Corpse (Commander Shaw Book 15)

by Philip McCutchan

  “Where do we start?” she asked.

  I said I hadn’t the faintest idea but something would come to me. In the meantime I needed some clean shirts and so on, and so we drove to my flat.

  TWO

  Miss Mandrake produced a late breakfast efficiently and then I took a nap. which refreshed me. I’d just woken up when FH came on the closed telephone line with information that the owner of the car, the one in which the second body had been found, had been contacted by Peterborough police: a food chain’s rep who had been blotto alter a night out in Stamford and had emerged to find his car had been nicked. A man on whom the police had nothing. All the same, since I intended visiting the Midlands again after contacting the Department of Industry, which I would do that afternoon. I asked PH to have the police keep the car owner available — just in case. He might have something to yield up. something that might click with me though it might pass over the police.

  I gave Felicity lunch at a small Greek restaurant near my flat, then I took a taxi to the Department of Industry in Victoria Street: a phone call just before lunch had got me an appointment with one Fishlock, the late Chartner’s boss. Fishlock was very prim, very precise, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a dark suit. He also had a somewhat forbidding manner. He said crisply, “I have the facts already, of course. Your HQ was in touch as soon as this most unfortunate affair came to light. What can I do for you?”

  I said, “A run-down on what Mr Chartner was to do at Corby.”

  “It’s classified, you know.” It sounded stupid and was, but we’re a furtive lot these days.

  “Sure,” I said sardonically. “So am I.”

  He looked very slightly disconcerted. “Yes, yes, I understand.” There was a pause. “Well, it’s quite straightforward really. A question of threatened industrial action over redundancies. Chartner went down to keep a finger on the pulse. We deplore strikes, of course, we do strive to keep management and unions together on these matters, to keep the dialogue going — ”

  “Naturally,” I broke in, stemming the Civil Service flow of meaningless verbiage right from the start. “Anything political involved, do you know?”

  Fishlock smirked: how brainless could the sleuths get. “My dear Commander Shaw, is not politics always involved in industrial disputes today? It’s not just pay and conditions any more, is it?”

  I said, “You know what I mean, l think, Mr Fishlock.”

  He looked down at his blotter. “Well, yes. Yes, I do. Extremists. On this occasion I don’t believe so. It’s purely the redundancies … the work force seeking to protect itself. That’s natural, and no one realises that more than we do. Equally naturally, their representatives — the shop stewards, you know — stand up for them.”

  “But somebody killed Chartner.”

  Fishlock sucked in breath, sharply. “Surely there’s no connection?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to find out. Had Chartner any political associations?”

  “Certainly not. We don’t, in the Civil Service — that is, we don’t militate about it. I happen to know he’d been a lifelong conservative voter.”

  I nodded. “Enemies?”

  “Not to the extent of murder! No enemies that I know of no. He didn’t get on with everybody, but who does?”

  “Who indeed?” I murmured, then asked, “How long had he been in the Peterborough area, Mr Fishlock?”

  “He went up the day before … the day before he was found. He’d not actually been over to the Adger-Craby complex, in fact I imagine he’d done little beyond settling into his hotel, which was the Great Northern … ”

  I let Fishlock talk on for a while in case something emerged, but he got me bogged down in Whitehallese and circumlocution and finally I cut in with a glance at my watch and a request for a breakdown of Chartner’s career from start to finish. He sent me along to Establishment Senior Staff Management Division, where I browsed through Chartner’s confidential file. It was ordinary enough: born 4 September 1931 in Hounslow, educated at a preparatory school and Haileybury, then Cambridge — Emmanuel — 1949 to 1952. He’d taken a BA degree in Modern History and had subsequently entered the administrative grade of the Civil Service via the War Office. He had held later appointments in the Ministry of Defence before being seconded to Industry. Very ordinary indeed. A conscientious civil servant, married with two children, no blemishes on his character. There being nothing outstanding about him, he had probably — I read between the lines — reached the zenith of his career. A conscientious plodder, with patriotic and Tory parents: he’d been hopefully named Stanley Baldwin Chartner. All in all, he seemed somewhat too cosy to merit murder by CORPSE. Whatever CORPSE might be …

