by HRF Keating
Tools. Harriet thought at once of Bolshy’s description of the forced window.
‘What do you mean tools?’ she asked. ‘A jemmy? You know what a jemmy is? Something weighty enough to break open a door. Was this a professional you were talking to?’
What if this man was not Tigger Drummond, but the hitman who sent that egg-bomb flying across the square at Gralethorpe?
‘Nah,’ Tonelle answered. ‘That pocket was just weighed down, like. Didn’t have no major stuff in it. I’d ’ave seen if it had. An’ the other pocket looked pretty stuffed too, with gloves, maybe. Real thick ones, though, enough to make a big bulge. Oh, an’ there was a bit of something dangling out, too. Hey, yes, I’d forgotten all about that till this minute. Let me just think.’
She lapsed into her envisioning world again, eyes unfocussed, plainly looking once more at the crammed pockets of the man who had come to the door, had stood there asking his duff questions.
‘What? What did you see?’ Harriet asked at last, unable to contain her excitement.
Tonelle came back from her dream-state.
‘Yeah. You know what? There was, there really was, something poking out of that pocket. I’m right. An’, just at the moment I took it in, all of a sudden he swung round an’ went striding off. Must’ve thought he’d learnt all he could from this black bint at the door, got fed up of me an’ the little I’d told him. As if I’d go gabbing to any stranger come asking stupid questions.’
‘But what you remembered just now? Was that all? Did you see anything more?’
‘Yeah. I’ll tell you. You see, he, that feller, took the wrong way rushing off in the dark like that. Went straight into the shrubbery there. And — An’ this was the last I saw of ’im. There’s some brambles there in among the proper bushes, an’ whatever it was sticking out of that pocket of his caught on one of ’em, on the thorns, got pulled right out. Saw it. An’ old Felt Hat didn’t notice nothing, went shooting out of the bushes, looked up an’ down, saw where he was, an’ belted off down the drive, heck of a lick.’
Harriet looked at Tonelle perched on the desk, her back just brushing the chrysanthemums in their bowl at the far end, bright yellow these ones instead of bronze.
‘You’re a marvel,’ she said. ‘But, listen, could whatever it was that caught on those brambles still be there?’
‘Don’t see why not. Gardeners never ever bother with the shrubbery. Why there’s so many brambles.’
‘Right then. There’s a torch in the car, I’ll go and get it, meet you here again.’
‘No need,’ Tonelle said brightly. ‘Always got a big torch on the shelf underneath where I am. Fishface’s strict orders, case of a power cut. Which we ain’t never had.’
She slid down, groped under the desk, came up with a long powerful torch and switched it on. Its white beam cut across the dimness of the hall.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Race you there.’
Tonelle won easily. Harriet, half-blinded by the torch beam, could only stumble after her.
Then, half a minute later, less, came the triumphant shout.
‘Got it. It’s a tie. Bloody posh one, too.’
But Harriet, when she had reached the spot a yard or two inside the shrubbery, felt shooting-up in her a yet bigger triumph. The tie Tonelle was holding up to the light of the torch was one she instantly recognised. Fellow to the tie she had taken particular notice of when she had first called on Matthew Jessop at his Rutland Place house. Carefully knotted, with its dignified broad stripes in white and soft earth-red running smoothly down the length of his ultra-white shirt, she had thought of it then as being a club one.
But now she knew it was not. It was the tie worn by the old boys of the Zeal School, the tie she had seen poor flurried Judge Cotmore wearing. And pig-faced Sir Marcus Fledge. No proof, of course, that Valentine Drummond, the Zeal School former pupil, was the man who had asked Tonelle those questions. It could, as easily, indicate that spruce Matthew Jessop had been there, were he tall enough.
Then, as Tonelle moved the torch a little, she thought she glimpsed something else about the long rain-wetted strip.
‘Just a moment,’ she said. ‘Let me have the torch for a second. There’s something I’d like to get a better look at on that tie.’
Tonelle handed the torch over and held the tie out to its full length.
