A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  “Nobody is hanged for not firing a revolver,” Gertrude replied, with a little twitch of her mouth.

  “You know that’s not what I mean.” Daisy had struggled to her feet, and stared at Gertrude with a wild expression which gradually set into one of despairing calm, as the woman would not meet her eyes.

  “The point, surely, is this,” said Mark—the lecturer getting a discussion on to the right rails again. “It would be unthinkable to offer this information to the police gratuitously. But, if they should ask us whether we have any evidence of Hugo’s violent temper—”

  “Then little Gertrude cannot tell a lie,” said Jacko, with a fine assumption of disgust.

  Daisy swung round upon Mark, standing over him, a lioness in her beauty and anger. “Do you believe he did it?”

  “But really, Daisy, that’s not the point. I—”

  “Do you believe your brother shot that policeman?” Mark Amberley turned his head away, as if her incandescent blue eyes were scorching his skin. “I don’t know,” he said miserably. “How can one be sure?”

  Daisy, in a quite different voice said, “It’s no good, Jacko. They don’t want to help us.” And before the Amberleys could speak, she was out of the room. On the pavement, she turned to Jacko, who had at once followed her. “You’re the only person Hugo and I can trust now.” Her eyes searched his face under the street lamp. “You believe in Hugo, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, you silly old goose.”

  They walked away towards the main road. Presently Daisy said, “I can see Mark’s point of view. He was trying to be honest. It’s very important to him to be honest, isn’t it? Even when it’s his brother?”

  “Oh yes,” replied Jacko, with an involuntary, furious grimace which was his sole reaction to his own infamy, “you could say he makes a profession of it.”

  16. Fair Enough

  The next morning, Saturday, Hugo Chesterman was taken down to Southbourne. The preparations for his arrival, almost unprecedented in criminal history, were the result of a conference between the Chief Constable and Chief Inspector Nailsworth the previous evening. Colonel Allison, though he had bowed to the necessity of using Dr. Jaques as a decoy, nonetheless felt qualms about it, and was determined to give the accused man a scrupulously fair deal from now on.

  “A lot depends on the identification, Nailsworth. Southbourne’s not a big place, and there’s very strong feeling about poor Stone. Everyone here knows a man has been arrested. You’re going to get a crowd of rubbernecks waiting at the railway station for his arrival to-morrow morning. Now then: I don’t want any of our witnesses to see Chesterman, or a photograph of him, or to be told by a bystander—at the station or when he’s brought in here—what he looks like.”

  “Chuck an overcoat over his head, sir. That’ll do it.”

  “I’m afraid not. It might fall off. Some enterprising pressman might snatch it off. We’ve got to make dead sure that, when the case comes up in court, the Defence can’t say the witnesses might have been prejudiced—even by hearsay about Chesterman’s appearance. You realise, Nailsworth, that if Jaques goes into the witness box, there’ll be rumpus enough about the police methods anyway?”

  “I was only acting in accordance with—” Nailsworth began stiffly.

  “I’m not criticising you, my dear fellow. I’m warning you that we’ve got to take extreme precautions.”

  “What do you suggest, sir?”

  “I want the whole station and the yard cleared of the public until Chesterman is off the train and safely in the police car.”

  “Good lord, sir, there’ll be a riot!”

  “Then you’ll have to deal with it,” said Colonel Allison, smiling. “He must have some sort of hood over his face, of course, as you suggested. Same procedure when he arrives here. Cordon to keep the crowd right back. Anyone trying to take a photograph gets his camera confiscated.”

  The Chief Inspector rubbed his chin dubiously. “Very well, sir, I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will. Now, about the identification parade.”

  Colonel Allison pointed out that, in a town the size of Southbourne, local men picked for the parade might well be recognised by the witnesses, and automatically eliminated, which would be unfair to Chesterman. Ways and means for avoiding this were discussed. Then Colonel Allison said:

  “What sort of a chap is this Chesterman? What d’you make of him?”

