The Long Arm of the Law

by Martin Edwards

  “Mr Walker,” said Benjamin, who believed in the attack direct, “is it right you changed your name towards the end of the war?”

  “Nothing wrong in that,” muttered Walker.

  “Nothing at all. Previously you used the name of Foster. Is that right? And had a shop at 36 Friary Lane, that you sold some time in 1944 to a Mr Martin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were living there, before you sold the shop, with your wife?”

  No doubt about it, thought Petrella. The reaction was sharp and positive.

  “Yes,” said Walker at last. “With my wife.”

  “Who died as the result of enemy action on 2nd October that year.”

  Petrella thought at first that Walker was not going to answer. Then he made a noise which might have been interpreted as, “Yes.”

  “Did you yourself identify the body, Mr Walker?”

  This time there was no answer. He’s going to faint, thought Petrella, and started to get up. Then he saw that tears were trickling down Mr Walker’s cheeks. Benjamin waved him back. After what seemed a very long time Mr Walker spoke.

  “So you know,” he said. “I guessed you did when you sent a man round to my house yesterday. I told Merlith that you must have found out. That’s why I—”

  Petrella felt a very faint prickle at the back of his scalp. Benjamin’s eye dared him to say anything.

  Mr Walker said, “It seemed to be the only thing I could do. It was wrong, of course. I see that. But if I’d been killed, my own insurance would have paid, and Merlith could have put the money back.”

  “We’d better be quite clear about this,” said Benjamin. “The present Mrs Walker is the woman who lived with you in Friary Lane as Mrs Foster.”

  “She’s my wife. I’ve never had but the one.”

  “And, of course, she wasn’t killed in the Pantheon Cinema.”

  “She’d planned to go there that afternoon. She told a lot of people she was going.” Walker was talking more fluently now. The relief of confessing had eased his tongue. “But at the last moment she was called up north. Her mother was dying. When the bomb hit the cinema, people jumped to the conclusion she’d been there. And I saw a chance of picking up the insurance money.”

  “So you telephoned her to keep away, and started up life again in north London when the fuss had died down.”

  “That’s right. We just took out identity cards in our new names. It seemed quite easy in the war. All you had to do was tell them the new name—”

  Benjamin looked at Petrella. Before both of them loomed large the unasked, unanswerable question.

  The telephone rang.

  Benjamin picked it up, said, “In a minute, we’re busy.” Then, “Oh. In that case just hang on a minute.” He cupped one hand over the mouthpiece.

  Petrella interpreted this correctly, and said to the uniformed policeman who had been sitting quietly in the corner, making notes, “Would you take Mr Walker back now.”

  As soon as the door had shut behind them, Benjamin removed his hand and said grimly, “Go on, please.” And finally, “All right, we’ll both come down at once.”

  Then he replaced the receiver slowly, almost reverently, in its cradle.

  “That was Mr Enwright,” he said. “He’s the builder that old Mr Martin’s executors have put in to do a few repairs at the shop. They wanted to smarten it up a bit before they put it on the market.”

  “Yes?” said Petrella.

  “His men have found four more bodies under the floor of the cellar.”

  ***

  “All girls,” said Dr Summerson. “One’s been there about ten or twelve years, two round about five, and one’s comparatively recent. One of them is certainly negroid. And one, though less certainly, an East European. The most recent one has only been there, perhaps, six months. I’ve done most work on her, and I should think there’s no doubt she was a prostitute. Which would seem to suggest that perhaps all the others were as well.”

  He paused for a moment, then added, “They had all been strangled.”

  “Four prostitutes. Perhaps five,” said Benjamin. “One of them black. One a Pole.”

  “The most recent one,” said Petrella, “was she, by any chance, quite a tall girl? Unusually tall, I mean.”

  “That’s right,” said Dr Summerson. “Why?”

  “I was thinking that she might be Linda. You remember her? Benny Light’s girl.”

  “It could be,” said Benjamin. “It could easily be. And it should be easy to check. She had a record, so we’ve got all her details.” He paused, and then said rather helplessly, “Have you any idea—any idea at all—what all this is about?”

  It was a measure of the shock to which he had been subjected that he should not only have asked his subordinate’s opinion, but asked for it in front of a third party.

