The Methods of Sergeant Cluff

by Gil North

  Greensleeve ordered, “Go and get your dinner, Margaret.”

  Cluff walked between the counters, into the street. Clive, sitting on the pavement outside the shop, got up and joined him.

  Chapter IV

  A tarpaulin spread as a windbreak across the end of one of the stalls on the setts hid him from the chemist’s.

  The High Street was busier, the farmers attending the market joined at this time of day by men and women either on their way to their midday meal or returning from it. Some of them, when they passed where Cluff was standing, either lowered their voices or stopped talking altogether. Others, on the contrary, spoke more loudly. He heard his own name mentioned, and Greensleeve’s. They were shop assistants and office workers, a step or so below Greensleeve in the social scale of Gunnarshaw. They didn’t like Greensleeve any more than he did, though they could connect Greensleeve as little with the death of Jane Trundle. It was something to them, at least, that she had worked for the chemist, a proof that he wasn’t always as removed as he thought from the commoner mass of his fellows. The Sergeant sympathized with them. His prejudices were as strong as theirs. He didn’t believe, any more than the people going by, in selfless service, in the labour of love men like Greensleeve quoted in excuse of their political and urban activities.

  The course he had to take nagged at him. He knew what he had to do and he had no clear idea of when he was going to do it, or whether he was going to do it at all. He was two men, the Sergeant of Police and Cluff. He feared that what the Sergeant might discover would prove mistaken the innocence in which Cluff believed, with nothing to support belief except Cluff’s identity with Gunnarshaw. The unreasoning emotions of Cluff warred with the detachment the Sergeant was obliged to maintain, the impersonality of the Sergeant with Cluff’s understanding and compassion for people like himself.

  Clive recognized a friend amongst the crowd in the street, the dog’s tail wagging, the dog, alert, moving away from Cluff. The Sergeant and Cluff, rejoined, came back to reality at the touch of a hand on Sergeant Cluff’s shoulder.

  Constable Barker said, “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  Cluff’s car confronted him, parked on the setts between the stalls.

  Barker explained, “I brought it in. In case you needed it. It was only a blocked feed pipe.”

  Cluff said, “That sort of thing’s a mystery to me.”

  Greensleeve crossed the pavement from the door of his shop. Cluff stepped a little out of concealment. He watched Greensleeve over the road towards a café, a superior type of establishment, patronized at lunchtime by the more prosperous tradesmen, the managers of banks, insurance inspectors, chartered accountants, solicitors, whose tables were permanently reserved. They took more than a professional interest in the life of Gunnarshaw, sitting on committees, attending the church as wardens and sidesmen, being active in charitable causes, some of them, like Greensleeve, serving on the town council. When the Sergeant ate at all in Gunnarshaw he chose a humbler place.

  “He doesn’t live all that far off,” Cluff remarked. “It wouldn’t hurt him to go home to eat.”

  The people in the street expected action from him. Barker, impatient, begged silently for instructions. Cluff’s fingers curled round the letter in his pocket. If he had more facts collected, confirming the facts he had already, what would he do with them?

  “The surgeon—?” Barker suggested.

  “We know she’s dead.”

  The letter was definite. The young man waiting outside the shop at night for Jane Trundle was definite. Cluff couldn’t gainsay the facts. The facts were clear. He didn’t believe in facts, not when interpretation of the facts involved men and women he’d grown up with.

  Facts didn’t lie to Mole. Cluff closed his eyes to shut out the facts. He wanted to throw away what he knew already and begin again. She hadn’t been killed for money, for any material gain. More than facts was in question here, the intangible, invisible passions of human beings. Facts could have one meaning to Mole, another to Barker, still another to Cluff. It wasn’t facts that mattered, but what lay behind the facts.

  He’d no weapons in his armoury but his own feelings. He wasn’t permitted these intuitions, these sentiments that might be false, guiding him not nearer, but farther from the goal he was expected to reach. He admitted the danger of his prejudices, the possibility of cardinal error inherent in his likes and dislikes. A man had to be true to himself.

