“Of course. I began to build it originally for Joyce, but I didn’t see any reason for pulling it down once I’d started on it.” Richard got to his feet. “Anyway, come and have a look and admit that I’m not such an amateur after all.”
Together they strolled round into the driveway and Richard switched on the Jaguar’s headlights. The doorless garage became brilliantly clear and he led the way towards it and into it. Garth followed, hands in trousers pockets, came to a halt in the centre of the concrete floor and looked about him.
“Well?” Richard asked dryly. “Did I make a good job of it, or not?”
Garth had been waiting for a moment like this ever since he had guessed how Valerie Hadfield has disappeared. He studied the brick walls, the concrete floor, the window frame without glass as yet, then he looked above him at the plaster ceiling.
“Ceiling, eh?” he asked in surprise. “Unusual!”
“In a way, perhaps, but it saves dropping chunks of mortar on the car in wet and rough weather. Some better class garages have them…Anyway this one has.”
Garth surveyed the ceiling again, brilliantly clear in the light of the headlamps, and then looked back towards the walls…But he jerked his gaze once more to the plaster. For a moment he had seen something that had not registered immediately — but it did now…
Something gleaming faintly golden, curling out of the plaster, a tiny little loop. A coldness went through him, and passed.
“You’ve made a good job of it, Dick, and I congratulate you. Maybe you’ll come over and build a house for me sometime?”
Richard only smiled — the cold, deathly smile of a criminal who has achieved his fondest hope and escaped unharmed. He had made Chief Inspector Garth look on the last resting place of Valerie Hadfield — and his lynx-eyes, the eyes of the man without a failure in his record, had not for a moment been aware of it.
Richard was still smiling as he led the way back into the house. So was Chief Inspector Garth — for quite a different reason.
CHPTER XVIII
Determined not to reveal his hand, Garth was in no hurry to leave Richard’s company. He spent the evening with him talking, playing a couple of short games of chess — in which Richard forced a stalemate both times — then, towards nine o’clock, Garth insisted that he must be on his way if his wife was ever to forgive him.
“You’ll keep me in touch with any developments in the Hadfield case?” Richard asked, seeing Garth to the front door.
“Surely — though I don’t expect anything. Still, I hope something does turn up because I appreciate how you must feel about Joyce Prescott…Well, thanks for everything.”
“I can’t run you home?”
“No, thanks all the same. The exercise to the Tube will do me good.”
Richard frowned as he closed the door.
Still he did not feel sure. Was there something at the back of Garth’s mind, or was he really beaten? If he was not, what point was there in maintaining friendship? Richard gave it up and returned to the lounge for a spell of serious thinking before retiring.
And while he tried to map out his future, Chief Inspector Garth remained in the road running past the house, on the opposite side facing the driveway gates. Well away from the nearest street lamp he stood in shadow, watching — and waiting.
Towards half-past-ten he saw Richard come out and drive the Jaguar into the doorless garage. The lights went out and the throb of the engine ceased. Richard reappeared and went back into the house. Not ten minutes later lights came up in one of the upstairs rooms. It might be either the Baxters or Richard. Not being sure, Garth fumed and waited, cursing the impossibility of a cheroot for fear of its glow being seen.
It was eleven-thirty before he felt safe to venture. He drifted across the quiet, empty road, entered the driveway and crept close in by the screening trees. As he moved he pulled a pair of folding scissors from his pocket and snapped them open. Without a sound he gained the garage on the side further from the house, crept within, and then very gently eased himself on to the Jaguar’s bonnet so that he could reach the ceiling.
He kneeled, listening. There were no sounds. Carefully he pulled forth his fountain pen torch and switched on the tiny needle of beam, flicking it round until it reflected back from that tiny golden loop. He held it gently, snipped it with the scissors. With finger and thumb crushed together he extinguished the torch with his free hand, slid down to the floor and left the way he had come.
