Prisoner at the Bar

by Roderic Jeffries

  “Yes.”

  Whicheck suddenly sneezed three times, each sneeze an explosive burst of sound. He hurriedly dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He sneezed twice more. “Hay-fever,” he said. “I thought of suffering a course of injections, but people say they’re useless.” He screwed up his nose, tried to sneeze, but couldn’t. After a while, he tucked the handkerchief up the sleeve of his coat. “Sorry about that, but my sneezes wait for no man. Now. You were there in a car on Monday evening. At what time?”

  “I can’t say exactly, but it must have been close to nine when we arrived. I expect I was there half an hour. I didn’t see or hear anything, but I know the negative evidence could be of some use.”

  “Of course. I suppose there could have been other people around there even though you didn’t see them?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be that certain?”

  Again Bladen hesitated.

  “Did you get out of the car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I saw a bush move in an odd manner so I checked everywhere with a torch.”

  “You were really searching for a peeping Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “What made you think there might be one around?”

  “I’ve already said, the bushes moved in an odd manner.”

  “You would seem to have come to a pretty quick conclusion. Had you been there before and seen someone or something?”

  Bladen’s “No,” was immediate and instinctive. He remembered how Katherine had been so certain people would rush to put the wrong construction on events. Whicheck’s expression suggested nothing, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine which way his mind was working.

  “How carefully did you search the area?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Did you actually go into the bays between the bushes?”

  “I went into one, I think.”

  “Could you say on a plan which one it was?”

  “No. I’ve no idea.”

  “Thanks for coming along, Mr. Bladen.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  Whicheck’s voice remained calm and even. “You, more than most, know how we work and how no one knows at this stage what is, and what isn’t, important. The lady’s name will not be disclosed by us unless there should ever be good cause for doing so.”

  “It won’t be disclosed by me either.” Bladen’s voice sharpened. Thin prickles of sweat stood out on the palms of his hands and absurdly it occurred to him that according to his reactions he might have been the guilty man, trying to hide his tracks.

  Whicheck made no reply.

  “Who was the dead man?” asked Bladen.

  “Thompson. James Thompson.”

  The name was too common to suggest any special significance to Bladen.

  “There’s a specially tragic face to this case.” Whicheck dropped the pencil on to the desk. “It seems Thompson hasn’t a relative or friend in the world. He was an only son and no one knows of any aunts or uncles. I haven’t had time yet to go out to see the people who own the place where he worked so it’s just possible they can help, but right now it looks as if here’s a man who dies and there isn’t a single person in the world who gives a damn. Don’t you think that begins to destroy a man’s faith in the divine position of humanity?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “But I expect you’ve got very much more sharply defined ideas on that sort of subject than I have. As my wife says, I’m much too earthy a person to try to worry about the hereafter or the hereinbefore.”

  Bladen stood up.

  Thanks for coming along, Mr. Bladen.”

  “It’s a duty.” As soon as he had spoken, Bladen thought he must have sounded insufferably pompous. It was a long time since people openly spoke about doing their duty.

  “I wish more people thought like that. Still, not many are as dedicated to law and order as you are, Mr. Bladen.”

  Bladen looked sharply at Whicheck, but the detective inspector’s expression remained urbane. Bladen left and was accompanied to the head of the stairs by the other. He went down and out to the street and now that the pavement was in full shade he appreciated the cold snap there was to the wind. He began to walk.

  He was not a man who often wondered what other people thought of him, but he did try to imagine the kind of figure he had cut in the detective’s eyes. As he reached the corner of the road, he shrugged his shoulders. What the hell did it matter? Any detective of experience knew enough about human nature not to be surprised or shocked by anything. As one of the more pessimistic psychologists had said, ‘normal’ human behaviour was, in fact, quite abnormal: take the lid of any adult mind and you’d find stews galore. Yet in this particular instance, the ironic thing was that whatever Whicheck did think, he was wrong. The only thing exchanged in the car had been a kiss.

  Back in chambers, Premble reported — with a trace of disapproval in his voice — that a lady had twice telephoned to speak to him but had refused to give her name so she could be rung back. He went through to his room. Wraight was no longer there — a blonde, a brunette, or a redhead? If Wraight took a car down Lovers’ Lane there would be no doubt about what went on inside: the only question would be that of degree. Two years ago, Wraight had been left thirty-one thousand pounds and there were those who thought there would be nothing left inside another two years.

  He picked up the telephone and asked Premble for an outside line. He called Forden House and Rollo answered.

  Whilst he waited to speak to Katherine, he tapped on the desk with his fingers. What did Rollo think about his telephone calls to Katherine? Backstairs gossip was said to be pretty vicious. Why the hell, he suddenly thought, had he taken to questioning everything?

  Katherine answered the call.

  “I wondered if it were you who’d been trying to get hold of me?” he said.

  “Yes, it was, Bob. Please, don’t.”

  He stopped tapping on the desk. “I’m sorry, it’s too late.”

  “Oh! Oh, God!”

  “I didn’t name any names.”

  Her voice was sharp from worry. “But you must have done if you told them what happened.”