  “He’s tough as they come, sir. Not a criminal type, to look at. Quiet; public-school accent; quite the gentleman, you’d think. But he’s tough underneath it all right—doesn’t give a damn for anyone.”

  “And he’s not talking?”

  “He’s certainly not confessing, sir. We questioned him for several hours. He admitted he was staying here with his girl, but said they were at the cinema the night Stone was shot.”

  “He did, did he? Very different from the story Daisy Bland told Jaques. Did you confront him with Jaques’s evidence?”

  Nailsworth looked a bit evasive. “Thorne and I agreed it’d be best to keep that till later, sir.”

  “I see. What about the girl?”

  “Thorne will be interviewing her to-night.”

  “A great deal depends on her evidence, eh?”

  “Just so, sir,” replied Nailsworth woodenly. Then, as if he wanted to get off dangerous ground, “Chesterman denied the charge, of course. He said, ‘Whoever did it did it to get the Princess’s papers for political purposes. That’s what I think anyway. No doubt she’s mixed up in some foreign political business.’”

  “Thorne’s original theory, eh?”

  “Yes, sir. We asked him how he knew about the Princess. Said he’d heard about her in a local pub, and read the newspapers later.”

  “H’m.” There was a pause. Then the Chief Constable asked, “You’re sure we’ve got the right man?”

  “He’s a convicted thief, a cat-burglar. He can’t or won’t give a satisfactory account of his movements during the period in question. That Brighton shopkeeper has identified Daisy Bland as the woman who bought a cap exactly similar to the one we found nearby, and the cap is Chesterman’s size. And everything Bland told Jaques—especially the impression he got from her about Chesterman’s revolver—supports my belief that he’s the murderer.”

  “But, if our eye-witnesses fail to identify him, we shall be relying largely on Jaques’s evidence?”

  “And the girl’s.”

  “Suppose she denies having told Jaques this story?”

  “I don’t see how she can, sir. Not at this stage. Thorne will get it out of her all right. Of course, I’d be happier if we’d found the revolver. That’d clinch it—”

  “One way or another. Yes. But you can’t expect the girl to help over that.”

  “Possibly not.” Nailsworth’s tone was stolid and evasive again. The Chief Constable glanced at him keenly.

  “This was a dirty crime. We don’t want to make it a dirty case, though, by exercising improper pressure on witnesses.”

  “No, sir.” Nailsworth’s huge face was utterly uncommunicative. Then, with a twist of the lip, he said, “No doubt someone’ll say we’ve been roughing Chesterman up, when they see him brought along with his head covered.”

  “There was none of that, of course.” Allison made it a statement.

  “No fault of his there wasn’t. At times during the interrogation he fairly asked for it, sir. I’d a job keeping my hands off him. Talk about insolence! I’d swear he was trying to provoke us into giving him a clout. First criminal I’ve ever met who seems really to hate the police like poison. Honestly, sir, I’d almost not put it past him to have shot poor Herbert just because he was in uniform.”

  The Chief Constable fiddled for a while with his cigarette case. “Hates us, does he? I wonder why.”

  “No doubt the Defence will rustle up some trick-cyclist to tell us,” said Nailsworth. “Maybe his Dad gave him a good spanking one day, or his Nanny wore buttoned boots, s
o of course he isn’t responsible for his actions when he shoots a poor bloody policeman.”

  “He’d like to get his own back for that jail sentence, I dare say. You don’t think he’s stringing us along?”

  “I don’t get you, sir.”

  “Suppose he has a perfectly good alibi, and is keeping it under his hat till the case comes up for trial. He could have told the girl all that story about going to meet a man at the Queen’s Hotel—just as an extra bit of bait for us to snap up. We’d look pretty silly. Wrongful detention—the Lord knows what.”

  “Why, bless my soul, you don’t really think—?”

  “Forget it, Nailsworth. No, if it’s a put-up job at all, my money’d be on that fella Jaques. Oily bit of work. Get Chesterman out of the way, and the girl’s all his. I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes when Counsel starts pitching into him.”

