Blood and Judgement

by Michael Gilbert

  “Then why don’t you?” said Mrs Bancroft, from the kitchen doorway.

  They both stared at her.

  “It’s forty years buried, now. It can’t harm you. If it can help, why not tell it?”

  Outside, a child screamed shrilly. Mr Bancroft looked at his wife, opened his mouth, and shut it again.

  “It’s not a very creditable story,” he said, and silence fell again.

  Petrella sat down again, very gently, so as not to disturb Mr Bancroft’s thoughts.

  “It was in 1918. I had my birthday in January. I was just eighteen. I was due for the call-up sometime that spring, but I didn’t wait for it. I went along. The first place I went to was an Intake Centre, at the old Crystal Palace. Then we moved down to Sussex. It was fun at first, waiting to go across. Then it wasn’t so much fun. It was the wounded that unsettled us. The men who had been wounded before, going back again. One of those blew his foot off, in camp, the night before he was due for draft. That sort of thing isn’t good for a young boy. It makes him edgy.”

  Outside, in the sunlight, the child screamed again. A long “Ya-ha-ha-ha”. She was having fun, being a jet bomber.

  “There was another young chap, enlisted the same day as I did. Name of Ricketts.”

  “Yes,” said Petrella softly. “Yes. Go on, please.”

  “He was about the same age and height and shape as me. Same red cheeks and dark hair. I don’t mean we were twins, but people who didn’t know us sometimes mistook us. He was full of spirits. The whole thing was an adventure to him. Then a day or two before we moved to our embarkation camp, we had a final check – and they found he’d got something wrong with his ticker. No active service for Ricketts. No fighting, no fun. Clerical duties at the base. It broke him up. Can you guess the rest?”

  “You did a swop.”

  “That’s right. Names, clothes, kit, everything. Only one thing we kept. On the form we had to fill in before we sailed, we each put our own next of kin. Just in case anything happened.”

  “So he put down his – sister, wasn’t it? And you put down your–?”

  “My aunt. What happened next was funny. Ricketts got sent straight out to the South Londons – a front-line crowd. That was in early March. I got my base job all right. Then we had the March push, when the Jerries nearly got to Amiens. By the time it was held, they were pretty hard up for men. So they had a recheck of all the medical categories.”

  “And found nothing wrong with you, and assumed the doctor at home had made a mistake.”

  “That’s right, and buzzed me straight up to the front, to the old 9th. And the funny thing was,” concluded Mr Bancroft, “that I believe I made a better soldier than Syd Ricketts after all. He got a ‘mention’ for me. I got an MM for him.”

  The story seemed to be at an end.

  “What happened then?” said Petrella.

  “Oh. When we were demobbed, we swopped back. We couldn’t either of us say anything about it. We were both in the wrong, you see.”

  “The thing I don’t like,” said Mrs Bancroft judicially, “was him having your medal. It wasn’t right. Particularly now it seems he left you a police record into the bargain. We didn’t know about that.”

  “But–” said Petrella. Then the absurdity of the whole situation struck him and he dissolved in laughter. Mr and Mrs Bancroft laughed with him.

  “Do you mean,” he said, “that no one ever knew? What about your families – I suppose you had to write a few letters?”

  “Field Service postcards. And all you had to say was you’d hurt your hand and got a pal to write for you. There wasn’t anything in any of them except ‘I’m in the pink and I hope this finds you the same.’ Anyway, my old aunt, who was the only relative I had, she died in April. Shock, they said, on account of a Zeppelin. She ought to have seen the old Blitz, eh?”

  “Did Ricketts’ sister ever write back to you?”

  “Once or twice. A lot of home gossip and stuff, I can remember that. Only she was always pestering me for matchboxes.”

  “Matchboxes?”

  “She collected ’em. Matchbox tops. I used to send her French ones, when I could get hold of them.”

  “And you’ve never seen Ricketts since.”

