Death Drops the Pilot

by George Bellairs

Leo, full of solicitude for Esther Liddell now, had brought her another whisky. She turned as Littlejohn called.

  “Was Grebe dead when you sent for the doctor?”

  “I don’t think so. He was gurgling in his throat. I think...I think the wound was in his lung.”

  “What kind of knife did you use? Keep your chin up... Don’t think of the crime. What kind of knife?”

  “A Bowie knife that was my husband’s.”

  “I see. Did you leave the doctor alone with the body?”

  Horrocks was interfering again.

  “Why all this, Inspector? I’ve told you I’ll give you a full written account.”

  “Don’t interfere.”

  Littlejohn thrust Horrocks forcibly away.

  “Mrs. Liddell...You left the doctor alone?”

  “He asked me to look out at the gates of the yard and be sure nobody was about whilst he moved the body.”

  “He was going to throw it in the sea?”

  “He was the only friend I could trust. That’s why I sent for him. He said he’d help me. If we didn’t get rid of the body, I’d be had up for murder. Then there was the ferry. As you said, if the captain was missing it would bring a hue and cry and probably both of us would be involved.

  “So I took the ferry over, Littlejohn. My motive was, I confess, to confuse matters and thus protect Esther. I put on Grebe’s cap and coat. I’m about his height. In any case, it was dark enough to pull it off. Then, as I’d got in the river, I suddenly realized, it wouldn’t be as easy on the Falbright side with all the light. Here, at Elmer’s Creek, it’s gloomy at the pierhead; there it’s as bright as day. I didn’t know what to do. The Jenny made up my mind for me. I thought I knew the river and was used to handling craft. But not the Jenny. She’s an old-stager and won’t answer her helm promptly. I was silly to try. I beached her and had to bolt for it, just as you said.”

  “And met Jumping Joe.”

  “You’re not insinuating...I saw nobody. I’d told Esther to get home as quickly as possible and I did the same when I got ashore.”

  “And you did it all for Mrs. Liddell. Well, well...”

  “No need to be offensive, Littlejohn.”

  “I’m not being. I know, Horrocks.”

  “You know what?”

  Another diversion. The entrance of Cromwell and Captain Bacon. Bacon’s face was a picture. It seemed to have changed its shape. Red, shifty, alarmed, like someone who’d been in mischief. Cromwell’s face was set and firm, like one who’d fought a battle and won it. As they entered the room, Bacon turned and said to Cromwell what was now becoming like the refrain of a popular song: “I shall hold you responsible...”

  The Chief Constable looked up suddenly, as though someone were using a phrase to which he’d sole rights. Cram was utterly confused. He didn’t know what to do. First Mrs. Liddell, now Horrocks. He wondered if it would be Fothergill’s turn next.

  Cromwell handed the warrant to Littlejohn, who took it and eyed it over.

  “Alexander Horrocks, I arrest you for the murder of John Grebe.”

  There was dead silence as Littlejohn cautioned Horrocks and arrested him. Then pandemonium broke out. Above it all, Bacon apologizing to his friend the doctor.

  “Cromwell said if I didn’t, they’d hold me responsible. I told him I’d hold them responsible for it all...You understand, don’t you?”

  Horrocks turned his back on him.

  “Now, Littlejohn. Tell me what I’ve done other than answer a medical call and help a friend.”

  “Help a friend? Help a friend, did you say, Horrocks? You’re an accessory on your own confession. You disposed of the body. You helped Mrs. Liddell to evade justice.”

  “They can’t hang me for that. I know it’s serious and it’s unfortunate it’s all come out.”

  “It’s unfortunate it didn’t work out as you’d planned, you mean. All this business of the magistrates trying to push us into arresting Fowler for murder was done on your instigation, I’m sure.”

  “He persuaded us all. He was very convincing.”

  Bacon, finding his old friend on a murder charge, was now ready with his own stab in the back.

  “But that’s not all. You tried to persuade Mrs. Liddell to take her own life if I arrested her. You were sure your share would come out if she stood her trial. So you gave her poison to take in emergency. You gave her your ring and she wore it with the receptacle on the inside of her finger to make it look like a wedding-ring.”