  Saturday morning was damp and close. A warm sea-mist hung over Southbourne, and it was this oppressiveness in the atmosphere which Hugo felt first when he set foot on the station platform—this, and a silence unnatural in such a place. A blue cloth, covering his head and the upper part of his body, prevented him from seeing its cause. Apart from a ticket collector and a uniformed policeman at the barrier, and a handful of porters waiting beyond it, the station was empty.

  Travelling in the first compartment of the front coach, Hugo’s escort had hurried him through the barrier almost before the other travellers had time to alight. The brief silence was broken by doors slamming farther down the train. Hugo could hear feet pounding behind him now, and it was like a pursuit, a stampede. He began to sweat. The cloth over his head entombed him, and he would have thrown it off but that his arms were firmly gripped on either side.

  When they reached the station exit, he became aware of another kind of silence—that of a crowd just before the teams emerge from the dressing-room—and then a distant, rising mutter in which nothing was distinguishable except its note of animosity, a sort of angry yet gratified susurration. Kept well back by a police cordon, all that the crowd glimpsed before Hugo was hustled into the police car was a smallish figure, weirdly hooded as if it were the high priest or the victim of some barbaric rite about to be performed, or the “he” in a sinister, new kind of Blind-Man’s-Buff. As the car drove off, Inspector Thorne heard a faint sound from beneath the blue cloth: he was not to know that Hugo was fighting against an agony of claustrophobia; nor, had he known, would he have cared in the least.

  Two hours later, a group of people were assembled in Chief Inspector Nailsworth’s office, eyeing one another with the furtive embarrassment of patients in a specialist’s waiting-room. There was the cabby, Charles Poore, a rheumy-eyed old man wearing a high, yellowish, stiff collar with a stock—his tribute to the occasion. There was the girl, a typist at the Municipal Offices, who had seen the murderer running away up Queen’s Parade: she was manifestly nervous, and from time to time took out her compact, only to thrust it back unused in her bag, flushing as though she had been caught making-up at a graveside. Next to her sat a brash young man, with the professionally cheery expression of a youth club leader. He had been passing through Southbourne on a cycling tour, and seen a hatless man walking briskly past the Queen’s Hotel from the direction of Princess Popescu’s house just after the time when Inspector Stone was shot: continuing on his tour, he had only yesterday seen the newspaper appeal for eye-witnesses, and come forward.

  Sitting against the opposite wall were the Princess, her companion, and the Italian maid, Velma. Though they had not seen the murderer at the time, Nailsworth wanted them to attend the identification parade, in case the sight of Chesterman should remind them of some previous meeting with him; for the police were still mystified by the would-be burglar’s attempting to break into a house as it were on spec. Thorne had elicited no admissions whatsoever from Velma—the obvious suspect as an accomplice of the burglar, nor had the police investigations unearthed any connection between her and Chesterman. But Thorne still hoped that, when she was actually confronted with him, Velma might betray herself by some involuntary reaction. At present, the Italian girl sat there, rolling up her lustrous brown eyes and sighing melodramatically four times a minute.

  The Princess, a gaunt, heavily-furred woman, with hennaed hair and an aquiline face as white as enamel, was deep in a book of memoirs: the huge rings on her fingers sent flashes through the sombre room as she turned a page: she seemed entirely at ease, dissociated from the proceedings; and when some passage in the book amused her, the deep, baying laugh she gave set up a visible wave of outrage amongst the trio sitting opposite her. Mrs. Felstead, her companion, fidgeted incessantly with a bead bag until the Princess, not looking up from her book, laid a hand on the bag and firmly removed it from her.

  Presently the Chief Constable entered, followed by Nailsworth. He bowed to the Princess, who acknowledged it with an inclination of the head, handed her book to the flustered nondescript little woman beside her, and assumed an attitude of gracious attention. Charles Poore struggled to his feet and stood, wheezing, with the glum apathy of a very old horse between the shafts, till Colonel Allison motioned him to sit down again.

