Wright moved into the doorway with him. There was plenty of room; it was not a popular position. The newsman would not be able to see anything of the procession, only the backs of the people in front of him.
‘A fair send-off for the most unchristian man in Fellaby,’ the cripple said. ‘It shocks you, doesn’t it, to hear me talk like that? Well, I can afford to speak my mind. I’ve had more than my share of suffering.’
‘What did he ever do to you?’ Wright asked.
‘Breathe out in the same air that I have to breathe in.’
The single doleful bell was still reverberating at long intervals across the roofs of the town. They heard a shout of command from the subaltern of a platoon of Territorials.
‘You’ll have to tell me about him, some time. I’m sorry I can’t stay now. I’m supposed to be at the cemetery.’
The deformed man caught Wright’s cuff as he stepped out of the doorway.
‘I know what I’m talking about, sergeant. I could tell you a thing or two. I was at school with him.’
Wright moved sideways like a crab, rubbing shoulders with the shop-fronts and the crowd. Beyond the shopping street, outside the terrace houses, the bystanders were thinner. Chairs and benches had been set against the edges of the gutter.
In the little road that led up to the cemetery, police were on duty, diverting people who wanted to park their cars. Windows were wound up in bursts of bad temper, and drivers took it in turn, with ill grace, to reverse into an entry. As Wright approached, Lesueur arrived in a gleaming Mercedes-Benz, and was signalled to a place by the kerb. The chauffeur pulled the nose of the vehicle across the narrow road to back down ready for departure.
Someone touched Wright’s sleeve.
‘Sergeant Wright?’
‘Speaking.’
‘My name’s Cook. Inspector. Other side of the Pennines. I’ve got the dope on that Bad Siebenhausen affair.’
‘After this, sir, if you wouldn’t mind. We’ll find somewhere for a coffee. If you’ll bear with me while I make a couple of phone calls first?’
‘Of course. I gather you’re up to your ears in it?’
‘Battling.’
The inspector was a tall man, broadly built, with a fresh, red, boyish face. He waved a hand to take in the whole décor of the funeral.
‘Bad business, eh?’
‘Mixed bag. You knew him in his earlier days.’
‘Not changed, I expect?’
‘Not for the better, as far as we can make out.’
The civic cortège began to arrive, the bands, cadets and hangers-on left outside the gate. The mayor’s chain was tied to his shoulders with bows of black ribbon. One of the undertaker’s men rearranged the folds of the Union Jack over the coffin.
‘Ex-serviceman,’ Wright said.
‘When I took a statement from him, he was just one week out of a pox hospital.’
The family mourners supported each other into the church, behind them the more distant relatives, well equipped in funeral finery, little grief in their faces.
‘How do you like working with Kenworthy?’
‘It’s the first time I’ve been out of London with him. He’s a fair bloody handful.’
‘I notice he’s been able to swing himself clear of this noble bit of pageantry.’
‘He’s out of town. Gone to check up on Warren.’
‘Warren? Not Warren of Bradcaster?’
‘I suppose there is only one Warren in Bradcaster. The one who used to be in their C. I. D.’
‘What’s Warren got to do with this case?’
‘Someone called him in as a private eye to try to shop Barson.’
O God, our help in ages past came swelling from the church, the congregation a bar and a half behind the organist.
‘Bloody hell!’ Cook said.
‘I hadn’t heard of Warren before. Kenworthy seems to think he’s dangerous.’
‘Dangerous!——Listen! He had the luck of the nine blind bastards. It staggered me that they let him resign. But if they hadn’t, he’d have pushed the pillars of the temple down. There’d have been some epoch-making changes in Bradcaster.’
‘And he cuts some ice as a free-lance?’
‘It stands to sense, doesn’t it? Provided that he plays it reasonably cool, he can do what he wants with either side. And if he’d rumbled Barson, no wonder someone had to remove the evidence.——Bloody chilly, isn’t it?’
They walked together between the rows of wreaths that lined the path from the church to the grave-side. Some of the spectators had begun to drift away, now that the most impressive pomp was over. Wright and Cook moved nearer to the church porch.
‘It’s not generally known, is it, that Kenworthy is on to Warren?’
‘No. Not outside the Report Centre.’
‘You’ll have to keep your eyes peeled, once the news breaks. Somebody in this town is going to be up to the ears in it.——And you must be out on your feet. Someone told me that you were up all night.’
‘I’ll get by.’
Wright knew that fatigue would come over him in waves at intervals during the day. At the moment, the cold and his mental alertness had him on an upward curve.
Cook nodded towards the church.
‘It’ll be a bloody sight warmer in there,’ he said.
They walked quietly into the porch, and a sidesman, mistaking them perhaps for weightier personages than they were, opened the felt-covered door with the merest creak of its hinges and beckoned them inside with his forefinger on his lips.
The bishop had been brought in to take the service, and in his purple cassock, with frills of lace at his wrist, was preaching about the self-sacrifice of those who dedicated their lives to public service. There were seasonal coughs among the congregation. Many were standing at the back of the church. The brass plate on Barson’s coffin was catching a ray of pre-spring sunshine that slanted across the southern transept.