  “I only gave them my name.”

  “What… what did they say?”

  “Nothing to give you a second’s worry. The man I saw thanked me and promised nothing would go any further. I swear there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  “Bob, a constable’s been here. It was Thompson who was killed.”

  “The detective inspector did say his name…” With a sense of shock, he realised the meaning of what she’d told him. “D’you mean it was your gardener?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why didn’t you know that before?”

  “We just thought he was away ill. He quite often used to get what he called his ‘turns’ and wouldn’t come along for two or three days: he was just sufficiently simple for it not to be like dealing with an ordinary person. Bob, I’ve got to see you.”

  “How about lunch?”

  “Yes. I’ll meet you in the usual place at twelve… I wish to God you hadn’t said anything.” She rang off.

  He replaced the receiver. She was obviously very greatly distressed, but did the identification of Thompson give her any greater cause for distress? Surely not? Her worry was that Elmer would learn she’d been with him in a car in Lovers’ Lane and would immediately jump to the wrong conclusions. The fact that the dead man turned out to be Thompson wasn’t going to make it any more likely she would be identified as the woman in his car.

  It was an odd sort of a coincidence, he mused, that he should have been with her in Lovers’ Lane and her gardener should have been murdered at the same spot and on the same evening. It went to show how, in life, the wildest coincidences occurred.

  Chapter 7

  Whicheck signed the last of the P24 forms, listing the claimable expenses
of each man in the detective force over the past month. He sighed. Form-filling annoyed him, to such an extent that he often became careless and put the wrong thing in the wrong line, thereby provoking a sarcastic letter from H.Q.

  He stood up and walked over to the window. The afternoon sunshine streamed down into the courtyard and splashed across the cars and vans parked there, presenting a sharp contrast with Lovers’ Lane at night and a man who skulked from bush to bush as he tried to watch couples making love. His job, Whicheck reflected not for the first time, was one that provided the sharpest contrasts. The normal world, the one the ordinary citizen knew, was relatively peaceful, orderly, and civilised. Most of the time he was in the ordinary world. Then some brutal crime would be committed and he would be plunged into a world of barbarity, where force ruled, the strong succeeded and the weak perished, where men’s minds were sewers and man’s inhumanity to man was endless.

  He thought about Bladen. As a counsel, Bladen was sharp but correct. He fought hard for his clients, as any worthwhile counsel would, but did not press his fights to the point of attacking the police beyond reasonable limits in the witness box. He would never twist the facts to suit his case, although he would extract every last permissible ounce of favourable evidence from them. He respected the law and did his best to uphold it in his work. Until now, he, Whicheck, had always thought of the other as the epitome of professional middle-class respectability, a first-class lawyer whose only fault was, perhaps, a little too much satisfaction that the law he helped administer was perfect: after all, no one could seriously argue that it was not biased in favour of the class of person he represented, simply because when a man was born respectable and had money he knew fewer temptations to become a criminal. Yet that picture of Bladen became very hazy when one knew he had been in a car in Lovers’ Lane on Monday night and refused to name the woman, which could only mean she was married.

  He left the window and returned to his desk. Work was piling up all the time, yet he had to concentrate on the killing. Quite wrongly, the public treated murder as a crime of unique horribleness and therefore most murders received an inordinate amount of publicity. It followed that any failure to solve a murder and make an arrest received much adverse publicity.

  He used the internal telephone to tell Eastbrook he was going out to Forden House. He then left his room and went downstairs and out to his car in the courtyard. The car was becoming very battered and he thought that it quite definitely was time he bought another. All he needed was money.

  He enjoyed the drive from Paraford Cross to Tenlington. The countryside looked beautiful and peaceful in the sunshine and offered a sharp contrast to the noise, smell, and dirt of the town. That the countryside was not entirely a pastoral heaven was brought home to him when he began to sneeze so violently that he had to stop the car until the spasm passed. He cursed. Hay-fever was an amusing complaint to everyone but those who suffered from it.

  Forden House struck him as ugly, in a reasonably pleasant way. The building was heavy in style and the square castellated tower over the porch suggested an attempt to play at castles. The wing, in line with the main part but narrower and only two floors high, looked like an afterthought, stuck on at the last moment. The place, he thought, would originally have looked much more in keeping in Hampstead, yet the years had helped to tone things down. The drive, which went between narrow herbaceous borders and lawns that were backed by rhododendron bushes, formed a circle around a flowerbed and then continued on and round to the main gates.

  He knocked on the front door and a butler in black coat and striped trousers opened it. For no readily discernible reason, Whicheck found butlers tremendous figures of fun: they appealed exactly to his sense of humour. “My name’s Detective Inspector Whicheck.”

  The butler looked a shade uncertain. Whicheck reckoned he was trying to make up his mind whether he was dealing with a tradesman or an honest, but humble, citizen.

  “I want to have a word with the staff about Thompson. And is either Mr. or Mrs. Curson in?”

  “Mr. Curson is in London.”

  “And Mrs. Curson?”

  “She is out to lunch.”

