‘A lot of you boys out tonight.’
‘Yes. You may have missed the main show this morning, but you’ve got a ring-side seat for this performance.
‘I see Grayling’s out himself. Sitting in his car up Angel Street. This still to do with Barson?’
‘Might be. Barson’s goings-on spread over quite some territory.’
‘You don’t have to tell me.——I see Dickie Watson’s joined the plain-clothes mob. He was at school with me.’
‘So was Barson, you told me.’
‘Bloody bastard.’
‘You said you’d tell me.’
‘And I will. You can see how it is with me——’
He shook his left leg, which was withered to about a third of its proper size, and hung back to front in his trouser leg. There was something wrong with his mouth, too, for his lower lip bulged forward like a pouch, and he had trouble with his saliva.
‘Bloody living miscarriage, that’s what I am.——All right, sergeant, I know the truth, I’ve looked in a mirror. Spare me your pity, that’s all I ask. You can be sure I got none from that sod Barson. The other kids——well——you don’t expect the milk of human kindness in a school playground, do you? But by and large they’d give you a hand when you needed it, even a bit of the core, when they’d finished with an apple. Not Barson. He thought I was funny. Got the others dancing round me, up against the railings, shouting and laughing. I never forgot it. I haven’t forgotten yet.’
‘How old would you be when that happened?’
‘How old? Stone the crows! Seven, ten, twelve, fourteen? It wasn’t only the railings, and it wasn’t only the playground. It was all the time, man. In class, when the teacher wasn’t looking. On the recreation ground. Bonfire night——’
‘All of which means that even if you knew who’d killed Barson, you wouldn’t be so keen on telling me.’
‘That depends, doesn’t it? It depends on who did do it. I don’t make rules for myself. Too many other people doing that for me.’
‘I don’t even know your name,’ Wright said.
‘They call me Lenny.’
Wright put his hand in his pocket to overpay for another paper.
‘No need for that,’ Lenny said, ‘unless, of course, you can claim it on your expenses. I’m enjoying this. I never have to stir from here. Everything comes to me.’
Wright brought out half a crown. Lenny put it in his pocket. Wright looked out into the deserted street. The sodium lights bathed pavement and road in an unnatural yellowness. The shop windows were all lit up: prams and babies’ baths and pyramids of detergent packets.
‘They’re coming!’ Lenny said suddenly.
On the opposite pavement, coming from out of town, Chick was approaching with long, gangling strides, leaning slightly forward as he walked, the fur coat shapeless on his shoulders, its sleeves too long for his arms. Beside him, barely keeping up with his pace, was the lieutenant in the bottle-green uniform with the gun-metal buttons. They turned into the Saracen’s Head.
‘We shall see something in a minute.’
Almost immediately there was a roar of motor-cycle engines. They came from the same direction as Chick, in droves, on mopeds, two-strokes, 500 c.c. Nortons, some ridden solo, others with girls or side-kicks on the pillions. There were riders in crash-helmets and riders without; leather jackets plastered with brass studs in tawdry patterns, broad backs with their owners’ names daubed in white paint: Mike, Red and Junkie. They came to rest at the kerb on both sides of the street, commanding the entrance to the pub, some of them wheeling round in the middle of the road, in contempt of an oncoming car. This would be Webbe’s gang, the out-of-town bunch, the patrons of Sal’s café.
Before the last of the engines had spluttered to silence, the uniformed police were out, from doorways, back alleys, side-streets, almost a constable to each machine, notebooks out, patient, plodding voices asking for licences and certificates of insurance. A dog-handler, with a black, bristling Dobermann Pinscher bitch had appeared from nowhere and was standing idly by.
Girls disentangled themselves irritably from pillions. A couple stood helplessly by whilst a policeman on a scooter far too small for him took it up the road to test its brakes. Wright heard off phrases reeled out in flat, parrot-like tones.
