The Murder Line (C.I.D. Room Book 8)

by Roderic Jeffries

  “They won’t succeed.”

  The chief constable thought about Brigadier Row with compassion and contempt.

  *

  Fusil, smoking his pipe, sat in Kywood’s office and for once was not silently critical of the detective chief inspector. Indeed, there was even a sense of harmony between them, in no way spelled out yet each was conscious of it. However different they were in character, a threat to their town and their police brought out the same prideful anger in each of them.

  “The chief reckons the town’s going to start going rotten,” said Kywood.

  Fusil nodded. He held the pipe by the stem. “Big money is bound to start a rot. But we’ll stop it getting bad.”

  “He also said they’re certain to try to land a copper.”

  “No policeman in our force will turn rotten like that bloody civilian, Row,” said Fusil with sharp anger.

  “Sure.” Kywood lit a cigarette. “But nevertheless, we must get a lead on them fast. Bob.”

  “If the chief’s right and they try to bribe a copper, we’ll have them by their short hairs. The copper’ll tell us and we’ll land the bastard who’s on the bribe so fast he won’t know what’s hit him and then he’ll sing like a prize canary.”

  Kywood drew on the cigarette. He frowned. “Any copper offered a real heavy sum… five thousand quid, say… is going to think twice…”

  “Offer any of our coppers fifty thousand quid and the story’ll be the same,” cut in Fusil angrily. Concerning this possibility, he was totally narrow-minded.

  Chapter 7

  In her bedroom, Heather put on the brassière and girdle she had earlier collected from the tobacconist in Whitelaw Road, two miles away. Both fitted reasonably well, although the cups of the brassière were of too deep a shape and she normally did not wear a girdle. She put on petticoat, green-patterned cotton frock, and slid her feet into toeless shoes. Then she checked, for the umpteenth time, that she had put the dock pass into her handbag. Who to say was her boss, if they asked her at the dock gates? Smith — the name she had to write on the parcel? But didn’t everyone automatically distrust the name Smith? Orville-Smith? A hyphenated name sounded so much more authentic.

  She checked the time and lit a cigarette. She felt weak in the stomach, as if she were going to have to dash for the bathroom. Suppose the other woman didn’t turn up, through some accident? They surely couldn’t blame her for a slip up like that and deliberately let Fred see those photos… In her mind, she saw the photos: the man almost on her, ready, face twisted by lust.

  It was time to leave. Normally a good, considerate driver, she made her way through the back streets to the New Docks with a careless disregard for other road users that twice forced oncoming drivers to brake harshly and to blow the cars’ horns with impotent anger.

  When she drew up at the gateway to number thirty-two dock, her mouth was dry, her tongue was over-large, and her heart was thudding. The dock policeman came out of the doorway of his wooden hut. “What ship, lady?”

  “The Southern Planet,” she answered, as she struggled to open her handbag, suddenly recalcitrant, to produce the dock pass.

  “Berth number thirty-two A. Follow those rails along to the second shed and you’ll see her: black hull and green funnel.”

  She finally managed to open her handbag and from it she brought out the pass. But he had already turned away and was walking towards his hut.

  She drove through and followed the railway tracks round until she reached a vast concrete and asbestos shed on which was painted in six foot high figures in green, 32A. She parked alongside a row of some dozen cars.

  They were unloading frozen telescoped lamb carcasses from the three for’d holds of the vessel, a large cargo liner. As she walked to the gangway, made fast to the mid-ships accommodation, the stevedores stared at her with lustful eyes and made comments which lacked both subtlety and variety. She hardly heard them. She climbed the gangway and a seaman, in lightweight company’s jersey and jeans, put down the newspaper he’d been reading and stood up.

  “I’ve come to meet…” Then she couldn’t remember the name she’d decided to use. In a panic, she said: “Mr. Fusil.” She fumbled in her bag and brought out a dock pass.

