by John Creasey
“How is it you know so much?” Roger had asked him.
“Always fascinated me even when I was a choir boy here,” Batten had answered. “And I’ve been one of the special security guards for years. A few of us take turns to keep an eye on the place at night. Why, I could show you . . .”
A message had come for Roger to call Scotland Yard and the library had closed a special late opening before he had been able to see the precious Magna Carta itself.
“It’ll be back in the safe by the time we could get back,” Batten had said. “I’ll show it to you tomorrow.”
When Roger had returned to the King’s Arms it had been nearly seven o’clock. Now, it was almost ten.
Nothing sensational had happened at the auction; the Old Masters had not reached their reserve and would next go to London salerooms; but high prices had been obtained for the rest of the paintings, and Leech, who impressed Roger as very shrewd, had sold at least a dozen pictures from his own stock.
The Stephensons and Caldicott had been remarkable only by their absence.
Kempton was still out with a search party sweeping across some of the hills and through copses, because two farmworkers had reported a car parked off the road the previous day; and repeated, also, that the wind had carried the sound of a woman’s voice as she cried: “No, don’t, no!”
They had thought it was an unwilling woman who had taken too great a chance. When asked why they hadn’t gone to investigate, one, a man of forty or so with a wind-reddened face and distance-calmed eyes had said simply: “No business of mine, was it? In any case I couldn’t have got there in time to stop ‘un, even if he’d be stopped.” And then the eyes had crinkled and the voice had cackled: “Take more than that to stop me if I was anywhere near, that I’ll tell you.”
Roger, drawn again to his room window, was thinking of that now.
It wasn’t callousness; it was simply acceptance of the way of the world. If a girl went with a man she couldn’t trust, then who was to blame for what happened? Another thought hovered at the back of his mind: that in this age of permissiveness, when comparatively few girls were virgins until their marriage, the old customs died hard. One was still shocked by rape; all his life as a policeman hadn’t hardened him to that. And once a girl found the man she wanted, she used all the old tricks to get him to the altar.
Whatever the intellectuals and the pseudo-intellectuals said, marriage was still the ultimate aim of most young women. And men, for that matter. It was still the way of society, and if it changed, would change slowly and almost imperceptibly.
He turned back from the window.
That kind of semi-philosophical pondering would get him nowhere. He had this job on his plate, and the fact that he was away from London didn’t alter the fact that he was obviously in charge. All eyes, then, were on him.
Did all eyes see what he sensed? That he had slipped up?
A whole day had passed with no progress at all, except that he had become familiar with local people and the local scene.
He had been accused much of his official life of working on hunches, and if he preferred to call them intelligent deductions, what did it matter? Hunches came in two kinds: the good and the bad. He had a bad one, now. At some stage in the investigation he had gone wrong. He wasn’t yet sure how or where but was beginning to think it was over Caldicott and the Stephensons. Had they been involved he would have expected them to show some kind of panic, but they behaved normally. Caldicott was in his St. John’s Wood flat, the Stephensons had gone on from Bath to Cheltenham, visiting picture galleries and antique shops on the way. They were due back in Bath tonight, for a sale next morning.
Should he have picked them up earlier? Should he at least have seen them himself instead of relying on others to tell him what they looked like? And should he see them himself, now? He went into a tiny bathroom, which had a shower, not a tub, and began to undress. He was stripped down to his underpants when the telephone bell rang. He turned back, without effort, muscular, lean, very flat at the stomach; he had a good body and was proud enough to take good care of it.
“West,” he announced.
“Kempton here,” the chief inspector said. “I think we’ve found something. At Gorley Woods, sir. A local man is on his way to pick you up.”
Gorley Woods was entrancing in the evening light. The sun caught the western branches and gilded the green and spread an eerie glow among the leaves at the top of the trees; and a gentle wind moved light and shadow, leaf and branch. It was high on one of the great stretches on the plain, at the top of a long climb from Salisbury toward Blandford, surprisingly near the road and yet hidden from it by a cutting in the crest of another hill. A dozen policemen, as many farmers and some newspapermen were gathered about, as well as ten or twelve youthful-looking soldiers. Kempton and Tom Batten stood by a slender tree, young compared with most of the beeches here, while policemen in plain clothes were searching the beech mast and the husks at the foot of the tree itself. New grass spots showed in sparse patches all about the roots, which spread evenly from the base of the trunk.
Kempton was on one knee, but stood up when Batten, at the trunk itself, called him. A newspaperman glanced round, saw Roger, and uttered his name; a photographer spun around and his flash went off. Roger reached the tree as Batten said: “It looks like ‘un.” He was peering at the trunk at chest height and Kempton was examining the spot just as closely. He took out a magnifying glass and went closer. As Roger drew up, Kempton said to Batten: “I think you’re right.”
“About what?” asked Roger.
Both men glanced round, Batten startled, Kempton calmly; and it was Kempton who answered.
“It looks as if Prell was here and fastened to this tree, sir. There are several pieces of linen strands, I mean. She was wearing a loose-weave linen suit of those colours. Then look down here, sir.” He bent down again and Roger knelt beside him. “Do you see the scuff marks on the root of the tree just above the ground? They were almost certainly made by shoes with iron heel tips.”