At the first street lamp he paused and heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the single hair still in his grip. He transferred it to a cellophane envelope, thrust it in his wallet, then went on briskly into the night…
*
First thing the following morning Garth appeared in the pathological department, accompanied by Sergeant Whittaker. The pale-faced Winters came over as he was signalled.
“You’ve got some hair somewhere, Doc, taken from that house in Twickenham in the Valerie Hadfield case,” Garth said. “I want you to check it with this one.”
Winters took the cellophane envelope and peered at the single strand.
“Getting down to single hairs now, Garth? Where’s this from?”
“I’ll tell you when you’ve identified it — if you can. My guess is that it matches Valerie Hadfield. Will it take you long to find out?”
“Not very,” Winters answered. “I can tell you straight off that it is a woman’s hair. Male hair is shorter, thicker, and more wiry. And it isn’t an animal’s. So female is the answer, and from the head too…Now, let’s see.”
Winters went over to the bench, studied the packed shelves above it and then took down ether and rectified spirits. Carefully he poured equal parts of both into a tube and placed the hair within it, shaking it gently.
“Cleansing agent,” he explained, as Garth and Whittaker looked on. “Seems to be a lot of rubbish sticking to it. What is it?”
“Plaster,” Garth said mechanically.
“Plaster? But what’s human hair doing in plaster?”
“This,” Garth said, his pale eyes fixed on the tube, “is not ordinary plaster.”
Winters shook the tube again — and again, during a period of ten minutes; then he removed the hair with forceps and put it into a clear fluid of oil of turpentine and finally dried it between blotters. This done he went to the filing cabinets and returned presently with a few hairs mounted on microscopic slides with Canada balsam.
“Are you in a hurry for this examination?” he asked, and Garth gave a grim nod. “All right; I’ll have to leave this specimen unmounted and make only a rough comparison. It’ll probably do for you and I’ll give you the proper thing later on. Takes forty-eight hours at least to mount a hair, you see. Anyway, let’s see what we have.”
He made up a rough slide with Canada Balsam for the single hair Garth had brought and, side by side, examined it with the mounted hairs in the comparison-microscope. For several minutes he studied the two specimens, then at last looked up.
“Identical!” he said. “The fact that this latest single specimen hasn’t set in the balsam properly blurs the details a little, but there’s no doubt but what this hair came from the same head as these other mounted ones. Colour, cuticle, cortex and medulla are all the same. It has been cut off, by the way, not torn out.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Garth said, his face grim. “Make a proper job of the mounting for when I need it, will you? Come on, Whittaker, we’ve things to do.”
The sergeant followed from the laboratory and back to the office. “What,” he asked slowly, “does all this mean, sir?”
“It means that Valerie Hadfield’s hair was used to mix in the plaster of the ceiling of Richard Harvey’s garage,” Garth told him. “That poor woman’s hair wasn’t burned, perhaps because the odour of burning might have been detected. Nor was it scattered to the four winds, nor was it destroyed by acids. Why this latter method wasn’t used I can’t imagine, unless it was because of Dick’s fear that some hairs might escape somewhere and be
detected — or else, most probable reason of all, it was because he was fanatically determined to use every part of that woman’s body to good advantage!” Whittaker said nothing. His mind was crawling with horrible possibilities.
“My God, sir,” he said suddenly, “if Valerie’s hair is mixed up in the garage ceiling plaster her body might be somewhere in that garage! After all, we did find human tissue on that hacksaw blade. Do you suppose that he cut her up and buried her remains under the concrete floor of the garage?”
“I believe,” Garth replied deliberately, “that Valerie Hadfield is not buried under the garage, but that she is the garage!”
“But that’s impossible, sir! You just couldn’t mix up parts of a body in building materials and get away with it. If that’s what you are suggesting?”
Garth reached his desk and sat down in the chair.
“Don’t forget that we are dealing with a scientist, and a clever chemist. Such a man would not use the methods of Crippen and others, cutting a corpse up and then trying to dispose of the pieces. He would, I imagine, strive for the total elimination of the corpse, if only to create the perfect crime. So, if the hair of the missing woman is mixed up in the garage plaster — thereby proving at last the situation of her body — and we can be pretty sure it didn’t get there by accident and that there may be her whole head of hair mixed up in that plaster, neatly cut into short lengths — the rest of her body might quite easily be mixed up with the concrete that forms the floor, or in the mortar between the bricks!”
