by J F Straker
Pitt thanked him. ‘We could do with a little publicity of the right sort,’ he said.
*
Dick Ponsford was in bed and far from cheerful. ‘A nice time I choose to fall sick,’ he groaned. ‘How’s it going, Loy?’
Pitt told him. When he heard of the proposed reconstruction the Sergeant groaned even louder. ‘It can’t wait, I suppose?’ he pleaded. ‘I’ll be up in a day or two.’
‘You know it can’t, Dick.’
‘No, of course. Who’s going to take Laurie’s place?’
‘I haven’t fixed that. I asked Bullett, but he turned it down.’
The Sergeant was surprised. ‘Did he though? And him always grumbling about the scoops he doesn’t get.’
‘He’s going to attend in his official capacity,’ said Pitt.
‘What about Carrington?’
‘I don’t think we’ll need a substitute for Carrington,’ said the Inspector.
‘Well, I hope it’s a success. What exactly do you expect to learn from it?’
‘Nothing much,’ lied Pitt, remembering his sister’s instructions. ‘But you never know.’
Inspector Pitt spent a busy and varied afternoon; but when he returned to his sister’s house that evening he considered he had done everything possible to ensure the success of the experiment fixed for the morrow. The Superintendent had promised him the needed men; the inhabitants of Grange Road had been advised and instructed. Yet he knew well that the odds against his plan succeeding were heavy. ‘I’d say you have enough evidence without this; but if you want the murderer to hang himself there’s no harm in trying,’ had been the Super’s comment. Pitt was not so sure he had been right there. It might well be that if the plan failed it would provide evidence for instead of against the killer. But he felt he had to take that chance. He had a fair case, but he wanted a perfect one.
‘How’s Dick?’ he asked his sister, as she prepared a hot drink. ‘I could do with his support tomorrow.’
‘You won’t get it,’ said Wendy. ‘He has a high temperature, and it isn’t improved by his fretting over this wretched case. He feels he’s letting you down.’
‘That’s rot. Let me talk to him.’
‘Not tonight, Loy. Tomorrow.’
Tomorrow. As he sipped his drink the Inspector once more reviewed the arrangements he had made. Grange Road had shown little enthusiasm for his plan. Perhaps they were reluctant to be dragged back into the realms of murder. There were, after all, only four more days to Christmas. It was a time for festivity, not for inquests; although there had been a lack of the usual seasonal decorations in the houses he had visited that afternoon. Only the Archers had done the thing properly: paper streamers and balloons, holly and a candle-lit Christmas tree. But then there were children at No. 19, and the Archers seemed essentially a united family. A happy one, too. But though there were also children at No. 17, no one could call the Harrises a happy family. There was nothing there to compensate for poverty. Mrs Harris had no doubt done her best: holly, and a few tattered decorations which had done service on previous occasions. But it would have taken more than this sop to festivity to dispel the dreary atmosphere pervading the house.
Pitt felt sorry for Mrs Harris and the children. But Harris himself was all wrong. Although he had not refused to conform to the police arrangements for the morrow, he had been extremely surly. No doubt he had suffered a shock when he had read in the newspapers of Morris’s arrest. The vision of easy money had been rudely dispelled.
Archer’s welcome had been typical. ‘Come in, man,’ he had said heartily; and then, to his wife, ‘Maisie, here’s the Inspector. The one that thought I was keeping another woman. Me — with my stomach!’ He had made no demur at the rather unusual request Pitt had made of him, had shown no surprise and had asked few questions. And as the Inspector was leaving he had said in a loud whisper, ‘Just write down the address, will you? Who knows, I might get fed up with darts.’
Robert Avery had shown little enthusiasm. ‘What use can I be?’ he had asked querulously. ‘I never saw the damned postman, as I told you. And I bet we get another of those filthy evenings.’ Pitt thought that the man’s charm was something he turned on only when it could be of use to him, but that otherwise he didn’t bother. He began to feel some slight sympathy for Mrs Avery. ‘You will probably be entirely superfluous, sir,’ he had said blandly; and had added, hoping it did not sound too much like blackmail, ‘I think you owe us a little co-operation.’
