Calamity in Kent, A British Library Crime Classic

by John Rowland

  “Any luck?” Beech enquired.

  “A fair amount,” Shelley said. “I think that we have got hold of a statement that will lead us somewhere useful. The trouble is that we have no concrete evidence as yet to support it. And we still haven’t solved the most awkward problem of the whole case—the problem of how those bodies got into the lift without the locks being tampered with. That is something that I’m still absolutely stumped over.”

  “Mr. London here has some evidence which he wants to give you,” Beech explained. “He said that he preferred to keep it and hand it over to you in person.”

  There was a touch of annoyance in Beech’s tone. I saw that, in spite of the man’s changed attitude, he still rather resented my refusal to give him the information.

  “Well, shall we all adjourn to my room?” Shelley suggested. I thought that he would probably have preferred to have had his talk with me without Beech being present, but as things were he had no legitimate excuse for getting me away from this local man.

  Anyhow, we all moved down the corridor to the office that had been allotted to Shelley. Here the Scotland Yard man settled down in his armchair, filled his battered old briar with his favourite mixture, and clearly intended to make a long session of it.

  “Who speaks first?” Beech asked, when we had all installed ourselves in chairs.

  “Well,” said Shelley, “provided you remember that this is not for publication until I give the word, Jimmy, I think that we might give you an outline of what has happened since I saw you last.”

  I nodded. “You know that you can trust me, Inspector,” I said. “I don’t give my paper anything that you may say off the record. All I want is to get the background material right; then I can deal with the more confidential stuff as you release it for publication.”

  “Good.” Shelley puffed out a cloud of pungent smoke and resumed. “You know that Mrs. Skilbeck has been saying nasty things about Timothy Foster,” he said, “flinging about accusations in the most wholesale way.”

  “She repeated her accusations to me,” I remarked.

  “Yes. Well, I thought that it was time that she was asked to give us an official statement that would give us something really concrete to build on.”

  “You have been to see her?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she give you anything which seemed likely to be in any way useful?”

  “Yes…and no,” Shelley said doubtfully. “She gave me a good deal of information which tended to confirm what I’d previously suspected. But she didn’t give anything that would prove what she has been saying about Timothy Foster. In fact, I rather think that her accusations of murder against Foster are pure hot air. I think that she has, for some reason, got her knife into Foster and that she is prepared to say anything at all that will hurt that young man. It may well be that she genuinely thinks that he is the murderer, and that in consequence she is prepared to accuse him of it, even to the extent of telling lies, if she thinks that those lies will tend to make us feel more suspicious about him. She is, in other words, that dangerous person who has made up her mind about the case from the start, and is prepared to twist her ideas to meet those prejudices.”

  This was almost exactly what I had thought about Mrs. Skilbeck, and I said as much to Shelley, “And you don’t think Foster is guilty?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,” he replied. “But I would say that I don’t think that Foster is guilty for the reasons that Mrs. Skilbeck advances. He may be innocent and he may be guilty; but I don’t think that what she has to say has any real bearing on the question.”

  I could see that Beech was getting impatient at this exchange of opinion. It appeared to me that the discussion seemed to him to be of merely academic interest. And, like most purely practical men, Beech had an extreme distrust of theoreticians.

  “But you said,” Beech now broke in, “that Mrs. Skilbeck had given you some valuable information. What you’ve said up to now seems to suggest that the information she gave you—if it was information at all—was of no value.”

  “She told me the truth about Tilsley,” replied Shelley. “She had no concrete clues to support what she said, but I had already come to the conclusion that what she told me was true, and her statement was therefore in a sense collaboration of my ideas.”

  “And what was that?” I asked eagerly. At last, I told myself, the case was coming round to a solution.

  “That was that Tilsley was working for a gang, mainly concentrated on the south and east coast, which was distributing cocaine.”

  Beech whistled softly. I saw that, in spite of his assertion that he and Shelley were working so closely together, he really had little idea of what had been in the mind of the man from Scotland Yard.

  “No evidence for it?” he asked.

  “None,” said Shelley. “But what we had found out previously about Tilsley’s activities had made me suspect something of the kind. You will remember that he was dealing in all sorts of things; the one quality they all had in common was that they were fairly small and that they could be sold at a price much above their normal value.”

  “That’s true,” Beech admitted. “But we shall have a devil of a job to prove it, you know.”

  I thought that it was time that I sprang my bombshell on the two policemen. I fished in my pocket and produced the sparking-plug in its little tin.

  “You see this plug, gentlemen?” I said.

  They both sprang from their chairs and made their way over to my side of the table. It was really quite impressive to see the two men waiting for my revelation. I chuckled gently to myself.

  “Watch,” I said. I took the plug out of its tin, fiddled with it until I managed to get the screw that Tim Foster had undone. Then I gently unscrewed it, tipped the body of the plug up on a sheet of paper, and made a gesture, demonstrating the white powder that came out of it.

  “Where did that come from?” asked Shelley.