“But a corpse just couldn’t be cut up that finely, sir.”
“That,” Garth smiled grimly, “is where the chemist walks into the picture! The answer, I think, is — liquid air! Quite a modern product of science and used a good deal in industry. The air is drawn into a compressor, pistons compress the air and drive it into a coil round which cold water circulates. Heat is constantly drawn out of the compressed air until a certain percentage of it is made liquid, at the frigidly low temperature of minus one hundred and ninety degrees Centigrade. This resultant liquid air is a pale blue mobile fluid and is stored in what are called Dewar flasks, stoppered with cotton. Actually they are on the principle of a thermos-flask.”
Whittaker nodded, thinking it out, though still obviously puzzled.
“There is a liquid air compressor in Dick Harvey’s laboratory,” Garth resumed slowly. “Also there are three Dewar flasks against the wall. Flesh, in contact with liquid air — if the process be prolonged — changes to the consistency of grey powder. It shrivels, blights, rots away under the unimaginable cold. Dip a living flower in liquid air and when you take it out you can snap it to bits like a piece of matchstick or…you can pulverise it! — with a pestle, hammer, or whatever you like.”
“Pulverise it?” Whittaker repeated, starting.
“So you begin to see? Maybe for convenience Richard had to dismember the corpse into sections, for a full sized adult body is a difficult thing to handle under liquid air processes. If we assume that diabolical process was carried out, there is no scientific reason why every scrap of Valerie Hadfield could not have been reduced to powder — flesh, bones, all the lot, turned into brittle residue which in turn was pulverised and then added to the sand and cement powder being used for the garage. Perfect dismemberment and elimination and not a trace remaining.”
“But the blood?” Whittaker questioned. “If he started dismemberment before the liquid air experiment some blood must have flowed!”
“Only very slightly, if at all, depending on how soon after death he cut up the body. Hypostasis — post-mortem coagulation — is complete in six hours as a rule and if there is any flow of blood at all it is only minute. What there was he could easily move from the floor, or wherever he performed his grisly task, with a cleansing fluid. As for the blood left in the body, he certainly knew what he was about!”
Garth gave a grim chuckle.
“There’s a hellish touch of genius about this, Whittaker!” he declared. “The only thing that might have given normal dismemberment away would have been blood-staining — signs of it in the concrete, in the mortar, but under liquid air treatment the blood would be frozen to minus one hundred and ninety degrees Centigrade, and blood at that temperature won’t give the slightest reaction in a laboratory! Damned clever! That’s what happens when an expert chemist takes to murder.”
Whittaker rubbed his jaw. “It’s only a theory though, sir…That single hair may not really mean such a diabolical, fiendishly clever plan was carried out.”
“You haven’t been tagging around with Dick Harvey as I have Whitty. You haven’t seen the pride with which he showed me that garage of his — and looking back on it I can see that it was desperate desire to prove his own criminal brilliance that made him show me the place. Normally, no man would waste his time showing a friend his garage. That craving of the ego for recognition of his handiwork — and the brilliant headlights revealing that single hair — will prove his undoing! Right from the start his interest in that garage has been unnatural. Amidst it all is Valerie Hadfield, and we’ve got to find some traces.”
“Even if we do they’ll be unidentifiable,” Whittaker sighed. “You know as well as I do, sir, that unless we can prove the traces belong to Valerie, we’re sunk. Even if Harvey should openly confess to his crime and we can’t identify the traces of Valerie, he’s still a free man.”
“I know — but he murdered Peter Cranston, and we have his body. Make Richard confess to the murder of Valerie and I’ll stake everything I’ve got that he’ll admit he murdered Cranston too. Then — and only then — can we charge him with murder.”
“How do you propose going about finding some traces of Valerie, sir?”