  *

  Late that afternoon we headed north into the Midlands again. Felicity and I. I drove up the A1 in blinding rain, a real cloudburst that almost had me aquaplaning at times. I turned off on to the A15 for Peterborough and in due time squelched to a stop at the nick. Nothing fresh: still no line on the dead girl. The nationwide missing persons check hadn’t yet produced a thing. There was, it seemed, no one to claim her. I was given the food chain rep’s address at a Stamford hotel, and we got carborne again. I found the rep in the bar with a woman, and I got rid of the woman tactfully by getting Felicity to buy her a drink, but it was no use: the rep was drunk again and in a belligerent mood because his car upholstery had been desecrated with Chartner’s blood and there was a dent in the wing and anyway he’d lost the use of it because the effing fuzz were hanging on to it and it was all my effing fault. No help there: he was just a boozy bum bacon flogger who’d had his car nicked in the interests of murder and that was all. His effing was better employed elsewhere, so I released him to his woman after extracting the one piece of hard information that he seemed capable of, and that was that his effing car had been effing nicked while he’d gone into a public convenience for a pee. He refused to admit, since it was a firm’s car, that he’d left the keys in the ignition, but I knew damn well he had. The theft had taken place at approximately three p.m. the day before the body had been found in Peterborough. I reminded him that he’d told the police he hadn’t discovered his loss until the next morning, and that shook him for a moment. He told me to eff off and I made the assumption that at the actual time of loss he’d been breathalysable and hadn’t wished to mention it to the police. Even boneheads have a sense of self-protection when their livelihoods are at stake, and, I say again, it was the firm’s effing car anyway …

  I rejoined Felicity and reported.

  “Where now?” she asked.

  I said, “It’s getting late, but I’m going to snoop round the Adger-Craby works — outside, just a familiarising look-see. After that, Oundle.”

  “Talbot House?”

  I nodded. She made a sound of pleasure. We headed out of Peterborough for Corby. Wet roads and the daylight going with the overcast … I put on my headlights and they beamed out over hedges and fields and trees, raising the occasional luminous sparkle from cows’ eyes. I took a wrong turn somewhere and after a while found I was heading towards Oundle. Getting back on track, we passed through some delightful villages, with clustered cottages built in what looked like Cotswold stone, and nice old churches. Very rural, surprisingly so when we were on the fringe of the industrial Midlands … and suddenly it changed. Way ahead we picked up the lights of the Adger-Craby chemical plant and as we came up to the complex we left country scenes behind us for the gates of hell. Corby was colossal, it was hard black beneath brilliant light, it was smelly, it was all clang from what was left of the British Steel Corporation’s presence and there was also a lot of closed-down dereliction. Once, it had been all steel and iron: I dare say it had had a City Slagheap instead of a City Centre. It was Port Talbot plus, or had been. I felt much sympathy for all those areas where the steel plants had shut down totally, drawing fires for the last act. At the same time I was glad I was not a steel worker forced to live in a steel town.

  I drove
around for a while, just looking, pausing when the road ran past entry gates to the once-busy steel works, peering within through binoculars, glimpsing the environs of job-loss, the sort of thing, I supposed, that might be about to hit Adger-Craby. There was some activity; steam and smoke rose like a pall, and there was the clang, clang too; the steam and smoke was like a heavy mist at times, as it was held down by the pouring rain. There was a sulphurous sort of stench; my heart bled for Northamptonshire and its quiet villages and lanes and woody fields. It could well be glad to see the withdrawal of British Steel. And what about Adger-Craby? Redundancies there, too, and some who liked Corby as it was, those who didn’t want to be made redundant and who’d been innocently, or maybe not innocently, responsible for bringing Chartner up here to be stabbed to death. Was there a connection? Had someone else a vested interested in ensuring that Chartner brought about no reconciliation, someone who was out for industrial trouble that would shut all the activity down? Socialist Workers Party, National Front, Trotskyites from somewhere beyond Britain?