  “Tim Foster’s garage,” I said.

  Shelley looked puzzled. “But I thought that you were convinced of Foster’s innocence,” he remarked.

  “So I am,” I explained. I went on to describe how the plug had come into Tim’s possession, and how it had been left behind because it was, as Tim thought, faulty.

  Shelley touched the white powder with his finger-tip and put a tiny portion of it gingerly on his tongue. He moved his tongue around his mouth, and then grinned.

  “This is just what we wanted, Jimmy,” he said.

  “You think it’s cocaine?” I asked.

  “Not a doubt of it.”

  “And it gives you the concrete evidence that you want, to connect Tilsley with the cocaine deals that Mrs. Skilbeck mentioned?”

  “Quite right.”

  Beech held out his hand. “I should like to apologise, Mr. London,” he said. “I admit that I didn’t trust you, but now I see that Inspector Shelley, here, was correct in his judgment of you.”

  I smiled. “That’s all right, Inspector,” I said. “The more or less hardened newspaper man is pretty well accustomed to being mistrusted and misunderstood.”

  “But don’t forget, Jimmy,” said Shelley, “this leaves some of our worst problems still unsolved.”

  “Such as…?”

  “Well, first of all, the fact that the bodies were found inside a lift with locked doors. That is the worst problem of the lot.”

  “But what do you think happened?” asked Beech.

  “As I view it, Tilsley was a comparatively minor figure in this drug-distributing scheme. Probably he was doing a bit of blackmail on the side. The chief of the gang thought that he was finding out a bit too much about what was going on, and therefore decided to deal with him. Margerison suspected what had happened, and maybe did something to hold the man up to ransom in some way. So he too had to be deal
t with. Those two murders are all of a piece, and the whole thing hangs together well enough. I’m a little bit less satisfied with the other business—the attack on Bender. He clearly knows very little if anything about what was going on in Broadgate; but the criminal may have thought that Bender knew more than he actually did, and have therefore decided that he had to be dealt with accordingly. The only thing that really puzzles me there is why that attempted murder was done so differently from the other successful crimes. Why was Bender not attacked in the lift? That’s what really puzzles me most. I think that if we could solve that mystery we should have the solution of the whole case.”

  And there, certainly, Shelley had uttered what was perhaps the wisest remark he ever made.

  Chapter XXIV

  In Which We Try to Find the Chief

  I knew well enough that when once Shelley had got on the scent of a case he was not a man to let go until he had got the whole thing thoroughly and finally solved. But at the same time I realised that he had now got something difficult to do. The general outline of the problem, as he had given it to us, was no doubt correct enough.

  Personally I could not see how the question of the lift could be solved. The thing seemed to me to be fantastic and impossible to straighten out. How a body could be found in a locked lift, the locks clearly not having been in any way tampered with, seemed to me to be such a nightmare problem that any rational solution appeared absolutely impossible. I was, indeed, not at all surprised that Shelley thought this of really vital importance.

  In fact, it seemed to me that Shelley had now succeeded in solving the case in its broad outlines; he had not, however, settled one not unimportant part of it—the identity of the murderer. That the chief of the drug-peddling gang was the man responsible for the deaths of two members of the gang seemed to be certain.

  But who was the chief? That was the great problem. After all, if he was someone outside those we had already met in the case it would not be at all easy to get hold of him. We should be working completely in the dark. If, on the other hand, he was one of those we had already met, who could it be? I assumed that Tim Foster and Maya Johnson were not implicated in the crime; and somehow I couldn’t see Mrs. Skilbeck as one of the great figures in a drug racket. Bender had no brains, and, while there were a few others who had entered on the fringes of the case, I could not readily envisage them as drug-kings. The whole thing was, it seemed to me, as puzzling as ever.

  I looked back at that morning when I had seen Bender staggering over the promenade. Many things had happened since that moment, and, while I now knew a lot more about the background of the case, I was really not much further forward in my knowledge of its fundamentals.

  I wandered into another little café after I had left the Police Station, ordered myself a pot of tea and some toast, and sat back, in a brown study.

  Then I suddenly became conscious of the fact that a familiar figure was sitting opposite me. It was Shelley.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked in some surprise.

  “Deep in thought, weren’t you?” Shelley said with a broad grin. “Well, Jimmy my lad, I thought that I’d like to have a few words with you away from the estimable Beech. He is a perfectly respectable officer, for whom I have a good deal of admiration, but he doesn’t possess one of the vital necessities for the good detective.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That little touch of creative imagination which is needful if you are to get to the heart of a case from the start,” Shelley said. “You see, I had to apply a considerable amount of pressure to our friend Mrs. Skilbeck before I got her to admit the connexion of Tilsley with the drug racket. Her main aim now seems to be to keep his memory sweet. And if for a moment she was prepared to admit that he was a peddler of cocaine it would make him a bit of a disreputable individual—not at all the sort of person whom she wants to remember. But at the same time she gave way when I pressed her hard. And I don’t think that Beech would ever have got to that point. The idea that the man might be selling cocaine is the sort of idea that only comes to a man with a trace of creative imagination.”

