The Snuffbox Murders

by Roger Silverwood

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd?’

  ‘Not odd, sir. A bit unusual. Maybe he’s a clever man.’

  ‘Maybe he’s innocent. He has reached the age of thirty-nine and he has no police record, not so much as a parking fine.’

  ‘He knows about security matters, sir. He might be a clever man, too clever to be caught.’

  ‘And you are trying to wrap a murder-for-robbery charge around him with insufficient evidence.’

  ‘I have a lot of evidence to show his guilt. For one thing, he had a home-made key to Razzle’s house in his pocket. Also, he opened Razzle’s security door in less that two minutes when he thought there was a CCTV camera in there with film of him murdering Razzle.’

  ‘Well, we can’t keep him locked up for much longer. You’ll have to find that necessary evidence or I’ll have to release him.’

  ‘You can’t do that, sir.’

  ‘Tell that to Twelvetrees, lad. He’s the one you have to convince.’

  Angel couldn’t think of a suitable reply.

  ‘Can’t hold him longer than Thursday,’ Harker said. ‘Then he must appear in the magistrate’s court and the CPS must declare what evidence they have. If it isn’t enough, they’ll have to let him go. You know the drill. You’ve two days.’

  Angel came out of the superintendent’s office and wearily closed the door. He made his way down the corridor as if he had a hundredweight sack of law books lashed to his back with red tape. He shuffled down the corridor to his own office, glad to reach his chair. He dropped into it, leaned back and contemplated the ceiling. Two days wasn’t long, especially as he had nowhere else to search and he hadn’t an idea in his head. Angel thought it would make him ill if Harker released Farleigh after all the trouble he had taken to get him in a cell. He couldn’t think what to do next.

  The phone rang. He reached out for it. It was Crisp from the observation van. Angel’s face brightened. He sat upright.

  ‘Hello, yes? Yes, what’s happening?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing, sir. It’s DS Carter and me, just checking in.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Just checking in”? Nobody checked in at all over the weekend.’

  ‘Nothing happened over the weekend, sir. We thought you would enjoy not being disturbed.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  Crisp said: ‘Riley and Violet Beasley have been surprisingly cool and uncommunicative towards each other, sir. It is probably a carry-over of the row they had on Friday about bills and lack of money.’

  ‘And nothing was said about where he worked, his boss or other premises or workplace anywhere?’

  ‘Nothing at all, sir.’

  ‘And did either of them go out?’

  ‘She never left the house all weekend, sir. He went out to the Rising Sun, just round the corner on Bradford Road, yesterday lunchtime on his own. It was ten past twelve. I followed him. He had one glass of lager, which he swallowed in one gulp. Came back straightaway. Didn’t speak to anybody, only the barman.’

  Angel growled, then said, ‘You could have told me.’

  ‘There was nothing to tell, sir. We were back here before you could say Frankie Dettori.’

  Angel recalled that at that time, that day previous, he had been trimming the hedge. If Crisp had only phoned him, it would have got him out of that. ‘Next time I tell you to keep me posted about anything, you bloody well keep me posted, understand?’

  ‘Yes. Right. Sir.’

  ‘Now poke out your ears. Keep your mind on the job. You can remind Flora Carter, Ted Scrivens and John Weightman what this obbo is for. We are still trying to find the leader of the country-house gang, who is a very clever thief and murderer. He guards his own and his gang’s privacy and security and liberty in the manner of Hermann Lamm. Also, he murders anybody who talks about him, or who might have talked about him, or might be about to talk about him, by pulling out their tongues with a hefty pair of pliers. He’s sly, cunning and brutal. He’s not your average uneducated villain, so you need to be on your toes. Got it?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. I’ve got it.’

  ‘I want him locked up.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The man we are looking for probably has no criminal record, therefore his fingerprints won’t be on file anywhere. And presumably when he is out murdering and stealing, he always wears gloves. Summer and winter alike. They will keep his hands warm in the winter, but….’

  Suddenly Angel’s voice petered out and his eyes glazed over.