  The seaman surveyed her body. “That’s a pity, lady. I thought maybe you was coming aboard to see me.”

  She managed to smile briefly at him. “He’s going to be down on C deck. Where is C deck?”

  “I’d give you a conducted tour of the whole ship, only the old man is due ashore soon and he’d have my guts for garters if I wasn’t here. Look. D’you see the ladder, there? Go in the doorway by it, turn for’d, and then down the companionway and that’ll bring you to C deck. Now if you’d like to have a longer look round later…?”

  She hurried across the deck and into the accommodation. The alleyway held the indefinable smell of a big ship. She went down the companionway, came to a cross alley and for one wild and frantic moment couldn’t remember which side of the ship was the lavatory. Then the man’s words came back to her and she turned into the starboard alleyway. Halfway aft was a notice Ladies in blue on white background. She went in. There were four cubicles, without ceilings, and three hand-basins with mirrors above them: the bulkheads were tiled up to four feet and then covered with a lumpy insulation which had been sprayed with white paint. All four cubicles were empty and she went into the right-hand one and locked the door. She checked the time and saw there were ten minutes to go. She took off the frock, petticoat, brassière, pants and girdle, hung the brassière and girdle on the door, hesitated, then put on her dress. She sat down, fidgeted with the straps of her handbag, lit a cigarette. The outside door hissed open and high heels clacked across the deck. The woman went into the far compartment for only a short time, then left.

  Another woman entered and chose the next compartment. There was the sound of clothing being undone, a quick oath, something which brushed against the dividing bulkhead was hung up, and then came the opening bars of ‘Tipperary’, whistled badly out of tune. Heather’s mouth was dry, but she managed a recognisable ‘God Save the Queen’.

  “Let’s have them, then,” said a deep-toned voice.

  Heather lifted the brassière and girdle over the top of the dividing bulkhead which was some six feet high and two feet below the deck-head. The two garments were taken. After a brief pause, two exactly similar garments appeared over the top and she caught hold of them.

  She put on the brassière and girdle with an acute sense of distaste, because imagination suggested the other woman was unpleasant. As she drew the dress down over her head, she heard the door of the next closet open. Steps crossed the deck and then the pneumatic stop hissed as the outside door was opened and left to swing shut.

  Heather went out and checked her image in one of the mirrors, stepped out into the alleyway which was empty. The seaman on gangway duty said: “Will you be returning later on for a look round the fo’c’s’le?” He grinned in friendly fashion as she just hurried past and down the gangway.

  Back in the car she smoked and gradually the numbness wore off because everything had gone smoothly despite all her fears and imaginings of disaster. Then she remembered she still had to get out of the docks. Her nervousness returned and she became very conscious of the brassière and girdle.

  The same dock policeman was still on duty. He bent down and looked into the car. “Nothing, eh? No kegs of over-proof brandy?” He stood upright.

  She drove out on to the road. Could anything have been simpler? Whatever she had been doing — not being a fool, she could be reasonably certain she had been smuggling — the arrangements had been fool proof. She began to hum as she drove along the straight New Dock Road, past berths which had been expensively altered to take container traffic, but which now lay idle from continuing stevedores’ strikes.

  There was no chance of Fred’s returning home for lunch so she went up to their bedroom and changed out of brassière and girdle. She folded these car
efully, wrapped them up in brown paper and string, sealed the knots with red sealing wax, and wrote on the front and back, ‘Mr. Smith, to be called for’.

  She returned to her car and drove past the small common with its horse-chestnut trees which attracted hordes of youngsters in the conker season and then cut through a shopping centre to Whitelaw Road. There was room to park close by the tobacconist.

  She carried the parcel inside. “May I leave this with you to be called for?” she asked.

  The elderly man reached across the counter of chocolate, took the parcel and peered at it over the tops of his spectacles. He looked back at her. “That’ll be five pence.” He had a croaky voice, as if recovering from a fierce cough.

