by J F Straker
‘That’s all right, thanks,’ Johnny said. ‘I’ll call back this evening.’
He doubted if Alice could help him to find Obi. Even if the two had known each other in the past, it was unlikely that they had kept in touch. But although he would not admit it to Polly, for Johnny the tracking down of Obi Bullock had become of only secondary importance. Like Mrs Frazer’s visitors, he was after the bullion, although he suspected his intention was more honest than theirs. He wanted the reward and the credit, not the gold itself. And if he could make the discovery in a solo run, before circumstances forced him to call on the police for aid, the credit at least would be the greater.
Slade had not mentioned in his letter to Obi the actual number of excerpts into which the directions had been split, but he had referred to Obi’s as the fourth. The word ‘dig’ suggested it might also be the last. One of the other three would be in the possession of Mrs Frazer’s ‘nice, polite gentleman’, and Johnny was moderately certain that Alice Slade had been sent another. He had hoped to persuade, trick, perhaps even frighten her into showing it to him. But it seemed that Alice’s possible contribution must wait. In the meantime there was at least one other excerpt to track down, and the most promising starting point that offered was the hospital. Someone there must have posted the letters, and that someone might conceivably recall the addressees. Posting a bunch of mail for a man after his death could not be an everyday occurrence.
The afternoon visitors were leaving when he entered the ward where Martin Slade had died. On his previous visit he had spoken to a pretty nurse from Barbados, and he looked for her now. She was there. But although she smiled a greeting, it damaged his ego to discover that the smile was engendered by her natural friendliness, and not from recognition. He had to introduce himself anew.
She remembered him then. But when he asked if she had posted letters for Slade after his death she shook her head. Neither before nor after his death, she said. He had been a difficult patient, unco-operative and disagreeable. Compassion had prompted the nursing staff to go out of their way to be friendly and sympathetic, but he had rejected all their advances. ‘He was suspicious of everyone,’ she said. ‘Even us. Nothing we did was ever right. I shouldn’t think he’d have trusted any of us to post letters for him. Not if they were important.’
‘Someone posted them,’ Johnny said. ‘Was he friendly with any of the other patients?’
‘I told you, he wasn’t friendly with anyone,’ she said. ‘About the only person he ever spoke to was Basil Cooke. He’s one of the orderlies. Perhaps they came from the same town, or something.’
‘Or the intimacy of the bottle and the bedpan,’ Johnny suggested. ‘Where do I find Mr Cooke?’
‘He’s off duty this afternoon. Anyway, if he had posted those letters I expect he would have mentioned it. It’d be unusual, wouldn’t it? You know — being asked to do it after the man had died.’
She smiled a goodbye and hurried from the ward. Disappointed, Johnny followed. She was busy with a trolley when he caught up with her in the corridor.
‘I gather Mr Slade didn’t have many visitors,’ he said.
‘One or two,’ she said. ‘Basil Cooke said they were policemen. I don’t know how he knew. I suppose Mr Slade must have told him. But no friends or family, if that’s what you mean. That’s what seemed so sad. You know — him dying, poor man, and no-one bothering.’
‘Except me,’ Johnny said.
She smiled. ‘Yes. Oh — and the vicar. He came.’
‘The vicar?’ Johnny whistled. ‘Sorry. But I bet he got a cool reception.’
The girl shrugged. ‘It was Mr Slade asked for him.’
Johnny’s first reaction was one of incredulity. But after he had said goodbye to the girl (not too briefly — Johnny was seldom brief with a pretty girl), incredulity waned. After all — why not? Men more hard-bitten than Slade had got religion on their deathbeds, so why not Slade? Was it, after all, a case of ‘love thine enemies’ — albeit in a rather misguided fashion?
He went in search of the vicarage.
The vicar was away. In London, his wife told Johnny, and she wasn’t expecting him back until the late evening. Johnny decided it wasn’t his day. But the woman confirmed that her husband had been given some letters to post by a patient at the hospital. No, she didn’t know the patient’s name or to whom the letters had been addressed. Her husband hadn’t said. But she remembered him telling her a few days later that the poor man had died.
