“Not on purpose, I’m sure. He just threw it, and I moved at the same time.”
“He was in a fury, then.”
She grimaced. Little lines appeared above her upper lip. “It was... well, it really shocked me.”
“He said it was because you took him for Fred Wallach.”
“As though I would.”
“Do you always call him Wal?”
She thought. Her eyes were dark. The back-lighting caught her hair and framed her concentration.
“I didn’t usually call him anything. People don’t, do they, when there’s just the two of you together.”
Elsa and I used each other’s names freely, and she never shortened David. “I suppose not. But when you do, it’s Wal and not Walter?”
“Yes. Walter’s too formal. Like when you want to keep people at a distance.”
I flinched. “This time, then, it was Wal?”
“I hadn’t seen him for a long time. I was kind of... excited.”
“Had time to slip on your special nightie, I hear.”
She flushed I think — and pouted at me. “You know how it is, you keep something back.”
“For special occasions?”
“He was coming back to me. He’d brought a case.”
“Which he threw at you.”
“Not at me,” she said, with a flash of anger.
“But threw, all the same. And then left it there, on the floor?”
“I realised, after he’d gone again.”
“He was there a whole hour.”
“He can keep it up,” she said in weary despair. “Hour after hour. You get to expect it. Sometimes I’d feel my whole insides knotting up when he started, knowing there’d be no end to it. Just anything could start him off. I’d get to be a nervous wreck, when I was shopping, say. I’d know he’d be counting the minutes, cutting me down fine, five minutes here, ten there, and if I was caught behind a queue in the supermarket I’d as near dammit go insane, waiting. Once...” She gave a small, choked laugh. “Once I even ran round, putting the stuff all back, just because I was going to be late, and he’d be wondering and building it up...”
She was silent. I said gently: “But you’ll still take him back?”
“When he wants to come.”
“You must have recognised the van, though.”
She frowned at the abrupt change in subject. “I thought he’d borrowed it.”
“You’d jump to the conclusion it was Wallach.”
“No!” she said sharply. She shook her head “Fred wouldn’t come that late at night.”
Wouldn’t he? I wondered. “But when he left he’d cooled down?”
“You do jump about. No, he hadn’t. That’s how it was — he’d work himself to a state where he didn’t know what he was doing. Then he’d just have to get away from me. I think he was afraid of what he’d do.”
“He’d already done plenty.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she whispered.
I switched away from that night. “But he sent you money?”
“He didn’t leave me short.”
“Plenty?”
“Wal always had money.”
“They say the job’s well paid. He probably put a lot in the bank.”
“He doesn’t believe in banks.”
“Safer than keeping it in the flat. There’s not many hiding places in flats.”
She eyed me curiously, aslant, her face tilted. “He didn’t hide money in the flat.”
“Are you sure? Would you know?”
She was impatient. “I suppose there could be places. Why’re we talking about this?”
“Just talking.”
“It’s not pleasant, talking about money.” She stuck out her lower lip. “I know what it is — you’re wondering about your fee.”
“Something like that. Away a lot, was he?”
“You’re the limit. Why should that interest you?”
“It’s all personal. One minute I’m feeling-out the background for my fee, and the next...” I let it lie.
“The next, the background for calling round and comforting me? I don’t think I like you, Mr. Mallin. All you’re doing is grubbing around in the filth, just trying to find out if I’m easy, like Wal says, or not. Well I can tell you, if you come round —”
“If I come round, it’ll be because I need comforting myself. And if I do, please call me Dave, not David.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“That tells me a lot.”
“I could hit you — what does it tell you?”
“If you wanted to seduce me you’d say you did understand. It’s wives who don’t.”
“Does yours?”
I said: “Would you like another drink?”
“Does she?”
“Only too bloody well. I’m having another, anyway.”
I brought her back an orange juice, whether she wanted it or not. “Are you staying here?” I asked.
“They’re letting me use his room.”
“We may need to know where you are.”
“Will you?” Less personal now — I’d said ‘we’. She’d relaxed.
“The man who came and shot at you — we may need you to identify him.”
“I couldn’t do that,” she said quickly.
“Did he actually shoot at you?”
“I told you... I fainted.”
“I didn’t smell cordite.”
“All the same —”
“You could’ve fainted because he pointed it at you, and thought he fired.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s what you say.”
“Very well, then, I just thought he fired it.”
“And you were so petrified you just didn’t recognise him?”
“It was nobody I know, of course.”
“Of course.” I looked round. George’s voice had come from somewhere. “Or you’d have said.”
She did not reply. She was looking at her drink, turning it in her fingers. When George spoke, she looked up, startled.
“Hello again. Heard you’re staying with us.” George hears everything.
His obvious and undisguised friendliness, after my interrogation, seemed to crumple her up. She got up quickly. “Go to my room,” she mumbled, and she hurried away.
George looked after her, still smiling, but concerned. “What was that about?”
“We’ve been talking personalities. Get anywhere?”
“Poker players!” he said in disgust. “They can see a full house across the room, but ask ‘em who they’ve played with... They don’t know any Dutch Marks. They must have played with him under his real name, but who started in with the fivers they don’t know. All I got was blank stares.”
