‘Don’t be so damn grudging,’ Pollard retorted, turning and groping on the back seat. ‘Where are those copies of today’s Corbury Courier that Thomas got for us? I want to look through the thing.’
The Corbury Courier of 8 June had gone to town on the sensational events of recent days. FORMER CORBURY RESIDENT FOUND MURDERED AT ROMAN VILLA, the headline spanning the front page proclaimed with less than perfect accuracy. Below this a subheading carried on the story with WELL-KNOWN LOCAL SALESMAN AND HIS SON MAKE HORRIFIC DISCOVERY. A photograph showed the trench where the body had been found, unnecessarily marking the spot with an X. An interview with Horace Rudd was graphically reported, and accompanied by his photograph, in which he looked almost unrecognisably grim. The medical evidence forthcoming at the inquest was quoted in full, with special emphasis on the fact that the deceased’s skull had been fractured by a heavy blow. Space was devoted to Bernard Lister’s early connection with the town, particularly his scholarships gained from the Grammar School. The account of his subsequent career was sketchier, being clearly of less interest to Corbury readers. His relationship to the Plowmans was discussed on an inside page in the form of an interview with Mark.
‘We have been out of touch with Bernard for many years,’ he was reported as saying. ‘After our schooldays our paths in life took very different courses.’
‘The bust-up very nicely papered over,’ Pollard remarked, who had been reading aloud some of the choicer extracts from the paper. ‘Thomas is quite right. This is a good photograph of Plowman: we’ll ask Warhampton to produce copies, and get some off to the Yard for the chaps working on his alibi. We seem to be making good time. Better stop off for a bite soon, and aim at turning up at the Warhampton HQ about two, when people’ll be back from lunch.’
This programme was followed, and after polite preliminaries and a discussion of the case with Superintendent Norrington, Pollard and Toye had a lengthy talk with Inspector Worrall. The latter was unforthcoming at first, which Pollard rightly attributed to chagrin at having failed to clear up the break-in. After a time, however, he thawed in response to the relaxed friendliness of the Yard pair.
‘Conclusive evidence, my foot, sir,’ he said. ‘To my dying day I’ll swear it was young Tresillian, and probably another one of that lot from the top flat. They’d know the ground, and exactly the sort of thing that’d rile a chap like Lister. Putting his work back, I mean. If there was any loose cash around, I don’t doubt they’d have nicked it but they wouldn’t pinch things they’d have to flog for ready cash. I don’t see them taking that amount of risk of landing up in court again so soon. Mind you, it wasn’t Lister gave us the tip about what was going on. It was Dr Halton, the gentleman in the ground floor flat. But Lister being right underneath, they’d naturally think it was him.’
‘Where’s Tresillian now?’ Pollard asked.
Although the enquiry had been temporarily suspended, Worrall admitted to having kept unofficial tabs on the students. Tresillian had been sent down for good by the university authorities after his conviction. He had now returned to Warhampton with the intention of rallying support for his appeal to be allowed to return in the autumn. His fine had presumably been paid by his family, and at the moment he was keeping himself going by odd jobs of casual labour. The other three residents in the flat, who had received conditional discharges and short suspensions, were back at the university. At the moment, Tresillian was sharing digs with one of them, Timothy Parr, whom Worrall considered a likely partner in the break-in.
‘He’s a bloody insolent type,’ he said. ‘Trouble was, you see,’ he went on, harking back to the difficulty of his enquiry, ‘when Tresillian’s aunt had ’em cleared out, none of ’em had any fixed abode up to Christmas, not really. Trying to pin ’em down for the night of 14 December or any other just wasn’t on. They mucked in with friends, one night here and the next somewhere else.’
‘Fair enough,’ Pollard agreed. ‘Suppose Inspector Toye and I have a go? Muscle in brandishing our Yard credentials, merely interested in the break-in because it could throw some light on the date when Lister vanished. Keep harking back to his murder, and trying to rattle them.’ Worrall was not optimistic.
‘They’re as hard-boiled as they come,’ he said. ‘Absolutely sure they’ve got us on toast over the job. Still, I won’t say that your being from the Yard mightn’t give them a bit of a jolt, especially as we’ve laid off them for some time now.’