  He took out the ring, pressed the minute catch, and the locket flew open. It contained white crystals.

  “Looks like potassium cyanide. But Mrs. Liddell was of better fibre. You’ve got to take your medicine, Dr. Horrocks.”

  “You’ve accused me of murder when all I did was make sure Grebe was dead and help Mrs. Liddell dispose of the body. I felt sorry for her at the time and acted impulsively.”

  “You made sure Grebe was dead. That’s just what you did. Grebe wasn’t dead when you arrived. Far from it. Let me read you the police surgeon’s account of the wound.”

  Littlejohn opened his notebook.

  “All right, Cromwell.”

  Horrocks’s eye was on the door, but Cromwell stepped forward, slipped his arm through the doctor’s, and handcuffed his own wrist to Horrocks’s.

  “This is an outrage. I’ll make you pay for this.”

  Littlejohn was waiting with his open notebook.

  “Perhaps this will explain why I’m holding you so firmly, doctor. The wound was a strange one. A savage gash, and then a long tapering wound, right to the heart. It is difficult to even guess the type of weapon. Like a stiletto wound with part of the handle thrust in as well.”

  Horrocks turned pale now. He knew.

  “If you don’t mind, Leo, just ask the constable in the hall to come in and bring what he’s holding for me.”

  The bobby, who’d had a drink in secret during his waiting, entered, trying to keep his distance lest the Inspector smell the beer on his breath. He handed over the walking stick and departed.

  “What are you doing with that, and where’ve you got it from? It’s mine.”

  Littlejohn gripped the stick in one hand and gave it a twist and pulled the handle with the other. It divided and revealed a short, strong blade.

  “A swordstick, by gad! You never told me it was a swordstick, Horrocks.”

  Bacon sounded grieved at this lack of confidence.

  “Shut up, Bacon.”

  “Really, Horrocks...”

  It was pathetic.

  “Grebe wasn’t dead when you arrived, doctor. So you got rid of Mrs. Liddell, and finished him off with this sword. I don’t know your real motive, but I think I can guess. You and Grebe were the sole beneficiaries from the drug racket before the war and you made a lot of money. Thieves must have fallen out. I can’t see your quarrelling for love. It must have been the money, or else Grebe was in a position to blackmail you. Certainly Mrs. Liddell’s blow with the Bowie knife wasn’t what killed Grebe. She played right in your hands by sending for you. You could have put him right, or sent him to hospital to be put right. Instead, you had him in your power and you finished him off, just as you did Jumping Joe. You can cool off in gaol till we find out the real motive. We won’t be long doing that. I must also arrest you, Esther Liddell...”

  And he went through the usual formula again. Attempted murder, this time. The lawyers must fight out the rest of the complications in her case.

  The Chief Inspector and Cromwell promised to follow the Chief Constable, Dixon, and the bobby from Falbright who crossed in a police launch with Horrocks and Esther Liddell. Everything seemed to fall flat after their departure. In spite of the noise of the patrons of the inn, excited by the night’s events, and the flashes of the press photographers who got busy as the guilty pair went out into the night, the tension had gone, the case was solved, and Littlejohn and Cromwell would soon be on their way again.

  Bacon, deprived of hi
s boon companion, the one against whom he’d signed a warrant for arrest for murder, threw a stricken look in the direction of Horrocks’s usual chair, drank up his whisky, walked into the darkness, and without another word went back to his moth-eaten Hall and his shabby squiredom. Fothergill, the blackmailer, the public servant who held half the village in his power through reading their private letters, sat neglected where Dixon had left him on a seat by the wall. He had lost all importance and prestige, even at darts. He was on his way out to compulsory retirement and the digging of his own acres on the moss. Nobody spoke to him as he passed through the hall and left the Barlow Arms for the last time.

  “Can I go?” he asked Littlejohn.

  “Yes.”

  That was all. And Fothergill went.