Johnny thanked her, told her he would probably call back the following day for a chat with her husband, and caught the next train to Town. It was nearly seven o’clock when he reached Penbury House, and the office was closed, but he checked to see if there were any messages. There was only one, written in Jasmine’s round, schoolgirl script: ‘Miss Frazer telophoned and said to ring before five thirty or not to bother it wasn’t vitle.’ Johnny smiled as he read it. Jasmine’s misspelling and disregard of punctuation always amused him. Nicodemus found it irritating. Why do we keep her? Nicodemus had complained; she can’t type, she can’t spell, she’s always popping off to the loo, and she takes up a hell of a lot of space. We keep her, Johnny had replied, because she’s cheerful and willing and loyal, and doesn’t grumble at the pittance we pay her. If you want an efficient dolly-bird you’ll have to dig deeper.
Since it was too late to ring Polly, and he saw no sense in wasting money on a trunk call to Nicodemus in Liverpool when he had nothing positive to say, he ate a solitary and unimaginative dinner at the café round the corner, and then went by tube to Finsbury Park. The redhead had hinted that Alice Slade might be late. He hoped nine-thirty would be late enough. Otherwise he must fill in time at the local pub.
The day had been showery, but the rain was coming down in buckets when he left the station. Before he was half-way to Duxbury Road it was running off his plastic mac in streams, soaking his trousers so that they clung damply to his legs. He tucked his head down and quickened his step, dodging the puddles where the pavement had sunk. It was as he dodged round a particularly large puddle that he collided with a man hurrying in the opposite direction. His sore arm took the force of the impact, and he grimaced at the pain.
‘Sorry.’ It wasn’t the weather for a long apology. But the collision had been solid, and although it was as much the other’s fault as his own an apology was certainly due. ‘You all right?’
He didn’t look all right. He had been knocked against a brick wall, and he stayed against it and stared at Johnny. He wore no hat, and the rain bounced on his bald crown and trickled down his face. It was a thin face, the skin heavily pitted, and the expression puzzled Johnny. Fear? No, not that. Shock, more like. But no scowl of annoyance, no grimace of pain.
‘You all right?’ Johnny asked again.
The man ran a hand over his face, wiping away the raindrops. Then he nodded, pushed himself off the wall, and hurried away. Johnny turned to watch him. If he were drunk his gait looked steady enough. Johnny decided that the impact must temporarily have knocked him scatty. But it was odd he had gone without speaking. One would have expected either apology or reproof.
He hurried on to No. 108. As before, the front door was ajar. Not bothering to ring, Johnny went in and knocked at the second door on the right, the one the redhead had indicated. He waited, but there was no response. Damn the woman! he thought. I come all this way, get myself drenched, and she still isn’t in. She’s probably holed up with her boyfriend, waiting for the rain to stop. And when will that be?
He knocked again, annoyance adding weight to the blow. Impatiently he rattled the door knob. As it twisted he felt the door give; he pushed it further, and was surprised to see that the light was on. It was not unusual for people to discourage burglars by leaving the lights on when they went out, but surely such a person would take the simple precaution of locking the door? So perhaps she wasn’t out. Perhaps she had merely slipped upstairs to visit one of the other inmates.
‘Mrs Slade,
’ he called. And again, louder, ‘Mrs Slade.’
There was no reply, and he opened the door wide. The room was large and comfortably furnished: wall to wall carpeting, two modern armchairs, a combined record player and television set, a divan on which the blankets looked rumpled. Had Alice Slade been entertaining her boyfriend? At the far end of the room were two doors. One, he assumed, led to a kitchenette, the other was probably a cupboard. A long chest topped by a triple mirror apparently doubled as a dressing table.