  “Well?” Felicity asked. “Are we getting places, or not?”

  “Not,” I decided. I’d come because it’s always been my policy to get to know the geography, feel the feel, get worked in and acclimatised. Not because I’d expected to pick up the killer at the works gate or anything like that. Tomorrow I would come again, on an official visit to the management. I said, “Next stop Oundle, and a drink, and dinner if it’s not too late. And?”

  “Almost certainly yes,” Miss Mandrake said in a prim voice like Fishlock’s. I got going and went fast out of desolation towards friendly countryside, back through the snug little villages of rural England. About fifteen minutes after leaving Corby behind I picked up something astern that shouldn’t have been. Just a blur in my mirror really, but a blur that stuck and was becoming faintly visible as the rain stopped and the night lightened just a little. I told Felicity to look behind, and she turned in her seat.

  “Nothing there.”

  “Sure? Keep looking.”

  She did; a few minutes later we came into another village and as I took a right-hand bend out of it again, she said suddenly, “I’ve seen it, a car without lights.”

  “Right,” I said, “We have a tail.”

  “So we shake it off?”

  “No. Sometime we have to make contact with someone. The sooner the better. We haven’t spotted it.”

  “Okay,” she said, and turned round and settled hack in her seat. I could feel the tension in her: there is a nasty feeling: in a tail and you never quite get used to it. I kept my speed steady and soon after that we were coming into Oundle. In my rear-view mirror I saw lights behind: my tail had no doubt switched on for Oundle and if we went further would switch off again. But we were going no farther than the war memorial in Oundle’s centre, and having reached it I turned left and left again into the Talbot House Hotel’s narrow yard where once the stage coaches had shed their loads. I parked up at the far end. saw no sign of our tail, and went with Felicity to check in at Reception. We carried our grips up, then rendezvoused for a drink. No one in the bar looked like a murderer. The only discord came from a public school youth with shoulder-length hair who was haranguing his long suffering and visiting parents with a statement that he washed to be a dropout rather than take A-levels. Officially dinner-time was past but the hotel laid on food all the same and afterwards we went straight up to our respective rooms. Half an hour after I had turned in, there was a tap at the door. Playing safe, I had my automatic handy when I pulled back the door catch, but. as I’d expected, it was Felicity. I took her in my arms and kissed her and we retired for the night. It was day light when I woke, and it was the soft burr of the telephone at my bedside that woke me. I glanced at my wrist-watch and it showed a few minutes after eight. I yanked the receiver off the hook, disengaged Miss Mandrake’s arm, and said, “Yes?”

  A woman’s voice, a nice one but full of strain, asked, “Commander Shaw?”

  I caught Felicity’s sleepy eye, and I didn’t answer. The voice went on, “This is Mary Chartner — ”

  “Chartner!” I sat up straight.

  “Yes. I came up yesterday … to see my husband. To see the — ”

  “Yes, all right, Mrs Chartner. I’m Shaw. I’m terribly sorry … is there something I can do?”

  She said, “There’s something you ought to know, I think. Not on the telephone, you’ll understand that.”

  “Yes, I do. The police — ”

  “Not the police. I was wondering … I’m sorry to be a nuisance … would you come and see me about ten o’clock this morning?”

  I temporised. “Where?”

  “I’m staying with friends near Alconbury. Tenbury House — it’s on the outskirts of Barham. You take the Thrapston road from Oundlc, and turn left a little before Thorpe Waterville. Thank you so much. Commander Shaw.” She rang off abruptly — too abruptly for a refusal. In fact I didn’t know whether I would have refused or not. I fancied she was genuine but I’m not grass green and I knew it could be a trap. On balance, though, I tended to believe she was on the level. Peterborough nick could conceivably have told her w here I was staying, and I suppose she was entitled to know I had been assigned to the job. Chartner had ranked high — his relative rank in. say, the Foreign Office would have been Assistant Under-Secretary of State or thereabouts. His widow would be treated with trust and respect. Anyway, I rang Peterborough. Yes, they told me. Chartner’s wife had formally identified the body and had asked to be put in touch with me, and they had given her the hotel’s address and telephone number. I said they might have warned me, and they apologised. They thought a call had in fact been put through to me from the nick earlier.