  “That’s right. And I don’t suppose I’d recognize him if I did. Nor him me. I used to be a bit nervous at first someone would turn the whole story up and I’d get into trouble. But the years went by and it got buried, and I don’t suppose anyone would worry a lot about it now if they did know, would they?”

  “I’m certain they wouldn’t,” said Petrella.

  “Has it been any help to you?” said Mrs Bancroft.

  “Well,” said Petrella. “It’s told us where not to look, and that’s always a help.”

  “So all the time we were checking up on Rickett’s army record it was really Bancroft?” said Haxtell.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “And everything we found out about Bancroft belonged to Ricketts.”

  “Except the next of kin. They were genuine.”

  “And Bancroft – I mean Ricketts – no, I don’t, I mean Bancroft got the MM that Ricketts wore in the Second World War.”

  “Yes. After all, it was a very safe fraud, from Ricketts’ point of view.”

  “I think that makes it worse,” said Haxtell. “What the hell are we going to do now?”

  “Our best chance is the sister. If she’s still alive.”

  “You think she might know where he is?”

  “It’s an odd sort of character who’s emerging,” said Petrella. He added apologetically, “I’ve been thinking about him a good deal, lately.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “This last little bit sort of sets the pattern, don’t you think? He tried on this change of identities with Bancroft – and it worked. It didn’t do him much good, but it came off. No one found out about it. Well, I think he’s been doing things like that ever since. Living a piece of his life in one place, then cutting completely adrift and moving off somewhere else.”

  “Living on women?”

  “Oh, yes. I should think so. And if that’s right, he’d need a firm base to manoeuvre from.”

  “And that might be his sister.”

  “Yes. He would be her brother who ‘lived abroad’ and came home on long visits every now and then. It would be perfectly natural for him to turn up at any time, with a suitcase, and reoccupy the spare room that was always kept for him.”

  “And all we know about his sister is that she was called Mrs Harman in 1918. She may have changed her name six times since then. There’s no law against it.”

  “We know she collected matchboxes,” said Petrella.

  That was Saturday evening.

  On Sunday Petrella got a message from Sister Macillroth and went round to the hospital. At ten o’clock the night before Gover had sneezed twice and opened his eyes. He had passed as good a night as could be expected and was now fully conscious. Something in the sister’s tone of voice made Petrella ask, “Will he be all right now?”

  “That’s impossible to say,” said the sister. “That’s what we want you for. Come along.”

  Gover was propped among pillows. His head, which had been shaved clean when he was operated on, had grown a stubble of hair during his long unconsciousness. There was a little more colour in his face, but not much. He looked like someone who has come back from the other side of the moon.

  “Nice to see you awake, sir,” said Petrella.

  Gover looked at him for a long moment. Then his mouth cracked into a smile and he said, “Hullo, Patrick. How are things with you?”

  “Fine,” said Petrella, and found himself being ruthlessly hustled out again.

  “Do you mean to say,” he said indignantly, “that that’s all you wanted me for?”

  “We had to see if his memory was working. He wouldn’t know any of us.”

  After this good start, the rest of the day dragged. That night Petrella ha
rdly slept at all.

  When he got to the station on Monday morning, Cobley said, “You’ve got a visitor. We put her in the interview room.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “No idea, Sergeant. It’s a woman. She said it was to do with the Reservoir Case. The superintendent isn’t here yet, so I told her you’d see her when you came in.”

  “Ricketts’ sister?” said Petrella.

  “Come again,” said Cobley.

  “Every time in this case,” said Petrella, “that we’ve talked about someone and said, ‘we shall never see them,’ they’ve turned up almost at once.”

  A small woman rose from the chair in the interview room to greet him. Petrella thought she might be in her early thirties. She had a pretty face, spoiled only by a hardness of the mouth and the two vertical lines between the eyes which can be engraved by worry or pain. Her blue eyes were shrewd.

  “Can we help you?” said Petrella.

  “I don’t know if I can help you, or you can help me,” said the woman. “I’m Mrs Ricketts.”

  “Mrs Ricketts?”

  “That’s right. Sydney Ricketts’ wife.”