  “The report,” Barker was saying. “He must have finished the post-mortem by now.”

  Cluff said aloud, “No weapon.”

  Greensleeve, as short as a woman, disappeared into the café.

  “And little blood,” the Sergeant said.

  “The rain washed it away.”

  Cluff had more in his pocket than the letter, a wallet well filled, fat with notes.

  Barker considered, his brow wrinkling. “No,” he said. “No. She was killed where you found her.”

  “Did I say she wasn’t?”

  Barker argued with himself, unconscious of Cluff’s attention: “No one would have carried her through the streets, even on such a night.”

  “Not in his right mind.”

  “Who doesn’t have a car these days?” Barker added.

  “—The people who lived where she lived—”

  “Besides,” Barker went on. “That boy—Jim—the one who reported it. He saw someone running off.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “It couldn’t—”

  “What?”

  “No one would do a thing like that. Find her, I mean, and then leave her for someone else to find, afraid to get mixed up in it, of questions, inquiries, the police—”

  “I shouldn’t like to think so.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “Anything’s possible. It’s as well it’s me you’re talking to and not Mole.”

  Barker looked embarrassed. He started, “I was—” and stopped. Cluff didn’t help him. Barker asked desperately, “Isn’t that what you were thinking?”

  Barker said nothing for a while. Cluff stayed still. Barker opened his mouth: “You’d seen her too. Her clothes weren’t cheap.”

  “We all knew her in Gunnarshaw.”

  “What was she doing there? On foot. In the rain. Walking the streets.”

  “Would we be standing here—?”

  “It’s not like her. How much did she earn?”

  “Six, seven pounds a week at the most.”

  “She couldn’t afford it.”

  “Was she poor?”

  “Her father—”

  “I’ve seen him.”

  “Then how—?”

  “She’s dead,” Cluff said, a second time since Barker had met him. “She’s dead.” He smiled at Barker: “Go and see the surgeon then.”

  He watched Barker’s back down the street. The owner of the stall stopped fumbling with a pyramid of oranges. He sidled closer to Cluff. He offered, “I’ll keep an eye open, Sergeant, if you like. Are you looking for anyone special?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes,” the man said. “She asked for it.”

  “You’d see her often.”

  “Wasn’t she worth looking at?” The man paused. “She made the most of it.”

  “She’d nothing else.”

  Cluff left him. The stall-holder’s wife, returning from a kiosk higher up the street with a steaming mug of tea in one hand and two meat pies on a plate in the other, looked at the Sergeant and then at her husband, lifting her eyebrows in mute question.

  The stall-holder said, “He’s got on to that young chap who used to hang about the shop.”

  “He couldn’t miss, could he?”

  “I’m sorry for the lad. He didn’t look to me as if he’d hurt a fly.�
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  “What do you think Caleb Cluff is?”

  “I just told him, I wouldn’t have his job for all the tea in China.”

  Cluff stopped by the chemist’s. He went in, unaware of the confusion he caused Jean, back now and by herself in the shop. She looked past him, into the street, across the road to the café where Greensleeve was, a tiny spark of fear in her eyes. He toyed with a show-card on the counter.

  He asked, “Is it pleasant for you, working here?”

  He asked again, “You all left together last night?”

  She shook her head: “Jane went early.”

  “I see.”

  “She did sometimes.”

  “I’ve met her in the streets.”

  “She wasn’t always in the shop. She worked with Mr. Greensleeve as well.”

  “In the dispensary?”

  “He uses it for an office too.”

  “When the shop’s open?”

  “She was helping him yesterday afternoon.”

  Cluff’s attention wandered. He didn’t seem to be listening.

  Jean said, “Ought I to be telling you this? He’s my employer.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Jean decided to admit, “She came out of the dispensary in her hat and coat. It couldn’t have been more than half past five.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “To Margaret?”