  Whicheck went into the house and when in the hall he looked at the furnishings, noticing their obvious value. Being a man with a natural sense of taste, he also found a suggestion of vulgarity in their display. Rollo led the way across the length of the hall and past the stairs, then down the left-hand corridor to the servants’ wing. Between the owner’s accommodation and the servants’ was a green baize door which afforded Whicheck more quiet amusement thanks to his irreverent attitude towards such things.

  The interview in the butler’s pantry was brief. Rollo — a perfect name for the man, thought Whicheck — had never, unless forced to, had anything to do with Thompson. Whether this was a natural dislike or a question of social etiquette was not clear.

  Mrs. Rollo was plump, pleasant, and in character a complete contrast to her husband.

  “I always felt a bit sorry for Jim,” she said, “even though there was something about him that made me… well, kind of shiver. I used to tell myself that it wasn’t as if he could help the way he was, but…” She spoke quickly, rushing the words. “I’ve never heard him talk of relatives or friends. I don’t mind saying, I used to think on what a lonely life he led. Not right, is it, for anyone to have to be that lonely? But then maybe it didn’t faze him too much: some likes their own company.”

  “Did you ever hear of anyone visiting him at home?”

  “No, I never did.” She began to play with her wedding ring, twisting it round on her strangely elegant finger. “I had to go to his cottage once, to give him a message. I’ll say it straight out, no one ought to have to live in such a place, no matter what the rent is.”

  “He’d been away for a day or two, hadn’t he?”

  “That’s right. Wasn’t around on the Saturday or the Monday. No one thought nothing of that on account of him often not turning up for a day or two. He used to have ‘turns’.”

  Whicheck thanked her and asked who else worked in the house. She said the chauffeur was up in London and then gave him the names and addresses of two women who lived in the village and came and helped in the house on alternate days. The staff, he thought, was only a tithe of what it would have been in the old days, yet to be able to pay their wages and maintain this house, plus a flat in London, called for the spending power of a millionaire. What was it like having so much money that one never had to wonder if one could afford anything? Sages were wont to say that money couldn’t buy happiness: sages were usually poor.

  He left the house, having been escorted to the front door by Mrs. Rollo, and had just reached his car which was on the far side of the circular flowerbed when a Mini drove up and stopped immediately in front of the porch. A woman, very elegant in a simple manner, got out. She looked at him and he was about to go over to introduce himself when Mrs. Rollo came out of the house and spoke to her.

  She was almost certainly Mrs. Curson — he was sure he had seen her photograph in the local newspaper — and she had the perfect peaches-and-cream beauty that was often called classical English. She also had blonde hair.

  Whilst it had naturally occurred to him when Bladen had said he was in Lovers’ Lane on Monday that Bladen might also be the B referred to in Thompson’s notebook as having been there on Wednesday the eighteenth of September, it certainly had not occurred to him that the C might be Mrs. Curson. It did so now. It was exceedingly difficult to make any sort of comparison from memory, but her hair did seem to be the same colour as the single strand that had been caught up in Thompson’s fingers.

  Satisfied Mrs. Rollo had finished explaining who he was, he went over to the Mini.

  “Good afternoon,” she said. “I understand, Inspector Whicheck, you’re trying to find out if poor Thompson had any relatives or friends?”

  “That’s right, Mrs. Curson,” he answered. There was an air of tension about her — something more
than the natural reaction to finding herself caught up in a murder case?

  “I’m afraid I know nothing that would help you, but perhaps you’d like to come inside for a moment?”

  “Thanks very much.”

  He followed her into the house. Mrs. Rollo shut the front door. They crossed the hall to a very large drawing room and Whicheck, who knew a little about furniture, immediately noticed the bureau-bookcase and the magnificent flower-inlaid treble settee. Those two choice pieces on their own would make his salary for five years look silly. Unlike some, however, he suffered no bitter resentment because the favoured few could enjoy such things: he was merely glad there were some fine pieces of furniture not yet entombed in a museum.

  “Would you care for some tea or coffee?”

  “I’d really enjoy a cup of coffee, Mrs. Curson.”

  Mrs. Rollo, who had been standing in the doorway, left and closed the door. If Mrs. Curson had been the woman with Bladen, what had gone wrong with her marriage? Was the husband to blame, or despite her apparent sincerity of character was she just a natural bitch, always hurrying to warm other loins? Looks could be so deceptive. The most virginally beautiful woman he’d ever met had been making fifteen thousand a year, tax free, because her clients couldn’t resist that air of virginity, even while they knew its falsity. “We’re trying to discover if Thompson had any relatives or friends, Mrs. Curson. So far, we can’t trace anyone.”

  “As I said, I don’t know of anyone. He always seemed to be completely on his own.” She opened a chased silver cigarette box. “Do you smoke?”

  “I do, thanks very much.” He stood up and crossed to the small pie-crust table. As he took a cigarette from the box, he noticed her hand was shaking slightly. He flicked open his lighter for her.

  He returned to his chair. “Can you suggest anyone we might contact to see if they can help?”

  She drew on her cigarette. “My husband first employed him five years ago: he’s a wonderful gardener. But in five years, we’ve learned nothing about him.”