  She handed him a five-pence piece. “Goodbye,” she said blithely and left, feeling light-headed as if she’d just enjoyed some wonderful stroke of luck.

  *

  The telephone rang when Rowan, tired, hungry, and thirsty, had been home for half an hour. Heather stopped his getting up and said she’d take the call and say he was out if it was for him and he gratefully remained seated, a glass of gin and tonic in his hand.

  “Hullo, Mrs. Rowan,” said the caller. “We’ve collected the parcel and I’m glad you’ve done exactly as we told you.” She turned her back on her husband and tried to find the words to ask the one all important question. “Have you…” She stopped.

  “Have we put the prints and the negatives in the post? No, we haven’t. And frankly we aren’t going to, just yet.”

  Absurdly, she thought, the caller was trying to sound nice. “But you said…”

  “We will, but only after you’ve done one thing more for us. Tell your husband to find out why Harry Longman was arrested in Palma, Majorca, on the fifteenth of last month.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “But he will. Especially if you add that if he doesn’t get us the information, that parcel will be handed over to the police. Know what’s inside the bra and the girdle? Two ounces of uncut heroin, sewn into the seams. And your prints’ll be all over the glossy surfaces, the parcel’s sealed, and it’s your writing on the outside. He’ll add things up. Don’t forget — Harry Longman, Palma, the fifteenth of last month. He’s got forty-eight hours, that’s all.”

  “I don’t…” she began frantically, but the dialling note began.

  She slowly replaced the receiver, her mind desperate. Rowan said: “That was a one-way conversation and no mistake! Who was doing all the talking?”

  “Raymond,” she said, automatically choosing a name she thought would cut him short.

  “That creep,” he muttered.

  She stared at the patterned curtains. It was all too fresh for her to understand the full implications of what had been said, but she did know that now she was in a corner from which there was no chance of escaping without hurt. “I’ll… I’ll get you your supper,” she said, her voice uneven.

  He stared curiously at her. “So what did he want?”

  “Only to tell me not to bother to go there tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he pointed out.

  She struggled to cover herself. “It was supposed to be a very important assignment and we were going to work tomorrow.” She hurried out of the room.

  The kitchen was small, but luxuriously equipped with a number of labour-saving devices. In the self-cleaning oven was a deep frozen steak and kidney pie, now about ten minutes short of being cooked, the potatoes were boiling gently, and the water for the beans was ready. She tipped a packet of frozen beans into the boiling water.

  How? she wondered desperately. How to escape a dilemma from which there was no escaping? Could she find out the information about Longman? It was too obviously an absurd question. Could she get Fred to find it out without telling him why she had to know? As soon try to move a mountain as get Fred to betray the force. Yet he was going to have to betray it unless she accepted all the consequences of her own appalling, stupid mistakes. Then, of necessity, he would learn everything…

  He came into the kitchen. “Is grub about ready? I’m starving…” He stopped suddenly when he saw her face. “Heather,” he said slowly, his face registering shock and fear, “something terrible has happened.”

  “No,” she muttered.

  “Is it Tracy?”

  “It’s nothing, I tell you. I’m just not feeling very fit… Fred, let’s have a bottle of wine to buck me up?”

  He stood immediately in front of her, hands on his hips. “You’re lying,” he said.

  “I swear…”

  “Swear all you like, but tell me what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jealousy made him suspect the worst. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

  She gasped as he’d used more force than he’d intended and his fingers dug into her flesh. Hearing her, he released her, but there was still an air of savage tenderness about him which suggested that in his unthinking jealousy he could easily again offer her physical violence.

  She began to cry, certain she’d reached the end of the road. Her body shook as tears coursed down her cheeks.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said, shocked by such helpless agony. “What’s happened to do this to you?”

  She shook her head.

  He moved forward and raised his hands and she flinched. He wrapped his arms round her and held her tightly. “Don’t,” he murmured. “Don’t cry like that. Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. We’ll beat it.”

