Cash My Chips, Croupier

by Piers Marlowe

  ‘Where did you open this?’ Drury asked, pointing with his pipe-stem to the bag.

  ‘On the train. I managed to get an empty compartment. When I saw what was inside I knew I’d been set up as a dummy. I had been made to look involved up to my ears, left with a story that I couldn’t prove, and been practically handed to you on a plate with a sprig of parsley in my teeth.’

  Drury smiled without enthusiasm.

  ‘All this was done to hide what?’

  ‘The real killer and the missing money.’

  Drury looked round at Hazard, who shrugged, unwilling to put anything in spoken words just then.

  ‘All right, Micky, so it looks bad. But you didn’t drag us all the way from London to this pub’s garden just to tell us that.’ Drury paused and let the silence grow until it seemed significantly prolonged, then he said, ‘This isn’t the time to get cold feet, pal.’

  Perran flushed. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘they wouldn’t have to pay me much to get to hate your guts, Drury.’

  This time Drury laughed aloud. He seemed genuinely amused. ‘I’ve been told much the same many times, Micky. You’re not unique. Just stop sweating and tell us what’s on your mind. Maybe it doesn’t seem so hot now we’re here. But for God’s sake stop stalling and let’s hear it.’

  Hazard lit a fresh cigarette, concentrating on the task.

  Micky Perran stood up, walked to the opposite side of the table, so that he faced the inspector, with Drury in between them. He said without any additional preamble, ‘That woman didn’t hear my car arrive and me being unloaded. She said something about going to bed and not sleeping well because of a nagging tooth. She was up several times, dosing it with laudanum, and at five in the morning was up and dressing. Why didn’t she hear my car arrive, and also the car that took away its driver — if that’s what happened? Also, why didn’t her husband hear the sound of the car or cars?’ Perran looked fiercely down at Drury, and his facial expression proclaimed that these were not mere rhetorical questions. ‘I’ll tell you why. I’ve been thinking a hell of a lot. About her finding me when she did. About her pointing out the slip-knots — a most unusual thing for a woman to spot, I’d say. About my being allowed to get away. She had a billhook and was damned well threatening me with it until she saw the body and had a genuine reason for thinking she might have to use it. It all adds up to something phony.’

  ‘Like what, for instance?’

  ‘Like the Bowdens being in this thing. Involved.’

  Bill Hazard choked over a mouthful of smoke. ‘You’re letting last night cream your wits, Perran.’

  Drury stood up.

  ‘We can soon find out, Bill,’ he said, and looked at Perran. ‘How long should it take us to reach this Little Dippers Farm?’

  ‘Under half an hour even if I lose my way a couple of times,’ said the journalist.

  ‘Then let’s stop wasting time. The budgies look thoroughly bored with us.’

  Mary Bowden stared at Micky Perran as though she beheld someone returned from a particularly deep grave. She had been crying, but when confronted by the Yard men and their companion she did her best to conceal her agitation.

  Drury’s first question broke down her resolve.

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  ‘I don’t know. He had a phone call and went off. He didn’t tell me where.’

  She was being cagey, but the tears were welling again under her puffy eyelids. She was scared all right.

  ‘Who phoned him?’ Drury asked.

  ‘I don’t know the man’s name,’ she said.

  ‘But he’s phoned before? You picked up the phone and recognised the voice didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  Micky Perran felt a tremor run down his back. This was Drury on top of his form. The journalist couldn’t be sure if the superintendent was indulging in inspired guesswork or asking questions to elicit information he had a shrewd idea would take a certain shape.

  ‘When did you previously hear this caller?’ As she hesitated Drury waded in again. ‘Was it yesterday?’

  Now there could be no doubt about her fear. It was in her eyes under the wash of tears and etched in grey lines around her mouth.

  ‘Yes. He wanted to speak to Bert, but I don’t know about what. That’s the truth, mister. Bert won’t ever talk about this caller, but I know it’s always about something he’s wanted to do. Bert I mean. And he never refuses.’

