by John Creasey
Soley pushed his glasses up over his forehead, and looked rather like an owl.
‘Don’t talk soft,’ he said flatly. ‘I didn’t lean inside to release the brake, I wanted my gloves off the seat. Checked the brake was on, too; one of these days I’ll lose my licence for forgetting it.’
Roger had a feeling that Tenterden was smiling.
‘Did you see anyone near the car, or anyone touch it?’
Soley pulled the glasses down to the bridge of his nose, as if he was determined to make himself look peculiar.
‘There was a little man, with a very small head. I know, because he drives a Ford Consul past my place most days. Don’t ask me his name, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard it. I’ll point him out to you if I see him again.’
‘Does he live near here?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ answered Soley, ‘but I’ve known him give a man from the works a lift – meets him at the gates, sometimes. Chap who lives at Park Terrace.’
‘Is this passenger small, dark-haired, and very thin?’ asked Roger.
‘That sounds like him,’ Soley said.
‘And it sounds like a man named Ragg, whom we’re after,’ Roger said. ‘Thank you, Mr Soley. You understand that we have to check everything, don’t you?’
‘Why don’t ‘ee check the trouble at the works?’ demanded Sam Soley, and opened the door for them to go.
‘We want Ragg and his friends as fast as we can get ’em,’ Roger said to Tenterden. ‘Radio your HQ to ask the Yard to put on the pressure, will you? Then we’ll get to work on Richardson.’
Tenterden was already switching on the radio.
‘I quite understand why you should want to see my husband,’ Mrs Richardson said, twenty minutes later, ‘but I really can’t allow it, Mr West. I would if I could, but he came straight home with me from Kemble, and he was in a state of absolute collapse, he really was. Dr Arnold gave him some sleeping tablets, and he only dropped off about half an hour ago. I simply can’t let you wake him.’
She was in the drawing-room of the house not far from Soley’s Farm, and Roger could not fail to notice the startling difference between the way this home was furnished and run, and Tenterden’s home. Had it been the other way round, it would have been far less surprising. The room itself was pleasant and spacious, but the carpet was threadbare and the furniture mostly old-fashioned – inherited, Roger imagined, from the days when the firm of Richardson and Key had been less prosperous. A few old oil paintings, of little value, were on the wall opposite the two large windows. Chintzes were pretty but inclined to be shabby. A photograph of an elderly man with a big white beard hung over the mantelshelf, looking down as if commandingly.
‘This awful thing happening to Rose was almost too much for him,’ said Mrs Richardson. She looked rather like the room, a little faded, obviously tired out and fighting for composure. ‘I do hope you won’t insist, Mr West. If you do, I shall have to ask Dr Arnold’s permission, and I’m sure that he wouldn’t readily grant it.’
‘Mrs Richardson, do you know what’s been worrying your husband so much?’ demanded Roger.
‘I only wish I did,’ she said. ‘I know it’s something serious, and I can’t think what it is except the strike. Can you come back in the morning? I just can’t talk any more tonight. I’ll make sure he doesn’t get up until after lunch. If you come about eleven o’clock, say, I expect he’ll be awake. I can’t be sure that he will tell you anything, though.’
‘Not even though he knows that his daughter is in such danger now?’
‘I simply can’t speak for him,’ Mrs Richardson insisted. ‘Sir Lancelot was here earlier this evening, he and my husband talked for a long time, so why don’t you see if Sir Lancelot can help? He wouldn’t stay any longer, he could see that the only thing for my husband was a good night’s rest.’
Roger looked at her steadily, and said: ‘Mrs Richardson, your daughter is still on the danger list. Your husband nearly died on the cliff. At least two people have been murdered. The firm of Richardson and Key is having a very difficult time, and might lose an order worth millions of pounds over a few years. The matter is desperately urgent, because we fear that the murderer or murderers might strike again. It’s possible that your husband has some information which might help us to find out who it is. I want to see him now, please.’
Tight-lipped, Mrs Richardson looked at him defiantly; then she turned to a telephone near the door, lifted the receiver, and began to dial.