  She buried her face against him. He smelled of stale tobacco and perspiration, but she found these infinitely comforting smells.

  “Is it… Is the trouble a man?”

  She felt his arms tighten. He’d asked her that, in a different form, many times before, but always his face had been ugly with hatred and his voice rough. She could not now see his face, but his voice was tender and compassionate.

  Still holding her, though of necessity more loosely, he sat and brought her down on to his lap. “Listen,” he said, “we’ve had rows, God knows we have, and I’ve said things to you I’d give a fortune not to have said. But when the chips are really down, you’re the only person who counts. It doesn’t matter what, I’m on your side.”

  “You’ll… you’ll…”

  “I swear that whatever you tell me I’ll do nothing but help. If… if it’s another man and that’s the way you want it…”

  “No!” she exclaimed violently. “It isn’t. I’ve never had another man. D’you understand, never. But…”

  “But what?” he demanded thickly.

  She told him about the photographs.

  In his mind, he saw her naked. The man approached, manhood erect, ready to mount her. Imagination made Raymond tell the man to position himself closer, so that the photographs would be… And then he remembered the way in which she said she’d never had another man and despite his jealous imagination he believed her. There was cause for soaring relief here, even at such a moment. “What do they want?” he asked. “Money?”

  She told him about her trip to the ship that afternoon, the exchange of foundation garments, the sealed parcel she had handed in to the tobacconist. He finally understood that what the mob had wanted from the beginning had been himself and that they had spun their web with infinite care.

  Chapter 8

  Had he been asked if he felt the same sense of loyalty towards the police force as a soldier felt for his regiment, Rowan would have answered with derisive profanity. He was not a man to wear his emotions on a sleeve. Yet, in fact, he did know the same part mystical, part prideful love and belief in the force he served. Therefore, to betray the slightest part of the trust placed in him was to become a traitor.

  Kerr was in the C.I.D. general room. Rowan had often envied Kerr his ability to get every possible ounce of fun out of life and this envy had indirectly at times led to a strained relationship, but Kerr was too ebullient a character, too concerned with living today and not yesterday, ever to know any continuing r
esentment at Rowan’s moody behaviour. Typically, as Rowan walked in, he looked up and said: “What the hell are you doing here on a Sunday morning? Don’t say the old bastard is turning everyone out?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a pity.” Kerr grinned cheerfully. “There’s nothing eases my misery so quickly as having other people made to share it.”

  Rowan walked over to his desk and sat down. “I just wanted to clear up some outstanding work.”

  “You’re not saying you’ve come in voluntarily?”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “Then you must be going soft.”

  “Very likely.” Rowan looked at his watch. “I reckon I’ll be around for at least an hour. D’you feel like a break?”

  No one ever had to make that sort of proposition twice to Kerr. He said he’d be down in the canteen and left.

  Rowan stared at the telephone on his desk. He had just two possible courses of action. He could turn traitor, or retain his honour and defy the mob. If he defied them, he could be certain they would carry out their threats to make public the evidence that Heather had smuggled drugs. She would be tried and would plead guilty, giving in mitigation of sentence the fact she had been blackmailed into acting by the threat of publishing some pornographic photos of her. By strict interpretation of the law, the fact she had been blackmailed could not alter her guilt, although it must surely lessen sentence. But all the evidence would have to be given in open court and the world would learn how she had been photographed nude with a man. The world was always bitchy when given even half a chance to be… Her story about being tricked must be old cod’s wallop — she’d surely been working out variations on the seventieth position… People would gloat wondering how he must feel, knowing his wife had… Old men, and men not so old, would read all about it in the Sunday papers and lasciviously picture what went on…

  If he went to Fusil and detailed what had happened, could a court case be avoided? No. The smuggling of heroin couldn’t be, daren’t be, suppressed by the police… The law must take its course. All too easy to imagine the malicious comments of his colleagues… He couldn’t subject Heather to such humiliation…