Later, Pollard and Toye left to inspect Bernard Lister’s flat. To avoid getting involved with Mrs Tresillian, now in residence again after her world cruise, they parked short of the house, and approached it on foot. They saw that a car could drive in, and immediately swing right along some weedy gravel which ran the width of the building.
‘Hold on,’ Pollard said. ‘These shrubs are quite thick. Would anyone on the pavement see a car if it was parked up against the house?’
‘Not after dark, you wouldn’t,’ Toye replied after they had investigated. ‘Got anything in mind, sir?’
‘No, just thinking generally. Lister got to Corbury somehow, either dead or alive. Let’s go inside.’
They let themselves in at the front door, and went quietly upstairs. After the fresh summer evening Bernard Lister’s flat was oppressively stuffy, and Toye opened some windows. In the course of the Warhampton CID’s enquiry a semblance of order had been restored in the sitting room. The torn pieces of paper were in plastic bags, the former contents of the desk had been sorted and stacked, and the typewriter retrieved, but the scattered piles of books still lay on the floor. In the bathroom the window was securely boarded up, and the scattered sponges and other toilet articles lay collected in the washbasin, now thick with dust. All food had been cleared from the refrigerator in the kitchen, and its door left open. Pollard looked into the cupboards. At the bottom of one of them was a pile of old newspapers. He recognised The Times and, to his surprise, the Corbury Courier.
‘Looks as though he had it posted to him,’ Pollard remarked. ‘Probably so that he could keep tabs on the Millenary plans. Look, something’s been cut out of this one.’
It was Toye who found the folder of newspaper cuttings as they sat looking through the papers on the desk. About a dozen were clipped together, with an account of Sir Miles LeWarne’s funeral on the top. In the list of mourners Mrs Gerald Stanton’s name had been asterisked. A footnote made Pollard and Toye exchange glances.
‘Definitely not a well-adjusted personality, the deceased occupant of this flat,’ Pollard said, examining the rest of the cuttings.
These all related to Sir Miles LeWarne’s last illness and death, and included a lengthy obituary, together with tributes from leading Corbury personalities. None gave information about his will, or Shirley Stanton’s inheritance. Putting the folder aside, they began to sort another pile of papers. These were mainly reprints of articles which Bernard Lister had published in leading historic journals, and Pollard’s attention was diverted to the contents of the plastic bags.
‘This is it all right,’ he said, after examining a series of torn fragments. ‘The foolscap is rough notes, probably made when Lister was down at Alchester, and the typescript is part of the article based on them which was meant to blow the Corbury Millenary sky-high. Just give me that card of Catchpole’s, will you? I’ll give him a ring.’
Ten minutes later he came into Bernard Lister’s bedroom, to find Toye contemplating a drawerful of clean shirts. He reported that his call had made the old boy’s day. The Alchester deputy archivist was coming up to see what he could do with the bits, a young chap called Beresford, who’d done some work on early charters.
‘Publication will be a matter for Lister’s executors, I suppose,’ Pollard went on, ‘but from our point of view it might be useful to see exactly what he’d got down on paper. Got any bright ideas from his underwear?’
‘Everything a chap uses is still here,’ Toye replied. ‘Why on earth should he have a completely different set of toothb
rushes and sponges and whatever for going away? All pretty lush, too. I can’t see him going off even for one night with just a comb in his pocket, either. It looks plain enough to me that when he went out of here for the last time, he had every intention of coming back.’
‘Or else he did come back, and was killed on the premises, the murderer removing the body in a car conveniently parked out of sight down below.’
As he spoke, Pollard suddenly felt stifled. The flat and everything in it seemed to close in, enclosing an unhealthily confined space in which resentment and hatred festered.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said abruptly. ‘There’s nothing more for us to do at the moment.’
Over a meal in the grill room of their hotel they debated a late descent on David Tresillian and the friend who had given him houseroom, but agreed in the end to wait until the following morning. As it was Friday night, the odds were that if Tresillian were in work the two of them would be on a blind, blueing his pay packet. Belinda Plowman seemed a better proposition for a visit, but on arrival at her flat they could get no answer. A note addressed ‘SUE’ was skewered to the jamb of the door by a drawing pin. It read ‘Away for weekend. Love, B.’