  I smiled. Shelley seemed to have forgotten that the idea had come from me—or rather from Maya Johnson originally. Still, as long as the idea seemed to be leading somewhere I didn’t mind all that much if my part in it was rather overlooked.

  “The greatest problem, I suppose, is finding the identity of the chief,” I said.

  “Yes; that was why I followed you here, Jimmy,” Shelley said. “You see, our branch at Scotland Yard have sent me some details that I think may lead us to the man we’re after. They’re a bit too vague to be immediately valuable, but I thought that if you did some unofficial snooping around you might be able to lay your hands on what we’re after.”

  “You want me to become a detective again?” I remarked with a grin.

  “Something like that. Mind you, there will be a bit of danger attached to this, Jimmy,” he said. “I’m not questioning your personal bravery, but I think that you should be warned before you shove your head into the lion’s mouth.”

  “I’m not braver than the next man,” I said. “But if I’m allowed eventually to publish what I find out, I don’t mind taking a chance on it.”

  “Good man!” Shelley answered. “I thought that was what you would say.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s a bit of a long story,” Shelley explained. “If you’ll listen I’ll see if I can make it clear to you.”

  Fortunately the café in which we were sitting was practically empty. We could talk quietly without much chance of being overheard.

  “Our men at the Yard usually have a fair idea of the gangs that are involved in this drug business,” the detective went on. “They may not always have enough evidence to convict them, but they keep a pretty close watch on them, and are ready to jump at any moment if it seems likely that a conviction can be obtained. I hope you understand what I mean, Jimmy.”

  “I think I do.”

  “You see, there’s a fairly constant amount of illegal cocaine in circulation in this country. If some new source of supply becomes available we usually learn about it pretty soon. And then the job is to run this new source down. If we can do that, we’re happy.”

  “And a new source has become known lately?”

  “Yes. And it centres on this bit of the coast. The idea they were working on at the Yard was that it was being smuggled in.”

  “Smuggled?” This surprised me somewhat.

  “Yes; there still is a certain amount of smuggling of one sort and another going on, and it seems at any rate possible that drugs are being smuggled in from a continental port,” Shelley explained. “You see, it is almost impossible for the coastguards to protect the whole of the English coast. The coastguards, in fact, are spread out pretty thin, and there are bound to be spots where little guard is kept. I don’t suggest that this corner is in any way worse protected than the rest; but it is here, in Kent, that our drug squad suggest a new source of supply of cocaine has become available in recent months. It’s not at all difficult to decide just where the stuff is centred on, you know.”

  I followed this pretty well. It was clear that the drug experts at Scotland Yard would have a fair knowledge of what was going on. If cocaine was being smuggled into the country and was then being distributed from some spot on the east coast, it might well be that Scotland Yard would become aware of that fact. But Shelley had asked me to help him in the case, and I couldn’t for the life of me see just where it seemed to him that I should be useful in the present set-up.

  “But what is to be my job in all this?” I asked, rather puzzled.

  “I was coming to that in a moment,” Shelley said. “You see, as I have explained, our people get some idea of what is going on; they know, with some degree of accuracy, just where the drug comes from. And
sometimes they have a fair idea, too, of where it is going to and how it is distributed.”

  “They have that in this case?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know that I should say that they know all about these things,” Shelley admitted. “But they have some idea, and those ideas lead them to some particular spots which need close investigation.”

  I began to see what the detective was getting at now, and I said as much to him.

  “They know,” Shelley went on, “that the centre of distribution is somewhere not very far from Broadgate. They have a suspicion that one or two local people are in some way connected with the business of distributing cocaine. But, in general, this was one of the cases that I was describing to you just now—a case in which suspicions may be quite strong but in which it is not possible to go into any definite legal action, since the direct evidence is lacking.”

  “You think that I could get that direct evidence?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What have I to do?” I asked.

  “Don’t forget what I said about the dangers involved in this business,” Shelley warned me.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I assured him.

  “Right. Then I’ll give you the details, as they were given to me on the phone from the Yard this morning,” Shelley said.

  You may be sure that I awaited this with some eagerness. I felt in my bones that this was the last lap. Even though there might still be something to do, the fact remained that if I could do what Shelley was suggesting, I might well lead them to the end of the chase. Thus I might be leading to the final proof of the innocence of Tim Foster and Maya Johnson. If I could bring that off, I should have no complaints. I should think that my intrusion was in every way justified, and I should be finally putting myself in the running for almost every special job that Fleet Street might have to offer me.

  “Our people at the Yard,” Shelley continued, “have no idea who is the leader of this conspiracy. Various names have been mentioned, but none of them convey anything to me, or to any of the others at the Yard. In fact, they are almost certain to be false names. Few people in this racket sail under their true colours, you know.”