A Knife For Harry Dodd

by George Bellairs

  ‘How did you know me?’

  ‘Wot, with your picture in the Helstonbury Gazette only this mornin’! I wanted to see old Lott squirm. And, by God, he did! He took to his heels and ran like ‘ell…’

  Battersbee laughed and coughed and spat at the thought of it.

  ‘You should ‘ave seen him…’

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘He went to his garage behind, took out the light lorry, and drove off as if all ‘ell was after ‘im…’

  They quickly got rid of Battersbee. They’d more to do than drag any more information from him.

  ‘He’s mixed up in Harry Dodd’s death,’ said Littlejohn, ‘and he thinks we’re on his trail and has bolted. We’d better send out a message to all police in the locality to stop and hold him.’

  They hadn’t to wait long.

  At midnight the Lowestoft police telephoned. Ishmael Lott had tried to board Pharaoh’s boat, the Betsy Jane, had been spotted by a dock policeman, had proved rough, and had been hit with a truncheon and put in the cells to cool off.

  ‘We searched him,’ said the officer at Lowestoft. ‘He’d a body-belt strapped round his waist with ten thousand in five-pound notes in it…’

  15—The Tragedy of Ishmael Lott

  THEY were bringing Ishmael Lott back to Helstonbury from Lowestoft at noon, but before he arrived, Littlejohn had much to do. He spent the morning telephoning various London offices from the list of securities on his cigarette packet.

  ‘Is that the registered office of the Amalgamated Brass Industries? Scotland Yard here…’

  And so on, at the registrars, or their agents, of Belang, Freifontein, Associated Nickel…

  ‘Have any shares in the name of Harry Dodd or of Ishmael Lott been registered with you?’

  The same reply every time. They looked back for six years, as Littlejohn suggested, but there was nothing on their books.

  Some of them got a bit fussy, too. Their books were confidential. Littlejohn’s authority and persuasiveness, however, won in the end. The last on the list, Ruritanian Concentrated Oils Ltd., brought results. All the others had suggested that Harry Dodd might have speculated on margins and taken profit or loss without registering his shares at all. But he’d bought and registered a hundred Ruritanians; and so had Ishmael Lott.

  ‘He held them three months, then sold. They cost about five hundred pounds and he netted a cool five hundred on the deal. You see, the company was prospecting for new wells and struck it rich. Lucky he got out when he did. The dictator of Ruritania nationalised the oil three weeks after…Eh?’

  ‘Were the transfers marked by a broker?’

  ‘I’ll have to ring you back. I’ll try to find them. We’re not really interested in Concentrated now they’ve been confiscated…’

  An hour later the registrar was back. The stock had been bought through Everit, Byle and Co., Cornhill.

  Everit, Byle and Co. weren’t very helpful at first. They didn’t, they said, supply information about clients to strangers, especially over the telephone. The voice was a lazy, drawling one, but it was stung into activity when Littlejohn reminded it that Harry Dodd had been murdered, that the information was in the interests of justice, and that an official from Scotland Yard or the Public Prosecutor’s Office would shortly be calling on Messrs. Everit or Byle, or both of them…

  Did the Inspector mind holding on till the drawling man got the ledger?

  Yes. Mr. Harry Dodd had, over six years, shown an uncanny insight into the ups and downs of the stock and share markets and had, in all, netted about five thousand a year in so doing. Now and then he’d lost, but on balance he must have made over twenty-five thousand pounds, all told. Mr. Ishmael Lott? Yes; they’d worked together apparently. But Mr. Lott had had a bad setback or two. Lost quite a packet on Persian Asbestos when the bottom fell out of them after the assassination of the chairman and vice-chairman at the general meeting in Tehran…Don’t mention it. Always ready to help the police…

  Mr. Lott arrived on time in a police car. He was in poor shape. In his pugilistic effort to board the Betsy Jane, he’d lost one of his rabbit teeth and got himself a swollen lip. He also needed a shave. He looked like a shrimp beside the huge constable in charge of him. About five feet six or seven, with thin arms and legs. His trousers were braced too high and his ankles looked like drumsticks entering his shoes. His suit was too large for him, as though he’d shrunk in the night, or else that Mrs. Lott had bought it for him, like a mother fitting up a growing boy and leaving room for him to fill it up.