‘Bet she’s gone home,’ Pollard commented irritably, as Toye pinned up the note again. ‘Father comes home like a roaring lion after we saw him at the Pottery, and reduces Mother to tears, who rings up her daughter. It looks as though the only thing we can usefully do tonight is to ring the Yard and ask if they’ve got anywhere with Plowman’s alibi.’
On returning to the police station he put through the call, and presently came back to the room allotted to them. A limited amount of progress had been made, he told Toye. Plowman had been present at the Ceramics meeting, which had broken up shortly before 3.30 p.m. He had also booked a room at the Hamilton Hotel, Bloomsbury, for the night of 14 December, and the bill for bed and breakfast had been paid on the following morning. Further enquiries were proceeding, but a lapse of six months, and staff changes at the hotel were making things difficult.
Pollard sat slumped at the table, unusually disgruntled, his thick fair hair ruffled and his face flushed in the heat. He had thrown off his coat, and his shirt was creased. Toye, also coatless, looked cool and dapper as always. He studied his superior through his horn-rims.
‘Bit early to be feeling up against it?’ he suggested.
‘I hate this bloody case,’ Pollard announced vehemently. ‘It’s like a highbrow film on TV, where faces and things materialise out of the blue and float across the screen and off again. You can’t see how they really fit in and yet you know you ought to take them into account. Pot-smoking parties, faked charters, a break-in, obscenities scribbled on the account of a funeral — the lot.’
Toye waited tactfully to see if there were more to come, and then suggested beer.
‘Chilled, if possible and plenty of it,’ he added.
When he returned with a supply from the canteen Pollard looked up at him with a grin.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll snap out of it. Half the trouble is the thought of going home to an empty house if we do get back to town tomorrow. Jane’s taken the kids down to my Aunt Is for a week.’
Toye seized on this diversion. A year ago they had worked on a difficult case in the area of the redoubtable Miss Isabel Dennis’s retirement, and brought it to a triumphant conclusion. They reminisced for a few minutes.
‘Here,’ Pollard said, ‘we’d better give what’s left of our minds to the job on the stocks. The only faint indication of a lead so far is Mark Plowman’s unconvincing alibi. I’m sure he could have got here and returned to London the same night. Let’s leave motive altogether for the moment and concentrate on opportunity. See if you can borrow an ABC.’
They found that a 4.15 p.m. train from Paddington would have reached Warhampton at 6.10 p.m. Return trains ran at hourly intervals up to midnight.
‘Opportunity to commit the murder seems O.K.,’ Toye said. ‘What would he have done with the body? Left it in the flat?’
‘Assuming that he hadn’t a car or an accomplice, that seems the only possible answer. Perhaps it isn’t as risky as it looks at first sight. If he came down and murdered Lister, they must have been in touch recently, and Plowman could have known Lister was going away the next day. If his alibi falls down, we’ll have to find out if he came up to this part of the world again between December and the beginning of the university term.’
‘Could those students, or whoever broke in, have overlooked a stiff in the place?’
‘You wouldn’t think so. Quite a useful card to play when we grill them, incidentally. It all rather bears out your theory that Lister went out, all unsuspecting, and somebody saw to it that he didn’t go home again, but took a trip to Corbury, quick or dead. Let’s go back to Plowman. What conceivable motive could he have had?’
‘He made no bones about hating Lister’s guts,’ Toye propounded. ‘And he stood to lose a fair bit of money over those mugs and things for the Corbury Millenary if Lister published his findings. Some of the souvenirs were going to America, too.’
Pollard stretched, and gave a cavernous yawn.
‘I can see Lister gloating to Plowman about blowing the Millenary sky high, but all this is absurdly thin as a motive for murder, let’s face it. But at this stage one just doesn’t know what may come out. We’d better get down to a spot of homework on Tresillian and co. Ask for the case file, will you?’
Later, as they sat looking through it, Pollard suddenly exclaimed and stabbed a name with a biro.