Such marks were there – obviously they were freshly made. Roger studied the ground nearby. It was dusty close to the tree but fairly damp on the edges, although wind and sun had dried the dirt road from the highway. It seemed clear that someone had been standing here, moving his feet; scuffing the ground. Roger stood up and Batten held out his right hand with three strands of linen: a green, a yellow, and a brown.
“The bark’s rough just here, sir,” he said. “If she was tied to it—” He broke off.
“Can we identify the fabric?” asked Roger.
“I can vouch for the colours,” Batten said, “and I think there’s an identical suit only a smaller size at a shop in town, sir, in Salisbury. It would be easy to check.”
“Yes,” Roger said. “How did you find the spot?”
“A local estate agent going to Blandford and Dorchester saw a metallic blue Ford Capri coming off this track onto the main road yesterday, just after lunchtime. Two-thirty or so. He didn’t think anything of it until he got back today and heard what had happened. So we searched the area. Two or three people have certainly been moving about just here, and a car was definitely here yesterday afternoon. One or two damp patches of soil show the tyre marks. Firestone F.100. Haven’t found any other distinguishing marks, but photographs may reveal something.” Kempton rubbed his great jaw. “Not much doubt she was here, sir, so we’ll have to concentrate the search in this area. Of course, if she was taken away in the car she might be hundreds of miles away by now.”
“Yes.” Roger looked at Batten. “Better search the ground nearby. Can we rig up some floodlights?”
“Oh, yes, sir! The army will help out with those.” Batten gulped. “Do you expect to find a grave?”
“All I know is that we have to look for one,” Roger said gruffly.
He left wi
th Batten ten minutes afterward, with the precious linen strands in a small plastic envelope. Batten drove his own small Morris while Roger looked about the almost deserted fields and road with the sun behind them, bringing different and darker shades of green and brown. But he noticed very little, he was concentrating so hard on the problem.
Had he gone wrong?
They reached the police station before he realised how far they had travelled, and went to a small office which was assigned to Roger for the duration of the case. Batten went straight to the telephone while Roger unfastened a large brown envelope addressed to him. Inside were small cards, each filled out with remarkably fine handwriting which sloped slightly backward. On each was a name and address, and Roger began to look through them. He found what should have been the top card, which read:
Notes on known visitors to Leech’s preview of forthcoming sale at the Hart Hotel
“Is Mr. Murrow there?” asked Batten into the telephone. “Or Mrs. Murrow?”
There were seventy-one cards, the assessment stated, and forty-five had been identified by Leech as trade visitors or local residents. He had identified Caldicott but not the Stephensons.
“Good evening, Mrs. Murrow,” Roger heard. “I’m sorry to worry you. . . . Oh. Oh! I’m Tom Batten, of . . . Yes, that’s right, that Batten.”
All of the local people were reputable, according to a note from Isherwood, who was keeping discreetly in the background most of the time. He had also telephoned the police nearest the houses of those who had come from outside Salisbury, and checked on twenty more. He confirmed Leech’s view; and he had got descriptions of six unidentified people and made out cards for them.
“I know it’s a nuisance, but if you could open the shop just for ten minutes while it’s still daylight . . . You’re very good, very good. In about ten minutes, then.” Batten replaced the receiver and looked up in triumph. “We can see that suit I talked about, sir. That’s if you’d care to come.”
“Try to keep me away,” Roger said.
The shop was on one side of the market square, with windows at three levels. In the street level window were dresses which looked not unlike Linda Prell’s suit, but of different colours. Footsteps sounded inside the shop, and a shrimp of a man with a bald head opened the door.
“Hallo, Mr. Murrow. Very good of you. This is Superintendent West . . . If we could see the pale blue, green, and yellow suit like the one Linda bought the other day . . . oh, Saturday! Then this was probably the first time she wore it . . . Ah!” He almost kowtowed before the suit, which the man soon brought to them on a hanger. “If we could just see it in the light . . . You’re very good, Mr. Murrow . . . Will you give me an expert opinion, now: were these strands taken from a dress like this?”
There was a brief pause as Murrow examined the strands. Slowly, he nodded and said: “Yes.”
“You think they were?” Batten’s voice rose in excitement. “Can you let us have the maker’s description and the colours and design?”
“No trouble at all,” Murrow assured him, beginning to look both eager and excited. “There’s a picture of it in the catalogue, very good as regards to the colours, especially.”
He went to a tidy roll-top desk filled with order books and invoices, catalogues and patterns, selected a catalogue and thumbed through it until he came to an illustration of an attractive flowered suit with a high-waisted jacket. Roger studied this, and then turned to Batten.
“Do you have a photograph of Woman Constable Prell?”
“I’ve several,” Batten answered, but for some reason he hesitated. Eventually he drew out his wallet and selected two snapshots and an enlargement of the girl. Obviously these were not official photographs, but Roger made no comment, simply took the enlargement and placed it near the head of the model.
“If we cut that photograph out and paste it over the model, we’ve a perfect photograph for colour television,” he said.
