There was a silence.
‘I suppose a chap with Plowman’s background could bring himself to it,’ Toye said doubtfully. ‘Driving his daughter from here to Corbury with a stiff in the boot?’ ‘One’s got to remember that he’d got almost foolproof disposal facilities on his doorstep. He could have felt the outrageousness — and the risk — was justified from the point of view of his family.’
‘What about the girl’s baggage?’ Toye asked. ‘Wouldn’t she have wanted to shove it into the boot?’
‘I doubt it. That age group doesn’t go in for organised suitcase luggage. She’d probably just have a duffle bag and an armful of oddments, and chuck them on to the back seat. I wonder.’
The telephone rang, shattering the deep quiet of the room. As Toye answered it, Pollard lumbered to his feet and took the receiver held out to him. There was a brief conversation, in the course of which a new urgency came into his voice. The call ended, he swung round.
‘They’ve traced a taxi driver who says he brought a fare to this house from the station at about a quarter past six on 14 December. He remembers it because of one of those perfectly staggering coincidences: his previous fare had been to the house next door.’
Toye whistled.
‘Have they tried the photographs on him?’
‘Yeah. He’s picked out two, one of which is Plowman’s. We’ll have to have an identity parade. And what we want now, of course, is evidence of Plowman’s return journey to London. The time’s crucial.’
‘He’d have walked to the station,’ Toye said. ‘You don’t get cruising taxis here, like London.’
‘This is it. The evening trains from here to London leave on the hour. If Plowman caught the seven o’clock, he’s cleared on the students’ evidence. Assuming that this taxi driver identified him, he must have been the man they saw going out of the gate just after that clock on the mantelpiece struck half past six. Get it going again, will you, and we’ll see if it keeps good time? If it was right — or more or less right — Plowman couldn’t possibly have come back, presumably with Lister, murdered him and got to the station in time to catch that train. But if there’s conclusive evidence that he left on a later one, it’s a different story.’
Toye agreed. They were discussing the chances of getting any such evidence after a lapse of six months when sounds of an arrival below took them to the window. A taxi had driven in, and the two passengers, a dishevelled man and woman, were helping the driver unload a large quantity of miscellaneous luggage.
‘Good Lord, it must be the people from the ground floor flat Worrall told us about,’ Pollard exclaimed. ‘The ornithologist chap who’s been in South Africa since early December. It’s worth having a word with him. He might possibly know something about Lister’s plans for the Christmas vac, although I rather doubt it.’
They shut Bernard Lister’s flat once more, and went downstairs to be greeted by chaos in the entrance hall. It was littered with boxes and bundles, among which a giant of a man with red hair and beard was rootling energetically. He straightened up and stared at them.
‘Good evening,’ Pollard said. ‘You’re Dr Halton, I think?
We’re Detective Superintendent Pollard and Detective Inspector Toye of New Scotland Yard.’
‘What goes on?’ Dr Halton demanded. ’You came out of Lister’s flat, didn’t you?’
‘We did. I gather that you’re only just back in this country and have been off the map recently? I’m sorry to tell you that Mr Bernard Lister has been murdered. His body was only discovered last week, but he disappeared on 14 December.’
Dr Halton appeared to be struck speechless, but only briefly.
‘Peg!’ he bellowed.
A small dark woman, face weathered to the colour of old leather and lank hair strained back in a ponytail, materialised in a doorway.
‘Lister’s been bumped off,’ her husband told her. ‘This is Scotland Yard,’ he added, indicating Pollard and Toye. ‘My wife.’
‘Lister?’ Mrs Halton exclaimed incredulously. ‘What on earth happened?’
‘So far we’ve no evidence of when and where he was murdered,’ Pollard informed them. ‘He was last seen in public on the afternoon of 14 December. When he didn’t turn up at the beginning of the university term, the authorities asked the police to investigate his flat. They found that it had been broken into from the rear, but there were no signs of a struggle. Enquiries were made on a national scale, but with no result. Finally, Lister’s body was found by chance in an archaeological dig at a place called Corbury, in the West country. His skull had been smashed in with the usual blunt instrument, and pathological evidence put his death about six months ago. I’m glad to have this opportunity of asking you if you knew anything about his Christmas plans.’