‘Not fitted with an efficient warning instrument——ought to do something about the angle of this mirror, son——not expecting to be overtaken by aircraft, now, are you?——This pannier-frame’s loose; hit a pothole and you’ll have the bracket in your spokes, then where are you?——Ah, yes——you’re the one who did the U-turn in front of the Triumph Herald, aren’t you? Sorry, I shall have to report that.——If you’ll tell me at which police-station you choose to report, within five days——’
There was no trouble. They were simply outflanked. Within fifteen minutes they had all gone, the way they had come, some of them wheeling machines which they dared not mount again.
The police-car drove slowly back towards the town centre. The Dobermann Pinscher had unobtrusively vanished.
‘That ought to help the poor tax-payer,’ Lenny said. ‘Two or three hundred quid in fines there, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Silence took possession of the street again and lasted about five minutes. Then the others began to arrive, in knots and groups, taking up positions of tactical prominence again, most of the newcomers on foot, but one or two on motor-cycles, one of which was left with its engine racing, almost outside Wright’s doorway.
The only diversion was from an undersized middle-aged mother, who came ploughing fearlessly through the crowd, clawing at a youngster’s belt with the handle of her umbrella.
‘You come on out of this! I’m not having you messing about with the Mods and Cons. You wait till I tell your father!’
This time, the police were not going to interfere. It was clever, Wright thought. The new leader of the Stanway gang had been elected by Grayling.
A group of eight youths bore down on the Saracen’s Head, led by a tall, slender, physically immature youngster with long, thin arms and legs, like those of some exotic spider.
‘I know him,’ Lenny said. ‘His name’s Riley. Real young hellion!’
They entered the pub. A silence fell on all the groups. All eyes were focused on the doorway opposite. Some one came up and turned off the engine of the roaring motor-cycle.
There was an interval of about five minutes, then Riley came swaggering out of the pub, followed by his henchmen. He was wearing the fur coat, which looked grotesque on his emaciated frame. Gun-metal buttons came a yard or two behind him, not acknowledged by them, but following them back to town.
‘So the borough has yet another new alderman,’ Wright said. ‘Do you reckon they beat Chick up?’
‘Him? No! Chick Stanway? They wouldn’t have to raise their fists. He’d start unbuttoning his coat the moment they came through the doorway. They’d just stay long enough for him to buy them all a drink. Now if it had been the other lot, there’d have been bloody noses for the sake of bloody noses.’
Grayling had played it very shrewdly.
The hangers-on began to drift back towards the town. The last of them had gone before Chick came down the two steps of the Saracen’s Head. He stood still for a few seconds, looking at nothing in particular, then belted his chest a couple of times with his arms, as if he were cold now that he had only his roll-necked jersey and his leather jerkin between him and the elements. He began to saunter back, the way he had come, away from the heart of Fellaby. Putty came out of the narrow passage between two shops. He did not see her at first, and then they seemed to argue. Then she took his arm and they walked slowly out of sight.
Chapter Twelve
Kenworthy was back at the County and dining alone, a newspaper folded beside his plate. Wright sat down opposite him.
‘Eaten, sergeant?’
‘No——and I couldn’t stand a full meal tonight. I’ll have a snack before I turn in.’
‘There was a message for you at the desk. I took it. Ring up Lesueur. He wants to talk to you tonight. After that, come up to my bedroom. There’s a lot I want to get off my chest.’
There was cigarette-ash in the mouthpiece of the telephone, and Wright could not at first find the light switch of the booth. Lesueur was hearty, and punctuated his monologue with bursts of artificial laughter.
‘Listen, sergeant, I’m sorry about this afternoon. Got to apologise. Shouldn’t have talked the way I did. Might have had you thinking all kinds of wrong things. Ha, ha! Might have had you thinking I’d got something to hide, ha, ha, ha! Trouble is, I thought a hell of a lot of Edward. Can’t bear to think of all this under-linen having to be pegged out in Fellaby. Still, I know you’ve got your job to do, all kinds of unpleasant enquiries to make. Just as bad for you as it is for us, really, I suppose. Only we don’t naturally think of it that way. Still, I want you to know, anything I can tell you, at your service. Don’t give another thought to what I said this afternoon. Tell you the truth, funeral got me down this morning. And I’ll tell you what, I’m having the Chief Constable to dinner, day after tomorrow. Like you and Kenworthy to come. Good chance for a pow-wow.’
