Deadly Pattern

by Douglas Clark

  Green said, when he and Masters were alone: ‘What about me?’

  ‘I want you to go outside and phone the Yard. I want details of Tintern’s car crash some months ago.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It may be hellish important. After that, wait for Bullimore and Swaine and join me in his room. I’m going to search it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Those women wore gloves and had purses. None of them has been found.’

  ‘And you think they’ll be there?’

  ‘No. I don’t. But I’ve got to make sure.’

  Green lit a Kensitas. ‘I’ll look forward to hearing how you know. It’s the screwiest case I’ve been on in years.’ He got up to go.

  ‘It’s the nastiest. And the sooner we wrap it up the better.’

  Tintern’s room was tidy. There were few possessions in the drawers. Masters went through them carefully and found nothing to help him. In a suitcase on top of the wardrobe he found nothing of interest except an electric soldering iron, flux and solder. Disappointed, in spite of not expecting to find anything of value to him, he stood in the centre of the room and filled his pipe. He smoked reflectively. He had finished one pipe and was packing another when Bullimore and Swaine, carrying his bag, arrived with Green.

  ‘Green tells me it’s Tintern. I hope to God you’re right,’ Bullimore said.

  Masters said: ‘I am.’ He didn’t elaborate, and this left Bullimore mentally stranded. He remained uncomfortably quiet for a moment or two and then said: ‘Do you want me to arrest him here?’

  ‘As you like. Take him to the station if you’d prefer it.’

  ‘I would prefer it. I want to hear your evidence before I take in a man on a multiple murder rap.’

  Masters smiled. ‘Doubting Thomas.’

  ‘Did you find anything here?’ said Green.

  Masters handed him the soldering iron. ‘This.’ Green inspected it. ‘What the hell’s this got to do with it?’

  ‘It had me foxed for a time. But I think it’s the last link in the chain. Or the next to last. Would you care to ask Brant if he and Garner have turned anything up?’

  Green lit a Kensitas, and then remembering his manners offered one to Bullimore who refused it. Swaine took one, and as Green left the room, said: ‘I know you haven’t made a dog’s breakfast of it. Can feel it in my bones. But I can’t for the life of me see how you’ve done it. Dammit, man, I’ve been with you half the time you’ve been here and you haven’t produced a tangible clue.’

  ‘What about the fifth body?’

  ‘Was that a clue?’

  Masters nodded.

  ‘Well, that was tangible enough. Stank to glory.’

  The phone bell went.

  Masters picked it up. Hill’s voice said: ‘He’s here, but he’s gone straight down for a drink.’

  ‘Right. Watch him.’ He turned back to the others. ‘We’ve got at least fifteen minutes—probably half an hour.’

  Bullimore said: ‘In that case give us a rundown on the evidence.’

  ‘We’d better sit if we can find room.’ Masters remained standing. Bullimore took the armchair. Swaine perched on the case stand.

  Masters said: ‘From the outset we were convinced that this crime was carried out by a local man . . .’

  ‘I told you so the first day,’ said Bullimore. ‘And now you’re going into reverse. Tintern . . .’

  Masters interrupted: ‘. . . is a native of Finstoft. Born here and lived here until he left school about the age of eighteen or nineteen. That’s well over twenty years ago.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, I don’t know him.’

  ‘Would you? After a gap of about a quarter of a century? An insignificant lad? What were you then? A constable? Sergeant perhaps?’

  ‘Come to think of it, I wasn’t even in Finstoft then. You get moved around in a County force, you know.’

  ‘Before my time, too,’ said Swaine.

  Masters went on: ‘I’ve waited to see if Garner would recognize him. But he hasn’t. And if an old Tofter copper can’t recognize one of his own kind, very few others would, either. However, I found one person who recognized him, but only after her mind had been jerked backwards over the years by your crop of murders. But let’s get on, shall we?’

  ‘Wait a moment. How did you find out Tintern was Finstoft born and bred?’ Bullimore asked.

  Masters turned to Swaine. ‘When we were having a drink at lunchtime on Sunday, Garner used an expression I’d never heard before.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘“Pounding the clits”. I guessed he meant walking over the dunes.’