  ‘Because he’s scared — as you are?’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she wailed, and broke down, the tears coming fast and her choking sobs leaving her quite unable to answer any question for nearly ten minutes.

  By the time she had recovered Drury knew how to get what he wanted.

  ‘You think your husband’s being blackmailed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has he a police record?’

  ‘He’s been to prison, if that’s what you mean. It was after he came out we took this farm. That was two years ago.’

  ‘Where did he get the money to buy this property?’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t ours,’ she said hurriedly. ‘We don’t own it. We just got the chance to come here.’

  ‘Who does own it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Bert wouldn’t tell me. When I asked he said it would be better if I didn’t know.’

  There was a brief silence. To the three men in the farmhouse living room the implication was clear enough and didn’t have to be spelled out. Bert Bowden had been put on to the farm to accommodate whoever owned it. In return he had been expected to take orders. The chances were Bowden was very much involved with a criminal set-up about which he said nothing to his wife.

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell us about these mysterious calls your husband gets, Mrs. Bowden?’ Drury asked, breaking the silence.

  Oh, I wouldn’t call them mysterious,’ the woman said defensively. ‘This man rings up and speaks to Bert. There’s nothing mysterious about them — not really.’

  Drury didn’t debate the meaning of a single word. He pressed her for information. ‘Well, is there anything you can tell us about what happens at the time these calls are made?’

  She fidgeted and her audience waited with barely concealed impatience. She said at last, ‘Well, he does try to get me to take these sleeping pills,’ she continued fidgeting, and her manner became one of extreme reluctance, ‘but I don’t hold with dosing yourself with that sort of drug unless a doctor prescribes it.’

  ‘Very wise,’ murmured Drury encouragingly.

  ‘But Bert always insisted. So when I went to bed I used to put a couple of these seconal tablets — they’re not really pills — in my mouth and pretend to swallow them with a drink of milk. But I used to keep them outside my teeth, then get rid of them when Bert wasn’t looking. That’s how I know those were nights when cars drove into our yard. I’ve heard men walking about, but only voices.’

  ‘Did you go to the window and look out?’

  ‘No use. Our room doesn’t overlook the yard, which is round the back.’

  ‘Well, did you go into another room and look out?’

  ‘No, and if you want to know why I’ll tell you. It was sight of Bert sleeping there, more often than not snoring. He’d swallowed his sleeping pills.’

  This remark effectively surprised the men listening to her, and she said with a touch of returning smugness, ‘Oh, yes, Bert didn’t want to know, and he didn’t want me to know. So we couldn’t talk about visitors we hadn’t seen or heard.’

  Visitors, apparently, who had found a use for the farmhouse away from any main road.

  ‘Did you hear the car last night?’ Drury asked her.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know the time. I’d been up to get some laudanum for my tooth and it was nice and comfy and I wasn’t getting out of the sheets and starting it up again. But it was after half-past two. I can tell you that. That was when I got up and dabbed some laudanum on my tooth with a piece of cottonwool.’ She
stopped abruptly and turned wide eyes on Perran. ‘But why don’t you ask him?’ she demanded, jerking her chin at the journalist. ‘He can tell you much more than I can.’

  ‘Oh, we’re going to have another talk with him, Mrs. Bowden,’ Drury assured her, ‘but he can’t tell us about your husband. You can.’

  ‘What about him?’ she asked, her eyes narrowing. She scratched an elbow with the fingers of her other hand, making rasping sounds through the material of her dress.

  ‘Why was he sent to prison?’

  ‘He — well, the police said they found his fingerprints in a building where a robbery had been committed. Bert said he was framed.’

  ‘You believe him? He convinced you fingerprints can lie?’ Drury kept his tone light and carefully avoided sarcasm. Just a couple of questions that rattled her. ‘Is that what you want to tell me?’

  ‘He said it was mistaken identity, that he wasn’t at this country house.’

  ‘But he wasn’t at home that night when the house was burgled?’

  ‘No. He was travelling.’

  ‘You mean he was a commercial traveller before you came here?’

  ‘I mean he was travelling that night — driving a lorry. He worked for a transport company. Drove an articulated lorry.’

