stolid but attentive. Norman doodled on a pad.

  “First, these five boys are under arrest. Their names are Bogan, Charkoff, Edwards, Gardner, and Garney. A sixth boy, Jones, was questioned, made a statement involving two of the others, and has since run away from home.” Twicker paused. Norman stopped doodling. Langton looked down at his big hands. The Chief Constable stroked his moustaches. “There’s no doubt that these six boys were involved in the earlier dance incident. No doubt either about their presence at Far Wether on the night of November fifth, which they have now all admitted after first denying it. The question is which of them were actually involved in the crime.

  “Here we have four witnesses. Joe Pickett, a jobbing gardener, was standing close to Corby. To-day he identified Garney and Gardner as two boys who actually attacked Corby. He saw a knife drawn, although he is not sure who used it. Garney, who is called King by the others, is the gang’s leader, and it is natural to suppose that he would be involved. Pickett also identified two other boys as having been present. These were mistakes in identification.” Twicker paused. Nobody spoke.

  “Next, Dr. Mackintosh, who was also at one time near to Corby, although he moved away. He agrees that Corby was attacked by ‘two or three’ boys. This morning he was only able positively to identify Garney.

  “Third, an eleven-year-old girl named Maureen Dyer, the daughter of a local farmer.”

  “Old Jack Dyer,” the Chief Constable said, “lives at Twelvetrees House, always used to have a fireworks party there every year. Wonder why he missed this year? Oh, sorry. Go on, Superintendent.”

  “Maureen Dyer identifies another boy, Gardner, as one who pushed her over. She says she saw a knife shining in his hand. She’s quite sure she saw it. A local reporter, Hugh Bennett, also identified Gardner as the man who knocked over the girl. Bennett struggled with Gardner, felt something hard in his pocket, saw him move towards Corby.”

  The Chief Constable jingled coins in his own pocket. “I’d like to know where this Rocky Jones boy has got to. No news of him yet, eh?”

  “Nothing yet, sir,” Langton said. “But he won’t get far.”

  “It’s all rather confused,” the Chief Constable said pettishly. “One saw this and another saw that. And then what about the boys themselves? I suppose they all tell different tales.”

  What does he expect, Norman thought to himself as he listened to Twicker recounting the different stories told by the boys, and then going on to an account of what Jean Willard had said. Did he think that the boys were going to serve it all up on a plate? A case like this was never easy, never cut and dried. At the end of this conference Twicker would make his report. It would be considered at Scotland Yard and passed on from there to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the D.P.P. would make up his collective mind. But you could bet your life that they would play it safe in a case like this and that one or two of the boys would be allowed to save their skins by turning Queen’s Evidence. The question simply was, which ones? Rocky Jones, no doubt, when they found him, and that long-nosed Pole, Charkoff. It was damply warm in the room, with a gas-fire hissing slightly, and Norman felt himself not sleepy exactly, but no lon
ger following the discussion with full attention. There was a big leather arm-chair beside the gas-fire. I bet he has his afternoon nap in that, Norman thought, looking at the Chief Constable’s slightly vacant face.

  “Sweat it out,” the Chief Constable said. “Got to sweat the truth out of them, only way to deal with these types, eh?”

  One of the three telephones on his big desk rang. The Chief Constable picked it up, spoke, handed it over to Langton. The superintendent spoke, mostly in monosyllables, for perhaps a minute, and then put down the receiver as if it had been a loaded gun.

  “They’ve found Rocky Jones,” he said. “He was in one of a couple of condemned cottages down by Platt’s Flats.”

  “Good,” the Chief Constable said heartily. “Get down to sweating a bit more out of him, get his tale straight.”

  “We shan’t get anything out of him. He’s dead. Someone did him with a knife.”

  17

  Platt’s Flats derived their name from a Victorian builder, who had erected upon flat marshy land two rows of cottages, with four rooms in each and a communal sewer. Most of the cottages had been pulled down but two remained, their roofs leaking, their windows broken long ago and boarded. Photographs of band leaders and film stars were pinned to the damp and dirt-stained walls. Some empty beer bottles stood in one corner. There were three chairs in the room, and a cane-topped bamboo table. The body lay face downwards on the floor. There was a good deal of blood. Men were dusting with fingerprint powder, measuring distances, taking photographs.

  “He’s been stabbed eight times,” the police surgeon told them. “Probably by two different knives, though it’s hard to be sure, because if it was two knives they were both of the same flick-knife sort. No other blows struck that I can see, though I’ll be positive of that when I’ve looked at him more carefully. It looks as though one of them held him and the other used the knife, then the one holding him helped to finish him off.”