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Murder Among Thieves (C.I.D Room Book 3)

Page 9

by Roderic Jeffries

“I’m not at all certain it’s experience we need.”

  Kywood, who sweated easily, took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. He disliked Fusil because he couldn’t understand the man. How could you begin to understand a D.I. who said he didn’t think experience was what was wanted?

  Josephine ground the coffee beans in a high speed grinder and for a short while speech was impossible. When the grinder stopped, Kywood put his elbows on the table and leaned across, his square chin jutting forward. “What have you learned from the vehicles the villains used?”

  “Virtually nothing.” Fusil scooped some apple sauce over the square of chop on his fork. Kywood glowered at the far wall. “Is the number on the oxygen bottle going to tell you much?”

  “At the moment, I doubt it.”

  “Then what about the guards? Is there any suggestion anywhere that one of them was a traitor?”

  “None.”

  “What about the grassers — what have they come up with?”

  “Nothing of any value.”

  “Goddamn it, they must have come up with something.” Kywood spoke with rising anger.

  “Their stories don’t vary,” said Fusil. “The job wasn’t carried out by a local mob and there’ve been no outsiders in the territory.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know.”

  Fusil’s calmness infuriated Kywood. “They’re not much good, are they? Yet you told me they would likely name the villains. You told me…”

  “There’s time.”

  “Oh, there is, is there? There may be all the time in the world for you, but there isn’t for me. I’ve got the chief constable snorting down my neck and he’s got the watch committee on his back. Have you seen the headlines in the Sunday papers?”

  “I’ve seen two of ’em. We had to expect something like that.”

  “What are you doing to counteract ’em?”

  “All we can.”

  “Which so far doesn’t add up to a packet of peanuts.”

  Josephine interrupted. “Can you suggest what more Bob can do other than work twenty hours a day and completely exhaust himself?”

  “Well, I… I’m not saying he isn’t working hard,” said Kywood lamely, surprised by the vehemence in her voice.

  Fusil tried to catch Josephine’s eye, to indicate to her to keep out of it, but she carefully became too occupied to notice him.

  Kywood drummed on the table with his fingers. When he next spoke, his voice was much more controlled. “D’you think there’s anything in this Glenton business?”

  “It’s impossible to say yet, isn’t it? We’ll have to wait on Kerr’s report.”

  “But why did you send Kerr?”

  “Because the job in Cressfield may call for imagination.”

  “I’d have thought he has a damned sight too much imagination.” Kywood lit a cigarette. He then belatedly remembered his manners and apologised for smoking before Fusil had finished his meal. Josephine poured out the coffee.

  Fusil yawned. Josephine yawned. After a time, Kywood left.

  *

  The Coach Inn, which stood on the corner of one of the crossroads in Cressfield’s main street, appeared not to have been altered from the days of coaching. It was a long time since Kerr had tried to sleep in so uncomfortable a bed and in so noisy a room. Plainly, he thought as he shaved, this offered the cheapest accommodation for miles.

  Breakfast, eaten in a room that had a profusion of genuine oak beams and a draught that in winter must have been lethal, was surprisingly good. There was fruit juice, cereal, two eggs, bacon, tomatoes and sausages, as much toast as he could eat, and really delicious marmalade. He began to feel a little less unfriendly towards the hotel-keepers.

  The day was overcast, bringing an end to the blazing sunshine that had covered the country from the Border down to the south coast for the past several days, but it was still warm so that by the time he had walked to the end of the main street and along Castle Road he was beginning to prickle from sweat. The desk sergeant at the police station directed him along a corridor and to the detective sergeant’s room. Ambleside greeted him pleasantly and then quickly gave him a resume of the known facts.

  “I’ve had the scientists checking all the clothes, especially the coat with the scorched patch,” continued Ambleside. He picked up a sheet of paper and passed it across. “There’s their report. They found traces of ash on the coat but can’t identify what the ash is from, so that doesn’t help. The actual scorching isn’t any more informative.”