‘Belinda Plowman was one of ’em, by God! Now this could link up. The girl smoking pot overhead, Lister in the flat underneath, and Plowman putting two and two together, and making five.’
Toye agreed that they had hit on something that looked more like a motive, seeing the aggressive sort of chap Plowman was.
The terraced house where Timothy Parr was living had been converted into student lettings and had the uncoordinated and slightly derelict look of its kind. The windows were in need of cleaning, and the curtains a job lot. Two cars were parked in what had originally been a small front garden.
‘That’s Tresillian’s A30,’ Toye said, indicating a battered model, once pale blue but skimpily resprayed scarlet.
The front door of the house was open, and they walked into a passage hall. A sheet of cardboard fastened to the wall with Sellotape gave a list of the tenants and their flatlets, under the heading ‘HILTON HOTEL’. Parr. Flat 3. First Floor, they read, and went up the stairs, to find the name painted in straggling white capitals across the panels of a door. Pollard looked at Toye, raised an eyebrow, and beat out a brisk tattoo with his knuckles. A languid voice from within urged him to come inside for God’s sake.
The room, a pleasant one, running the depth of the house, had been fitted up as a bedsitter, with a small electric cooker and a sink in a cubicle at the far end. A young man was sprawled in a divan bed against the opposite wall, his features largely obscured by a shaggy growth of fair hair. Another, barefoot and wearing only shorts, sat at a table littered with dirty crockery, food, newspapers, a couple of textbooks on economics and sundry miscellaneous objects. Both stared. Before either could speak Pollard took the initiative.
‘Mr Timothy Parr?’ he enquired, instinctively addressing the figure at the table. ‘Good morning. I’m Detective Superintendent Pollard, and this is Detective Inspector Toye, both of New Scotland Yard.’
He observed the swift chain reaction of defensiveness, unpleasant surprise and in the case of Timothy Parr, assumed facetiousness.
‘Wot, no deerstalker?’ the latter asked. ‘No fiddle or foul pipe?’
‘Not even a hansom cab at the door,’ Pollard replied. ‘The A30’s yours, I think, Mr Tresillian?’
Lying with his right arm behind his head, David Tresillian registered complacency.
‘You can’t get me on that one. It’s licensed, and the insurance is O.K.’
Timothy
Parr lit a cigarette, drew on it and expelled a mouthful of smoke.
‘Worrall sent you along, no doubt,’ he observed. ‘A sticker, that bloke. He’s been trying to fix the break-in at Imperial Road on us for months. Wants to get his stripes, I suppose. Or don’t inspectors get stripes? I wouldn’t know.’
‘Another thing you don’t know,’ Pollard told him, sitting down on a chair brought forward by Toye, ‘is that the late Bernard Lister was not the person who tipped off the Warhampton police about your pot-smoking in the flat above his.’
The silence, though fleeting, was unmistakably startled.
‘What bloody right have you got to barge in here and start asking questions and making insinuations?’ David Tresillian demanded loudly.
‘Don’t mind my friend,’ Timothy Parr cut in quickly. ‘He’s got a hangover as it happens. Do make yourselves at home, won’t you?’
Toye, sitting unobtrusively on Pollard’s left, and slightly behind him, remarked that the A30 was a decent little bus for the money. His unexpected entry into the conversation had caused both young men to give him an uneasy glance.
‘I expect you found the roomy boot handy?’ he suggested.
Pollard watched Timothy Parr’s first and second fingers flatten the cigarette held between them. He waited, letting Toye’s question hang unanswered in the air.
‘Of course, you had better parking facilities at Imperial Road, hadn’t you?’ he said. ‘Plenty of room and well off the street. Quite a secluded berth for a car, in fact. Much safer.’
‘What the hell do you mean, safer?’ There was the hint of a rising note in David Tresillian’s voice.
‘Why, from several points of view, surely. Less obvious to car thieves — vandals. So many of them around these days. And of course very much safer for carrying out a removal that was nobody else’s business. Plenty of room to back an A30 right up to the front door, and load directly into the boot.’
Buried in the Past Page 12