  ‘Lord, yes. Clits. I haven’t heard it myself for years. You’re quite right, of course. You won’t hear anybody, anywhere, using that word except a real old Tofter and perhaps a Dane. You see, clit is Danish for dune. It was imported by the invaders and got left behind.’

  ‘I didn’t know the history of it, but I guessed it must be an old word peculiar to Finstoft,’ said Masters.

  ‘Not to Finstoft as a whole. Just to people born here of old Tofter families. Like Garner. I’d never use it myself. Apart from the fact that it wouldn’t come natural, it smacks of a certain part of the internal anatomy of the female which, now I come to think about it, can be dune- or dome-shaped. And just imagine the impression I’d create if I went around talking about “pounding the clits”. Old Bullimore here would run me in for indecent exposure or something.’

  Bullimore said: ‘What’s Garner’s lingo got to do with Tintern?’

  ‘On Sunday evening, Tintern used the same word. “These gentlemen need a good stiff drink after climbing about over the clits all day.” Hearing that particular—and unfamiliar—word again so soon caused it to stick in my mind. I’d already decided it must be a Finstoft word, but taken alone it didn’t necessarily indicate that Tintern was a Tofter. He could have picked the word up anywhere—from the workmen at the church, for instance. But, as I said, it made me think. And I’d already asked myself why an architect as famous as Tintern should stay here in Finstoft for a couple of months to supervise a church restoration. I’d have expected him to come and go like any other busy man would.’

  ‘You use everyday facts to make shackles. Honest you do,’ said Bullimore.

  What else he was about to say was interrupted by Green who came in full of excitement. He said: ‘We’ve got one. He phoned the Osborn house on Sunday the twenty-sixth. You remember. Her son said Joanna took an unknown call on that afternoon.’

  ‘That one alone will do for us. But if they can get others it’ll help to substantiate,’ said Masters.

  Bullimore said: ‘Now what’s going on?’

  ‘We’re tracing Tintern’s calls through the hotel exchange. We know he phoned the Osborns two days before Joanna disappeared. We’ll probably get further confirmation that he was in touch with all these women.’

  ‘You people frighten me,’ said Swaine.

  Masters said: ‘What d’you expect? Footprints, fingerprints, bloodstains and blunt instruments?’

  ‘Something of the sort, I suppose.’

  ‘You’ll not get them in this case. But to get on. You can take it from me, Tintern is a Tofter, and I visited the registrar to prove it. It cost me one and nine to have a look. I’ll be putting it on the expenses sheet. My next problem was to discover how the murderer managed to strangle his victims without the traditional scratches showing on the neck. It took some thinking about, but once I was on to it, it was so obvious it made me want to cry. Judo.’

  ‘Cripes. Is there a hold . . .?’ said Swaine.

  ‘A snatch, I think you’d call it. With crossed hands from the coat collar jarring nerves in the neck.’

  ‘What nerves?’ asked Bullimore.

  Swaine said: ‘If you want me to be specific, I’d have to look it up. But I can give you the general picture if you like.’

  ‘I would like.’

  ‘Well, there are two sorts of nerv
e fibre. Sensory and motor. Sensory for sensation, motor for movement. And at various parts of the body—particularly in the neck—these are bound together in great sheaths. One bundle for each side of the body and the opposite side of the brain. And what travels along nerves are impulses, caused by stimuli. These stimuli can be caused by electrical shock, heat or cold, chemicals or—as in this case—mechanical means. If the stimulus is strong enough at one certain point it raises the local excitatory state of the nerves to a critical value and a disturbance spreads at high velocity along the nerve. Now if this impulse is sharp enough to excite practically every nerve in the body all at once, you can imagine the brain’s response. It passes out. And it stays out for some time, because these impulses are like a spark travelling along a trail of gunpowder—except that they travel about a hundred and twenty-five yards in a second—and they leave a trail of burnt out powder behind. No other spark can travel that way until the trail has been relaid. And this is exactly what nerves do. They regenerate themselves. When we’re living and moving normally, we have relays of nerves. One takes over when another is played out and so we can have constant motion and sensation, with each nerve burning out, regenerating and coming into play again when necessary. But if a sharp flick stimulates every nerve at once, they’re all burnt out at once, and the body’s useless for a given length of time. Possibly only for seconds . . .’