  ‘Hello. Hello,’ Crisp said.

  Angel’s thoughts were in another place. He was recalling the picture of seeing a mangled black glove coming out of a washing machine on one of the hottest days of the year. His heart was pounding. His eyes opened. He blinked several times, saw the phone in his hand, frowned, quickly said, ‘Goodbye,’ into the mouthpiece and closed it down.

  Then he came out of his office and made for the BMW. He drove it along Wakefield Road, turned left on to Canal Road and pulled up outside number 22. He got out of the car, raced round the bonnet and banged on the house door. He stood impatiently on the step … it seemed a long time before it was answered.

  Elaine Dalgleish eventually appeared.

  ‘Oh. Inspector Angel. Whatever’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘I must see you,’ he said.

  She pulled the door open further and he pushed past her into the little sitting room and through the internal door to the kitchen.

  Elaine Dalgleish closed the front door with shaking hands, and came up behind him. He stood in the centre of the tiny kitchen and looked up to the ceiling at the clothes’ rack. It was empty.

  She watched him and said, ‘What is it you want, Inspector?’

  ‘Where is that washing?’ he said pointing in the direction of the ceiling.

  She swallowed. ‘What washing?’

  His eyes flashed. ‘Do you do washing for other people?’

  She didn’t answer immediately. ‘A woman has to make a living, Inspector, in these hard times.’

  ‘I’m not criticizing you, Mrs Dalgleish. Work is virtuous. I want to know who you do washing for?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Can’t you answer a simple question? A week last Friday, I came here to see you. The place was flooded. A washing-machine repair man pulled a woollen glove out of the thing. He said it had been causing the trouble. Remember?’

  She could hardly deny it.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was one of my gloves.’

  Angel’s jaw dropped open. He stared at her. ‘There was enough wool in that one glove to knit you four jumpers. Whose glove was it?’

  ‘I’ve told you, mine.’

  ‘And the five sets of overalls on your rack, were they also yours? Be careful how you answer, Mrs Dalgleish. I could lock you up this instant for obstructing me in the execution of my duty.’

  She licked her lips, twice. ‘What do you want to know for?’

  Angel shook his head. He was surprised at his own patience. ‘It is very likely that your customer is a murderer and the head of a gang of thieves.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Inspector. Not this man.’

  Angel’s eyes were nearly popping out of his head. ‘I want his name and address.’

  ‘I don’t know his address. He drops the dirty clothes off here, I wash them, then he picks them up a couple of days later. His name is Lucan, Arthur Lucan.’

  Angel sighed. ‘Arthur Lucan. Mmm.’ He thought the name rang a bell.

  ‘And you have no idea where he lives? Do you have his telephone number?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How does he pay you, cash or a cheque?’

  ‘Cash. Are you sure you’re not from the Inland Revenue, Inspector. You can tell me now.’

  ‘Certainly not. Why?’

  ‘Well, you see, I don’t declare my washing money to anybody.’

  ‘Well it’s nothing to do with me, Mrs Dalgleish. Is that
why you didn’t want to tell me about it?’

  She hesitated. ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me. That’s entirely up to you. Tell me, have you done washing for this man, Lucan, before?’

  ‘Yes. About five times. He says he wants them thoroughly washing and drying but not ironing.’

  ‘And what exactly do you wash?’

  ‘Five overalls, five woollen hats, five balaclavas, five pairs of gloves.’

  ‘You’d better come back to the station with me and make a statement.’

  Elaine Dalgleish frowned and reached out for her coat.

  On the journey back to the station, it came to Angel that Arthur Lucan was the name of a music-hall comedian who played the part of an Old Mother Riley character early in the last century. He wondered if Sean Noel Riley had adopted the alias.

  He led her through the cell entrance into his office, and instructed Ahmed to bring in the laptop and the memory stick with the up-to-date ‘rogue’s gallery’ on it.

  ‘I want you to look through these photographs, Mrs Dalgleish,’ Angel said. ‘See if you can spot the man.’

  Ahmed set up the laptop on Angel’s desk.