  “Not to either of us.”

  “And Mr. Greensleeve?”

  “I’m not sure. He came out behind her and followed her to the door.”

  “It was early for the young man to be waiting.”

  “You know about him?”

  “Does it make it easier for you?”

  “He was always there. From soon after five, every evening.”

  “There wasn’t anything regular about her movements.”

  “I’ve seen him there—when I’ve been out—at all times of the night.”

  “He went after her?”

  Jean stared at him: “But they went away together.” She said quickly, “It was the first time. She used to walk past him as if he wasn’t there.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to get him into trouble.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “She went straight up to him. She linked her arm in his. I could see her past Mr. Greensleeve in the doorway. She turned round and looked back at us. It’s hard to explain—”

  “On purpose?”

  “Perhaps—”

  The minute finger of an electric clock, with letters spelling out the name of a proprietary medicine instead of figures on its face, jerked hypnotically, fascinating Jean.

  “He won’t be back yet,” Cluff said and Jean knew that he was referring to Greensleeve.

  “Margaret will.”

  “Have you anything else to tell me, Jean?”

  “She’s coming now.”

  “I’ll go this way,” Cluff said, making for the door to the dispensary, Clive behind him. He heard the parting of her lips, the expulsion of her breath, and walked on without looking round.

  He closed the door of the dispensary and leaned against it. He had his stick in one hand, the other in the pocket of his Burberry, gripping the letter and Jane Trundle’s wallet. His eyes wandered about the room, coming to rest on Greensleeve’s desk. He listened to a vague murmur of feminine voices, the accents of question and answer.

  Clive waited quietly. He was glad, as he always was, of Clive’s presence, easier in Clive’s company than in the company of people, of people like Mole and Greensleeve. He divined in the dislike, barely suppressed, that Mole had for him a reflection of the hostility he felt for Greensleeve. The voices in the shop were louder. He could distinguish between them though he could not hear the words. Jean’s voice had in it a note of panic. He remembered that if the assistants had the use of a cloakroom it must be through here somewhere.

  He went to the desk. He stood looking down at the papers on it. He stared at the drawers on either side of the desk. The safe in the corner attracted his attention and he knew it would be locked.

  He was unwilling to leave. He didn’t care very much whether Margaret came in and found him, or not. He cared nothing for Greensleeve in spite of Greensleeve’s power and position in the town. Something disturbed him and he didn’t know what it was. The girl he had seen dead on the cobbles last night had been in this room at this time yesterday. Was it the memory of her living that troubled him, or his own lethargy, his lack of direction, his reluctance to commit himself to a course of action? The day wasted, as he had wasted the night in his office, himself complicating what should be obvious, Greensleeve’s writing materials reminding him of the report for Patterson he had not so much as begun. Why was he haunting the chemist’s shop? What good was he doing, either to himself or to the law of the land?

  The voices continued, complaining, querulous, argumentative. He sensed again an uneasiness in his surroundings, something in the atmosphere on which he couldn’t put his finger, which couldn’t be real or real only because it was born of his own imaginings. It wasn’t enough to allow his contempt for men like Greensleeve to run away with him. If Greensleeve was involved it was only by proximity, by the casual coincidence of his position as Jane’s employer. The shop was Greensleeve’s, pregnant with the character and the presence of Greensleeve, the material by long association taking on an affinity with the immaterial aura of Greensleeve. Could Jane Trundle too not have left something of herself behind in a place where she had spent so many of her days?

  The dead didn’t talk; the dead left no part of themselves as memorial. Cluff’s visit had no priority, no more conscious intention than his long inaction in the High Street. He had simpler, more direct pointers to his duty. He idled away the hours, chasing chimeras, trying to impress on what was the stamp of what he wanted it to be. Had he hoped to learn anything from Jean? What had Jean to do with it, any more than Greensleeve, any more than Margaret with her bitter mouth, her hard eyes, her life gone sour?