‘I am calling Dr Arnold,’ she said firmly. ‘You—you can’t go against a doctor’s orders.’
Roger turned away, back towards her, and heard her cry out; there was a break in the dialling. He strode to the foot of the stairs, and then ran up them, his footsteps muffling all other sound. When he reached the top of the stairs he stopped to look round. He heard Mrs Richardson cry: ‘Please hurry, doctor. Please hurry!’
Roger saw the open door of a big room, and the foot of a large bed. He looked inside. Nothing was going to make him soft-pedal with Richardson, the time had come when the man must be treated roughly – as roughly as Blake.
Then he saw the man, and stopped in his tracks, for Richardson was in bed, with only a sheet over him. He looked so still and stiff that he might be dead.
After the momentary shock, Roger swung round to the door, knowing that Richardson’s condition might be desperate.
‘Mrs Richardson!’ he shouted. ‘Your husband’s ill! Get hot-water bottles, and more blankets, and don’t lose a minute!’
He went to Richardson’s side, felt his pulse and its faint beating, felt the cold flesh, saw the ashen cheeks, the eyes which were closed, the agonised expression. Then he saw an empty bottle, a piece of cotton-wool, a little white tablet on the floor by the bed. He pulled up the blankets, to start getting the man warm.
Soon he heard Mrs Richardson, rushing upstairs. Then he heard a car outside.
Chapter Eighteen
Part of the Truth
Arnold took one look at Richardson, and said: ‘We need an ambulance, at once.’ Then he looked at the empty bottle, and said: ‘You can tell the hospital to get ready for a case of acute barbiturate poisoning.’
Mrs Richardson was thrusting hot-water bottles beneath the blankets, and muttering as she did so. Roger went downstairs, picked up the telephone, and dialled.
The ringing sound stopped, and a man said in a deep, leisurely voice: ‘Corby Police Station.’
‘This is Superintendent West,’ Roger said briskly.
‘Oh, yes, sir!’
‘First arrange for an ambulance to come to Mr Sydney Richardson’s house. Then brief the hospital that a case of an overdose of barbiturate will be in very soon. Dr Arnold is in charge. Then ask Mr Tenterden and Mr Brown to ring me at Mr Richardson’s house. All clear?’
‘I’ve got all that, sir,’ the man said, his voice still deep but not hurried.
Roger rang off.
He heard Mrs Richardson ask: ‘How bad is it, doctor?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ answered Arnold, his voice softer with understanding and sympathy. ‘I expect we shall be able to pull him round, though.’
Roger started up the stairs.
‘Poor darling,’ Mrs Richardson said in a steady voice. ‘What a dreadful, dreadful time he’s having. Do you think he—?’ She broke off, Roger reached the landing behind her, and she went on as if to herself: ‘He always said he couldn’t stand it any longer, that he would kill himself if it didn’t stop.’
‘Mary—’ Arnold began.
‘If what didn’t stop?’ demanded Roger.
Arnold was at the foot of the bed in a room which was immediately over the big room downstairs. All Roger could see of it now was the big wardrobe on the wall at one side, two chairs, a part of a gilt mirror, and the foot of the bed itself, with Richardson’s feet making a hillock beneath the bedclothes. Mrs Richardson was just inside the room, and she started when Roger called out. The doctor looked as if
he were going to protest. He actually opened his mouth; it was hard to imagine a more insignificant little man, with his smalmed down hair and smooth face and rather small eyes and thin lips. He didn’t speak, after all. Mrs Richardson put her hands to her face, and stood quite still.
‘It’s time you told us everything you know, Mrs Richardson,’ Roger said. ‘If you keep anything back, you might be responsible for anything else that happens.’
Arnold closed his mouth and pursed his lips, then said unexpectedly and quickly: ‘Mary, Mr West is quite right. It is your duty to tell him everything you can. It may help Sydney. It may help Rose. You mustn’t keep anything else back. Tell him all you can, there’s a good woman.’ It was almost as if he meant to say: ‘There’s a good girl.’