  “If it turns out,” said Petrella slowly, “that they are, all of them, prostitutes, I suppose the only solution is that old Mr Martin lured them in at considerable intervals and killed them. They wouldn’t be afraid of him, you see. A nice old man like Martin.”

  “But why?”

  “For their money, I should think, sir, wouldn’t you? All those girls carry wads of money about. Stones, too, sometimes. They’ve really got nowhere else safe to put them. And if the last one was Linda, it looks as if it was Benny who knocked off Mr Martin. A run-down in a stolen car. It’s got his mark all over it.”

  “Old Mr Martin,” said Superintendent Benjamin helplessly. “I did wonder just how he got his money. He can’t have made a penny out of that shop of his. He used to give most of his sweets away to the kids.”

  The Moorlanders

  Gil North

  Gil North was the pen-name adopted by Geoffrey Horne (1916–1988), a skilled exponent of the police story with a well-evoked rural backdrop. A doughty Yorkshireman, he was born in Skipton, and died there, although after studying at Cambridge he spent several years in Nigeria and the then British Cameroons, working in the Colonial Service. He turned to police fiction in 1960 with Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm, the first of a series of eleven novels about the dour but compassionate detective from the small town of Gunnarshaw—a fictional version of Skipton. The twelfth and last North novel, A Corpse for Kofi Katt (1978), was set in Africa. Under his own name, Geoffrey Horne wrote five other novels.

  Although the Gil North novels reveal the influence of Simenon, the setting and Cluff’s personality makes them stand out. A television series in which Leslie Sands played Cluff ran for 26 episodes in the 1960s; the scripts were written by North, but not based on the novels. This story, characteristic of North in style and setting, first appeared in the London Evening News in 1966, and has not previously been published in book form.

  ***

  The abrupt ringing of the telephone startled them both. Inspector Mole’s fingers stopped drumming on the public counter and Constable Harry Bullock, on station duty, lifted the receiver. He said, “No more news, Annie,” and replaced it.

  “Caleb Cluff’s cleaning woman?” asked Mole.

  “The Crofts aren’t on the phone at home, Inspector. She’s waiting at the Sergeant’s cottage.”

  “Is it serious between her daughter and Barker?”

  “Mary’s with her now.”

  The screech of brakes, the opening of the street door. Dan Patterson, Head of the County CID, as big as Cluff, stared at them briefly: “How is he?”

  “Still unconscious,” Mole said.

  “Barker’s one of my men, Inspector.”

  “I’ll come with you to the hospital,” Mole said.

  A sister showed them to the threshold of a private ward.

  They had a glimpse of Doctor Hamm beside Barker, whose head on the pillow was bandaged. An arm in plaster, a cage over his body under the bedclothes, the detective-co
nstable rambled disconnectedly.

  Sergeant Cluff came towards them and Patterson took his arm. “Has he told you how it happened, Caleb?”

  “Nothing we can make sense of, Dan. He keeps on repeating, over and over again, ‘I didn’t see it’…He had been up to Cragend,” Cluff explained, “about some missing sheep. The constable there’s a friend of his.”

  “He went on a motor-bike?”

  “His own car’s broken down: he borrowed it from one of Mole’s men.”

  “He should have kept to the main road,” Inspector Mole interrupted. “You’re a Gunnarshaw man as well, Chief Superintendent: he rode over the Tops by that lane that comes out near the Sergeant’s brother’s place at Cluff’s Head.”

  “Lying there all night?” Patterson asked.

  “His landlady took it he had stayed at Cragend. The post van found him this morning.”

  Baker stirred restlessly.

  “Caleb,” the police surgeon called softly, and Cluff returned to the bedside.

  Mole said: “The Sergeant thinks a lot of him. He’s alone in the world.”

  “You’ve been to the spot yourself?”

  “The Fellside constable had him in an ambulance and halfway to Gunnarshaw before I knew about it.”

  Patterson set off down the hospital corridor: “We’re only in the way here.”

  ***

  Patterson with Mole swung the car off the road on the floor of the narrow valley and changed gear up the steep lane. A grey, stone-built farm in the fields on their right duplicated another huddling in the lee of a shoulder of land on their left.

  A large, ruddy-faced constable contemplated a buckled motor-cycle lying by the wall into which it had crashed.

  Patterson gave the policeman a shrewd look: “What’s wrong?”

