Pollard surfaced to find the other passengers already on their feet and reaching up to the luggage racks. He turned to Toye and grinned as he stretched himself.
On arriving at the Yard Pollard learnt that Chief Superintendent Crowe wanted to see him immediately. Wishing that he could have had a little time in which to tabulate his new ideas, he took the case file and went along to his Chief’s office.
Crowe looked up from his desk.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Well, whodunnit?’
‘Roy Garnish, I think, sir, with his wife and A. N. Other as accessories.’
Although Crowe’s face remained impassive Pollard sensed gratification.
‘Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, then.’
Concealing his elation Pollard embarked on his report. It was lengthy, but Crowe followed it with unblinking attention. Only once did he interrupt.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Those boys. Did you question ’em?’
‘No, sir. I didn’t want any hint that we’d tumbled to the impersonation racket to leak out.’
‘Good. Carry on.’
Pollard continued through the intricacies of charred bandages, Dettol, the injury sustained by Streak, and his enquiries at the Zenith-Excelsior and Esplanade Theatre. As he reached the topic of the Garnishes’ two recent visits to Affacombe within a fortnight he was aware of an appraising glance.
‘My theory is, sir,’ he went on, ‘that the reason for the Garnishes’ visit at the weekend of November 8th was a blackmailing letter from Roach to Pamela Garnish, in which she demanded a meeting at the Monk’s Leap on the Saturday of the murder. Assuming that the boy Ferrars saw and heard what his cousin said he did, it seems reasonable to assume that a professional snooper like Roach would have got on to it as well. She contacted Mrs Winship, and almost certainly Ethel Earwaker by post. The Garnishes — or a couple purporting to be Roy and Pamela Garnish — left Affacombe on Saturday, November 1st. A letter posted in Affacombe that weekend would get to London on Monday, or Tuesday at latest.’
‘So what?’ enquired Crowe.
‘If we provisionally accept the impersonation, sir, I suggest that the idea behind it wasn’t to cover an affair of Pamela’s, but to provide cast-iron alibis for Roy Garnish when he was engaged in criminal activity elsewhere. Hence Roach’s murder. Too much was at stake to risk letting her go on living once she’d rumbled the impersonation racket.’
Crowe lit another cigarette in a leisurely way.
‘I should have thought the dates October 31st to November 1st might have rung a bell for you, Pollard,’ he remarked drily. ‘Large-scale organized crime’s a commonplace these days, but that week was rock-bottom. You chaps get absorbed in your own cases. The 31st was the night of the break-in at the Landchester branch of the Southern Counties Bank, when they got away with a cool £80,000. Usual story. Shop to let next door. You’ll be interested to hear that the sole agents were Bagnell and Mayhew, Garnish’s high-class estate agency in West Audley Street. I needn’t add that everything about the keys was above reproach. Garnish himself fell over backwards trying to be helpful to the police.’
‘Good lord, sir! And the day before was the payroll snatch at Railstone’s.’
‘Yeah,’ replied Crowe. ‘People here started getting worked up when you rang about those dates last night.’
‘What about the earlier dates? The weekend of September 19th?’
‘No big job around here, but on the morning of the 19th there was a sizeable mail van robbery at Bristowe. Lot of registered stuff. Clean getaway, too.’
‘If that was a Garnish job by any chance, he could have been in that car late the same night going to ground at Affacombe,’ Pollard mused aloud. ‘But why should he have wanted a stand-in for the rest of the weekend? It doesn’t seem to make — here, wait a bit!’ he almost shouted. ‘Suppose they sometimes worked it the other way on?’
‘What the hell do you mean?’ demanded Crowe.
‘Sorry, sir. This way. Suppose Garnish and the chap who impersonates him are partners in the organized crime racket? Sometimes one of ’em organizes a job, and sometimes the other. If the impersonator did the mail van hold-up at Bristowe, wouldn’t it have been a damn good stunt for him to vanish into thin air by assuming Garnish’s identity at Affacombe? Meanwhile Garnish lies low up here, or in one of the handy empty houses on the books of Bagnall and Mayhew.’