Garth got to his feet and strolled to the window.
“Yes, how?” he muttered. “I could take out a search warrant and have the garage pulled down and analysed, but that would shatter the friendship between us, which I must preserve if I’m ever to tempt a confession out of him.”
“Would that matter so much now we know everything, sir?”
“I think it does, yes. Besides, I have a personal stake in this. Dick Harvey thinks he has proved to me that a perfect crime can exist. I want to prove to him that law and order can in the end beat the best modern criminal brain, if only as a lesson to other misguided mutts who try the same thing.”
Whittaker waited expectantly and Garth returned to the desk.
“I’ve just remembered something! He told me last evening that he had sent all surplus material back to the building contractors — Rothwell’s — having finished with it. It means that there may be some sand, cement powder, and so forth still in the sacks he sent back, and the residue in the concrete mixer might be worth analysing too. The next point of call is Rothwell’s, where Richard won’t have the least idea what I’m up to.”
*
In forty minutes they had reached Rothwell’s disordered timber and brickyard, and found the builder himself in his little shack. He looked up expectantly at his two visitors and set aside a sheet of specifications.
“This won’t take long, Mr. Rothwell,” Garth said, and the builder’s eyes widened at the sight of the warrant card. “Say, look ‘ere! What did I do?”
“Nothing,” Garth assured him with a grim smile. “All I want to know is, are you the man who sold a load of bricks, cement powder, sand, timber, and so forth to Richard Harvey recently?”
“That’s right,” Rothwell nodded. “For his garage…‘E makes an ‘obby of buildin’.”
“I believe you loaned him a concrete mixer, too?”
“Aye — an’ tools. But ‘e’s had us collect what’s left o’ the stuff.”
“Was there any material left in the sand bags or cement bags?”
“Might be,” Rothwell admitted, rubbing his chin. “Nothin’ t’ shout about though…Why?”
“That part needn’t concern you, Mr. Rothwell. Let us say it is a check-up on building materials, shall we? I’d li
ke to see those bags, and the concrete-mixer.”
“Okay,” Rothwell agreed, shambling out into the chaotic yard; “but I can’t think why. There y’are, gents — take your pick. Just as the stuff were dumped down. I ‘aven’t even moved it yet.”
Garth and Whittaker moved over to where the nearby empty bags were standing and looked into them. In each was about two inches of powder remaining.
“I can take these by getting the necessary authority,” Garth said, turning and looking at Rothwell and then nodding to the bags, “but that would waste valuable time. Do you mind if I borrow them for analysis?”
“‘Elp yourself — though I’ll be ‘anged if I can see what you’re up to.”
Garth jerked his head and Whittaker picked up the two bags and walked off with them to the waiting car in the roadway. Garth moved across to the concrete-mixer and peered inside it. Then he put his hand in the mixing crucible. The material within was hard as iron. Taking out his penknife he snapped open the blade and dug out enough of the hard substance in powdery, chipped formation to fill a small cellophane envelope that Whittaker produced from his wallet.
“Look ‘ere, gents, are you sure I ain’t in a mess?” Rothwell insisted.
“You have nothing to fear, Mr. Rothwell,” Garth said quietly. “That is, as long as you say nothing about what has happened. It is to be kept a complete secret. You understand?”
“Uh-huh, I understand,” Rothwell agreed.
Garth nodded a farewell, and then followed Whittaker out of the yard to the car. They drove back in the direction of the city.
“Think we’ll have any luck with this stuff, sir?”
“I don’t know. It’s the last chance we’ve got of proving my theory outside of dismantling the garage and analysing it bit by bit. Of course we’ll do that in any case when we’ve arrested Dick, in order to complete our evidence, but let’s hope we find something here to go on…Doc Winters is in for a busy day!”
Winters did not seem in the least disturbed when Garth and Whittaker appeared in the laboratory for the second time that morning with one sandbag, one grey paper bag, and the cellophane envelope full of residue from the concrete-mixer. He merely raised an eyebrow and listened attentively while Garth explained the position.
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