‘If it had been given to our brother to complete the work which he had with such exultant promise begun——’
A number of unecclesiastical ways of finishing the sentence crossed Wright’s mind, and he guessed that Cook would also be making the most of its possibilities. As silently as he could, he reached for the handle of the door and let himself out into the frostiness. Cook followed him, the thick herringbone material of his greatcoat rubbing against the door-post.
‘Going to stay for the graveyard stuff?’
‘I’d better, just in case there’s an incident.’
‘Whose is the big car?’
‘The squire. The man who pulled Barson’s strings.’
‘Name?’
‘Lesueur.’
‘Don’t know him. Still, there’s one in every community.’
They watched the committal ceremony from a discreet distance and then left the cemetery in time to be ahead of the main body. Wright thought better of his plan to entertain Cook in one of Fellaby’s more respectable cafés, deciding that they were likely to be over-worked on account of the crowds in town.
‘I think we’d better go back to the nick,’ he said. ‘And I’m afraid I’ll have to do my telephoning before we get down to business. I’m sorry to keep you hanging about like this. I’m sweating blood trying to fit everything in.’
‘Not to worry, son. This is a day out for me. We can talk as we walk along.’
‘I think it would be better to wait until I can sit down and take full notes. Kenworthy’s a stickler.’
His first call was to New Scotland Yard. He wanted to know from inspector Heather whether check had yet been made of the recent movements of Barson’s army associates. Heather treated him to a verbal display that almost seared the wires.
‘Will you ask superintendent Kenworthy if he thinks this department is something out of Softly, Softly?——’
But the job had been done. The men had been cleared.
Next, Wright went to see Grayling, who had by now returned by car from the cem
etery. The austere commander of the division had his desk strewn with duty rosters.
‘I don’t know how we’re going to do it, sergeant. There isn’t a man on the station who’ll get a rest day this week. Treble town patrol this morning; a parade; a Report Centre to man; all these questionnaires; eight officers in court; now a pitched battle to be catered for in the High Street.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve not come to bring you any relief, sir.’
Wright outlined the nature of the charges that the town clerk would be laying.
‘Blast it, sergeant——I don’t know whom I can spare. And yet I mustn’t keep the Borough waiting. This means an inspector and a sergeant. And it isn’t really germane to your main issue, is it?’
‘We think not, sir.’
‘Well, I’ve no choice. I’ll ask Malpas to go over. All right, sergeant, thank you.’
Wright then used the C. I. D. phone to call Fellaby Moor Hall. It took some patience with a servant to bring Sir Howard to the phone in person. But the man was extremely civil, remembered their brief meeting in the County, sounded even interested. Would Wright come over to the Hall for tea?
As he replaced the receiver, Wright realised that there were beads of sweat on his forehead. Cook looked at him across the little office.
‘Don’t let it kill you, sergeant. After all, you’re only working on one case. Back home I’m in the middle of a dozen. Are you ready for my little story now?’
Wright turned to a fresh page in his note-book.
‘I don’t know how much of this is likely to interest you, but it’ll help you to get to know Barson. His unit was one which we’d had our eyes on for a long time. A long time before Barson was called up——right back, in fact, to a few weeks after D-Day, when they opened up a supply dump at a roadhead in Belgium. One of their main activities——and one of their main sources of fiddling——was to receive large consignments of motor-cycles from England and distribute them to units in the field. It didn’t take us long to discover that quite a frightening number of these machines were finding their way to the civilian market. It was quite remarkable what you could do with an army bike, once you got rid of its khaki paint and put a bit of chrome on its silencer and gear-box cover. They fetched a hell of a price, too——well, you can imagine.’
Cook offered Wright a cigarette, took one himself, and flicked the match in the general direction of an open fire-place stuffed with old newspapers.
‘We ran a few of these machines down, but we were never able to prove anything. The presiding genius was a lieutenant, whose name you’ve already got——the one who’s been playing parliament. It was only a tiny little section that was involved, in an otherwise impeccable unit, and they must have cleared up a bloody packet. It worked well enough while the war lasted, and even for some months afterwards. But demobilisation broke the original team up. New faces appeared, new men, that the lieutenant did not know whether he could trust or not. One of these was Barson. Barson looked a likely lad, was made up to corporal, was cut in on the deal. There weren’t as many machines to dispose of, now, but such as there were found as ready a market in occupied Germany as anywhere else.’
Cook tapped cigarette-ash into an empty tobacco tin on the wooden table.
‘The trouble was, Barson had ideas of his own, Barson was a big-head, a clever bugger. He had to show the old-timers he could go one better than they could. I shall never forget the first time I questioned him. He treated me with complete contempt, that’s the only phrase I can find for it. And even when he found himself under close arrest, he was still as blasé as ever——still had that bloody sneer on his lips, seemed to know from the start he was going to get away with it. And, of course, he did——because I put my bloody great foot in it, out of over-anxiety to shop the bugger.’