  For Leo, there was a bit of added excitement, a flash in the pan, before he went back to the Saracen’s Head. “I’ll look after things while you’re away,” he told Esther Liddell when they took her out. “When you come back, I’ll be there with the place still ship-shape.”

  On his way for a drink in the public bar, where he also hoped to be feted by the gentlemen of the press, he met his offspring, Leo, back from hospital.

  “Hullo, dad,” said Leo. And as he said it, he palmed the two pound notes he’d cadged from his sister.

  “What are those? Give them back to her. You’re going to work now for any money you get.”

  “Sez you!”

  Whereupon Leo Fowler, Senior, gave his son a clip on the jaw which rendered him unconscious.

  “You don’t know how to look after your money, my girl,” her father told Lucy when she appeared again. “You’re giving up this filthy job and coming to the Saracen’s Head with me. You can look after things while I sit at the door and smoke my pipe and watch the stream roll past.”

  “I’m getting married. His name’s Fred Heath.”

  “You can both come and live there, then...”

  And they did! Lucy bought the pub with John Grebe’s legacy.

  At the Falbright police station, the Chief Constable allowed Dr. Horrocks to smoke a final cigar before retiring to his cell. Colonel Cram was a bit apologetic towards the doctor after all, they were of the same class and had fished and shot together. The Chief looked as though at any time he might wake up and find it all a dreadful nightmare.

  “After all,” he said later, “he was an old friend and a JP. I never imagined he’d do me such a dirty trick. It wasn’t playing the game.”

  For Horrocks dropped dead shortly after smoking the cigar he’d specially prepared for just such an occasion. He did manage to do his best for Esther before the poison started to act, however.

  “She merely gave Grebe a scratch. She was off her head with worry. Blackmail, loneliness, and I’d not treated her very kindly myself. She thought a lot of me. But I’d got older and wanted peace without women mixed up in it. I finished Grebe off when I arrived. He’d collapsed from shock which made it easy. Esther thought he was dead, but he’d have soon come to. His age and the fact that he wasn’t at all well had knocked him out temporarily.”

  A constable took it all straight down on the typewriter as Horrocks spoke.

  “I’d arranged to meet Esther near the signpost. She never said a word against me when Littlejohn was questioning me. She thought a lot of me, that girl. Jumping Joe must have heard us talking near the signpost and recognized Esther’s voice. He started putting it round about Esther meeting Grebe’s ghost. He even approached her and she gave him some money to keep him quiet. I couldn’t have that. Once in the murder business, the rest was easy. I killed Joe, too. Neither Joe nor Grebe was any good physically. As a doctor, I knew they’d only a year or two to live. Funny...And I had to kill them instead of just waiting...You’ve got all that down, constable? I’ll sign it...Be quick...By the way, as regards my motive for killing Grebe, when my estate’s dealt with, you’ll understand...Good night.”

  He was right. They found that Horrocks and Grebe had thirty thousand pounds in a joint account at the bank, both to sign, benefit to the survivor. The proceeds, or what was left of them, from the dope business of 1938. Horrocks was found to be hard up apart from the little joint nest egg. Perhaps he was ready to ask Grebe for another share-out when he found it better to finish off a half-dead Grebe and get all instead of half.

  Esther Liddell, on the strength of Horrocks’s dying testimony, had her case put nice and tidy to a jury by a clever lawyer. She looked nice and tidy herself and to see her in court you’d have thought that the life she’d left at the Saracen’s Head was bondage and what faced her was freedom.

  She got seven years, and if she behaves herself, perhaps she’ll get away with four or five.

  If you enjoyed Death Drops the Pilot, you might be interested in A Knife for Harry Dodd, also by George Bellairs.

  Extract from A Knife for Harry Dodd by George Bellairs

  1—Trouble at Mon Abri

  Two women were sitting in the drawing-room of Mon Abri, a small bungalow on the main road between Helstonbury and Brande. The lights were on and you could see inside. They never drew the curtains, thus giving a peep-show for passers-by.