Wright extemporised. He would have to ask the superintendent.
‘Yes, of course, I know that. And if you have to call it off at the last minute, duty-wise, not to worry. All the more for the rest of us to eat. Ha, ha!——night, sergeant.’
Kenworthy had not yet left the dining room. Wright went back to his table.
‘I’ll have a coffee with you, if I may. Though if I drink much more of the stuff, I don’t know what it’ll do to me. I’m getting palpitations already.’
‘Had a trying day, sergeant?’
‘You might call it that.’
‘So have I. And I’m not going to talk about it here, in case of explosion.’
They drained their cups without talking, Kenworthy lighting his pipe and letting it go out again.
‘Come, Shiner!’
Wright looked at Kenworthy’s bedroom as if he were taking part in an indecent invasion. There was so much of the intimate Kenworthy about——so many of the personal belongings of a superintendent that one did not normally see: Kenworthy’s tooth-brush, in the rack over the wash-basin, Kenworthy’s pyjamas on the bed, blue, faded, and definitely past their prime; a little stack of picture postcards of Bradcaster on a corner of the dressing-table, one of them written, stamped and ready for posting to Mrs Kenworthy.
‘Sit on the bed, Shiner. This is one mattress that you can’t damage.’
Kenworthy sat in the only chair and put a match to the bowl of his almost empty pipe.
‘Shiner——I lost my temper today. And it’s the first time that’s happened to me since I held your rank. It’s still got me rattled. I had a better opinion of myself. At one point, I must have come pretty near to wrecking my chances on this case, and in a man of my experience, that would have been unpardonable.’
Wright neither interrupted nor tried to provide cues for further enlightenment. He waited through long seconds of silence, and then Kenworthy made a proper job of scraping out and recharging his pipe.
‘Warren!’ he said at last. ‘I’d better just remind you of the facts. Warren was chucked out of the Bradcaster City Borough Force three or four years ago. Chucked out winning, smiling all over his oily chops, knowing he’d pull some big brass down with him if they didn’t let him out on his own terms.’
Kenworthy’s anger was not play-acted. He had met something he abhorred, and it had poisoned his system.
‘Now he’s set himself up in an office in Bradcaster’s most expensive block. G Plan furniture and fitted carpets. High level tart in the ante-room with fingers like a vampire, who looks at you as if you’re something not very savoury that she’s just found inside a soused herring. And a two-way mirror, so that he can keep his beady little eyes on a battery of eight shorthand typists, battering away in another room as if he’d all the work on hand in northern England.’
Kenworthy expended another match.
‘Which I think he has. There’s no doubting that Warren is booming. Divorce cases for the cream of the aristocracy and private information services to a member of the shadow cabinet. And he sees you in an office that hasn’t got a scrap of paper in sight. Not a filing cabinet, not a calendar even. Just a nonsensical modern painting on the wall, about half an acre of polished desktop, and all the rest’s nothing but arm-chairs, too bloody low to get out of, and bloody thousands of cut-glass ash-trays.’
Having spent his main effort against Warren’s furnishings, Kenworthy subsided.
‘Supercilious sod, too,’ he said. ‘It gave master Warren one of the biggest kicks he’s had for a long time, to be able to call his own tune to a Yard man of my standing. He made it quite clear, without actually saying so, that we can’t finish the Barson case without his help.’
‘And can we?’
‘He could certainly cut a few corners for us, if he’s a mind to. But I’m not buying anything off Warren——or begging it either. He was quite magnanimous, up to a point. Offered to make me a free gift of the file on Barson’s garden. Also let fall a few gems of colourful information. For example, although he doesn’t have a seat on the board, and stays strictly in the background, your friend Lesueur has the controlling interest in Futurco Publicity.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘It’s more than interesting. It slots a whole range of further suppositions into place.’