Johnny hesitated. If Alice Slade had had a letter similar to Obi’s she would be reluctant to show it to him, and he lacked the authority to compel her. He was no longer a policeman; he could threaten her with the law, but she might not be so easily intimidated. Not if she were the woman her husband had so unpleasantly depicted. This, then, was his opportunity. He would be committing a felony — but what the hell? She wouldn’t call the police. Not if she had that letter tucked away in her possession.
He tried the chest first. There were four compartments, all of them full, but there were no letters, no documents of any sort. The cupboard was large, with drawers down one side and a hanging compartment at the other. Experienced in the ways of burglars, he started with the bottom drawer and worked his way up. No joy there. He leant against the drawers to close them as he rummaged hastily through the dresses on their hangers, then knelt to examine the shoes below. Under the divan he found a cardboard dress box, and his hopes rose when he removed the lid and saw that this was where she kept her meagre correspondence. He was sorting through it when he heard voices and footsteps on the stairs, and he shoved the box under the divan and hurried to the door. He had left it ajar. Now he closed it and stood listening, wondering how to explain his presence if this was Alice Slade.
The voices and the footsteps came on down. A man and a woman. In the hall they paused. ‘I’d better ring her,’ the man said. ‘It’s late, she’ll be wondering. Mind if I use the blower?’
‘Help yourself, dear.’ Johnny recognized the redhead’s voice. ‘But don’t expect me to wait. It’s chilly down here.’
‘It’d be chilly anywhere in that,’ the man said.
There was the sound of kissing, a smothered laugh from the woman, and the slap of slingbacks on the drugget as she went back up the stairs. Relieved, Johnny waited. The woman had gone, but there was still the man. If he were a frequent visitor to the house he would probably know Alice. The sound of movement in her room might prompt him to look in.
He was speaking on the telephone: a rich, smooth voice with a West Country burr, explaining how they had sat for hours over dinner, talking shop, and that afterwards the others had wanted to continue the discussion. He could hardly refuse, could he? They were important clients, and business was business. But they were through now, thank goodness! If he wasn’t drowned in the downpour he would be home in half an hour.
The receiver clicked back on its cradle. As the man’s footsteps clattered down the steps into the night Johnny turned to survey the room. He had covered it pretty thoroughly, he thought; there was nowhere to look now except in the kitchenette. If the letter wasn’t there he would have to hang around until Alice returned, and hope that he could persuade her to be co-operative.
It was no kitchenette, but a large kitchen-cum-bathroom, with a refrigerator and an electric cooker, a sink and draining-board under the window, and plenty of cupboard space. The bath was medium sized, and had a bedspread draped over it. Johnny tried the cupboards first. His mother invariably kept money or valuables in the kitchen cupboard, hidden in jars or under a pile of cleaning cloths, ignoring his repeated warning that this was where a thief might expect to find them. But if Alice Slade had anything to hide it was not in the cupboards, and after a peep into the oven and the refrigerator there was nowhere else to look. Except in the bath.
It was such an unlikely hiding place that another man might have ignored it. But Johnny had been trained to ignore nothing. He twitched the bedspread aside and stood aghast. The bath had been used as a hiding place, but not for a letter. It contained the fully clothed body of a woman. And although there were no obvious signs of violence, Johnny needed no doctor to tell him she was dead.
His immediate reaction was to run. He was out of the kitchen and half-way across the sitting-room before sanity stopped him. He must not panic — he knew he must not panic — and he forced himself to return to the kitchen and look at her again. She lay half on her side, half on her back, her legs twisted grotesquely and her head slumped forward: a small, plump woman in the middle thirties, her brown hair dusted with grey. In life she could have been attractive. With the cold grey mask of death on her face she evoked in Johnny a vacillating mixture of pity and revulsion.
Reluctantly he touched her forehead. Its waxen coldness suggested she had been dead for some hours. That would be in his favour were he to report the death, as duty demanded he should; the risk of being held responsible would be minimal. He could bring witnesses to prove that just over an hour previously he had been dining in the café, and that before that he had been in Westleigh. And why would he kill a complete stranger? But could he afford to report it? To do so would necessitate explaining the reason for his presence there — and the fact that he had entered and searched the room illegally was only part of it. His major worry was that the police would take over the investigation that Obi’s letter had started. There would be no reward, no credit. It was even possible that the agency would lose its licence.