  After only a couple of clicks of the mouse, she pointed to one of the photographs and said, ‘That’s him.’

  Angel looked across at her choice.

  It was Sean Noel Riley.

  He nodded and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Dalgleish.’

  He looked at Ahmed and jerked his head towards the door. ‘We’ll organize a lift for you back to Canal Road.’

  PC Ahaz nodded and showed Mrs Dalgleish out.

  Angel was only moderately well pleased that Elaine Dalgleish had picked Riley out. It confirmed that Riley was a member of the gang, if not the leader, but it didn’t broaden the inquiry at all. A different face would have provided Angel with an entirely new line of inquiry. Nevertheless, he promptly phoned the observation van. Scrivens answered and said that there was nothing to report. Angel updated him about Elaine Dalgleish laundering the crook’s kit and the fact that she had picked Riley out of the rogue’s gallery. He told him to tell the others on that watch. He thought it would encourage them. He ended the conversation and replaced the phone.

  He leaned back in the chair again and gazed at the ceiling. There was nothing more he could do to speed up the listening operation at Edward Street. Riley’s mail was being intercepted; his phone calls and all his conversations downstairs were being monitored. Something had to break soon. Angel accepted that he would simply have to be patient.

  Regarding Farleigh, things were more difficult. He really needed to find those twenty-eight gold snuffboxes. Farleigh’s house and office, land and cars had been thoroughly searched. There simply was nowhere else to look. Angel desperately hoped that the CPS would be able to make a case with the evidence he had already provided. He could think of nothing else he could do to drive that inquiry along.

  He looked down at his desk. There was another pile of mail and reports needing his attention and on top of it was the big EVIDENCE envelope of balance sheets and bank statements gathered by Don Taylor from Farleigh’s office. He wrinkled his nose and opened the big envelope. He pulled out the balance sheets for the past five years and spread them across his desk. They made pleasant enough reading. Brian Farleigh had apparently been running a very prosperous security business. Both the turnover and the profit had been maintained at approximately the same ratio each year, and both increased handsomely each year. It all seemed satisfactory as far as it went, and justified Farleigh’s sumptuous lifestyle. Angel then turned to his bank statements. Throughout the five years, they were always in credit which was also a very comfortable position to be in. The debits could usually be understood from the tiny, hand-penned notes against each entry, but the credits were sometimes large sums with only the words “sales and labour” scrawled against the entry. He reckoned that Farleigh must be working on a high hourly rate for his labour. Angel frowned, shook his head and moved on.

  The bank did not seem to charge Farleigh excessively for their services. It could have been because he always maintained a high credit balance in the account. The only direct bank entries he could see were “S & S” charges of forty pounds a quarter which were debited from the balance, which Angel considered had not been at all excessive.

  He heard the church clock chime five o’clock. He leaned back in the chair, yawned and rubbed his chin. He was ready for home. He closed the file of bank statements, stuffed it and everything else to do with Farleigh in the envelope and locked it in his desk drawer. He would try and come back fresh to the job and finish the statements tomorrow.

  He then made for his car and home.

  Mary was pleased to see that he was on time. He could see that she was. He gave her a peck on the cheek, opened the fridge, took out a beer and went into the sitting-room. He threw off his coat, loosened his tie and flopped into the easy chair. He had a sip of the beer and switched on the TV.

  When the picture and sound came up, it was the tail-end of the news. There was a picture of the front of Spicers’, the specialist antique jewellery and work-of-art auctioneers, and their imposing Georgian stone-pillared doorway on Royal Crown Road, London. It quickly cut to the statue of Dorothea Jordan in the entrance hall, and a voice-over reporter was retelling the history of the statue and the fact that a TV documentary programme was to be shown on that channel very shortly. Angel noticed a tall man in a black hat worn Gestapo fashion. He peered at the screen. The man turned and looked direct to camera. Angel’s eyes opened wider. It was Alec Underwood again. He seemed never off the television, and never far away from that statue.