‘We should have come on to it before long,’ Wright said.
‘Before long, yes. Warren’s been working on this case much longer than we have. And his methods are slicker than ours. He can look at things we daren’t ask to see. He’s not responsible to anyone but himself. No protocol. No Judges’ Rules. No regulations. And he’s delved into this case very much more extensively than he cared to tell Gill. For example, he was careful to let it slip that he’d been out and about in Barson’s working area, checking up on his contacts, calling at the hotels where Barson took his midday meals in the intervals between checking up on Bisto and Guinness posters.
‘Again——we’d have got round to it,’ Wright said.
‘In time. But remember——Warren didn’t exactly have to count his pennies on this case. He could afford three quid to a receptionist or head waiter, where you and I would have had to account for five bob.’
‘And he didn’t tell you what he’d found out?’
‘He did not. And that, Shiner, is something that we’ve got to know about. I don’t know whether Barson was a womaniser——’
‘I’ve certainly drawn a major reaction three times when I mentioned his domestic background——to the town clerk, Lesueur and Hawley.’
‘I think I know why. I’ll come to that in a minute. What worries me most is that Warren might still be in the game. It’s certain that he found a good deal more in it than he ever proposed to share with Gill.’
‘You mean that even with Barson gone, there’s still a chance of blackmail?’
‘Obviously. It stands out a mile that there have been things going on in the Barson entourage that didn’t start and finish with the parish pump——things that Barson couldn’t have been handling without Lesueur. And Warren knows about them——but he hedged like hell, and I couldn’t be certain why. That’s what happens when you let yourself get rattled. You see, I knew he was playing it cool partly to humiliate me, and I’ve no doubt he thought that I’d be willing to pay at least a limited price for a neat conclusion. But I’m more inclined to think that his eye’s really on the pile of pickings that’s still in it for himself. It may well be something that he can afford to lie low about until the captains and the kings have departed. If we ever discover that Warren has called on Lesueur——’
‘There is, of course,
no evidence to suggest that Warren ever made a direct approach to Barson.’
‘Indeed there is not. I put that bluntly to Warren, and got as blunt a denial as I expected. That would make things too easy. It would, in fact, put me in a position of considerable danger.’
Kenworthy stood up suddenly from his chair.
‘If I thought there was a ghost of a chance of proving that Warren had accosted Barson, I wouldn’t be able to see a single other tree in the forest. It would blinker me. And intricate though Warren’s connection with this may be, there are plenty of other interesting characters who might have killed Barson.’
He sat down again and laughed at himself.
‘See how it’s got me, Shiner? I hope you’ll let this be a lesson to you.’
‘If Warren’s crooked,’ Wright said, ‘he must be going to bed at least a trifle rattled himself tonight. There was a lot of bluff in his attitude to you. However much he may under-estimate us, he must know pretty realistically the line of thought you were following. You must have got him just a little worried.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t under-estimate us, Shiner. He’s got a very high opinion indeed of me. Damn it, he even offered me a job!’
Kenworthy got up and brought a hip flask from the flap in the lid of his suit-case.
‘Go and get your tooth-glass, Shiner. We’ve both deserved sustenance. Then you can tell me how you’ve whiled away the day.’
Kenworthy listened attentively whilst Wright recounted his interview with the town clerk, his impressions of the funeral, the story of Barson’s crimes in Germany, the progress reports from Heather, the conversations with Lesueur, Hawley and Lenny, and the displacement of Chick. Kenworthy made only monosyllabic interruptions. When Wright had finished, he poured out more whisky.
‘Let’s come back to this reluctance of certain people to talk about Barson’s home relationships. I’m sure they’re all thinking of the same thing. That was why I didn’t put you in the picture earlier——why I was anxious for you to ask the question in all innocence. I wanted an independent reaction, and your own unprejudiced feeling about it. You see, we think that Lesueur obliged with a passing squire act on Hagley Brow in the late nineteen twenties. We think that Barson’s widow is Lesueur’s bastard. We think——’
Death of an Alderman Page 10