“We could get him, George, tonight. Short-cut it.”
“You think so?”
“All we’ve got to do is tell Lubin about the bits of fiver in the cellar.”
He’d been looking round for service. He stopped, clicking fingers stilled.
“There weren’t any bits in the cellar.”
“Exactly. Just like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark in the night. There should have been. There should also have been one old thirty-two automatic and its ejected cartridge and one Welsh tweed bag. Those could have been carried away, George, but not the hundreds of scattered bits of white paper there would have been on that floor.”
“It needs thinking about.”
“I have thought, until my head’s splitting, and it always comes round to the fact that Dutch Marks has been fooling Lubin. Marks got that money thirteen years ago, George. He left the tweed bag with the body, and took the money. At that time he could’ve picked it up.”
“How could he, with the trapdoor...”
“Wait, wait! Leave that for now and hear me out. Marks must have known about Marty Coleman’s cellar, though Lubin didn’t seem to think so. But say he went there, shot Marty, and got the money, then quietly spent m
ost of it before it ran out of time. Some left, you understand. Then along comes Lubin, comfortably happy because he thinks Coleman’s corpse is still guarding the money. But Mark’s has been rash. In the heat of a straight flush he’s thrown in one or two of the old fivers, which eventually drift round to Lubin. And this makes Lubin suspicious. And Marks is in trouble, because somehow he’s got to produce evidence that the stuff’s still in that cellar. So he gets this grand idea of faking it. The mice got it, Mr. Lubin, but here’s what’s left. It’d get by, with a bit of luck. But he’s still got to get down into that cellar for the original tweed bag. No faking that — it had to be the real thing. All right, so far?”
“I don’t like where it’s heading.” He’d managed to get a straight whisky.
“It becomes worse. Marks gets down into the cellar, with the help of Wallach, and collects his tweed bag, or what’s left of it, and the cartridge case he left behind thirteen years before.” I paused. “No comment? Right. Takes the cartridge, because he wants Lubin to think that Coleman simply died, and wasn’t shot. He doesn’t know anything about police technology, you understand. He’s shot Wallach, because he knows too much, with the same gun, George, as those police experts would testify, but there’s no point in taking that cartridge case. It’s Lubin he’s got to convince. You with me?”
“Ahead,” he grunted.
“Then you realise what he’s got to do next. He’s got to get that bag home and put in the faked bits of chopped-up fiver. But perhaps the tweed bag was more delicate than he’d expected. It needed something to carry it in — and Wallach had been seen to toss a case into his van.”
“And then,” said George, “while he was putting the shed back, along comes Dyke and takes away the van — and he’s stuck, in dead trouble, because the suitcase isn’t in it when it comes back.”
There was a peculiar discrepancy that I preferred to ignore. Marks had been there, with a gun, and he’d allowed Dyke to drive away. And he’d been putting the shed back, but Dyke had heard nothing? There was an unexplained time gap in there somewhere. I slid over it.
“But eventually he manages to get it, and fakes the paper bits, and Lubin’s happy. So you see, George, it just doesn’t do, this trapdoor bolted on the inside bit. Marks had to be able to get to Coleman in that cellar, shoot him, take the money, and take away the gun he’d shot him with. Bolted on the outside, George. Had to be.”
He shook his head. Like a bull, George can be. “No.”
“In the face...” I controlled myself. “George, there’s something else. Lubin said that Coleman wasn’t going anywhere with that money. And he knew he was dead in the cellar. So he must have bolted him in, knowing there couldn’t be any other way out, before the police picked him up. And he left him to rot, George; said absolutely nothing to the police. It explains why Marks is so terrified of him.”
“It doesn’t explain how the trapdoor came to be bolted on the inside.”
I sighed. “I know you’re doing this for Dyke,” I said. “But now it’s the other way round.” He could be ridiculously loyal, fighting every inch of the way. “You stick to that, and the only way that the same gun could’ve killed both men was for it to have lain there, and been used after thirteen years of rusting. You might say that’s impossible too, but it’s the lesser of the two impossibilities. Accept that, and Dyke could have done it, and in just the way the police say. You know that, George.”
“Lubin’s story...” He stopped. It was nothing we could put to the police. It was just a story.
I let a short silence build up. He was hopeless. I’d just prayed he’d go my way and forget his blasted twisted trapdoor. But no. So I had to take it further.
“All right, George,” I said at last, resigned. “We simply ring Lubin and tell him how Marks has fooled him then we watch to see who he tries to murder, and we’ve got him. Then we ask him to explain the trapdoor, if that’s what you want.”
“I’m not keen. Lubin’s not stupid. What if he did nothing?”
“We could pray he’d do something. Doing nothing would be the proof I don’t want.”
“Proof of what?”
“That he simply can’t get at Dutch Marks at this moment. It’s an idea that’s been worrying me, George. That Dutch Marks is Ginger Dyke.”
I hadn’t wanted it to come to this. I was even suspicious of the mental approach that had brought me to it. Was I prepared to sacrifice our client, just to prove George was wrong? Or could I smugly claim that the truth was all that mattered?