  ‘So no alibi.’

  ‘There was plenty made of that in court. How can a man driving a lorry know where he is at any precise time at night.’

  ‘So he was night driving?’

  ‘Of course he was. That’s the whole point, as if you didn’t know,’ she said, trying unsuccessfully to touch a note of high scorn for the devious ways of the police. ‘He was bringing this load of market produce from Hereford and the burglary took place at this house in Gloucestershire. He didn’t have a chance, did he?’

  Drury wasn’t tricked into getting a debate with her on the wrong terms. He saw Hazard’s sly grin and asked, ‘How long did your husband get?’

  ‘Three years. He served two of them, and it was a rough time for me, I can tell you.’

  Hazard’s grin vanished as the inspector said, ‘Well, I’ll be damned. The Blaise Manor job!’

  ‘That was four years ago, and none of the stuffs been recovered,’ Micky Perran, one-time Fleet Street staff crime reporter, said softly. ‘Said to be worth a quarter of a million, wasn’t it?’

  Chapter 7

  Chris Dunmore, the inspector in charge of the Sussex Regional Crime Squad car that had been sent to answer the Bowden phone call, who had missed Micky Perran and the chance to make an arrest for murder, was a stocky man with a trim moustache under a nose with a predatory emphasis in the middle of his broad face. As he listened to Superintendent Frank Drury he kept his gaze on Micky Perran. If the uneven tenor of his thoughts was that these Metropolitan high-rankers took a hell of a time to get to the point, he carefully gave no sign.

  It would have been different if he had arrested Perran and prevented the Ford with the corpse in the boot vanishing. Very different. In fact, Chris Dunmore was a very disappointed man. But the feeling was not exactly a novelty. Nor was the desire to save what he could from what he considered a personal fiasco.

  So he listened closely and gave his mind to what Frank Drury told him.

  He had suggested the back room at the Hare and Hounds because he knew he could rely on Sam Pettish, the landlord, keeping his tongue behind clamped-down teeth. The R.C.S. car and the Yard’s saloon were parked behind the inn, which was only a few miles to the west of Horsham, between a couple of small villages that showed signs of interesting housing-estate developers. As Dunmore had said over the Squad car’s radio, ‘Convenient and not off the map, but not where anyone’s likely to trip over it.’

  The Squad car had arrived first, with news for the two Yard men. The red mini in Micky Perran’s Putney garage had been checked out as a rented car. The man who had paid for it had shown a driving licence made out to Walter Bronley. He had spoken, according to the car-hire firm’s manager, with an Irish brogue. The man’s general description, when described for Perran’s benefit, seemed to fit the man Sandra Beltby had called Pat.

  Chris Dunmore had been asked to pass on the information to Drury. It was information that filled in an empty space in a puzzle, but it didn’t provide anything like an answer to any of the questions lining up for elucidation.

  ‘What the hell do you make of it?’ Perran wanted to know. The question wasn’t directed to the watchful Dunmore.

  ‘I’m getting the impression Sandra Beltby is a smart woman,’ the Yard superintendent told him. ‘She keeps close to the centre of things, but other people get involved — Ray Ebor, Cuzak, you, this Pat character, and the woman whose body was in your car, Micky.’

  ‘You could include the Bowdens in that case,’ said Perran soberly.

  Dunmore found his voice at that.

  ‘What’s this about the couple at Little Dippers?’ he asked. ‘That farm’s bang in the middle of my patch. I’m more than just interested, Superintendent.’

  Drury looked at him thoughtfully before asking, ‘Did you know Bert Bowden had been inside?’

  The Squad inspector didn’t have to answer. The expression that suddenly covered his face was answer enough.

  ‘Where did you get that news?’ he inquired.

  ‘His missus. She wasn’t giving anything away. She knew we could check back, and she’s scared because Bowden’s not around. It looks as though he’s been pulled out for the time being.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘My guess is because Perran didn’t stop there to be arrested by you, Inspector,’ Drury said bluntly.