‘The Garnish woman would have had to come down to Affacombe alone in that case,’ objected Crowe.
‘I don’t think there was much risk there. If she’d been noticed driving off from their flat up here alone, anyone would have assumed she was going to pick up her husband somewhere. Most of the Affacombe people seem to take the weekly bus into Polharbour on Saturday afternoons. If somebody saw her driving up the village alone, it would probably have been assumed that she’d arrived earlier with her husband, and had nipped back to Leeford to get something at the shops. If anyone speculated about it at all, that is.’
Crowe sat silent for a few moments.
‘I’m not sure you aren’t on to something, Pollard,’ he said at last. ‘I hope to God you are. There’ve been too many high-level enquiries about all these unsolved robberies. Last night the A.C. had a conference for the chaps in charge of the Landchester and Railstone cases — that’s Reynolds and Blake — and myself. As I said in that message I left for you, there’s been a lead of a sort on this alleged impersonation. The Garnishes’ flat is in Huntingford Court, an extremely expensive block in Knightsbridge. It’s ultra-modernized rather than ultra-modern, if you get me, so the tenants have an unusual amount of privacy. There’s a hall porter at the main entrance in Gaveney Street. The block’s rectangular with four street frontages. Service entrance at the back, with a mews opposite where the tenants’ garages are. And there are handy side entrances as well, on the two other streets. Where one of these joins Gaveney Street, there’s a newsvendor’s pitch belonging to an old boy called Reg Platt. We had a stroke of luck here. There’d been a minor car smash at this road junction on October 28th, and Platt had a ringside seat. We sent Nugent along yesterday as an insurance agent making further enquiries. After a bit he made some remark about a Mr Garnish’s car having gone out into the main road immediately in front of the one that was in the smash, and suggested that it might have blocked the view. Platt contradicted this at once: said he’d seen both the Garnishes drive off in their Mercedes half an hour earlier. He knew their car well. It was a posh outfit, if ever there was one, and so on. Nugent pretended that he hadn’t understood, and after a bit more chat said something implying that Mrs Garnish had been alone in the car. Platt took him up rather impatiently, and then suddenly became reminiscent. Funny thing, he said, but right in the middle of the hullabaloo over the smash he could’ve sworn he saw Mr Garnish crossing the road. Something about his walk and build — way he had of shoving his left shoulder forward. Then he saw it was a working chap, and anyway it couldn’t’ve been Mr Garnish, seeing he’d cleared off half an hour before. Nugent started another topic, and when he thought they’d had about enough, tipped the old boy and pushed off.’
‘Where do we go from here, sir?’ asked Pollard after a pause.
‘Joint conference with the A.C. on all three cases in an hour’s time,’ replied Crowe, ‘so you’d better have some proposals to make about yours. I’m going to brief him on it now.’
He made a gesture of dismissal. Pollard rose to go. Half way to the door he halted.
‘I drew up for a couple of minutes outside a bungalow called Sunset View when I was running into Polharbour, sir.’
‘You ought to be damn well ashamed of yourself, wasting your time and the taxpayers’ money.’ Crowe’s bright-eyed stare was broken by the suspicion of a wink.
It was Pollard’s first experience of a high-level conference on cases suspected of being interrelated. He found himself the most junior member, but it was the facts he’d unearthed at Affacombe which had first suggested the link between Sist
er Roach’s murder and the robberies. The A.C. was, as usual, incisive beneath surface languor, and the general atmosphere not unfriendly although highly critical. Pollard sensed the need to steer carefully between the Scylla of appearing pleased with himself and the Charybdis of having nothing constructive to put forward. During the cut and thrust of the discussion he tentatively introduced a point which had only struck him within the past ten minutes.
‘It did just occur to me, sir,’ he ventured, ‘that there might be a connection between the Garnishes’ trip down to Affacombe last weekend and that eleventh-hour cancellation of the bank robbery we were expecting.’
There was a silence during which three pairs of eyes were focused on him, the A.C’s continuing to contemplate the ceiling as he reclined almost horizontally in his chair.
‘Could be,’ the latter pronounced judicially.