  ‘It was demonstrated on Sergeant Hill,’ said Masters. ‘He was out for only a short time.’

  ‘But long enough for somebody to strangle him unhampered?’

  ‘I think a strangler applying pressure would have kept him unconscious.’

  ‘Then that explains that,’ said Bullimore. ‘But would Tintern know such a hold or snatch or whatever it is?’

  ‘I have no absolute proof that he did. But he studied judo in Hawksfleet under a chap called Shen Ma Pang, in Acre Yard in Hawksfleet.’

  ‘Did he, now?’

  ‘Shen’s a bit cagey. This particular snatch is not supposed to be taught and he says he didn’t teach it to Tintern. However, he suggested Tintern could have seen it being demonstrated among judo experts. It’s a point you’ll have to clear up. Can you get the Hawksfleet people to lean on Shen to get the truth if the prosecution needs it? Personally I don’t think it will be vital to the case, because whether their necks were scratched or not, the women died. But it might be useful circumstantially to point out that Tintern learned judo.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ said Bullimore.

  Masters went on. ‘So I had a native Tofter who knew judo, staying for a remarkably long time here on a flimsy excuse. I hope by now you’ll see I had good cause to suspect Tintern.’

  Bullimore grunted.

  ‘But it was Tintern’s behaviour that clinched matters. We were all talking about a madman—a dangerous lunatic. I don’t know much about neuroses and psychiatric disorders, so I borrowed the doc’s little books. But before that, the doc had said that a neurosis could be triggered off by one severely shocking experience or it could appear gradually due to environmental pressures. With my mind firmly fixed on Tintern, I remembered that a few months ago he had come physically unscathed through a serious car accident on a motorway. But though he was unhurt, I seemed to remember somebody was killed.’

  Green said: ‘That’s right. His wife and only child.’

  There was silence for a moment.

  Masters went on: ‘I hadn’t realized it was as personal as that. That’s a shock big enough to send any man off his rocker. But to get back to doc’s books. I came across our old friend dementia praecox. I say old friend, because that’s the sort of name that, once heard, tends to stick in the mind, even if you don’t know what it means. So, because it sounded familiar I read it carefully. I can now quote the definition given. It’s this. “Term for a large group of psychoses of psychogenic origin, often recognized during or shortly after adolescence but frequently in later maturity, characterized by disorientation, loss of contact with reality, splitting of the personality: schizophrenia.” And it was that last word that did things for me. I turned to the schizophrenic symptoms and I read those up.’

  ‘What did you get?’ said Swaine.

  ‘The first was symbolism in behaviour and speech. Now you’ll remember that symbolism was another word we were bandying about, because the bodies were all laid out in the same way, hands and feet spreadeagled, all heads pointing east and so on. And there was the fifth body. I haven’t explained to you how I came to find it. I will now.’ He took from his inside pocket the large scale plan of the area, and spreading it in front of them described how he had come to realize that a perfect cross, pointing east, would be formed by a body buried where the two arms crossed. He went on: ‘We found the fifth body as you know. But the really important part is that the book said schizophrenic symbolism was usually either religious or sexual. And this burial pattern screamed out that it was religious symbolism. And Tintern has devoted his life to restoring religious buildings. What is more, he is an architect and surveyor. Who but a trained man could lay out five bodies so exactly? It is only because Inspector Green has a working knowledge of artillery survey that we were able to make sense out of four bodies dotted about in an apparently aimless manner.’