They both shook their heads emphatically.
‘A clam,’ Dr Halton said, ‘was chatty compared with Lister. Our contacts were normally minimal. But I’ll hazard a guess about who might have been involved. Not long before we went off to South Africa I butted in to rescue him from a chap who was knocking hell out of him, up there on the landing outside his front door. Remember me telling you, Peg? You were out, and missed the fun.’
‘Would you recognise this chap if you saw him again?’ Pollard asked, suppressing his excitement.
‘Sure thing. I peeled him off Lister, and held him by the collar before booting him downstairs. What’s more, I can put you on his track. The top floor here had been lent to some students who were run in for pot smoking, and the dust-up I’m talking about was in the evening of the day they’d been in court. The chap’s daughter was one of them, and he’d come round to beat up Lister, thinking he’d grassed on them. Actually I had, as I told him.’
‘I’d like you to have a look at some photographs. This could be important.’
‘O.K. Come along in. Light’s better inside.’
In the living room further chaos was erupting from suitcases and boxes. Mrs Halton helpfully swept a pile of garments on to the floor, and switched on a table lamp. Pollard set out a row of half-a-dozen photographs.
‘This is the bloke,’ James Halton said, picking out Mark Plowman without the slightest hesitation.
The evening’s unexpected developments involved setting a number of enquiries in train involving both the Yard and the Warhampton CID. Finally, after a belated supper Pollard and Toye wrote up their notes, and an early start on the following morning was decided upon.
‘We’ll make for Alchester first and get a warrant for Plowman there. Less chance of a leak that way,’ Pollard said.
‘Do you reckon to pull him in tomorrow?’ Toye asked.
‘Only if he gives himself away when asked to explain his false statements and two visits to Lister’s flat. There are two whacking great holes in the case as it stands. So far we can’t prove that he caught that seven o’clock train, nor how he could have got the body down to Corbury.’
Before going to bed Pollard made an attempt to get the case off his back by ringing Jane, now home again with the twins from their seaside holiday. It had gone like a bomb to the end, he learnt, and all three had a super suntan. Neither twin had done anything really outrageous, and Aunt Is had been duly complimentary on their upbringing. Would one of those plastic pools be an anti-climax after the Atlantic, did he think?
Later, however, the case and its problems tiresomely reasserted themselves, and he could not get to sleep. Tomorrow’s interview with Plowman could easily result in the chap’s bringing off a successful bunk, or even committing suicide. Even if he did neither of these things, what real chance was there of really clinching evidence against him turning up? How utterly frustrating and humiliating it would be if the A.C. started trotting out his usual gag about the law of diminishing returns when a case dragged on. One would have to play for time, only it was so damn difficult to get past the old boy. Not even a moderately convincing alternative suspect.
Pollard’s thoughts rested briefly on the Stantons, then b
egan to move from one member of the Plowman family to another, in the manner of a spotlight. It struck him that they tended to run true to type. That Victorian casting out of Lister’s mother, for instance, suggested that her parents were climbing the social ladder with the same determination as their granddaughter Shirley Stanton at the present time. Did the male Plowmans tend to marry inept women? Surely Mark and Shirley’s mother should have been able to cope with her own children’s bloody-mindedness towards Bernard Lister at the nursery stage, and Mrs Mark was a poor creature by the side of her husband and daughter. Wouldn’t modern psychologists say that Mark’s fanatical dislike of Lister was really self-hatred, arising from an unacknowledged awareness of his own inferior ability?
These academic speculations were soothing, and before long he fell asleep.
By half past ten on the following morning, Pollard and Toye were at Corbury police station, closeted with an unhappy Superintendent Thomas.