  “There wasn’t any mud on his shoes, or anything like that?”

  “A sprinkling of dry dust, probably clay, but nothing of special significance to it. We’ve naturally turned the car inside out and hoovered it until it’s cleaner than new, but that’s yielded nothing. Dabs went over every inch, but most of it’s been wiped clean and there were only Glenton’s prints on the driving door, steering wheel, etc.”

  “Was the car his?”

  “It’s registered in his name, yes.”

  “And he hadn’t a load of money on him?”

  “Nothing other than three and six in coin and silver.”

  “That’s odd. Surely a bloke of his kidney wouldn’t tour the countryside with empty pockets?”

  “That’s worried me.” Ambleside spoke slowly. “Most times you can say that the bigger the villain, the thicker the bankroll, just to show the world he’s Mister Big.”

  “And if he was on the robbery, what’s he done with his share — cached it? But then there surely wasn’t time in between leaving Fortrow and crashing up here? And if he didn’t have any real money on him, how did he pay for the booze he got drunk on — he’d surely never have had enough on him just to buy the drinks and then be skint? And where did he find the time to drink?”

  Ambleside picked up the ruler and tapped it up and down on the palm of his left hand. “Some of the answers won’t add up.”

  “Then was he murdered and robbed of his share of the loot?”

  The ruler became motionless. “We know that Glenton was drunk, real drunk, the car was descending Pretley Pass, hit the cliff face, regained the centre of the road, hit the cliff face again, shot across the road just before the sharp bend and crashed through the railings. Apparently, accidental death resulting from drunken driving. But the nearest pub is a mile away and there wasn’t a bottle in the car, yet the amount of drink in him was so high that the pathologist says he was only a hair’s-breath away from being comatose. So perhaps to all intents and purposes he was comatose and someone lined up the car, dumped him in the driver’s seat, hopped out, and took off the brake. It could be — we just don’t know.”

  “There weren’t any eyewitnesses?”

  Ambleside smiled, a trifle sarcastically. “Only the driver of an oncoming car and he’s still so shocked he’s off work — nervous type.”

  “So it could be an accident, period. It could be an accident and Glenton did take part in the robbery. Or it could be murder, following the robbery, and the motive was Glenton’s share of the loot.”

  Ambleside put down the ruler on the desk. “That about covers the alternatives.”

  “The news isn’t going to make old Fusil dance for joy, that’s for sure. Isn’t there anything definite I can take back to him, Sarge?”

  “Only that Glenton’s dead.”

  “You don’t think there just could be something in the car…”

  “I searched the remains of that car as carefully as I’ve ever searched anything. There’s nothing.”

  “But how did Glenton buy the drinks if he didn’t have any money? How did he drive the car at all if he was that tight?”

  “Put the questions to your D.I. and see if he’s clever enough to answer ’em.”

  Kerr thought sourly that he’d come a long way to collect only a load of unanswerable questions. Fusil was going to spit tacks — he’d been hoping for proof of the fact that Glenton had been in on the robbery.

>   “Cheer up, cock,” said Ambleside, content that the matter wasn’t basically his problem. “The worst they can do is sack you.”

  They left the detective-sergeant’s room and went out through a side door to the rectangular parking space and the lock-up garages.

  The shattered red Ford Executive was out in the open, close to a high brick wall. The bonnet was pushed in and the roof squashed down on to the body: the front wheels were twisted and buckled, but the rear wheels were surprisingly intact.

  Kerr studied the car and he immediately recalled Miss Railton’s telling him about the large red car that had been outside her house all Friday morning and how it had gone when she was out, only to be replaced by the yellow Austin. A ‘large red car’ offered no standards of comparison — to the Railton woman ‘large’ might mean anything and however many tens of thousands of cars in however many shades of red were there on the road? And yet…

  Where the hell did he go from here, he wondered? It was easy to say there must be more than coincidence in the fact that Glenton had been driving a large red Executive and Miss Railton had had a large red car outside her house on Friday morning, but Fusil would demand proof that this was more than coincidence. Where did such proof lie?