Not far off, a car engine sounded as Mrs Richardson turned round slowly, looked at Roger, and said in a low-pitched, pain-racked voice: ‘Ever since the strike he’s been getting threatening letters, that’s the truth. Ever since the strike someone’s been saying they would ruin the works. He told me not to say anything, he made me promise. He—he said that it was a matter he had to work out for himself.’ All the colour was drained from her face, and her eyes seemed almost colourless too. ‘He was almost beside himself, about a year ago, and I made him tell me. He pretended he wasn’t really worried, only angry, because it was some madman who had a grudge against him, but I could see that he was getting more and more distressed. That—that’s why I asked Rose to go and work at the works. I thought she might be able to find out more, she might be able to help him. He was always so fond of Rose.’ She spoke almost as if she was thinking of her husband in the past. ‘Sometimes I would try to make him talk about it, but he told me that I mustn’t tell anyone else, that it would be all right, that I wasn’t to question him about it. And—and I didn’t. I just couldn’t.’
There was the sound of another engine, this time louder, and it was drawing nearer; this would be the ambulance.
Roger hoped that the telephone bell wouldn’t ring just yet, he wanted more time to talk to the woman.
‘How many letters have there been?’ he said.
‘I don’t know, I only know about three or four.’
‘Have you got one now?’
‘No. Syd—Syd wouldn’t let me see them.’
‘Do you know if he kept them?’
‘He burned some of them, I know,’ answered Mrs Richardson wearily. ‘I don’t think he kept them. I—I used to search for them, and I expect he realised that. It—it wasn’t only letters, though. Sometimes he would get telephone calls, I believe he had them even when he went to London. I watched him getting worse and worse, in front of my eyes, and there wasn’t anything I could do to help him, there just wasn’t a thing.’
The car, or ambulance, was just outside.
Arnold said: ‘I’ll go and open the door.’ The man had a genius for doing the right thing, and he pushed past Mrs Richardson and then past Roger, while the woman was closing her eyes, and tears seemed to be squeezing between the lids.
‘Why didn’t you tell Dr Arnold, or Sir Lancelot, or even Superintendent Tenterden?’ Roger asked quietly.
‘Syd told me not to,’ she whispered, ‘and I daren’t disobey him. If I’d disobeyed him, he wouldn’t have had anyone to help him. He used to come home from the works sometimes absolutely done in, and if I’d nagged at him, or if he’d thought he couldn’t trust me, it would have been the last straw. I just had to do what he said.’ She caught her breath, screwed up her eyes tightly, and said in a shrill voice: ‘It’s a wife’s duty to do what her husband wants.’
There were voices downstairs, and Arnold said: ‘Good, you were very quick. It’s Mr Richardson. Upstairs.’ He led the way, and Mrs Richardson went into the room, Roger followed her, and saw the unconscious man again. He was lying with blankets piled over him, his face ashen grey, and his lips bloodless. His eyes looked huge, although they were closed, the eyeballs pressing darkly against the almost translucent lids. He looked an old man near to death; or an old man who had been taken in death, for there was no movement at his lips or at his chest as far as Roger could detect.
On a table by his side was the small, empty bottle. The piece of cotton-wool was by it, and a glass partly filled with water.
The screw cap of the bottle was on the floor by the side of the table. Roger went towards it, and studied the unconscious man and wondered whether there was any hope at all for him.
Arnold and the ambulance men came in.
‘I must come with him,’ Mrs Richardson said. Roger expected Arnold to say that she mustn’t go, but should have some rest; instead, the doctor simply said: ‘Get a hat and coat then, Mary, and when we’ve made Sydney comfortable, you must come and stay with us.’ He superintended the removal of Sydney Richardson, the two white-smocked ambulance men looking like pall bearers. He hovered about Mrs Richardson as she took a small cloth hat and a brown tweed coat from the wardrobe, helped her on with the coat, and then went downstairs with her. Roger followed them closely, seeing car headlamps on the road at the foot of the drive. He guessed that Tenterden had come instead of telephoning. Mrs Richardson was in Dr Arnold’s car when Roger called: ‘Dr Arnold, can you spare me a moment?’
The ambulance doors were closing on Richardson.
‘It mustn’t be more than a moment,’ Arnold said, and came forward briskly.