  “You know what you’ve come here for, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll just tell you the procedure. You will be taken out into the yard, one by one. There you’ll see a file of men. One of them is a man arrested under suspicion of having killed Inspector Stone. I want you to look at these men carefully—take your time about it—walk round behind them as well and get a back view—one of you only saw the man in Queen’s Parade that night from behind. They are all wearing cloth caps, and you may ask any of them to remove his cap, if you wish. You must not address any other remark to them. If you spot the man you saw, or in your case”—Allison turned to the Princess’s party—” if you recognise a man you had met before, you must identify him—point him out to us on the spot. I must impress upon you all,” the Colonel earnestly continued, “what identification means. It means you must be able to swear in court that, to the best of your belief, this was the man you saw on the night of the murder. Remember, you’ll be cross-examined on it. If you only think it may be the man, but are not sure, would not be prepared to swear to it on oath, that is not good enough for an identification. You’ll understand, of course, that when you leave you must not talk to anyone, drop any hints whatsoever, if you identified or suspected one of these men. Well, I think that’s all. But if you have any questions—”

  The Princess’s deep voice, speaking in a strong foreign accent, turned every head towards her:

  “It is permitted to make them run?”

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am?” said the Chief Constable, his eyes popping a little.

  “This young person”—the Princess flung out a glittering hand towards the typist, who visibly quailed—“has seen a man running away. To identify, the same conditions will be helpful, yes?”

  “Oo, I couldn’t!” the typist protested.

  “My dear young lady,” said Colonel Allison, “all you’d have to do is say a word to the Chief Inspector. But not unless you’ve already seen a likeness in one of these men, and wish to confirm it.”

  The Princess raised one shoulder very slightly, as if to repudiate the kid-glove methods of the British police, then returned to her book.

  In the yard behind the police station, six men were drawn up. Hugo Chesterman was third from the left. The others chatted in a desultory way, looking awkward and self-conscious like new boys at a school. Hugo glanced round at the high wall behind and to both sides of him: he’d managed worse walls than that in his time, but there were policemen at either corner, and anyway it’d be crazy to make a bolt for it now: he remembered what Jacko had said about running away looking like a confession of guilt—easy enough for old Jacko to talk—he’d never known the inside of a cell. He had been told that he could have a friend or a solicitor present, and could take up any position he liked in the line when each new witness was introduced: but he felt too apathetic
to bother. A black frost of bitterness, anguish, despair had come over his mind.

  “Now, my lads,” Inspector Thorne called out. The file of men automatically stiffened as Nailsworth emerged from the back door, followed by Charles Poore. The old cabby trailed lugubriously along the line, with his stiff bow-legged gait, pausing to peer at each man’s face. Hugo was standing at ease, his hands lightly clasped in front of him. The old cabby paused, muttering something to himself, wrinkling his eyes at Hugo, then shambled on.

  “Just like a General Inspection,” Hugo’s neighbour whispered, nervously waggish. “What price Field Marshal Montgomery!”

  “Silence there in the ranks,” Nailsworth barked.

  The typist came next, and the men were asked to doff their caps as Nailsworth led her round to the rear of the file. The girl was speechless, and indeed half blind, with nerves. As she stood there, her eyes returned several times to the back of Hugo’s head; but she’d sooner have died than request the Inspector to make any of these men run.

  So, like some macabre version of a children’s-party game, the identification parade proceeded. The Princess walked round with the dignity of a royal Personage reviewing a guard of honour. The youth club type, conscientious to a fault, took an intolerably long time about it. Mrs. Felstead only raised her eyes from the ground to give each man a furtive and appalled glance, as if their faces were dirty postcards. When Velma approached Hugo, Thorne could not detect, closely though he was watching, the slightest change of expression on her face.

  The parade had been, from the police’s point of view, a total failure.

  “So it depends upon the girl’s evidence now,” said the Chief Constable. “And you say she refuses to co-operate?”

  “Not exactly that, sir. When I interviewed her last night, she was so agitated that I couldn’t get any sense out of her. She’d just returned from a rather painful visit to Chesterman’s brother—Jaques told me this—he went with her; and he warned me it might gravely endanger her health if I pursued the questioning any further.”