  The voice-over reporter finished by saying that the actual auction of the statue was tomorrow morning at ten a.m., and that it would be transmitted live on their channel and asked viewers not to miss it.

  Angel thought that he probably would.

  Then up came the local news, which led with a piece about a local fishing trawler from Bridlington, which had been involved in an accident in early morning mist in the North Sea forty miles east of Flamborough Head. It had been badly holed by a huge foreign container ship. The coastguard at Flamborough Head had been aware and an RAF rescue helicopter from Leconfield had been dispatched. No lives had been lost, and, ‘In the tradition of the Navy,’ the news reporter said, ‘the captain refused to leave the badly listing trawler.’

  Angel thought you could take bravery too far.

  He leaned back in the easy chair, took another sip of the beer and closed his eyes. Next thing he knew, he felt the beer can being whisked out of his hand. He looked up and saw Mary going out of the room with it. He blinked a couple of times. She returned after a few seconds with the remainder of the beer in a tumbler, and held it out to him. He took it. She stared at him and said, ‘You’re not in the back of a bus going to Blackpool, you know, Michael.’

  He looked at her in a vague sleepy fog, sipped the beer again and closed his eyes.

  SEVENTEEN

  The following morning, Angel came into the office at the usual time and was met by an excited Ahmed who had an unusual twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Isn’t it a hoot, sir?’ he said with a grin. ‘About that gold statue. After all that ballyhoo.’

  Angel frowned. ‘The auctioneers are selling it today, lad, then it’ll all be over.’

  ‘Oh no, sir. Haven’t you heard? It’s disappeared. It’s gone. Unless they find it very soon, they won’t be selling it. They can’t. They made a point of saying that. Spicers are worried about losing faith with their customers. They expected a big crowd attending the auction because that statue was to have been there … and now it won’t be.’

  Angel looked at him, almost closed his left eye and pulled his head back on to his neck. ‘What do you mean, lad?’

  ‘It’s been on the news, sir. The statue disappeared last night.’

  ‘Really? Was it stolen?’

  Ahmed hesitated. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Angel
pursed his lips. ‘What about our friend, Alec Underwood? What’s happened to him?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir. He doesn’t seem to be anywhere around the auctioneers now. I saw the TV news this morning. I saw a live shot of the pedestal where the statue had been in Spicers’ entrance hall, and Spicers’ spokesman being interviewed … and Alec Underwood wasn’t anywhere about.’

  Angel squeezed the lobe of his ear between finger and thumb. ‘Did anybody say what time the statue was taken?’

  ‘All the man said was last night, sir.’

  ‘Really?’

  Angel rocked on the swivel-chair for a minute, then said, ‘Get me Spicers’ auctioneers on the phone.’

  Ahmed found it and Angel was on the phone within a minute or so. He had to hold on a few minutes before he got through. A weary voice said, ‘Spicers’ Auctioneers. Melanie speaking. How can I help you?’

  ‘This is Detective Inspector Angel of Bromesley Police. I want to speak to Mr Alec Underwood please.’

  Angel heard the girl gasp, then say meaningfully, ‘So does Mr Oberon.’ Then she changed her tone. ‘Here, are you having me on? You know that Mr Underwood doesn’t work here.’

  ‘No, miss. I really am a policeman. So Alec Underwood is not there?’

  ‘Nobody knows where he is.’

  ‘And Mr Oberon – is he the boss?’

  ‘Yes. He’s absolutely livid. The gold statue will not be offered for sale today. The management is very sorry. Now, this phone line is extremely busy, sir. If you don’t want anything else, sir, I’m afraid you must hang up.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Angel said and replaced the phone.

  He suddenly turned to Ahmed. ‘I think I know where Underwood and the statue will be. If anybody wants me, I’m going to his place, 29 Bromersley Road, Cadworth.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  Angel then went out through the back entrance, passing the cell where Brian Farleigh was being held. He looked though the food hatch in the door and saw him with a big tough-looking man in a dark suit and sunglasses. They were seated on the bunk and seemed to be whispering together intensely about something.