Harriet stepped nearer, pushing aside the rain-damped bushes, twisting her head to benefit to the maximum from the light of the torch. And, distinctly, there was a little circle in black on each of the broad red stripes.
In Matthew Jessop’s smart house, she recalled with clarity, she had, making conversation, paid his tie a compliment. He had then betrayed some embarrassment, and, had gabbled out a half-explanation about the small black circles on its broad red stripes indicating membership of a sort of little club. He must have thought, guiltily perhaps, that I’d particularly noticed them, though I hadn’t at all, and had felt bound to explain, or half-explain.
But what matters now is that the lank strip Tonelle is holding up to the light must mean the tie belonged to a member of the Cabal, and Tonelle’s first description of the inquisitive visitor, broad-shouldered like a boxer, fits, really, only one of the Cabal members I’ve seen. It’s all but a certainty now that it was Tigger Drummond. So, won’t Kailash Gokhale, in the event he is actually briefed to defend Drummond, have more than a little trouble in bringing his task to a successful conclusion?
But, abruptly overcome with fatigue, all she could do then was to murmur to herself Tomorrow to fresh woods …, say goodnight to Tonelle and get waiting Bolshy to drive her home.
Chapter Twenty
‘What is it about this case of yours?’ John asked.
Harriet was sitting at the dining-table tense with tiredness. The freezer fish-pie John had left too long in the low oven was heavy on her stomach. She took her time to answer him.
Indifferent and unimaginative cook though John is, she thought, he has the one great necessary talent. He can judge my mood to a nicety. He knows unerringly the right thing to say at just the right moment.
‘What is it about the case?’ she said at last. ‘I’m not sure I even know myself. It’s just that I’ve been feeling all the time as if I’m fighting ghosts. Or, no, not that. More it’s that everyone I question feels like a phantom figure, people never quite what they seem to be. Or who seem to be what I think they cannot be.’
‘You’re leaving me baffled.’
‘Well, I’m pretty much baffled myself. Or at least I was till an hour or so ago. Now I think things are beginning to come clearer. I think. Because I can hardly believe it. But — all right, perhaps I can give you a taste of it. I mean, when you said, or implied, there was something about the case somehow wrong, my mind went straight back, not to my actual discoveries just now but to first thing this morning. It seems ages ago. The ACC had summoned me to report on progress, and I knew I wasn’t really ready to. You can’t properly report on a mish-mash of suppositions. And, for another thing, he’d called me over when I’d hardly set foot in my own office.’
‘You don’t actually get on with the chap, do you?’ John said.
‘No, I don’t. I don’t know why exactly. It’s probably because I did get on very well with his predecessor, bless his dour Scots heart. But … Well, this chap has a very different way of going about things. I mean, what he says, his appreciations of whatever I have to tell him, are perfectly fine, and even fair. But —’
John ventured a small laugh.
‘But. By which you mean they’re unfair?’
‘Oh, all right. I do think he’s unfair. On me. I mean, what he says is generally reasonably well thought-out. But it’s almost always not what I happen to believe about whatever it is we’re discussing. Or, rather, about what he’s giving me his view of.’
She stopped for a moment to get her thoughts into order.
‘All right, a case in point. At the very beginning of this, when all that ha
d happened was that someone in the darkness there in the square in Gralethorpe had shot some sort of missile at Robert Roughouse as he was haranguing those anti-hunting protesters, the ACC simply announced to me that an off-shoot group of the Animal Rights people was responsible. He said he was going to hand over the inquiry to the Met task force set up to deal with such extremists. OK, it was a possible answer. And, yes, maybe I was hostile to it because I had thought this was going to be my own case. After all, as you’ve good reason to know, that bomb had been hurled right in front of my eyes.’
‘So, in fact you were probably every bit as much entrenched in your view as the ACC was in his.’
‘No. Not fair. Certainly, I wanted the case, and felt I had a right to it. But I wasn’t totally — your word — entrenched. I know I wasn’t. I’d have accepted any reasonable, well thought-out theory for the inquiry going to whoever was best equipped to have it. But it was — Oh, right, it was the way that man just laid down the law that got to me. ACC’s law. And you’d better obey it.’