  “What’s got your brain ticking over?” asked Ambleside, studying his face.

  Kerr told him.

  Ambleside took out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it. “It makes a nice fit, but as you said, where’s the proof? You haven’t any tyre marks to go on?”

  “No. The gutter and road outside the woman’s house were as dry as a bone.”

  “And there’s absolutely no lead on the registration number?”

  “She didn’t begin to notice it. All she did was to curse the driver of the car for having had the nerve to park in front of her house and to slap on one of her notices threatening…” He stopped.

  “And?”

  He didn’t immediately answer, but when he did speak there was a suggestion of excitement in his voice. “Were there any traces of a notice on the windscreen?”

  “Aren’t you overlooking one small fact? The car fell fifty feet over a cliff. The windscreen just happened to shatter.” Kerr ignored the other’s sarcasm. When a notice was stuck on a windscreen, it very often didn’t tear away cleanly. If this were the same car that had been outside Miss Railton’s house, Glenton would certainly have ripped off the notice, but might there not have been left behind fibres of paper from that notice? “Where’s the glass from the windscreen?”

  Ambleside shrugged his shoulders. “There was a pile of glass at the first point of impact — where the nose of the car struck the rock ledge before it turned over and crashed to the floor of the valley. That glass is presumably part of the windscreen. There was also a load of glass inside and outside the car where it ended up.”

  “Did you keep the bits that were found inside?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can I see them?” They returned into the station and went past the rows of cells to the exhibits room a dark, dank room. The walls were lined with shelves, now mostly empty except for one on which were half a dozen cardboard shoe boxes. Ambleside picked up the boxes and put them on the central wooden table. Inside each one was a plastic bag, sealed and labelled as to contents and place where found. He handed Kerr a bag half-filled with shattered toughened glass.

  Kerr emptied the pieces of glass on to the table and began to check them. After a while, Ambleside became restive but Kerr worked doggedly on and when almost finished he turned up a lozenge shaped fragment that had a few fibres of paper attached to it. “Look! “he exclaimed, “there it is — that’s where the notice was.”

  “That could be where a notice was,” corrected Ambleside.

  “There isn’t any doubt…”

  “I’d say there’s a whole host of doubts. It might not have been a notice at all, or it might have been an entirely different one from the one you’re on about.”

  “The fact that Glenton’s car was red and it had a notice stuck on the windscreen…”

  “You’ve no proof.” Ambleside jammed his hands in his trouser pockets and began fiddling with the coins in his right-hand one. “Can you imagine how your D.I. would treat your theories based solely on a few shreds of what might be paper… but might not?”

  Kerr could well imagine Fusil’s response. The colour of the Ford and the fibres of paper made it possible that this was the car which had been outside Miss Railton’s house, but no more than that. Hell, he thought, there must surely be some way of obtaining proof one way or the other?

  Couldn’t the fibres be tested and compared with fibres from notices Miss Railton had not yet stuck on offending cars? Of course, the size. The notice on the yellow Austin had been printed and that surely meant all the notices would be of the same size? If the bits of windscreen could be put together and sufficient fibres had remained behind to mark out the size of the notice on the windscreen of the Ford… “Can you take me out to where this car crashed?”

  “Of course. But why?”

  “I want to collect up all the pieces from the windscreen and try to fit them together to see if I can get the length of any of the sides of the notice.”

  “You must like work!”

  They drove in a Morris 1100 to Pretley Pass and parked in the viewing area that was at the top of the pass. “They say you can see four counties from here,” said Ambleside.