  Bullimore turned to Green. ‘I’ll see you don’t lose by it. We have a merit award system here for bits of good work like that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Masters said: ‘Some of the other manifestations of schizophrenia also applied to Tintern. One of them is that they see objects change shape and colour. Once when I was in the bar he pointed to a colourless bottle and told me it was red. At the time I thought it might be reflecting a red fairy-light, but now I know it wasn’t. Then there was one of the most characteristic facets of the disease—disturbance of thinking. In the book it gave as an example a schizophrenic who had translated the old saying “a stitch in time saves nine” into “I must sew nine buttons on my coat”. All four of us heard on Sunday morning, at breakfast time, a waiter say to Tintern, “You get that down pretty nippy like and you’ll find you’ve made up for lost time.” Tintern’s reply was, “I’ve lost my time maid.”’

  Swaine said: ‘Good lord. Anything else?’

  ‘There’s oceans of it. According to your book schizos often answer questions by using the same words as the question is asked in. Green will bear me out that Tintern nearly always repeated a questioner’s words—like one of those inept interviewees on television.’

  ‘That’s right. Like a parrot,’ said Green.

  Masters went on: ‘And his shirt. He wore one with a smudged collar all Saturday and Sunday. The book says they don’t change dirty garments for weeks, sometimes. And the row about his change in the bar. Shirl says it has often happened. But for an example of unpredictable variability what do you think of a man who can’t work out change for a pound note, but who can play chess and bridge extremely well?’

  ‘It’s conclusive enough,’ said Swaine.

  ‘There is more. Examples of social withdrawal—when he wouldn’t speak to us one day and was standing us drinks the next. Persecution mania—he complained the chambermaids wouldn’t let him use the nearest lavatory. And, I believe, one other very conclusive example. He must have realized that something was wrong with him, and he made desperate attempts to regain control in what the book says is the typical way—by trying to stick to a rigid timetable, diet, etcetera. He was cross because he wasn’t wakened on time, and he wouldn’t eat a decent breakfast. The signs are numerous, and though they may not make good evidence in court they certainly bolster up the reason for his arrest.’

  Bullimore said: ‘I agree. But you haven’t so far given us any reason for the killings, or any reason for his choice of victims. And without those we’ll get nowhere.’

  Masters grinned as he lit his pipe. He said to Bullimore: ‘You gave me the hint that first day when you spoke about the social strata in Finstoft and Hawksfleet. Why break the noses of dead women?’


  ‘To put them out of joint, like as not,’ said Green.

  ‘Right. That’s what occurred to me. Noses out of joint—socially. The reaction of an unbalanced mind to real or imaginary social slights in the past. You know, the obvious step in multiple crime is to look for common factors, common contacts or some other means of connecting them. This time I felt sure there must be a common contact—probably several. But we satisfied ourselves with one. A Mrs Mary Turner. She was known to all these women many years ago. She was friendly with them all when they were senior schoolgirls. She’s given us an account of what went on between that group of girls and their boy friends at that time.’

  ‘Was Tintern one of them?’ Swaine asked.

  ‘Yes. But he was odd man out. The girls fought shy of being alone with him. They tolerated him in the group, but refused single dates with him. I believe he thought at the time that they shunned him because he came of a working-class family. That’s the impression a poor lad would get in this area at that time, isn’t it, Super?’

  ‘As like as not.’

  ‘Personally, I think he wasn’t snubbed by these girls—socially, I mean. I believe that even at the age of eighteen he was beginning to show some of the signs of his schizophrenia, and that frightened them off from being alone with him. Remember the definition says that the disease is often recognized during or shortly after adolescence. And one of the main symptoms is sensitivity—more developed than in the normal person. A hypersensitivity which causes them to over-respond to any stimulus. I think he over-responded to the attraction these girls had for him. He grew fanatically entangled in his emotions, and when they wouldn’t play, he was so oversensitive to their response that he misinterpreted it and it became a mania.’

  Swaine said: ‘That’s supposition, surely.’

  ‘Maybe. But Mary Turner will tell you that out of the six girls involved she was the only one who did accommodate him, and she’s the only one who’s still alive.’

  ‘Accommodate him?’

  ‘She was a lively young imp. She’s been married twice and divorced once. I go no further than that. But she’s not a frigid type, and whatever she got up to with Tintern was powerful enough to save her life more than twenty years later. I think Inspector Green was right when he described her as a girl who hadn’t always kept her hand on her ha’penny.’