‘All right, but look at it this way. He’s newly appointed. From another force, didn’t you tell me? Used to different ways. But he’ll adapt. You know he will. Sooner or later you’ll find yourself getting on with him just as well as you did with his predecessor.’
Harriet sat thinking.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t believe you’re right. It isn’t as if that’s the only thing he’s been bloody bull-headed about.’
She saw John’s sharply raised eyebrows.
‘Oh, all right. I’ll find some other word than bull-headed,’ she said. ‘Adamant? How about that? More classy, more smoothly academic.’
‘Let you have it. Just.’
‘OK. But here’s another instance of his bull — of his adamancy. And I don’t believe there is such a word as that.’
‘In the dictionary,’ John stated.
‘Well, you’re the dictionary-monger. But it oughtn’t to be there. It’s not a proper word. It’s something some pedant made up once. To make himself — it would be a him — look important, one of the ones who tell the lesser breeds what’s right and what’s not. And his fellow pedants all jumped on it as making them look important in their turn. But why should a mere dictionary, even one written by Dr Johnson, be able to create laws?’
‘I think, if I may say so, you’re straying somewhat from the point.’
The mild rebuke brought her up short.
‘I am. You’re right. What I was saying … What I wanted to tell you is that just a day or so ago that man wanted to stop me interviewing a possible suspect because it was someone with a high position in the world. But my man’s also a member of a sort of secret club about which I have some evidence — not perhaps court-of-law stuff, but evidence — that it’s behind both the attack at Gralethorpe and the murder at the Masterton. A group of ex-pupils of the Zeal School who —’
‘I know about the Zeal School. They insure with the Majestic. I went down there once. A very odd place. And very, very expensive.’
‘You would know. OK, I’ve got some evidence that this group — they’re very secretive, they’re all rich as rich — is up to something. And — you’re not to pass this on to anybody — one of the people in it is the industrialist, Sir Marcus Fledge.’
‘Pettifer’s. Chairman of almighty Pettifer’s. You’re on dangerous ground, my girl.’
‘Well, so I am. It’s where a police officer has to be sometimes. But what a police officer of my seniority does not expect is to have it suggested — it was all but given as an order — that Sir Marcus should not be interviewed.’
‘So you’ve interviewed him.’
‘I have, though not until I dragged out of that man a sort of grudging permission to do so.’
‘Then what are you worrying about? Your ACC was amenable to reason, yes?’
Harriet sat thinking.
‘But I am worrying,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m worrying because, not only is this case such a phantom-like affair, but because I find I’m totally out of sympathy with the officer I have to report to. And, what’s more, I’ve a pretty firm idea that he’s going to be where he is for a long time to come. You know what a place like Headquarters is, gossip-ridden from head to foot. Especially, in fact, at the foot. You’d be surprised at the things that are well-known to the bottom-of-the-barrel people, the clerks, the PCs, the lab assistants, even the catering staff. There’s a whole bubbling, boiling layer of — if you like — sludge down there. And it’s all animated by rumours, true or false, slithering about from one end to another.’
‘A fearsome picture. Actually much the same at Majestic House.’
‘Right. So, from things that rise up from that bottom layer, I’ve a fairly good idea that our friend wants to see out his days in Birchester. He’s made remarks that indicate as much, and they’ve been heard, overheard, passed down, and floated upwards again.’
‘Yes. I see why you feel disheartened.’
‘I do, John. I’ve told you — I think it was actually in the car at Gralethorpe while we were wondering how to get past the crowd blocking the square — sometimes I feel disheartened to the point of wondering whether to chuck the job in altogether. But now I’m beginning to think the moment may have come. What if, when I report on my newest evidence about what’s actually happening — and, true enough, it does take some believing — our friend simply declines to accept it.’
‘Darling, all this isn’t like you. Really it’s not.’
She sighed.