As the complex interrelations of the students’ appearance in court, Mark Plowman’s assault on Bernard Lister, and his attempt to get into the latter’s flat on 14 December were unfolded, the Superintendent’s initial incredulity gave way to mounting anxiety. When Pollard came to an end there was a prolonged silence.
‘Well, what’s your reaction?’ he asked at last.
Superintendent Thomas gripped the arms of the chair, and hoisted up his stalwart form.
‘Nobody but a fool would deny there’s the makings of a case there,’ he said, and relapsed into silence once more.
‘It’s over the body being got down here we specially want your help,’ Pollard told him. ‘We think it’s a practical possibility from the Warhampton end, provided Plowman had the keys of the house and flat. If he killed Lister on 14 December, he could have taken his keys then. We know that he went up to Warhampton on 19 December to fetch his daughter. In your opinion is it conceivable that he brought the body back in the boot?’
Superintendent Thomas shot a glance at him from under the thickets of his bushy eyebrows.
‘Knowing the Corbury set-up better than you, if you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘I reckon he could’ve brought himself to it, feeling it’d be better to risk it for his family’s sake rather than chance the job being traced to him by just leaving the body in the flat. One’s got to remember he’d got a ready-made grave for it that nobody would notice, and which would be sealed over for good and all. The Plowmans would have been finished here, a leading family for two hundred years back and more. There’d be no living it down, not in a place like this.’
He made a gesture incorporating the borough of Corbury. Pollard had a passing claustrophobic sensation of being hemmed in by curious eyes and whispering tongues.
‘I get you,’ he said. ‘At the same time, we’d like you to find out if he went off for the best part of a day between 15 December and 9 January, other than on 19 December.’ Superintendent Thomas scribbled a note on a pad.
‘This is a bloody awful business,’ he said. ‘I hope to God you’re after the wrong man. Mind you, if he did kill Lister it would’ve been accidental. Manslaughter, I mean, in a punch-up. Not that a manslaughter verdict wouldn’t finish him here in Corbury just the same.’
‘There’s still a vital gap in the evidence against him over the time of his return to London,’ Pollard pointed out. ‘If he can prove he caught that early train, he’s clear.’
‘And how the hell can he after all this time?’ Superintendent Thomas demanded savagely.
‘Equally difficult for the prosecution to prove that he didn’t, you know. Well, I suppose we’d better push along to the Pottery, and see what he’s got to say for himself. We’ve got our procedure lined up for the alternative outcome, haven’t we?’
Assenting gloomily, Superintendent Thomas showed them to their car. Five minutes later they drew up in the car park of Plowman’s Pottery, Pollard remarking that he felt like a cat on hot bricks.
‘Pick where you like, and go wrong every time,’ Pollard said as they walked towards the entrance. ‘One, we arrest the wrong man. Two, the only serious suspect flees the country. Three, the said suspect commits suicide.’
‘I’d go for the last,’ Toye said seriously. ‘Proves we got the right chap, saves no end of bother and better for the relatives in the end.’
The receptionist greeted them with interest, but nothing more, and returned in a short space of time to say that Mr Plowman would be free in five minutes. There were seats in the reception area, but Pollard wandered around restlessly, inspecting samples of the firm’s output, his ears straining for the sound of a car being driven off at speed. How effective were the shadowing techniques of the Alchester CID, he wondered? Then, as he stared at a vast ornate vase in lime green and mustard yellow glaze, Plowman’s Pottery’s contribution to the Great Exhibition of 1851, a bell rang sharply and he relaxed.
‘Step this way, please,’ the receptionist invited brightly.
As they came in, Mark Plowman sketched the gesture of rising.
‘Morning,’ he said briefly, indicating two chairs. ‘Well, what is it this time?’
Pollard settled himself in a leisurely manner, crossing his legs and looking steadily at the combination of mediocre ability, doggedness and choler in the face confronting him.
‘This time, Mr Plowman,’ he said, ‘it’s to give you the opportunity of amending various false statements you have made in connection with the late Mr Bernard Lister. If you wish, you are entitled to send for your solicitor.’