  The bar third from the bottom of a five-barred gate was newly broken in two, its splintered ends jutting out at in angle.

  “And look at this,” Elliot, the constable, pointed to a wound on the bark of a scrubby hawthorn growing on the verge directly across the lane from the gate. “I was going to report it when I got the bike away. A truck’s coming up.”

  Patterson walked slowly the little distance to the crest of a rise. A pretty girl from the opposite direction half-stopped as if she was going to speak and then continued on her way.

  “Who is she?” Chief Superintendent Patterson asked.

  “The reservoir keeper’s daughter—Miriam Kerr.” When they looked behind them the girl had turned across the fields for one of the farms.

  ***

  “But it could have been you, Mat,” the girl said.

  Patterson, in front of Mole and Elliot, their approach unnoticed, demanded, “Why could it have been him?”

  Open doors revealed the stalls in a pair of shippons. A bigger motor-cycle than the one Barker had been riding was visible in a dim space.

  “On most nights,” Mat, the young farmer, replied slowly, “I ride out to see Miriam.”

  “Not last night?”

  “I had a bitch whelping.”

  “Well?” the Chief Superintendent said, when they reached his car again.

  “I’ve nothing against Mat,” Elliot said. “He hasn’t been there long but he’ll make a go of it—if he finds himself a wife.”

  Patterson’s eyes followed the direction of the policeman’s, towards the second farm.

  “I can remember Toovey dying,” Patterson said. “His widow’s still carrying on?”

  “And runs Moor Bottom better than her husband did…”

  “She must be nearing seventy.”

  “That farm’s her life.”

  “There’s a son to take over.”

  Elliot led them along twin wheel-tracks. Movement through the open waggon doors of a barn diverted them from the farmhouse at right-angles to it. The dog chained in a corner leapt and choked.

  A weedy man in his early thirties scooped cattle cake and dairy nuts from a row of bins into feed-buckets.

  “Frank,” Elliot said.

  The man, nervous, negative, ineffective, dropped his scoop.

  “I knew your father,” Patterson told him. “You’ve lived here all your life.”

  “Miriam Kerr’s lived all hers by the reservoir,” Elliot remarked. “As neighbours go in these parts, they’re neighbours.”

  The Chief Superintendent reached over the bins for a length of rope: “And Mat over the lane’s a newcomer…”

  He ran the rope through his fingers. “Something like this, across the carriageway between the gates and the hawthorn, just below the rise…”

  Inspector Mole moved towards Frank Toovey.

  “And Mat,” Patterson went on, “wasn’t on the road, but Barker was.”

  “You fools!” they heard a woman’s voice. “You don’t imagine Frank’s either the wits or the guts to do a thing like that?”

  Widow Toovey was tall, grim, domineering, dressed in a man’s hat and coat, and the dog in the corner backed on to its litter of straw.

  “All my life I’ve worked,” she said. “I kept this place going when his father was alive, and his father wasn’t any loss. I’ve kept it going ever since.”

  “For Frank?” Patterson returned.

  “I’ve tried everything with him.”

  “Except a wife?”

  “What’s going to become of all this when I’m gone? It’s been ours for centuries.”

  “And Miriam would have married him?”

  “There wasn’t any other choice for her…”

  “Until Mat arrived.”

  “I strung that rope,” she said. She flashed contempt at Frank: “He’s my blood in his veins, even though you can’t see it. Perhaps I’d have found hope in a grandson before I died.”

  ***

  The Inspector’s wife met her husband at the door.

  “There’s an improvement,” Mole, said. “Barker’ll get better.”

  “I was thinking of Mary Croft.”

  Mole’s good humour evaporated. “The Chief Superintendent’s gone out to the cottage with Cluff.”

  “He’s fond of Annie’s cooking. The Sergeant and he are friends, Percy. They were boys together.”

  The Inspector relaxed a little. “It’s just,” he admitted, sadly, “that you can’t get away from them. If it isn’t the Sergeant it’s Patterson.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe—would you?—there was room in the police force for anybody except Gunnarshaw men.”

  She agreed, “No dear,” and smiled. “You’ll be accepted as one of them someday.”

  Mole’s tone was that of a man suddenly determined to look on the bright side. “I hear it doesn’t take more than a quarter of a century for Gunnarshaw to forget people like us are foreigners.” He let his face slip. “Maybe I’ll live through it.”

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