  I rang off.

  I told Miss Mandrake that we would head out for Barham immediately after breakfast and that was what we did. After a close scrutiny of the road atlas I had the route fixed in my mind: that left turn before Thorpe Waterville would head me on to very minor roads for the village of Barham. When I took the left turn I found just how minor they were, and after I’d turned again in the hinterland they became more minor still. There wasn’t much traffic but what there was had got stuck in my vicinity: I had two cars behind me, keeping close, the leading one being a powerful Volvo driven by a girl with long blonde hair. Ahead of me, blocking the whole narrow road and ambling at an infuriating pace, was a huge pantechnicon with its rear doors hooked open. It was empty but for a youth leaning back against a mattress hung against the near-side bulkhead. The youth was reading a copy of Fiesta. I was close enough to read the title over the top of the tailboard and to see the nude on the cover. The youth glanced up from his studies, saw the impatience in my face, and gave me a reversed V sign. However, after a while the pantechnicon gathered some speed and more or less tore away from me. As the blonde behind crowded me impatiently and used her horn in a long blast, I put on a little speed too. After that things happened fast. The youth released the tail-board and swung himself up to the top of one of the doors, and simultaneously the pantechnicon braked hard. A man of quick reactions. I braked too and hoped fleetingly that the Volvo blonde would be as fast as me. My brake pedal went flat to the floor, no resistance at all, and I swept willy-nilly up the pantechnicon’s tail-board, bounced on the flooring, and smashed forcefully into the reinforced bulkhead behind the driver’s cab. My engine went, so did a lot of other things including the radiator. There was a burst of steam and boiling water. Felicity and I had been saved only by our seat belts … as I sat somewhat stunned, the daylight went: the doors had been closed. Looking sideways I stared right into the little round hole in a revolver held by the youth. He was grinning like a satisfied tom-cat. I twisted to the rear: four men and the blonde, all armed, had crowded in behind. The pantechnicon, having trapped me, had stopped fora moment, presumably to embark the posse from the Volvo and the other car behind, but was now under way again and moving fast and we were swaying about like a ship in a heavy sea.

  I look
ed stonily at the youth. “My brakes.” I said. “What happened?”

  “Didn’t effing answer, did they?”

  “That,” I snapped, “is obvious. Why didn’t they? Who tampered with them and why didn’t they fail earlier?”

  He grinned on. “Effing things got bled, didn’t they, and refilled with water.” I listened aghast as he proceeded with his technical exposition: it was clever, all right, and of course it had all begun with that tail from Corby. In the brooding peace of a dark night the work had proceeded without interruption once chummy’s master key had gained him entry to my car, and the use of automatic bleed nipples had meant that just the one villain had been able to eject the brake fluid and refill. On went the nipples and with one of them open chummy sat in the driving seat and pumped the footbrake, emerging now and again to fill up the master cylinder with more water and to open up the nipples on the other three wheels. Once I was on the road, gentle braking would only warm the water up and I would notice no effect whatever; but the moment I slammed the brakes on hard for an emergency, as in the case of the pantechnicon, the water reached boiling point, and wham. Total brake failure, and me in the van. The explanation given, the youth was joined by another man. a man wearing dark glasses and a lot of hair under one of those grotesque blue fake nautical caps with peaks. He, too, thrust a revolver at my face and told Felicity and me to sit tight, keep quiet, and all would come clear in due course. He motioned the youth away and as he did so the blonde came up on the near side of my imprisoned car and out came yet another gun, this time a small handbag automatic, a pre-war Sauer & Sohn 6.35mm. This covered Felicity. I looked at the man in the funny cap and said. “I presume we’re not going to call on Mrs Chartner after all?”

  He grinned: his teeth were good and white. “Correct. Commander Shaw.”