As the conference went on the question of whether Roy Garnish had been the murderer of Sister Roach assumed priority. If he had, there was no question about the existence of his impersonator, and if the latter could be traced the prospects of clearing up the two robberies — and probably others of the same type — would be decidedly more encouraging.
There was agreement that a near relation of Roy Garnish was almost certainly involved. There must surely be a strong physical resemblance to make so successful an impersonation possible. During the investigation of the Landchester bank raid Superintendent Reynolds had looked into Roy’s early history. He had emerged from an unknown background in the post-war years, and been borne up on a rising tide of financial success. The War Department reported that he had served unremarkably in North Africa and Italy, and been demobilized in the normal course.
‘They gave us his home address, sir,’ said Reynolds, consulting his notes. ‘It was 73, Worrall Street, Poplar. Next-of-kin, Mrs. Doris Garnish.’
‘It will almost certainly turn out to have been flattened in the blitz,’ commented the A.C. ‘We’ll follow it up, of course, and try Somerset House, too, but it looks like a long job.’
Ultimately he turned to Pollard.
‘In the first instance this is your murder case. What steps do you propose to take next?’
‘I feel I’m at a great disadvantage in not having met either of the two Garnishes, sir,’ he replied. ‘I’d like to make an appointment to see them both together at their flat. Be rather pedestrian about it, saying it’s a routine check of their statements, and so on, and rather dumb when I get there. Play up to them a bit, while keeping my eyes open, of course. And I’d like to take one of the make-up experts along, if I may.’
‘To make sure you’re dealing with the genuine article, I take it? Not a bad idea, Pollard. I suggest you take Sergeant Bendle. Well, gentlemen, I propose that we adjourn until the enquiries into the Garnish family have had time to get off the ground, and Chief Inspector Pollard has paid this visit of his.’
Sergeant Henry Bendle of the C.I.D. was a sad-looking man in the fifties whose pale blue eyes gave a misleading impression of vagueness and short sight. In reality his flair for observation of his fellow creatures was phenomenal, and his memory photographic. He was frequently in demand when identifications were wanted and specialized in the creation of disguises for investigating officers. He had followed the Affacombe case in the papers and listened to Pollard with interest.
‘Not to worry, sir,’ he said, with complete confidence. ‘Why, if the chap was got up so he’d fox his own mother, I’d spot the fake touches all right. And I’ll get him taped for future reference all right, too.’
As soon as Bendle had gone off, Pollard rang Jane to report his return and hopes of getting home that evening, and then settled down to review the case. He felt satisfied that his request for an appointment at the Garnishes’ flat had not aroused any suspicion. He had rung the head office of Countrywide Properties, and the call, passed progressively upwards, had led to a brief conversation with Roy himself. Careful to be a little routine-bound and implicitly apologetic he had evoked a brusque but matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation, and been asked to come round at five that same evening, when a short time could be made available.
On the way there he’d prime Bendle about playing the red tape touch. Anything remotely resembling a crunch must be avoided like the plague. Then in the meantime the enquiries into Garnish’s past would be going on, but that sort of thing took such ages. With a pang of discomfort Pollard visualized some new development in the robbery cases, and one of the two Supers getting in ahead of him. A short cut, that was what was wanted. Something really imaginative. Disconsolately he was forced to admit that his imagination seemed to have gone off the air altogether. The excitement of the early part of the morning had evaporated, too. He decided that a break was called for, and dismissing the entire case from his mind worked at the arrears in his in basket until it was time to go down to the canteen for some lunch.
After an unsatisfactory afternoon which brought him no nearer to any plan of action, he left for Knightsbridge with Sergeant Bendle soon after four, allowing time for a reconnaissance of the outside of Huntingford Court. He stopped to buy an evening paper from Reg Platt. In response to a leading remark, the shabby sharp-eyed little man was voluble about the traffic jams in Gaveney Street, and the dangers of cars coming out of the side roads too fast. While he reminisced about the accident which he had seen right under his nose, Pollard noted the island on which Platt had thought he saw Garnish standing. It was quite near the newspaper pitch, and anyone on it would be clearly visible from the pavement. There must have been quite a decided resemblance, he thought.
