Killer in the Shade

by Piers Marlowe

  It was just about the time Bill Hazard headed back to London that Dr John Cadman had an idea. He rose from the chair in which he was seated and got from a rack of magazines one issued by a local professional association. He turned over several pages until he came to a group of men standing in a double line. Underneath, in small print, was the caption: ‘The Upper Borley Chess Club — members have accepted a challenge from a chess team in Rouen, France.’

  ‘Carol,’ he said to the tired-looking girl who was waiting while Judy Cadman made up a bed for her, ‘take a look at this chess group. Tell me if any face among them seems familiar.’

  Surprised at the request, Carol opened her eyes wide, and looked from John Cadman to the photo. She glanced over the two lines of faces and was on the point of shaking her head and handing back the magazine when she started and sat bolt upright.

  She glanced again at one of the faces in the group.

  ‘My God!’ she said softly, in a tone of awe. ‘This is the man who ran from Holly Lawn holding a bloodstained handkerchief.’

  She pointed to the face of the third man from the left in the front row.

  Dr John Cadman came and leaned over her shoulder and looked at the face just above the end of her shiny fingernail.

  Chapter 7

  Joe Murphy’s broad Irish face creased in an expression compounded of equal parts of disgust and admiration. He slid off the news editor’s desk and, while holding his gaze on Rollo’s face, said to Dan Simpson, ‘Some of us wear our shoe leather through to our socks pounding the pavements for news of evil in the big city — ’

  ‘He means,’ said the Gazette’s news editor, ‘rubbing the seat of his trousers shiny on the hard upholstery of taxis.’

  ‘ — others have it just pour into their lap,’ finished Murphy, his voice becoming sad. ‘Pour, not fall,’ he added. ‘Not even shower — pour, as in downpour.’

  Simpson looked at Rollo with speculative gaze. ‘Drury said we can’t use any of it?’

  ‘That’s what the man said,’ Rollo affirmed.

  The Irishman made a sound that suggested his windpipe had been permanently plugged, finally got words out of his almost closed mouth.

  ‘He can’t stop us doing some research, damn it.’

  Dan Simpson looked almost coy. ‘You thinking what I am, Joe?’

  ‘I’d bet your next pay cheque on it, Daniel.’ Murphy suddenly looked happier. ‘After all, he isn’t officially missing. Just not around. But he was a do-gooder. No family and his only hobby prisoners’ aid. Perfect.’

  Rollo asked, ‘Who are you talking about, Mr Murphy?’

  The sad expression returned to the worldly-wise Irish eyes. ‘Don’t be harsh on me, boy. Anyone as covered in luck as you should call me Joe and stop being bloody formal. Formality doesn’t allow luck to rub off. I’m talking about that goddamn Anthony Arbuthnot. Now there we can start something, like where is he? Who last heard of him? We can really work it into something because we know all the answers, and when we get the word we can use them. Exclusive to the Gazette. Right, Daniel?’

  ‘Right, Joe.’

  Joe Murphy’s voice became sorrowful. ‘But something else is not quite so right, and that’s for you to explain, boy,’ he told Rollo. ‘Tom Moore showed you two photos. Later you recognized Peel although he wore those big sunglasses, had hair all over his face and wore hippie clothes, none of which was in Moore’s photo. How did you do it?’

  ‘It wasn’t really difficult.’

  ‘God, now he’s being modest,’ complained the crime reporter. ‘All right, boy, how easy was it? I’m willing to learn. No one except a damned schoolmaster in Mullingar ever said different, and that bastard was biased.’

  ‘It was the ears,’ Rollo said, suddenly aware that the air in the office was very close.

  ‘The ears, for God’s sake,’ Joe Murphy marvelled. ‘The boy’s been studying Lombroso.’

  ‘They’re pointed and they protrude from the side of his head, and those heavy dark glasses emphasized them — frame them, if you like,’ Rollo said, trying not to sound apologetic, but aware that he wasn’t succeeding.

  Joe Murphy looked overcome. ‘Not if I like, boy. What the hell have my likes got to do with it? Don’t you know that Lombroso stuff is discredited by all modern criminologists? Modern forensic science has even chopped the late Alphonse Bertillon into sacrificial mincemeat and his anthropometric system with him.’