‘We heard about that——a technicality——’
‘I ought to have known better. Things might have come out differently, even in Fellaby, if I had. Barson wasn’t content with flogging bikes that the section had fiddled through their books. He starting pinching other people’s. Despatch riders were under strict standing orders to remove the leads from their sparking-plugs, whenever they left their machines unattended. But spare leads were no difficulty to Barson. He had half a dozen in his kit when we searched it. He must have had some wild night rides——he took some skin-of-his-teeth chances——and enjoyed every minute of it. He stole bikes of makes that R.A.S.C. didn’t handle. In at least two cases their riders were court-martialled for negligence in losing them. And Barson started under-selling his own confederates——to the same dealer who had carried out most of their transactions.’
‘Who was probably no stranger to you people——’
‘The German civil police had had him under surveillance for some time, but he was pretty fly. He was one of those cases you know well enough from your own experience——everyone knows, everyone’s been dying for years to clap iron on him, but there’s never a second witness to put in the box.’
‘I’d better have this German’s name,’ Wright said, ‘in case he harboured a grudge.’
Inspector Cook read from his notes.
‘Kurt Fischer, Auto-betrieb Fischer, Bad Siebenhausen, Walsroder Landstrasse 7, Rhine-Westphalia.——To come back to Barson: he went a step too far. He nicked one of my section’s bikes——from outside a guard-room in a military compound. And he’d started getting careless over details: little things, like filing serial numbers off engine-parts. We found the bike at Fischer’s and were able to identify it. Fischer talked, volubly. We got a list of payments that he’d made for machines received.’
‘Surely they found it difficult to dispose of all this foreign currency?’
‘They didn’t take payment in money, you understand. They stuck to convertible property: watches, jewellery, cameras, binoculars, ciné projectors. Fischer was systematic. He gave us an inventory, chapter and verse. And we found a lot of it in their kit. And I, bloody fool, was so almighty eager that I searched their quarters in their absence. The whole case fell down.’
‘Couldn’t you have charged them nevertheless? You’d got Fischer’s statement. You’d got the loot.’
‘I don’t know how intimate you are with British court martial procedure, sergeant. Of all systems of justice in the world, it’s the one most heavily weighted in favour of the prisoner. Fischer’s word against theirs was uncorroborated, and he was a shady character, to put it mildly. The Judge Advocate-General’s department gave my C. O. a rocket that made military history, and this was duly passed on to us, adequately condensed, concentrated and rarefied.’
‘So Fischer got away with it, too?’
‘We dropped the lot. Eight of us were handling sixteen murders, two dozen rapes and eleven abortions simultaneously.——And that’s about all I can tell you. I don’t see it’s going to be much use to you. But they asked me to come over, and it’s made a change.’
Wright ate shepherd’s pie in the police canteen, and the black coffee which followed it brought some new lease of wakefulness to his arteries. Then he put through another call to inspector Heather.
‘No, sergeant——I have not yet finished my longhand copy of the nominal roll of Barson’s army company.’
‘It isn’t that, sir. This is one for Interpol. Kurt Fischer, sometime garage proprietor, Bad Siebenhausen, Rhine-Westphalia. Could you get them to advise present whereabouts and recent journeys, please?’
‘Making progress, are we, sergeant?’
‘No, sir.’
Wright hung up with the curtest of acknowledgements. Then he found a shorthand typist in the Report Centre who was sufficiently off her guard to let him dictate a summary of what Cook had told him. He did not think it was likely to serve any great purpose, but it was the sort of thing that Kenworthy was likely to ask for for no particular reason and without notice. In the event, Kenworthy was often to claim, when he talked about the case afterwards, that it was this statement which enabled them to make their
ultimate break-through.
Chapter Ten
Three of the vehicles which Wright attempted to requisition to take him out to Fellaby Moor Hall were diverted before he could take advantage of them. One was sent out six miles to a by-pass to cut off a hit-and-run driver. The second was put at the disposal of inspector Malpas, to take him to the corporation stock yard, three hundred yards away. The crew of the third were told off to attend the chief superintendent’s briefing conference on the show-down of the Stanway gang.
‘Why do you want a car to take you up to Fellaby Moor?’ the desk sergeant asked him. ‘There’s a bus service every hour and a half. Next one at five past three.’
The positive result, as far as Wright was concerned, was that he missed the hour on his bed which he had promised himself after lunch. His eye-lids were heavy as he sat on a wooden bench on the bus station, and the backs of his hands and fingers tingled with fatigue.
The bus was a single-decker with upholstery worn thin and packed tight. In the low gears, which it had to maintain to climb the steep hills out of town, every window rattled in its frame and every bolt and rivet of its coach-work seemed loose in its housing. Over the crest of Coal-Pit Lane Wright looked down at half a square mile of similar streets, laid out with geometrical precision, differentiated only by the endless variety of the smoking chimneypots, or by the bound-breaking exuberance of some householder who had painted his front door lemon yellow or Cambridge blue.
Then they were free of Fellaby. The road still climbed, between hedge-bottoms sodden with February rain, past clustered farm-steads that wrested a living from poor soil and steeply contoured fields.
Death of an Alderman Page 8