‘The flat’s Number Nine,’ he told Bendle as they moved away. ‘I think we’ll give the impressive front entrance a miss, and go in unobtrusively at the side. Better chance of spying out the land, perhaps.’
A brief inspection showed that Number Nine was on the first floor. They went up a well-carpeted staircase and explored some passages. The front door of the flat was round a comparatively secluded corner, conveniently near the staircase leading down to the side entrance opposite to the one they had used. The whole place seemed deserted and surprisingly quiet.
Roy Garnish himself opened the door in answer to their ring. Pollard’s immediate reaction was that his stocky heavy-shouldered figure looked incongruous in city clothes.
‘I rang your office this morning, sir,’ he said pleasantly.
‘Chief Inspector Pollard and Detective-Sergeant Bendle. Good evening.’
‘Glad you’re on time, at any rate,’ Roy Garnish replied, without returning the greeting. ‘Straight ahead, first on the right,’ he added, shutting the door behind them.
It was a large room with windows on to the side street, furnished with ostentatious luxury, yet somehow giving an impression of emptiness. Lack of personal touches, Pollard decided, in spite of a vague untidiness. No books, hardly any odds and ends, not even a writing desk. A few pictures of the poster type. A tall, unusually thin woman got up and switched off a gigantic television set, a cigarette dangling from the comer of her mouth.
‘My wife,’ said Roy Garnish briefly. ‘Scotland Yard, Pam.’ His tone conveyed mock respect. ‘Plenty of chairs,’ he added, slumping into one himself. Pollard and Bendle waited for Pamela Garnish to resume her seat and then sat down themselves.
‘Get cracking, if you don’t mind, as I’ve an appointment at half-past five, and this business has wasted enough of my time already.’
‘We shan’t need to keep you that long, sir,’ Pollard told him, taking out his notebook. ‘It’s merely a question of checking the statements you and Mrs Garnish have already made. According to the receptionist at the Zenith-Excelsior in Polharbour, Mrs Garnish came in at about one o’clock last Saturday, and spoke to her before going through to the cocktail lounge.’
He turned enquiringly to Pamela, who sat with her head tilted back, watching the smoke from her cigarette wreathing upwards.
‘Quite correct, Chief Inspector,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Ac
tually it was three minutes past, if that helps you. I happened to notice the clock over the reception desk.’
‘And then, Mrs Garnish?’ he prompted.
‘I ordered a couple of drinks. My husband came in and we drank them. Then I went on ahead to the Grill Room to order lunch, while he rang the theatre to find out if they’d got a couple of seats for the show that afternoon.’
As he plodded on, deliberately laborious, Pollard noted how shrewdly Bendle had stationed himself in order to get a view of Roy Garnish with the light from two sets of wall lamps converging on him.
‘What the hell’s the sense of all this pettifogging detail?’ the latter interrupted impatiently.
Pollard registered the watchfulness in the small grey eyes set too close together, and adopted a defensive tone.
‘It’s official routine to check alibis in a murder case, sir, even when they are apparently quite straightforward. May we go on to your visit to the theatre now?’ He speeded up, to give the impression of being anxious to bring the interview to an end. ‘Did you both arrive there together?’
‘Obviously, since we drove down in the car. My wife went inside to collect the tickets I’d phoned for, while I parked the car. It was later than we thought.’
‘Did you meet again in the foyer, then?’ asked Pollard.
‘God!’ exploded Roy Garnish, staring truculently at him. ‘Of all the bloody silly nonsense and waste of time! As she was paying for the tickets I found her at the box office. Surprising, wasn’t it? And to save any more damn fool questions we went straight in to our seats — third row of the stalls — and sat out the show. Oh, a woman brought us tea in the second interval. Anything else you’d like to know?’
‘Thank you, sir,’ replied Pollard, watching Pamela Garnish pick up the lighted cigarette which had fallen from her hand on to the carpet, ‘that concludes the statements of the theatre staff. I think you told Inspector Dart that it was after six when you arrived back at Affacombe?’
The Affacombe Affair Page 18