Avery’s bubble of discontent had burst like a balloon at that.
Mrs Gill, on the other hand, was only sorry that she had no proper part to play; and Donald Heath had seemed eager to help. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to sport another black eye,’ he had said, with some attempt at humour. ‘I suppose I couldn’t give the postman one, for a change?’
There had been a bunch of mistletoe hanging in the hall of No. 9, and Pitt had wondered whether it was there for Miss Weston’s benefit. If so, he doubted whether it would be brought into use. Miss Weston herself had made it quite clear that she had no intention of observing Christmas. ‘I don’t want to be morbid,’ she had said to the Inspector, ‘but Jock Carrington was a special friend, someone out of the ordinary. It wouldn’t seem right to be celebrating so soon after his death. At least, that’s the way I feel. And Mum and Dad agree with me.’
I wish I understood women, thought Pitt. If she wasn’t in love with Carrington, she certainly wasn’t indifferent to him. Yet she had referred to the man without a tremor in her voice, and had spoken of her plans calmly and easily. And, if he had not expected to find her in mourning, he also had not expected the bright attractiveness that she had displayed for his benefit. Either she’s a cold-blooded fish, he decided, or she’s a better actress than one would expect a chorus-girl to be.
He had saved Miss Fratton until the end. Despite her less bellicose attitude on his last visit, there was no knowing whether or not she had reverted to her former frame of mind. As he knocked at the door of No. 14 he had been glad that he was alone. To confront Miss Fratton with a uniformed officer would not have been a tactful beginning.
She had been grudgingly suspicious, but she had not refused him admittance. To his surprise, however, she had been most reluctant to re-enact her former role of Postman’s Nightmare. Only an assurance that in so doing she would be benefiting her neighbours had made her consent. ‘I still don’t like ‘em,’ she had said as he was leaving. ‘They’re a thieving lot, as this business only goes to show. But telling them so doesn’t make ‘em any better, it just puts them on their guard.’
I wonder how much of her former ferocity was an act, Pitt thought sleepily, as he got into bed. If she ever looked in a mirror she would know how well it suited her. Benevolence in the guise of Miss Fratton would be difficult to recognise.
13—So It Was You
As Avery had predicted, it was raining again. Not the cold, driven sleet of the afternoon on which John Laurie had disappeared, but a fine drizzle that had been falling all day, blotting out the cliffs and the sea and much of the golf-links; appropriate weather for the play about to be enacted, however inappropriate for Christmas. But few adult minds in Grange Road were properly attuned that afternoon to Christmas. The police arrangements had reminded them — if reminder were necessary — that two men had died a sudden death, and that the reckoning was yet to come. It might be very near now. For some the fear had lessened, for others intensified; but all were filled with a common curiosity, a common sense of impending drama.
At twenty minutes past five Ethel Plant left her house and turned left. It was dark in the road, and she shivered as she hurried on. The postman’s red bicycle was propped against the gatepost of No. 5, a man in postman’s uniform, with cape and leggings, beside it. She could not see his face, but he gave a curt grunt as she bade him good afternoon. And suddenly her spine no longer tingled with the apprehension that had formerly possessed her. For the postman was taller — much taller — than the
man she had seen that fateful Friday. That was a mistake, she thought. The police should have chosen a man nearer Laurie’s size if they wanted to create an air of reality for the performance.
But as she plodded down the road in her sensible shoes some of the excitement returned to her. She saw curtains pulled aside and faces pressed against the glass panes. Some of the houses were in darkness. Miss Plant imagined the silent watchers, and wondered at their thoughts.
It was, she thought nervously, unusual to take part in a play and know nothing of how it would end.
Footsteps behind her made her quicken her pace. There was no cause to be frightened, she told herself; there must be dozens of policemen in the area. All the same, it was a little unnerving. That dark stretch between Nos. 19 and 20 — she wasn’t looking forward to that. But she was looking forward to the shelter of Hermione’s house and the tea which she hoped Hermione had not forgotten to provide.