  A rear door in the dispensary let him into a short, narrow passage. He postponed leaving by a door on the left of the passage giving on to the yard until he had opened, in turn, two doors on his right. He discovered only a store and a cloakroom.

  A few drops of water still glistened on Greensleeve’s car, scattered here and there over its smooth bodywork. The broad trail left by water sluicing from the car as the hose was turned on it had almost dried, marking a cleaner track on the concrete, its edges sharply defined. Cleaner, but not quite clean, swilled in consequence of the swilling of the car, the result fortuitous.

  Clive rumbled in his throat. The Sergeant retreated into the shallow recess in which the yard door was framed. He heard movement in the dispensary, Margaret on her way to the cloakroom. He abandoned pretence gratefully, accepting the fact of discovery, allowing events to proceed as they would. He stepped into the yard as a leaf of the solid gate creaked and swung farther inwards.

  The man wasn’t Greensleeve, nor had Cluff expected him to be Greensleeve. He had a leather and dusters in his hands. He went to the car and stood looking at it, not yet aware of Cluff.

  Cluff remarked casually, “I didn’t know you worked for Greensleeve.”

  The man whirled, recognizing Cluff’s voice, startled, his face taking on an expression of guilt, delving into the depths of his mind to bring up crimes of which Cluff could accuse him. The Sergeant eyed him, grimly amused, eyes a little narrowed, looking as though he knew all the secrets of Gunnarshaw.

  “You’re off your beat,” the man returned, wary, unable to discover in himself a misdemeanour worthy of Cluff’s attention. “This is private property.”

  “You’re not usually so fond of work.”

  “An odd job now and again when we’re slack.” Tatter
ed clothes, too large for him, hung on his wiry body. Ingrained dirt lined the crevices of his skin on face and neck. A greasy cap covered greasy hair. He wore a handkerchief twisted round his throat. Cracks threaded the uppers of his unpolished, down-at-heel shoes.

  “So long as they know at the rag-shop,” Cluff said.

  “They know where to find me if I’m wanted.”

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  The man wiped his leather perfunctorily over the car bonnet, without exerting himself. He dabbed with a duster, resentful of Cluff’s supervision. He asked, “Have you nowt better to do?”

  “I’m easy,” Cluff said. “It does me good to see you working.”

  The man spat. A murky scrawl appeared on the car.

  “They’d make a better job of it at the garage,” Cluff remarked.

  “They’d be paid more.”

  “Whatever he gives you, it’ll be as much as it’s worth.”

  The leather squealed. The man said, “What are you snooping about for?”

  “It doesn’t look a job you’re used to.”

  “Is he back?”

  “What’s your hurry? He won’t want it till closing time.”

  “He was sharp enough this morning about getting it done.”

  “He must know you like I do.”

  “You should have seen it when I started.”

  “The weather’s dirty at this time of year.”

  The man worked for a few moments: “Look here, Mr. Cluff—”

  “I’m not after you this time.”

  “That’s a change,” the man retorted. “Not that I’ve done anything.”

  “If you haven’t, you will.”

  “We get blamed for everything, me and a few others.”

  “There was a murder in Gunnarshaw last night.”

  “Here! I’d nowt to do with that.”

  Tiny black spots of debris, stranded on the concrete as the water had drained away, dotted the yard at Cluff’s feet. Lines running diagonally hatched the yard into a pattern of diamond shapes.

  Cluff went through the gate, the rag-merchant’s warehouse on one side of him, a pile of rubble on the other, where a couple of cottages had been condemned and demolished. The building beyond the site of the cottages, at the corner where the back entrance to Greensleeve’s shop joined one of Gunnarshaw’s older streets, looked as though it had been lucky to escape destruction. A grimy window stared across at the rag-merchant’s. The door Cluff made for was down some steps, the floor on to which he trod below the level of the setts leading from the chemist’s yard.