  As soon as he saw Littlejohn, Mr. Lott rushed to him. The attendant constable lumbered after him and seized him by the coat collar.

  ‘‘Ere…’

  ‘I only wanted to appeal to the Inspector. He knows me. You know me, don’t you, Inspector?’

  ‘Of course I do. I want to talk to you about quite a lot of things.’

  Mr. Lott looked ready to break down.

  ‘I don’t feel like talking. I’m all mixed up. I can’t collect my thoughts with all this crowd. Besides, they took my money. It’s my own. I didn’t steal it. I swear.’

  ‘I know it’s your own, Mr. Lott. You’ll get it back in due course.’

  ‘‘E’s got ‘is receipt. What’s ‘e botherin’ about?’

  The guardian bobby sounded annoyed. It might have been a couple of pounds, instead of ten thousand, of which they’d relieved poor Lott.

  ‘Have you had your lunch, Mr. Lott?’

  Judkin and the constable looked at Littlejohn as though he’d gone mad. Here was a little bloke who’d, as likely as not, murdered Harry Dodd and taken his money. And the Scotland Yard man was bothering about food!

  ‘I don’t feel hungry.’

  ‘I’m not surprised!’ muttered Judkin, eyeing the miserable little corn merchant.

  ‘All the same, you’ll have a bite with me. We can talk better.’

  There was another room in the police station where Judkin dined as a rule. It smelled of soot, and a burst pipe in the winter had stained the ceiling. There must have been, at one time, huge pictures on the walls, for the paper was faded, leaving large rectangles the original colour. Somebody had worked a division sum in pencil in one of the rectangles, and another bore a grim warning: Caution, gas pipe behind here, with a break in the plaster to show that the message had been born of experience.

  Drane, with many excuses and polite exclamations, brought food from the canteen.

  ‘Get on with it, Mr. Lott,’ said Littlejohn. ‘It’ll make you feel better…’

  In reply, Mr. Lott carefully laid down his knife and fork, put his head in his hands, and burst into tears. His body heaved with his emotion and he choked with weeping.

  ‘I’m sorry. I felt touched. I haven’t a friend in the world since Harry Dodd died. Yore kindness just moved me, sir.’

  ‘You see, Mr. Lott, I know a good deal more about you than the others. I know exactly what you and Dodd did together, but you’ll have to answer some questions before I can help you.’

  ‘Anything, Inspector, anything…’

  ‘Get on with your meal, then, sir, and we’ll talk after it.’

  Drane was too polite to express amazement when he saw Littlejohn and Lott smoking cigarettes together when the Inspector ordered coffee.

  ‘And now, Mr. Lott. Will you tell me what you were doing and where you were on the night Harry Dodd died?’

  ‘You don’t… I never…You don’t mean I killed him?’

  ‘That’s the first question, and I want it settling before we go any further.’

  ‘I didn’t do it, Inspector. I was at home. My wife and daughter will tell you that. Yes, and my wife’s cousin Abel from Exeter, who was staying with us at the time, can tell you. We were papering the sitting-room that night. My wife wanted it done, and what did Abel do but go and buy the paper and paste and start doing it. Got himself in a horrible mess with it. We ‘ad to start all over again when I got in. Of course, my wife blam
ed it all on me, for not getting it done myself before Abel arrived. I can never do the right thing, you know.’

  ‘Just give me Abel’s address, will you?’

  ‘Abel Birtwhistle, Itlldo, Parracombe Road, Exeter.’ Littlejohn could imagine cousin Abel and his Itlldo! The Johnny Know-all, papering himself as well as the walls!

  ‘And now, sir. You and Harry Dodd seem to have made quite a lot of money between you…’

  Lott had been pale, but he now grew leaden. He looked like having a seizure.