‘I know, and I appreciate your co-operation very much indeed,’ Roger said. ‘Just one question: how was it that Richardson had access to so many tablets?’
‘We don’t know yet how many he took,’ said Arnold, ‘but he has been taking sleeping tablets for a long time. For twelve months, at least. It would be quite easy to accumulate enough to kill himself, and—’ He hesitated, and in the light from the hall and the headlamps, he looked very grave. ‘It will be my duty, if I am called, to say that Mr Richardson has threatened to take his own life on several occasions. That is the sad truth. It is quite possible that he anticipated this day by accumulating the tablets. I did all I reasonably could, Mr West. I had his wife watch him carefully, and report all his movements and moods. She has had a terrible time, a terrible time.’
‘I can imagine,’ Roger said. ‘Did you know about these threats?’
‘I only knew that Richardson was in great distress, but had no idea what caused it,’ said Dr Arnold. ‘He simply would not talk. Now, I must go.’ He saw the ambulance moving slowly down the drive, turned to his own car as Tenterden and Brown, two huge figures, got out of the car which had just arrived. ‘Good evening, Arthur,’ he said to Tenterden.
‘How bad is it?’ asked Tenterden.
Arnold glanced swiftly at the car, as if trying to judge whether Mrs Richardson would hear anything that was said, lowered his voice, and answered: ‘Not good. Very little chance. I’ll see you later.’
Then he climbed into his car, and jabbed the self-starter.
Chapter Nineteen
Search
‘I suppose it was inevitable,’ Tenterden said glumly. ‘And I suppose I ought to have anticipated it and made sure it couldn’t happen. I just didn’t know that the Richardsons would be on their own tonight. I thought Sir Lancelot and one of the sons would be there, there’s plenty of room.’ He sounded as if he hated himself and hated the world. ‘Arnold wouldn’t talk like that unless he thought Syd was a goner.’
‘He could be wrong,’ Roger said briskly. His eyes were stinging with tiredness, and after the excitement he was acutely conscious of his aching back, but there could be no rest for several hours. ‘Heard anything from Bracken Head yet?’
‘Had a message just before we left,’ answered Tenterden. ‘They’ve got the Austin free of the MG, so they can get inside it. They won’t get at that hand-brake or the steering-wheel much before morning, but there won’t be another fall of cliff to bury the car or send it down into the sea. That’s the main thing.’
‘Yes,’ Roger said. ‘Something, anyhow. Arthur, who hates Richardson enough t
o do this?’ He told the story of the threatening letters and the telephone calls, watching the Corby man’s expression all the time.
They were in the hall of Richardson’s house, where all the lights were on. The ambulance and Arnold’s car had long been out of sight and earshot.
‘Mrs Richardson says it started about the time of the strike, but I’m beginning to doubt the importance of the strike,’ Roger went on. ‘Richardson didn’t make any open enemies, did he?’
‘No,’ rumbled Tenterden. ‘More likely he hated some individuals. He had reason to hate the guts of the men who wouldn’t stay in work and wouldn’t try to stop the others coming out.’
‘This worsening of the management-and-worker relationship – it’s been gradual, and due chiefly to Richardson’s temper, hasn’t it?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘No groups or factions in the works would hate Richardson enough to work on him like this?’ When Tenterden didn’t answer, Roger went on: ‘It doesn’t stand to reason. These chaps work there. It’s one thing to strike for better conditions and wages, but no one in his senses would want to break the firm, certainly not anyone in Corby. They would be killing their own livelihood. So we’re back to some competitor, or to a personal motive against Richardson.’
‘I know,’ Tenterden said.
‘And the more I think about it, the less likely it seems that this is from competition,’ Roger went on. ‘The sabotage could be due to someone being paid by a rival firm who would like to get the big Bantu order, I suppose, but that looks too obvious. The whole job has an inside look to me, in spite of the men who broke in and killed Jensen. Until we’ve some evidence that a competitive firm is behind it I think we can soft-pedal on that angle.’
Tenterden was very subdued, obviously because of what had happened to Richardson. He looked tired, too, and more dispirited than Roger had seen him.