Inspector Pitt watched her go, heard her footsteps fade into silence. Then he sat back and waited.
Donald Heath stood in the front parlour of No. 9, his mother beside him. The room was dark, and occasionally he took his eyes off the white blur of the garden gate to glance at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. Mrs Heath watched his nervous, jerky movements until the darkness hid them from her. He had told her nothing of his flight, of his enforced visit to the police-station; but she sensed he was in danger, and wished she knew exactly whence the danger might come. He had not been a good son; he had brought her many worries in the past. But he was her son, and she had no one else.
Each time she tried to talk he silenced her. His nerves were too taut, his mind too preoccupied for conversation. But now she could stand the dark and the silence no longer.
‘If only you’d tell me, Donald,’ she pleaded, harping on the same theme as before.
He shook his head, forgetting that she could not see the action. ‘For God’s sake, Mother! Can’t you leave me alone? I’ve told you all there is to tell. I don’t know what they’re up to any more than you do.’
‘But they suspect you, don’t they? You must know about that.’
‘I don’t know what they suspect.’
He moved away from her, farther into the bay-window. But she would not leave it at that.
‘Is it Carrington?’ she asked haltingly. It was the first time she had dared to put her fears into words. ‘You — you didn’t, did you, Donald?’
Something of what she had gone through in the past few days communicated itself to him. He said, his tone more gentle than it had been previously, ‘Of course I didn’t. You don’t have to worry, Mother. It isn’t what I’ve done but what the police may think I’ve done that worries me. I told you, I don’t know what they suspect. I only wish I did.’
‘What will you do?’ she asked.
‘Do? What they want me to do, of course. There’s no alternative.’
His gentler mood calmed her. She could not help saying, a note of bitterness in her voice, ‘None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for that Weston girl. You wouldn’t have stolen the money, you wouldn’t have had to write to your Aunt Ellen, you wouldn’t have had that fight with the postman. If she hadn’t got her claws into you and Carrington there would have been no reason for the police to suspect—’
‘Shut up!’ he said, his gentleness gone. Would she never learn? ‘I’ve told you before — Shh! Listen!’
The click of the garden gate, the faint crunch of feet on gravel. Now for it, he thought, as he went into the hall. There must be no mistake. I don’t know where they are or what they’re up to, but I know they’ll be watching. If I make a mistake…
He hardly saw the envelopes that slid through the letter-box into the wire cage; but as the metal flap snapped back into place he opened the door.
The torch was moving away down the path. He tried to shout, but his throat was dry.
‘Hey, postman!’ The words sounded cracked, detached from himself. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Hey, postman!’ That was better. ‘There ought to be a registered letter for me. Are you sure you haven’t mislaid it?’
It sounded all wrong. There wasn’t the urgency in it that had been there that other time. It was uncertain, half-hearted.
‘Sorry. That’s all,’ came the postman’s muffled voice.
Donald stood petrified as the beam moved on down the path, shone on to and through the white gate, and disappeared. His brain urged his feet to move, but they would not respond.
Behind him came his mother’s anxious voice.
‘Go on, Donald! What are you waiting for?’
The tension snapped. He started off at a run. Faster even than on that other occasion, so that the water shot from under his flying feet as he splashed through the puddles.
Out on the road the beam was moving steadily away.
‘Hey!’ he shouted; and this time there was no lack of urgency in his voice. ‘Hey, you! I know—’
Dark figures moved from the shadow and grabbed at him, holding him back. He struggled furiously.
‘Let me go!’ he shouted. ‘Let me go, damn you! I—’
‘That’s all right, sir,’ came the calm voice of a constable. ‘We know all about it. Just you come along with us, Mr Heath. The Inspector’ll want to see you.’
Down the road the postman turned, shone his torch for a moment on the struggling figures, and then went on with his task.