  ‘All right, Joe, that’s enough,’ the news editor said. ‘I’ve still got to get out the next edition.’

  The Irishman looked at his watch. ‘Slave-driver,’ he muttered. ‘The pubs don’t open for another twelve minutes, and I can crawl there in ten.’ He moved towards Rollo, grabbed the young man’s arm. ‘Boy, I feel like buying you a drink. Nothing like the first beer of the day to refresh yesterday’s memory. Come on.’

  Rollo was dragged away from the empty desk on which he had been leaning. He glanced over his shoulder at the news editor. Dan Simpson was frowning at a galley proof, chiselling at the print with a soft-lead pencil like a mason shaping stone into a figure for some anonymous grave. At least, that was what the look of determined distaste on his face suggested.

  Five minutes after Joe Murphy bought Rollo a pint of keg bitter the Press Information Officer at Scotland Yard released the name of the victim found in Holly Lawn. Within seconds it was ticking over the tapes, ending with the hopeful promise, ‘More to follow’.

  The release had come following the morning interview between Superintendent Frank Drury and the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department. It had been a tough interview for Drury. He had been asked a great many questions he couldn’t answer, which left him in a sour mood when he returned to his own office.

  Half an hour later he was joined by Bill Hazard, who nicely judged the tension in the atmosphere when his chief frowned at him and asked shortly, ‘Well?’

  ‘She was sure this man in the group of chess players was the man who ran from the Croft Avenue house.’

  ‘So,’ grunted Drury, ‘what have you come up with about Cecil Weddon, a bank manager with a flashy wife?’

  ‘First,’ said Hazard, ‘the bank. It’s a branch of the National City.’

  ‘And you know I hate coincidences, Bill.’ Drury sounded as though the tension was easing and his sour mood lifting, which his assistant found encouraging. ‘Peel has a scheme for lifting the contents of a National City vault, which branch we don’t know. Now Weddon, who was in that house where Clayson was stabbed, is manager of a branch of the same bank. Well, well. Someone’s either taking too many chances or being over-subtle. I can’t decide which, and that isn’t a feeling I enjoy. Go on, Bill.’

  Hazard said, ‘The wife’s a flashy redhead and at one time she was running around with Clayson. That checks with Dr Cadman.’ The inspector rubbed his chin. ‘She spends money freely, clothes, parties, pruning herself and filling the big house they’ve got with pricey modern furniture. He’s a bank manager, but he’s living as though he owns a chain of supermarkets. Holidays by jet in the West Indies, likes race meetings. Very easy go. Not so sure about how easy it is to come by.’

  Drury sat back and felt for his pipe.

  ‘We’d better pay them a visit. The A.C.’s been pushing me for answers, Bill. Maybe the Weddons can supply a few. I’d like that. Especially why he was at Holly Lawn. I’d like to have both of them there, so if one lies the other’s got to follow through with no help.’

  ‘Best time would be around four-thirty,’ Hazard suggested. ‘Gives him time to get home for a cup of tea, feeling relaxed.’

  Drury dragged at his pipe, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Even if she’s out we’ll be taking him by surprise, especially if he hasn’t seen an afternoon edition.’

  ‘With Clayson’s name?’

  Drury nodded again. ‘Yes, the A.C. agreed to let it be released. After all, we’ve been damned close-mouthed about this Holly Lawn murder. Comes the time when it defea
ts itself. So we give out Clayson’s name.’

  ‘Chances are,’ said Bill Hazard, ‘he will have seen an afternoon paper. Bank managers like being up-to-date with the latest news, specially Stock Exchange figures.’

  ‘So he may be worried before we arrive. He may even have phoned his wife, especially if he knows about her and Clayson.’

  ‘Which may not be all it appears on the surface,’ Hazard pointed out. ‘If Cecil Weddon didn’t want to appear to know Clayson. She could have been the go-between.’

  ‘True, but we don’t know if there was anything between Weddon and Clayson, Bill. We only know the woman was, as you said when you came in, running around with Clayson. But as you said just now, that may not be how it appears on the surface. No, we’ll take a chance,’ Drury decided, pulling deeper at his pipe. ‘We’ll pick him up when he leaves the bank and tail him home. Then we’ll go calling.’