A dull flush mounted slowly to Mark Plowman’s temples.
‘I don’t need a damn solicitor, thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ve done nothing criminal.’
The wording was unexpected. Pollard turned impassively to Toye.
‘Record that Mr Plowman declined to send for his solicitor. We’ll take first your statement that the last time you saw Bernard Lister was twenty-two years ago, Mr Plowman. We have an eyewitness of a meeting between you at number 7 Imperial Road, Warhampton, in November last, in the course of which you physically assaulted him. Do you deny this?’
Mark Plowman picked up a pamphlet from his desk, stared at it, and threw it down again.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Obviously you’ve got on to that hulking red-headed bastard Halton, who butted in on what was no business of his. Incidentally he assaulted me.’
‘It seems,’ Pollard went on, deliberately provocative, ‘that you mistakenly thought Bernard Lister was responsible for your daughter’s appearance in court.’
‘Mistakenly my foot! That’s all you know about my late unlamented cousin. It’s exactly the sort of thing the little rat would have enjoyed doing out of sheer bloody-mindedness, once he’d discovered Belinda was mixed up in the business. Any decent father would have reacted as I did.’
‘If you think your conduct was justified, why didn’t you admit to it when I questioned you before?’
‘For heaven’s sake! ’ Mark Plowman exploded irritably. ‘Doesn’t it stick out a mile? Would you let on that you’d had a scrap with a chap whose body had just turned up a few yards from your back door? And admit that you’d had the worst of it, what’s more, because of that swine Halton sticking his nose in?’
Pollard was momentarily silenced from astonishment. Was it possible that Plowman could be guilty if he really equated the finding of Lister’s body in the dig with his own discomfiture at being thrown out by Dr Halton?
‘We’ll go on to your statement about your movements on the evening of 14 December,’ he said brusquely. ‘I put it to you that it was a fabrication from start to finish, and that when the meeting at the Waterbury Hotel ended you went down to Warhampton by train. Do you admit this?’
A more guarded expression came over Mark Plowman’s face.
‘No comment.’
‘In that case, then, we shall ask you to take part in an identity parade before a Warhampton taxi driver. He took a fare to 7 Imperial Road, at about a quarter past six on that day, and has picked out your photogr
aph and one other from a set of half-a-dozen.’
There was a silence. Mark Plowman examined his fingernails. Finally he gave a shrug.
‘You win,’ he said. ‘All right, then, I did go down to Warhampton after the meeting. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t admit it. It’s alleged to be a free country. I did nothing illegal.’
‘What was your motive in going?’ Pollard asked, an edge on his voice.
Mark Plowman stared at him contemptuously.
‘You can’t be human. I suppose the police aren’t, come to think of it. Bloody holier-than-thous — except the corrupt ones, of course. I wasn’t going to let Lister get away with what he’d done to my girl. This time I knew I’d have a clear run: I’d seen in the papers that Halton had gone off on some expedition. Pity the natives didn’t put paid to him.’
‘You’ve got some curious ideas of what is legal, Mr Plowman,’ Pollard remarked. ‘Beating people up, for instance, and making false statements to the police. And I don’t think you realise the seriousness of your position,’ he added, ignoring an expletive.
‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘You’ve admitted going to 7 Imperial Road on the evening of 14 December. Lister was last seen, other than by his murderer, on the afternoon of that day. Six months later his body was found not far from your back door, as you remarked just now.’
‘So what?’ Mark Plowman leant back in his chair, eyeing Pollard with a certain complacency. ‘Even if I had killed Lister, how do you suggest I got the body down here? On a magic carpet? If you’re interested in the facts, I never set eyes on the cad. He hadn’t the guts to come out of his funk-hole and face me.’
‘We’ll leave the question of how the body reached Corbury for the moment,’ Pollard said authoritatively. ‘The facts we’re interested in right now are the true ones relating to your movements after the end of the meeting. I may add that we have other witnesses besides the taxi driver.’
Buried in the Past Page 15