  Kerr, not usually over-conscious of natural beauty, was struck by the quiet serenity of the view. The so-called pass was really no more than a steeply descending road down the side of a hill that stood at the end of a range of hills, but from it there was a commanding view to the south and west. Spread out was a typical patchwork of countryside, fields completely irregular in shape and size, hedges, copses, woods, scattered farmhouses, and villages. In the distance — too far away to expose its inevitable ugliness — was a town.

  They descended the cliff face, formed unknown centuries ago when the end of the hill collapsed as neatly as if it had been cut away, down the steps cut into the rock and from there they were able to work across to the ledge where the Ford had first struck. The rock face bore several recent scars, none of which was very large, moss and some of the small tufts of grass had been torn loose, and there was a neat pile of pieces of shattered windscreen, but that was all to show that here a car had crashed and a man had died.

  Ambleside stared down at the hundreds of pieces of opaque toughened glass. “You’ve got yourself a job, mate!”

  He’d got himself one hell of a job, thought Kerr, suddenly overwhelmed by the magnitude of it. This was what came of having an idea! Why hadn’t he strangled it at birth?

  They collected up all the glass and put it in the large cardboard box they had brought with them, then returned up the steps to the Morris. They drove back to the station.

  “You’d better work in the conference room,” said Ambleside, as they walked across the courtyard. “There’s a good sized table there and since no one at this station believes in conferences, you won’t be disturbed.”

  The conference room, oblong and painted in the depressing shade of brown so often found in police stations, was hot. Kerr took off his coat, slid down the knot of his tie and undid the collar button of his shirt. He opened the cardboard box and stared down at the pieces of glass in it, then looked at the glass which had come from the exhibits room, and he felt overwhelmed. He sat down on one of the chairs and smoked a cigarette.

  After stubbing out the cigarette, he checked on the time: a quarter past twelve. Originally, he’d hoped to catch the two o’clock train down to London and the five to six on to Fortrow, but there wasn’t any chance of that now. Initiative, he decided, was not the valuable asset that so many people tried to make out it was. The bloke who always caught the train he wanted to was the bloke who had the sense not to use his imagination. He sighed, then tipped out the hundreds of bits of glass onto the table and morosely decided that every piece
was precisely the same shape and size as the next so that there was as much chance of his fitting them together correctly as of being asked to dine with the chief constable.

  Time passed. He found some pieces that had paper fibres on them, but not enough to form a side. By two o’clock his stomach was rumbling, reminding him he had not eaten since breakfast, and he left the conference room and went in search of the canteen. It was down in the basement and the civilian staff might have been sisters to the staff at Fortrow: meals were served until a quarter to two and then meals were not served and did he really think they were going to slave away all day and night? He had a cheerful smile and a manner which sometimes led middle-aged women into thinking he was rather sweet, with his curly brown hair, even white teeth, and slightly flappy ears, and that he needed mothering. He smiled at the plump woman, whose two front teeth were capped with gold, and said that he had a duodenal ulcer and the doctor had told him he must eat regularly or he’d drop down dead. She called him a brazen liar, but served him a plateful of sausages and mash and undercharged him by sixpence.

  He returned to the conference room feeling much better and continued work. An hour later, he decided it was quite hopeless and he was being a prize fool and should give up immediately. He smoked a cigarette and then returned to the table and doggedly continued work. There would have been many at Fortrow police station who would have been very surprised at his slogging persistence.

  At five past six he found one piece of glass that joined two others and suddenly he had the length of one side of the notice and all his efforts were rewarded. He borrowed a ruler from the duty sergeant and measured the length — four and fifteen-sixteenths of an inch. It was a useful length, irregular enough to provide a positive identification.

  He returned to the duty sergeant and asked if he could telephone Fortrow.

  “Sure, but reverse the charges, will you? We’re always in hot water because of the size of our telephone bills.”

  The call was soon put through and he spoke to Fusil, whose opening sentence was characteristic. “Why the hell have you only just got through? I expected you to report hours ago.”

 

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