George did not look surprised. “I’ve been wondering. Meakin said he fitted, for age, and he travels about a lot — very useful, the odd crime here and there being in different areas.”
“The dislike of Wallach overemphasised,” I said. “They never came to words over it, so perhaps Wallach was friendly with it.”
“Playing it down,” said George.
“After all, he was having it off with Clare.”
“Wallach could’ve been persuaded by Dyke to help him lift the shed — it’d need the strengthening Wallach did to it. And Dyke, having got the tweed bag, didn’t see it driven away by somebody else — as he told Lubin he drove it home himself to doctor it, there, with the fivers he’d got hidden away. But his jealousy got the better of him. It all became personal, and in a rage he left the case there, with the tweed bag undoctored. Then he was stuck. He had to get it back, and yet it’d draw attention to it if he simply went back for that purpose.”
“I wondered whether that phone call was faked.” George was smiling, I couldn’t think why.
“Pretended he’d had it,” I agreed. “To give himself an excuse. I wonder if he can bring on these jealous rages when he needs them. Anyway, we scotched that. We were guarding him too well and he really needed guarding, because Lubin was pushing things. He tried to scare him into action by dropping the steel ball on him. So in the end, Dyke followed Clare and me. Perhaps he pinched a car or a motor bike. But Clare, I’m sure, knows it was him at the flat. She knows, George, and nothing will get it out of her.”
“I don’t like the way you’re thinking, Dave.”
“But you go along with the reasoning?” Then he laughed. “You’ve talked yourself in a circle, Dave. If he’s Dutch Marks, then he needs my trapdoor bolted on the inside. And if he’s not well, I’ll go to my grave swearing he couldn’t have fired a gun he found in there.”
“You’re stubborn. You know that. Don’t you believe any of it?”
“Dave, I’m going to take a young lady out. Years since I’ve done that. Clare can come on a tour of everybody we’ve come in contact with, and then, perhaps, she’ll recognise the man who fired at her.”
“For God’s sake, George, take care.”
“Don’t you deny me this bit of pleasure. And I’ll treat her like porcelain, I promise you.”
“I was wondering how she’ll treat you,” I said morosely, and like a fool I lent him the Porsche, because you can’t take a young woman out on the town on foot.
Twelve
I don’t know how long I was sitting there, but I gradually lapsed into an aimless apathy. Then I became aware that the bar had become noisy, and that Ken Duxford had sunk into the chair opposite.
“Still here?” he asked.
Such inspired observation requires no comment. I stared at him balefully. “Did you check the walls?”
“The cellar walls?” He was right on the ball. “Of course we did. Solid, all round.”
“I don’t mean now. I mean thirteen years ago.”
“So did I. There’s ways of dating cement. Take it from me, those walls have always been solid.”
Another idea down the drain. I looked round for inspiration and saw that the noise came from one tight little group at the bar. Ron Taylor was ordering a sandwich for himself and a round for Reaman, Potter and Lane, his mates, for Emmett Cash, and for Ginger Dyke.
“What’s he doing out?” I asked. It threw me a little. Fingal, I noticed, was on the edg
e of the group, no doubt still feeling his way towards the murderer who had upset his sister.
“Things became a little shakey,” Duxford admitted.
“But he’d been charged!”
“Not actually charged. Meakin’s got a tendency to exaggerate. He was being charged.”
“Second thoughts?” I felt sour and unsympathetic. “Not so straightforward, is it?”
“There’s this trapdoor…”
“I know.”
“Here... these two beer mats, they’ll do. One’s the opening and the other the trapdoor. Put one on the other —”
“For God’s sake!”
I got up and went to join the party.
They were celebrating Dyke’s release. Considering the way he’d been in and out of that Station, it was perhaps premature, but any excuse will do for a party.
Cash saw me. “Here... what you having?”
“I’ve had enough.”
But all the same he called me up a pint of bitter. Dyke turned. He was clutching a double whisky.
“Still here, then?”
“You’re employing us.”
“It’ll cost a fortune. Where d’you think I’ll get the money?”
“Fivers will do.”
He stared. Ron Taylor came from behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “He don’t need no detective now. Do you, Ginge?”
“Besides,” said Dyke, “you ain’t done much.”
I took up my bitter. I said: “Did you know your wife’s here?”
His eyes went wild. “You rotten bastard! Fetched her back here, thinkin’ I was safe inside. No wonder you ain’t done much!”
I looked at him, sick and hopeless.
“I must admit,” I said carefully, “that I wish they hadn’t let you go.”
Then he threw the whisky in my face. Another shirt gone, and it stings if it gets in your eyes. I could just about see enough to put the beer down on the bar. Fingal did the right thing. If he’d tried to restrain me, I’d have gone mad. He restrained Dyke, who’d been inflamed by his own aggression, and you can’t hit a man when his arms are held.
I turned and headed for the lobby, wiping my face with a handkerchief. But you can, you know. I went back. Fingal had let Dyke go, so I hit him. Then I went into the lobby.
The Weight of Evidence Page 12