  Cautiously Chris Dunmore wiped all expression from his face. He had the feeling, and it wasn’t a comfortable one, that he was confronted by a man with vastly more experience not only of police work, but of the characters who made close-liaison police work necessary.

  ‘I was meant to find him and make an arrest?’ he said, feeling his way.

  ‘I think so,’ Drury nodded. ‘But what I don’t understand is why they stole back Perran’s car when he left it at Horsham station.’

  Chris Dunmore’s eyes flicked a look at the journalist. It was a look that did not have to be interpreted as meaning, ‘That’s if he isn’t lying.’

  Perran stirred restively, and Drury let Bill Hazard say, ‘We accept what Perran’s told us, Dunmore. He’s got nothing to gain by lying. If he didn’t want to play ball he’d have done his best to vanish. Instead, he’s forced the others to do that.’

  ‘And this is good?’ the Regional Squad man asked.

  ‘No,’ put in Drury, ‘but neither is it bad. Not the way I see. Whoever they are, Inspector, they’re rattled.’

  ‘This ‘they’ you refer to, Superintendent. Can you give them a name?’

  ‘When I can do that for certain I’ll probably be asking for a warrant,’ Drury smiled. ‘What I’d like now is for you to tell me what you can about the Bowdens.’

  Chris Dunmore eased back in his chair, puffing his cheeks as he pursed his mouth, which made his moustache bristle in a way that was close to being comical. But no one was smiling on the other side of the back-room table.

  ‘It isn’t much. In fact, you’re the one with the information. Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I know Bert Bowden doesn’t own the farm. He’s been there about a couple of years, but the real owner is a company.’

  ‘You know the name?’

  ‘Yes, now let me think. It’s a name rather like his own. ‘Bowker — no. Bow something. Bow — Bow — Bowmander, that’s it. Bowmander, Ltd. I remember because I had to serve a summons once. Nothing special. But I remembered the company’s name was similar to his.’

  ‘Know anything about them?’

  ‘A company with a Brighton address I seem to remember.’

  ‘Look, will you get on to them, check, and find out what you can, especially,’ Drury leaned forward to add, ‘any other firms linked with them?’

  ‘Yes, that shouldn’t take long, Super. You wa
nt the farm watched?’

  ‘That would be a good idea,’ the Yard superintendent agreed, as though he hadn’t been wondering how much longer he’d have to wait before the Sussex man came up with the suggestion. Drury wanted Dunmore to feel the Regional Crime Squad had come up with at least one constructive idea. As the man had said, the farm was in the middle of his patch.

  But Dunmore had a surprise of his own to deliver, though he made his suggestion diffidently.

  ‘I’d like to see that black leather bag and the junk inside,’ he said, ‘if you’ve no objection.’

  Drury’s eyes widened. ‘None at all, Inspector. Bill, get the bag.’

  Hazard was back with the bag in a couple of minutes. He carried it by a piece of string through the handles, and used the string to open it.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Drury invited the Regional man, gesturing to the gaping bag.

  Dunmore lifted out newspapers and two directories. As he examined them the Yard superintendent said quietly, ‘You’ll see most of the papers are national, with the newsagent’s scribble for an address torn from the top right-hand corner. But there are a couple of Sussex weeklies.’

  Dunmore nodded, sorting the newspapers, looking at the dates, running his eye over the pages for any pencilled paragraphs. There was none.

  As he picked up the telephone directories Drury said, ‘Also Sussex.’

  The local inspector frowned. ‘You feel that’s significant?’ he asked.

  ‘In the circumstances, very. Whatever happened last night, there must have been some ad libbing, I’m convinced. I think Perran staying at the club to take that last daiquiri upset a number of plans. Possibly more than one interested person had to give an extempore act and very fast.’

  Whether the words made sense or gibberish to the Regional Crime Squad man it was impossible to say from the blank look on his face, which he carefully maintained as he asked, ‘What do you want me to do, Super?’

  ‘Go to Little Dippers. Tell the Bowden woman some story about checking her cowshed. Anything to allay her suspicion. Afterwards ask to use her phone to make a call to your own headquarters, and when she’s agreed then casually request the loan of her local directories.’ Drury paused.