In the front room of No. 13 Miss Weston and Inspector Pitt stood in the dark. ‘My sister was here with me that afternoon,’ she had told him. ‘You’ll have to be like a sister to me, Inspector. And sit yourself down in that chair. That’s what she did — I was the one who was restless.’ He had done as she directed, glad for once that Dick was not present. Dick, he knew, would have made some crack out of that bit about the sister.
But after a while he had got up and walked over to stand by her at the window. ‘I’m here to watch what happens,’ he said. ‘I can’t see anything from the depths of an armchair.’
The street-lamp at the corner of the hedge shone mistily. He could sense the tension in the girl beside him, despite her pleasantries. Or maybe because of them they sounded forced. She’s all keyed up, he thought. Well, I hope there is at least one other who is feeling the same way. I am, for one.
For some reason he could not explain, her nervousness pleased him. She wasn’t so hard-boiled as he had thought. Though why that—
Her hand gripped his arm. ‘There it is,’ she whispered.
The postman’s cap glistened in the rain as it passed under the street-lamp and glided along the top of the hedge. Pitt nodded to himself.
‘Was it like that?’ he asked.
‘Just like that,’ the girl said. ‘But it didn’t seem so eerie before. Only rather odd.’
He ran from the room and out of the house. From the garden path he could see the postman’s torch shining on Miss Fratton’s doorstep, heard the clang of the knocker. As the front door opened he had already joined Sergeant Roberts inside the gate of No. 14.
Although Miss Fratton had previously expressed reluctance to lecture the postman in the manner she had been wont to use in the past (that Friday had been no isolated instance, as Gofer had testified), she showed no reluctance now. Her voice was as shrill and as strident as ever; her tongue dripped venom. The two officers, concealed by the darkness, listened entranced.
‘Atta-girl!’ whispered the Sergeant joyously.
The postman did not stand it for long. He wrenched himself free and ran down the farther arm of the path, his figure outlined faintly by the light from the street-lamp. And as he ran Pitt snapped his fingers in grim exultation.
‘He didn’t drop the torch,’ said Sergeant Roberts.
‘I expect he forgot. It doesn’t matter.’
Miss Fratton was down the path, a stick upraised in her hand. But this time the postman did not stumble, was through the gate before she could reach him. For a moment Miss Fratton stood irresolute.
Then she turned and went back to the house.
As the knocker sounded on the front door of No. 17 William Harris got up and went into the hall. ‘Play-acting!’ he scoffed, as he returned to the kitchen with the letters. Play-acting, that’s what it is.’
‘But you’re going out, aren’t you?’ asked his wife. ‘You said you would.’
‘I suppose so. When I’m ready.’
Marion Harris had never had any dealings with the police before the trouble started in Grange Road. Her husband’s arrest for theft had been a great shock to her. All her life she had been poor; but always, as she said, her family had kept themselves respectable. And although Will had escaped so easily, she no longer felt clean. There were the neighbours, too. To leave the security of her house was now a torment to her. Every eye, she imagined, was watching, every finger pointing at her in scorn. And, above all, they would never be free of the police. There would always be that black mark against Will. The smallest slip…
Well, there would be no slip. Not if she could help it.
Normally a quiet, unassuming woman, she jumped up and gripped her husband’s arm. ‘You go out now, not when you’re ready,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’ll not have you bringing any more disgrace on us. You go out now, as the police said.’
‘All right, all right!’ His complacency was shaken by this unexpected assumption of authority. ‘I said I’d go, didn’t I?’
As the door closed behind him she ran to the front room and peered out into the night. She could see Will standing by the gate. But it was a policeman he was taking to, not the postman.
Marion Harris watched them nervously.
The postman walked past the dark and untenanted house of Wilfred Morris, leant his bicycle against the low hedge of No. 19, and shone his torch on the one envelope left in his hand. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he pushed open the gate and walked up the path.
As the knocker sounded the door opened, and a flood of light bathed the glistening figure of the postman. In the doorway, his bulk almost filling it, stood Sam Archer.