  ‘You didn’t tell my missus, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘For pity’s sake don’t. If she gets to know, I’ll gas myself. I swear I will. That money’s all there is between me and destruction. I can’t stand it anymore.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘About six years since, Dodd came in my shop for a budgerigar for his…for the woman he was livin’ with at Brande. Then he started calling for bird seed for it. We got a bit chummy, and one day the talk turned to investments, and I showed him my graphs. He was quite took-up with ‘em. So much so, that when I told him I did it for fun, and not profit, he said he’d like a proper try. It ended by him havin’ a flutter. He was damn’ good at finance. Shrewd, that’s what Harry was. Do you know what he did? He made five hundred, cool, on his first deal, and he gave the profit to me. “That’s a sort of royalty on your system, Lott,” he says. “Now we’ll start level. Five hundred apiece.” I reckoned he made between twenty and thirty thousand on it, from start to finish. Mind you, he was lucky. Never knew anybody luckier. A fortnight after we’d bought Cornelian Stores, for instance, they sold out to Mammoths at three pounds for a ten-shilling share, and we’d bought at eleven and six…’

  ‘And you, in your business deals, got to know Dodd’s middle name?’

  ‘Yes. What’s that to do with it?’

  ‘He never used it normally, but you put it on the card on the Free Fishers’ wreath for his funeral.’

  ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’

  Her bared his rabbit teeth and smiled blankly.

  There was a sudden commotion in the outer office. Mrs. Lott had arrived, and her shrill voice could be heard demanding to see Lott.

  You’ve got ‘im in there, I know. You can’t stop me seein’ him. I know my habeas corpus…I’ll get my lawyer…’

  ‘In heaven’s name, don’t let her get at me!’ begged Lott.

  ‘We’re busy,’ said Littlejohn to the sergeant, who entered with a red face. ‘He can’t be seen now.’

  Lott crouched beneath the table as his wife passed the window of the room. He was terrified of her.

  ‘I can’t bear it…Dodd and I kept it secret. He put his cash in a safe deposit in London, because he didn’t want his family to know. You see, they made him an allowance, although I understand he wasn’t really entitled to it. If they’d got to know of his money, they might have stopped it. As for me… I kept it on me night and day. I had a belt with pockets in it. I was scared if I put it in a bank, or even hid it, she’d find out.’

  ‘I see.’

  Lott showed anger for the first time. He leapt to his feet and thumped his narrow chest.

  ‘No, you don’t see at all. Do you know I went to a public school and had two years at a University? Now look at me. Selling pints of peas and meal in a shop! My dad wanted me to go in the church. With a bit of luck I might have been a vicar somewhere now… or even a bishop. Instead, I put my wife in the family way before I married her. Her father kept a pub and she was at the bar. A crowd of us from college went there once on a spree. I drank too much, and next morning I found myself in bed with Emmeline. Her father was wanting to get her off his hands, and mine was a tartar for doing the right thing, and the way of transgressors was hard. They saw that we got married…’

  Lott’s eyes were wild, his hair dishevelled, and two bright hectic spots glowed on his cheeks.

  ‘I hate her. And I hate the daughter I begot in my folly, because she’s just like her mother. As soon as we were married, my wife took control. My father died, heartbroken, I reckon, not long after. What should have been the Rev. Ishmael Lott started to deal in guinea-pigs, white mice and bird seed! I made a mess of it. I lost money and went bust. My wife, with money from her family, which she’d clung to like a leech, bought the shop from my creditors and I became her hireling, except that I didn’t get wages; just spending money…’

  He took three shillings and a few coppers from his pocket and flung them fiercely on the table.

  ‘That’s what I’ve got left till pay day tomorrow, when I draw twelve and six. The rest, she says, she keeps because I ought to be supporting her and her daughter.’

  His face lit as he contemplated what was coming. He continued with a burst of enthusiasm.

  ‘That’s where Dodd and his help came in. I could never have laid my hands on enough to try out my stock exchange system. Harry found it for me. I lost quite a bit, though, through my own stupidity and eagerness to make money. Three times Harry got out just at the right time. I hung on and came a cropper. All the same, I made over ten thousand. I wanted fifteen and then I was going to vanish. I was going to leave Emmeline and her brat with the shop and go and live a life of peace and quiet on my own.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Last night, after the evening at the Free Fishers, which my wife let me join, by the way, because it was good for business, I called for her at the shop. Battersbee, a queer chap who spends his time hanging round the lamp near the shop every night, stopped me. “The police are in there with your wife, and they’re turning the place upside down,” he said. I panicked. I knew you were on the Dodd case and I thought you’d found out about our syndicate. I thought you’d told my wife. So I cleared out. The first thing I thought of was to get to sea. I could sail round to one of the northern ports, or even abroad, without being seen on the roads or the railway or buses. I know how you track people down these days. I went in the van to five miles from Lowestoft. Then I parked the van up a quiet lane and walked the rest. I’d seen in the paper about Pharaoh’s boat being there, and now that he was dead, as likely as not idle. I knew which it was, because in the summer the Free Fishers took the crippled kids to Lowestoft for a day’s outing, and Pharaoh lent us the boat and his man for excursions. I went for the boat and ran right into a dock policeman. I was so desperate that I got rough, and he got rough, too…That’s all.’