  They were obviously mother and daughter. By looking at the old one you could tell what the young one would be like in twenty years’ time. They sat there among a lot of modern furniture, pink silk cushions with pink parchment lampshades to match, illuminated by a lot of little lamps instead of one from the ceiling. The old woman was knitting, her back straight, her lips moving, counting the stitches. The younger one was reading a novelette. She had her legs tucked under her in the large chair, and from time to time she helped herself from a box of chocolates on a little table nearby. In the hearth an electric fire glowed; two hot bars and beneath them a lot of illuminated cardboard coal and a fan revolving to make it flicker.

  The younger of the two still bore traces of good looks in a lush kind of way. She was small, with large eyes and yellow dyed hair. Her face was round, good-natured and self-indulgent, her figure full and rather attractive for those who liked them that way. A smell of cheap powder hung around her. The way she was sitting showed a good five inches of pink flesh above the top of her stocking. The old woman leaned forward and, with a tightening of the lips, decently adjusted her daughter’s dress.

  Mrs. Nicholls, the old one, was the thinner of the two, a worried-looking woman with a mass of white bobbed hair and always dressed in black. She wore rimless spectacles and seemed to be ever on the alert, as though expecting something to happen at any minute. She knitted interminably. Scarves, jumpers, stockings, gloves, caps. It kept her arthritic finger-joints from stiffening and found her something to do to while away the time.

  The radio was going at full blast. A smart comedian cracking jokes and pausing for laughter, which came regularly like a roar created by some monotonous machine. Neither woman heeded the wireless. It provided a background of noise; otherwise it might just as well not have been on.

  ‘Is that the telephone?’

  The old woman cocked an car in the direction of the door. Above the chatter of the comic they could just hear the rhythmic noise of the bell.

  ‘Shut that thing off…’

  The younger woman lazily turned and flicked up the knob. The bell kept ringing.

  ‘Hello…’

  The old woman’s voice grew affected.

  ‘Hello…’

  She listened, gingerly laid down the instrument, and returned to the room.

  ‘It’s Dodd. He wants you…Quickly, he says…’

  She always called him Dodd when he wasn’t there. It was her way of showing lack of respect for him. Her daughter, Dorothy, had worked in Dodd’s office in Cambridge until six years ago. Then the pair of them had run away together. A terrible scandal, because Dodd had a wife and grown-up children.

  The old woman turned her ear in the direction of the hall, trying to hear what was going on.

  Dodd hadn’t wanted his wife to divorce him, but the family had pushed
it through. His son took over the business in which the bulk of his mother’s money was invested. He made it pay better than his father did. Harry Dodd was a funny, lackadaisical sort, who liked knocking around in old clothes, free-and-easy, talking and drinking with common people. His family pushed him off in spite of their mother, and the price at which they bought out his shares in the firm was quite enough to keep him.

  And then Dodd hadn’t married Dorothy Nicholls at all. He’d bought Mon Abri in Brande, taken her and her mother to live with him, and started a ménage á trois. Dorothy called herself Mrs. Dodd in the village. Dodd never objected, but he slept in his own room, a sort of cockloft over the bungalow, and treated his two women like relatives. Dorothy didn’t seem to object. Dodd kept her well in funds and was polite to both of them. The old woman felt her presence there gave the union a kind of respectability…

  ‘But you know I can’t, yet…’

  Dorothy sounded scared.

  ‘All right then…If it’s that important. I’ll get it out…’

  She hung up the receiver and almost ran into the room, her bosom heaving as if she were ready to have a good cry.

  ‘He wants me to take the car and meet him in the village…’

  ‘But…’

  ‘He says he’s ill and can’t get up the hill. I’ll have to try. He sounds bad. I could hardly hear him at the end.’ But you’ll smash it up. You never were any good at it. Didn’t you stop learning because you hadn’t confidence…?’

  ‘I’ll have to try. He might die. I don’t know how I’m going to turn round, once we get there…’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  They hurried to the garage at the side of the house. In the confusion it took them twice as long to get the door open and light up the drive.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the phone box at the bottom of the hill.’

  Every night Dodd walked down the hill for a drink at the village pub; then he walked back. Sometimes he got in very late, but the women left his supper and went to bed if he wasn’t in by eleven. Now it was just after ten.