  “When–?”

  “In 1946. In the Marylebone Registry Office.”

  It suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t know what to say. She saved him the trouble.

  “You’re going to tell me he’s married already,” she said. “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” said Petrella. “If we’re talking about the same man.”

  She fished in her handbag and pulled out a photograph. It was a snapshot, taken on the beach. It showed a man, lying back on the sand, on his elbows, laughing; a good figure of a man, despite advancing middle age; a nice, easy, indeterminate face.

  “I’ve never seen Ricketts or a photograph of him,” said Petrella. “But I can soon show this to someone who has.”

  “He was funny about photographs,” said the woman. “He’d never have one taken. If there was anyone about him with a camera he’d keep out of their way. When he found out I’d taken this one, he got hold of the negative and the print and tore them up. I never told him I’d kept a spare print. As a matter of fact, that was what first made me wonder about him. That and the fact that he was so mysterious about his family.”

  “You never met any of them?”

  “Met them? I never even heard him speak about them. I asked him once or twice, but I soon gave up. Wait a minute, though. When I say never, I’m wrong. Once – it was soon after our marriage – we passed a little girl in the street wearing one of those iron things round her leg and a great heavy foot. I said something – ‘What a handicap it must be.’ He said, ‘My sister’s been like that since she was a baby, and she’s had a very happy life.’”

  “You gathered she was still alive?”

  Petrella’s eagerness had betrayed him. She stopped, and looked at him.

  “Suppose you tell me something first,” she said. “You can guess why I’m here. I read that piece in the papers, about him being found drowned. Was it true?”

  For a moment he hesitated. Then a look from her sharp eyes decided him.

  “No,” he said. “That was just the newspapers. The truth would have to come out as soon as they had the inquest. It wasn’t Ricketts, it was – someone else.”

  “So he’s done the disappearing trick again.”

  “Yes,” said Petrella. “He’s done it again.” (How many times before, how many times since?) “When did he walk out on you?”

  “In 1949. As soon as we’d spent all my money.”

  “I see.”

  “And he didn’t walk out on me. I walked out on him.”

  He looked at her.

  “You probably won’t believe this bit,” she said. “It was early in 1949. We had a flat, at Romford, and he was travelling for Barshalls, the sweet people. But it’s no good asking them about him, because I tried that later, and they didn’t know a damned thing. I was saying – it was one evening, when we were going to bed. We’d had a quarrel. We didn’t quarrel a lot. He was an easy man to live with – but we’d had a quarrel that night, about my money. And it went on in the bedroom. I was sitting on a stool, in front of the dressing table, doing something to my hair. And I said – I can’t remember the exact words – something about it was no good him thinking he could spend all my money and then walk out on me. He married me, and I was his wife, and that was something that lasted for life. And he said, quite quietly, ‘Yes, of course.’ It wasn’t what he said, it was just that I happened to look in the glass at the moment, and caught the expression on his face. It was – it was quite cold. Like a reptile. I’d never seen a look like it before, on a human face, and I never want to again. The next day I packed up my things and walked out on him.”

  17

  Central

  “It doesn’t tell us a great deal we didn’t know already,” said Haxtell. “It fills out the picture a bit.”

  “I’m beginning to visualize Ricketts,” said Petrella.

  “He fits into a sort of pattern, doesn’t he? Living on women, spending their money, then cutting adrift.”

  “The second Mrs Ricketts cut adrift from him. He scared her stiff.”

  “He seems to specialize in scaring women. Now. What have we got–?”

  “We’ve got a photograph. I thought I’d check it with Lundgren at once, and then we could have it enlarged and duplicated.”

  Haxtell stared down at the snapshot on the desk. From the fading print, the man laughed back at him. Haxtell said, “He’s a handsome old goat, isn’t he? He’s got what all women go for, Patrick. You know what that is? It’s the relaxed look. It doesn’t matter if you spend all her money, beat her, rob her baby’s china money box – as long as you’re relaxed about it, she’ll love every moment of it.”