“So we have,” breathed Batten. “So we have!” He appeared to be recovered from his brief embarrassment. “Do you think we could take three strands from the hem . . . ? Thank you . . .”
“Identical,” declared a young man who worked in the carpet factory at Wilton, a nearby borough as ancient as Salisbury. He put the strands beneath a microscope in the small laboratory at the police station. “Those strands came from identical bales of cloth – even the dye is identical. You can be absolutely sure, sir.”
Roger said warmly: “That’s exactly what we needed to know.”
“I only hope it helps to find Linda,” the young man went on. “No news yet, I suppose?”
“Afraid not,” Roger said; and he was surprised how much that truth hurt him.
He arranged for copies of the photograph to be rushed to London, where it should catch the late-news bulletins, then returned to his hotel. He had a hurried meal, went on to the borrowed office and telephoned Isherwood as well as Scotland Yard, prepared a brief statement for the press saying that Linda Prell had been in Gorley Woods, added the description of the suit, sent it up to the Photography Department, where they would make prints for circulation to the newspapers and to police forces, then drove himself to Gorley Woods. He saw the lights in the sky from several miles off, and reached some crossroads where a policeman and two traffic wardens were on duty under a floodlight rigged up among the branches of a tree. Roger stopped as an officer came up to him.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“Mostly we can’t keep the crowd away,” the man answered resentfully. “There must be a couple of thousand of them near Gorley Woods, come across country from all directions. There was a traffic hold-up before we could say snap. If you want to get through to Blandford, sir, I’d take the first left, and—” He broke off, backing a pace. “It’s Mr. West, isn’t it?”
“And I’d like to go through to Gorley Woods.”
“No trouble about getting there, but if you take my tip you’ll turn off to the left as soon as you see the first parked cars. All over the place they are, too close to the road. You keep going into the field and do a half-circle round the cars, sir. It’ll look as if you’re going over some young barley but if you keep close to the hedge you won’t do any harm. Did you follow that, sir?” he asked anxiously.
“Yes thanks,” Roger said.
He checked the impulse to ask if they had found the body, drove on, and followed the instructions closely. Once he was off the road itself the track was very bumpy, but soon he was opposite the main part of the copse and within easy walking distance. He left his parking lights on before locking the car and walking toward the parked cars and the roadway. The light was bright by the copse itself and spread far enough to show couples snuggled down in some cars, others, quite shameless, lying in the fields. No girl was crying “No, no, don’t!” here.
Had the farmworkers heard Linda Prell?
As he approached the road itself he saw cars parked in all directions and a crowd thick among the trees. A dozen or so police were keeping a space cleared and in this space men were digging. The light was eerie; the curious movements of the men and the shadows they made were eerie, too. The gaping spectators were – macabre, grisly, ghoulish. He saw a tiny flame above his head, falling down, and ducked. It went out. Half-ashamed, he realised that there were people up in the trees, and one had lit a cigarette and tossed the match down. His attention once caught, he saw dozens of figures squatting in the trees and looking down at the working men.
Kempton was here, looking pale in the white lights. He seemed to recognise Roger, instinctively, and looked up.
“Hallo, sir.”
“Hallo. Anything?”
“No, sir, nothing at all. What we at first thought was a grave was old rubbish someone buried weeks ago. Any news your end, sir?”
“If you can call it news. No other suspects were at the gallery.”
“I suppose we ought to have expected that,” Kempton said. “It certainly doesn’t help, sir.”
“There’s one thing. Those linen threads certainly came from the woman’s suit,” Roger remarked.
“I wonder what the hell they did to her,” Kempton said in a growling voice. “It’s bad enough when one of our chaps runs into trouble, but when it comes to a woman officer—” He broke off. “I’m pretty sure about one angle, sir.”
“What?”
“She won’t be found in these woods. We’ve seen all the soft ground where she could have been buried and there’s no fresh digging. Most of the place is a tangle of roots. There’s so little soft ground we haven’t had any luck with identifying car tracks or anything else,” Kempton went on gloomily. “I suppose we’d better keep the search going, though.”
“I’m not sure we shouldn’t call it off until the morning,” answered Roger. He watched men scraping dirt from the foot of the tree where the policewoman had been tied, but he wasn’t thinking of that; he was thinking of the Stephensons and Caldicott, and the fact that he wished he had questioned them himself. Suddenly, he asked: “Know how far it is to Bath?”
Kempton’s answer came back as quick as thought.
“Forty miles or so, sir. Are you thinking—” He broke off.
“The same thing as you are,” Roger said. “According to my last report the Stephensons are still in Bath, at the Pump Hotel. I’ll tell these chaps to call a halt to this, then we’ll get moving.”
He was about to drive off when Batten appeared, triumphantly holding some copies of the catalogue picture with Linda Prell’s face superimposed.
“Took them myself, sir, and got a pal of mine to do some prints quickly. Not bad at all, are they?”
“Not bad at all,” Roger agreed. “You get some teleprinted for the Yard and tell them I’d like nationwide distribution – press, television, they’ll know. I’ll take two with me. Kempton and I are on our way to Bath.”