‘I know what you mean. And I know, too, that it’s really not, as you say, like me to indulge in conspiracy theories. If that’s what I am doing. But I know, as well, that this is what I feel at this moment. In fact it’s, more or less, what I’ve been feeling almost from the start of the whole business. And there it is.’
John looked steadily at her across the smeared remains of fish-pie and frozen peas.
‘Look,’ he said at last. ‘Let’s put all this in suspense until the case is over, one way or another. You may find you feel completely different when you have made an arrest, or a dozen arrests come to that.’
Now Harriet managed a laugh, of a sort.
‘It won’t be a dozen arrests,’ she said. ‘Or at least I’ll be very surprised if it is. From what I’ve learnt about this group of middle-aged, money-flush ex-public schoolboys, the Cabal as they call themselves, it probably runs to no more than eight or nine merry souls. With one or two of those beginning to ease themselves out. Robert Roughouse, I believe, was among them.’
‘And you think that’s possibly why he was murdered, twice murdered if you like?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said with decision, ‘I do look at it that way. There’s no other reason, as far as I’ve been able to make out, for anyone else to want him permanently out of the way.’
‘Not even dear old sex? Lies at the back of a lot of seemingly mysterious deaths.’
‘No, not even that. Roughouse had a lover, a mistress if you want to put it that way. She’s a star athlete, a long-distance runner from Kenya. I’ve seen her, talked to her at length, great length, and there’s no doubt in my mind that sex doesn’t lie at the bottom of this.’
‘All right. So, let’s accept that you’re on the right lines with your Cabal. You know the history of that word? It’s —’
‘John, stop. Stop at once.’
‘Oh, all right. If a fellow can’t have a bit of a ride on his hobbyhorse, I suppose he can’t. OK then, accepting you’re on the right lines, shouldn’t we leave it like this: one, you’re contemplating taking early retirement, partly because you’re frustrated over your current inquiry and partly because you think you’re at variance with your stuck-in-place boss. And, two: whatever difficulties you’re experiencing in investigating the case, in the end, judging by your track-record, you’re going to arrive at the right answer. So, let’s leave it till you succeed, or not. And then, if you’re still of a mind to quit, we’ll talk about it. And yo
u, ultimately, will decide.’
‘Please, sir, can I go to bed now?’
‘You may.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Harriet, coming at her own request to report to the ACC next morning that she might be nearing the end of her inquiry, found him producing something resembling a smile.
‘So, you’ve got a case against somebody? Why don’t you take a seat and tell me about it?’
Big folder of statements from the Incident Room clasped to herself, Harriet took the chair in front of the desk, notorious for being so hard that no one sat there a minute longer than they had to.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘In my estimation we have an excellent case against one Valentine Drummond for the murder of Robert Roughouse. You may remember me telling you that a man went to the door of the Masterton Clinic in the evening of the night Roughouse was smothered and asked the receptionist there, Tonelle Danbury —’
‘Black girl? Sounds like it.’
‘Yes, sir, she is black, and, incidentally pretty bright.’
The ACC grunted.
‘Yes, sir. And, as I was saying, this man who appeared at the Masterton asked Miss Danbury a number of questions about the clinic. In the interests, so he said, of a friend who might need to become a patient there. The man, whom Miss Danbury cannot, unfortunately, be absolutely sure of identifying — he wore a hat with the brim pulled well down — eventually turned away, apparently in a bad temper because he had learnt so little. But in the gloom — it was latish — he strode straight into a shrubbery.’
‘Is there much more of this, Superintendent? Shrubberies and bad temper and hats pulled well down?’
‘Yes, sir. There is more. But not a great deal.’
‘Very well then.’
A sigh.
‘Inside the shrubbery, sir, there are a good many bramble bushes, and, on one of these a necktie, the end of which was jutting out from the pocket of the visitor’s mackintosh, caught on their thorns and was pulled out. The visitor, not noticing this, crashed his way out of the shrubbery found again the drive leading from the house and left at a fast walk.’