It was that last thought that decided him. Much as he disliked shirking a social duty, this was one he simply could not afford. He replaced the bedspread, grabbed a dishcloth, and began systematically to wipe his fingerprints from everything he had touched or might have touched. It was imperative that his presence there should remain undetected. If some time were to elapse before the body was discovered it was possible that there could be uncertainty about the exact hour of death. That could put his alibi in jeopardy.
It wasn’t an easy job — he had handled just about everything — and it took time. But thoroughness had become more important than speed. He no longer feared interruption; Alice Slade was dead. And if she were to have a visitor — well, the door was locked. If the visitor’s knock went unanswered he would go away, assuming that Alice was out.
Working in the kitchen was a ghoulish business. After a while it seemed to Johnny that he could actually smell the dead flesh, and it was a relief to be back in the living-room, with the door shutting him away from the corpse. Or perhaps it was guilt that made him feel bad. This was his first deliberate flouting of the law. As he saw it, necessity had forced him to it. But necessity could not quell his conscience.
No-one saw him leave. The rain was still belting down, and now he almost welcomed it; it afforded an excuse for haste, to hide his face from other pedestrians. But waiting at the bus stop was an unnerving experience, almost as unnerving as if he had actually murdered the woman. Had someone in the queue, someone sheltering in a shop doorway or standing at a window, noticed him as he turned the corner from Duxbury Road? Was there something about guilt that made a man conspicuous, that would prompt them to remember him when news of the murder broke? Would he have done better to return as he had come, by tube, where the crowds were greater?
He relaxed slightly in the bus. After all, he told himself, the only sin he had committed was one of omission in neglecting to report a crime. The police might not view that lightly, but there was no cause to burden his conscience. When he came to change buses he felt so much easier that he went into a telephone kiosk and dialled 999. With a handkerchief covering the mouthpiece (how corny can one get? he thought) he asked for the police and informed them that he had unwittingly discovered a corpse and where they might find it. When the desk sergeant asked for his name he rang off. Now they can get on with it, he thought, and no skin off my nose. My conscience is clear. I have rectified the omission.
As he travelled the final part of the journey back to his digs he wondered about Alic
e Slade. Who had killed her? And why? Had her death any connection with the missing bullion — and, if so, was Mrs Frazer’s ‘nice, polite gentleman’ behind it? That, surely, was too wild an assumption — except that it would explain why he had not found Slade’s letter in the apartment. The murderer could have taken it, and he would not have done that unless he had come for it. On the other hand, there could be other explanations to account for the letter being missing — Alice could have left it with her boyfriend, for one just as there must be other explanations for her death.
If only he had searched the apartment on his first visit, Johnny reflected, when Alice was out. He should have waited until the redhead had gone back upstairs, and then tried his luck. It was possible, of course, that Alice had locked her door when she went out. But ...
Jesus O’Grady! The redhead!
It seemed to Johnny that the bus had come to an abrupt halt, jerking him from his relative composure. Seconds elapsed before he realized that the bus was still travelling, that nothing untoward had happened. But the woman next to him was eyeing him strangely. Had he sworn aloud? He turned to the window, trying to shrink into his clothes. That bloody redhead! He had completely forgotten her. But she was unlikely to have forgotten him, he had stood with the light full on him while they talked. Under police interrogation she would remember him as the stranger who had come looking for Alice that afternoon, and had said he would call back later. The Identikit boys would get weaving, and if her powers of description were anywhere near the norm — well, how long would it be before one of his former buddies at the Yard recognized him?
4
‘All right,’ Johnny said. ‘So I boobed. But it’s not every day one uncovers a body in the bath, dammit! I mean, I’d a lot on my mind. I clean forgot the bloody woman.’