  However, things didn’t work out as Drury had hoped they might. For one thing, he and Hazard wasted nearly an hour after the bank of which Weddon was manager closed before he sent his assistant to find out if Weddon was still in his office. The chief cashier, who was working late, told the inspector that the manager had left shortly after returning from lunch, about a quarter past two.

  ‘He had a visitor,’ Hazard relayed to an unhappy Drury when he returned to the police car. ‘The young man was with him about five minutes, then they both left.’

  ‘This visitor, was he known to the chief cashier?’

  ‘A stranger,’ Hazard told Drury. ‘I got a description.’

  He hesitated.

  Drury looked at him sharply, aware that Hazard was holding back something.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure about this. It’s only a feeling I have.’

  ‘All right, so you could be wrong, Bill. Hell, it wouldn’t be the first time, but in God’s name don’t waste time. We’ve lost enough already. Let’s have it.’

  ‘I thought this visitor, from the chief cashier’s description, sounded rather like Rollo Hackley.’

  ‘Hackley!’ Drury had indeed been taken by surprise. ‘Didn’t he give his name?’

  ‘He sent in a card. The girl cashier who took it into the manager’s office has left. I asked the chief cashier to look inside the office. The card wasn’t on Weddon’s desk or in his waste basket.’

  ‘Which suggests he slipped the card in his pocket. That in turn,’ Drury muttered, ‘suggests he didn’t want it left lying around. Of course he could have pushed it into a drawer.’

  ‘It wasn’t in the central drawer of his desk. I couldn’t ask the chief cashier to go further than that.’

  ‘Very well, Bill. You’ve got Weddon’s address. Let’s pay him a call. A bit late, but let’s hope it’s still unexpected and won’t be anything but an unpleasant surprise.’

  The name of the Weddon home was Gable End, a name that would seemingly have fitted any of the other detached houses in a tree-lined road with grassed verges in a good residential area of properties, any of which would have brought a five-figure sum in the current property market.

  Bill Hazard halted the police car at the kerb outside the second house past Gable End. As the two Yard men stepped on to the pavement they turned to see a figure making towards them from the other side of the road.

  ‘Tom Moore,’ Drury scowled. ‘What the hell is he doing here?’

  It wasn’t very long before he knew. The private detective looked worried and tossed away the butt of a cigarette that had become sodden in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Thank God someone’s turned up, Superintendent,’ he said to Drury. ‘I got a call from young Hackley, who said he was calling on a bank manager and hoping to be brought home by him. He gave me this address and asked me to keep watch. Just in case, as he put it.’

  ‘Of what?’ asked Drury shortly.

  ‘He didn’t say. All he told me was something might happen and he’d like me to be on hand. That’s all.’

  ‘And what has happened, Moore?’

  ‘I saw him drive up with a man who was a stranger to me,’ Moore explained. ‘They went into the house. I kept watch on the place as Hackley asked me. About twenty minutes ago the stranger and a woman came out, got into the car, and drove off.’

  ‘What was the woman like?’

  ‘Red hair, well dressed with very short skirt, well-groomed type, looking like she’d got money to spend.’

  ‘Hackley?’

  Tom Moore shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t leave with them. That’s what got me worried just before you arrived. Something could have happened to him.’

  ‘Bill,’ snapped Drury, ‘let’s take a look. I’ll go to the front door. You look round the back.’ He glanced at Moore. ‘You’d better keep with Bill, as Hackley said, in case.’

  Three minutes later Drury, standing on the porch and getting no reply to his ringing at the doorbell, heard Bill Hazard calling. He left the porch, hurried to the side gate which led into the garden and round to the back of a double garage. One glance showed him the broken window of the garage, the door of which was open with a key in the lock on the inside. Car exhaust fumes were being sucked outside by a light breeze. Bill Hazard and Tom Moore were in the act of lifting the limp figure of an unconscious man.

  As they brought him out into the garden Drury scowled at the face of Rollo Hackley.

  If Joe Murphy had been present he might have found reason for revising his opinion about Rollo’s luck.

  Then, again, he might not. The rescue had certainly been in time to save Rollo’s life.

  The smell of Drury’s pipe was rank enough, for the Yard man wasn’t choosey in the matter of the tobacco he smoked. His wife claimed he used his pipe as an incinerator. But the pipe smell was pleasant after the lungful of carbon monoxide Rollo had breathed. He sat on a car cushion under a silver birch bare of leaves and the grass beside him felt damp to his groping fingers.