  He looked at Littlejohn like a dog about to receive a beating.

  ‘What’ll happen to me? They won’t take my money, will they? My wife needn’t know, need she? Then, one day, I’ll just slip off quietly and leave her. It’ll be better that way. We hate one another.’

  ‘If you get clear of the Dodd case, you’ll probably be fined twenty shillings for trespass, and five pounds for violence to a policeman. I shan’t tell your wife about the money; neither will the rest of the police. That’s not our business…’

  ‘Thank God!’

  Ishmael Lott rose as he said it, and it was like a heartfelt prayer.

  ‘There are one or two other things, though. Did you and Dodd spend a lot of time together?’

  ‘Yes. Every Friday when he came shopping in town, and often on market days, Wednesdays, when he brought his women to the films. We went in the cellar and worked out our business and then laid the orders with the brokers.’

  ‘Did he talk much about other things. For example, did he ever say what he wanted all the money for?’

  ‘Obligations, as he called them. He said he’d enough to keep himself, but he had commitments.’

  ‘What were they?’

  Lott looked sheepish.

  ‘He didn’t tell me this. I found it out myself. You see, we have three lorries and a van which go all round the countryside and, well, you hear things, don’t you? I go with one of the lorries three times a week. I pick up gossip…’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘There’s a woman at The Aching Man, for instance. Some of the farmers
round there told me that Harry spent a lot of time there on and off. There’s also a kid there, and her mother, the owner of the place, isn’t married. I did hear you mightn’t need to look farther than Harry Dodd to know who’s her father. Dodd’s been at The Aching Man more of late. It was said he might be planning to leave his two women in Brande and go and live with the Boones.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘We collect corn from farms round there. The farmers often spend a night drinking at The Aching Man. There’s not much they miss.’

  ‘Do you ever call there yourself?’

  ‘I’ve been once or twice. We’ve stopped for bread and cheese and a pint on our rounds. It’s a convenient spot and the limit of our territory. I’ve seen the girl, Peg Boone. She’s a good-looker and no mistake. Can’t say I blame Harry.’

  He looked a bit furtively at Littlejohn, sneaking desire bred of long repression in his eyes.

  ‘It’s a well-known calling-place, then?’

  ‘Yes. Harry isn’t the only Dodd who’s a customer. From what I hear, his son shares his admiration for Peg…’

  ‘Wait! Which one is this?’

  ‘The young ‘un, Peter. It’s one of his calling-places, too. I’ve seen his car there at night. We had a breakdown up there once and didn’t get going till nearly eleven. My old woman nearly killed me when I got in. We stopped for a drink at The Aching Man on our way home. Young Dodd’s car was there, but he wasn’t in the public room. He’d be a special.’

  ‘What kind of a car is it?’

  ‘A little black M.G., with a row of club badges on it. I’d know it anywhere.’

  ‘Does young Peter come to Helstonbury a lot, then?’

  ‘I’ve seen him around now and then. Perhaps he’s been to see his dad, or Mr. Pharaoh, who handled Dodd’s affairs. I guess Peter looked after the family interests.’

  ‘Did Harry ever mention to you going back to live with his divorced wife, or getting even with his family?’

  ‘No. I should think that ‘ud be the last thing Harry would do. He was very conscious of having done badly by them and was hardly likely to inflict himself on ‘em again. He had affection for his wife and Peter, who, I must say, treated his dad quite decently, calling to see him when the rest of the family wouldn’t recognise him. I never heard him mention going home again, though one time he did say he was fed up with the Brande set-up. Dorothy, he said, was too young for him and bored with him, and as for her mother… well… she just got on Harry’s nerves.’