  “I bet he’s relaxing right now,” said Petrella. “And I’ve got an increasing hunch that he’s with that sister of his, taking things easy, planning his next foray.”

  “If she’s still alive.”

  “She was alive in 1946. And we know one more thing about her, now. She was born with one leg shorter than the other, and she has to wear a thick boot.”

  “Unless Ricketts was making that up, too.”

  “He’s quite capable, blast him.”

  “I’m beginning to think–” said Haxtell, when the telephone interrupted him. It was not a long conversation. It consisted mostly of Haxtell saying “Yes”, and at the end, “All right.”

  “You’re wanted down at the Yard,” he said. “As soon as possible. You can take a car.”

  “Are you sure that’s right? I was due down there at four o’clock for a – whatever it is is going to happen about Kellaway’s complaint.”

  “I don’t know about that. All I know is that the assistant commissioner has expressed a desire to have a word with you.”

  Petrella gaped at him.

  “I’m not pulling your leg. You’d better get a move on. He’s a bad man to keep waiting.”

  “I understand,” said Romer, his long, hatchet face expressionless, “that there have been developments in the Binford Reservoir Case since the hearing at the Central Criminal Court. I’m told that you have been the officer most actively engaged, and it seemed to me that the best way of bringing myself up to date was by having a word with you. If we’re going to change our minds about Howton, we haven’t a lot of time to do it in.”

  Petrella made what he hoped was going to be a non-committal noise. It sounded so terrible that he swallowed it, half uttered.

  “What I’d like you to do is to tell me exactly what you think did take place. You needn’t waste time over the background. I’ve read the file.”

  So Petrella told him. Once he had got started, it was not difficult. He had told it to himself so often that it came tripping out like a favourite story, almost too word-perfect for complete conviction. At the end of it Romer said, “So your view is that Howton was there that night, but that he turned up too late to d
o anything but collect some oddments of jewellery – and to put himself on the spot by selling them later.”

  “Yes, sir. The people who gave evidence of sales by Howton all spoke of the last two months. And the pieces involved were quite small. Mr Robins, for instance, only gave him a hundred pounds for six of them. Even at the usual rate of discount, that’s not big stuff.”

  “Your idea is that Ricketts had already sold anything that was worthwhile. And that if we took the witnesses who had failed to identify Howton and confronted them with Ricketts they would identify him.”

  “I think so, yes, sir.”

  “And that the fingerprint found on the gun will turn out to be Ricketts’. Wrongly filed here, incidentally, as belonging to Bancroft.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that the people who identified the gun as being Howton’s weren’t entirely reliable witnesses.”

  Petrella could easily have gone wrong there. But the last few months had taught him a lot of lessons. He said, “It was a very common type of gun, sir. It would be quite easy to be mistaken about a thing like that.”

  “Yes,” said Romer. “It would. The Crown, on the other hand, maintains that Howton did arrive in time. That he shot both Ritchie and his wife, and disposed of the bodies. The facts which have now come to light about Ricketts living with Mrs Ritchie – and living on her – affords an explanation, which was missing before, of why he ran away when it came to the pinch. They don’t necessarily make him a murderer.”

  “No, sir.”

  “In fact, there are two theories. And there’s only one way of discovering which is right. We’ve got to find Ricketts.” He unfolded his long body and took it across to the bow window which looked down on Westminster Pier and the pleasure boats.

  “And you have a photograph, and you think he may be living with his sister, who has a deformity of the leg.”

  “And collected matchboxes,” said Petrella. “According to Bancroft.”

  “Well, we’ve got home with less than that before now. We’ll see what we can do. Thank you.”

  As Petrella turned to go, Romer added, “I nearly forgot. There’s been a disciplinary complaint against you over your conduct in this case.” He picked up a thin, Oxford-blue folder from his desk. “I have read the papers. I have an overriding discretion in all such matters. And I have decided that, although you acted in disobedience of orders, those orders were not, themselves, very sensible. I have given instructions for the record to be destroyed.”