  ‘Just take your time, Mr Hackley,’ Drury said. ‘Let’s have it as it happened and as you remember it, and don’t get shy about telling the truth. You shoved your nose where it wasn’t welcome and you’ve got a bump on your head to prove it. Thank heaven you had the sense to get Tom here to cover you.’

  Moore didn’t feel like taking credit he felt he hadn’t earned.

  ‘No,’ he said gruffly, ‘I made the mistake of waiting too long. If you hadn’t arrived when you did, Superintendent, he might have run out of luck.’

  ‘My thanks to all three of you,’ Rollo said with a self-conscious grin. ‘This sort of meeting is becoming a habit.’

  ‘One you’d better not let develop,’ Drury retorted. ‘Now put us in the picture.’

  Rollo explained how he had rung up the bank, made an appointment to see Cecil Weddon, went there, and explained who he was and why he had called.

  ‘At six quid an hour for taking up bank managers’ time, you were running the Gazette into debt,’ Drury muttered sardonically. ‘What was the reason you gave?’

  ‘I wanted to know if he had told his wife he was in the Croft Avenue house the night a man she had been meeting privately was murdered.’ Rollo stared at Drury. ‘All right, Superintendent, now hit me on my nosey nose.’

  Drury was staring back at the man lying propped against the silver birch. He was bending down a little after concentrating on Rollo’s words.

  ‘Not before witnesses,’ he growled. ‘Just get on with it, Mr Hackley.’

  ‘Weddon played it cool — damned cool. He pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about. To prove I had made a mistake he offered to take me home to meet his wife, just what I wanted him to do, so I could confront both of them at the same time.’

  Bill Hazard lit two cigarettes, one for himself and one for Rollo, and passed the packet to Tom Moore, standing glumly by absorbing the speaker’s words as though his skin was blotting-paper. Hazard fitted his offered cigarette into the corner of Rollo’s mouth and asked casually, ‘What made you feel you hadn’t ma
de a mistake?’

  Rollo exhaled smoke. ‘He shouldn’t have invited me home. He should have called one of his clerks as a witness and threatened me with a slander suit.’

  Drury smiled approvingly. ‘So you knew you were walking into trouble?’

  ‘Let’s say I was glad I’d rung the Temple-Moore agency and made the arrangement I had with Mr Moore.’

  Tom Moore choked on a mouthful of smoke. No one looked at him, and Rollo explained how, after he had met Beryl Weddon and again made his request, he had been told they were not prepared to tell him a story any more than they were prepared to let him tell one. He knew what was meant when he looked round and saw the woman covering him with a gun pointed at his head.

  ‘But she didn’t shoot,’ Drury pointed out.

  ‘The gun was just to make me acquiescent, let’s say.’ Rollo removed the cigarette from his mouth and grinned in a shamed way. ‘They wanted to find something out before getting rid of me — like how much I knew.’

  ‘You obligingly told them?’ Drury sounded sceptical. But of what Rollo couldn’t be sure and decided he’d rather not know, anyway.

  ‘Not in so many words,’ he said defensively. ‘But they began some crosstalk, about they supposed I must know about Vince Pallard, and I’m not a good enough actor to keep from giving myself away.’

  ‘They sound like a team,’ Drury decided. ‘Neat. No rehearsal. Just went straight into an ad-lib act and got the right reaction. That it?’

  ‘That’s precisely it. It was as though I was an audience, and making expected reactions,’ Rollo admitted glumly. ‘Until Weddon asked me something I couldn’t answer.’

  ‘What was that?’ Drury inquired readily.

  ‘After deciding I knew of Pallard, Weddon asked me how I had learned of Pallard’s connection with them. I said nothing, because I didn’t know what he meant.’

  Drury straightened his back without removing his gaze from the young man seated under the tree. He said, ‘I think you’ve just told me why Vince was murdered. He was playing two ends against the middle. It takes a very clever man to keep that up for long. Vince wasn’t all that clever. I think he was running with Clayson and hunting with the man who killed him, which is why Weddon was at that house in Croft Avenue. He had to know what was going on, if only to satisfy his wife. Yes, that could be how it shaped,’ Drury nodded, a man talking more to himself than those listening to him.