Body of a Girl

by Michael Gilbert

  “I’m not sure that I follow you,” said Rye stiffly. “Are you suggesting that Rollo was guilty?”

  “Not of the things he was charged with. But I think it’s possible that once or twice, in the past, he may have done a few small favours. It mayn’t have seemed important at the time. It was probably for someone he liked. Someone who’d done favours for him. But when the crunch came, it was this little bit of rottenness inside that broke him up.”

  Rye said, “I’ve never listened to such utter balls in my life,” and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

  Mercer returned to the pile of dockets on the table. He was grinning, but there was not a lot of mirth in it. Rye’s way out took him past the Superintendent’s office. The door was open and Clark beckoned him in.

  He said, “Shut the door, Tom, and sit down. I’ve been wanting the chance of a word with you. You look worried. Something wrong?”

  “I’ve just insulted my superior officer.”

  “This isn’t the army. You won’t be court-martialled. As a matter of fact, it was your superior officer I wanted to talk to you about. What do you make of him? It’s all right. You’re not giving evidence in court. This is completely unofficial and off the record.”

  “I’m damned if I know what to make of him,” said Rye. “Usually, I can sum a man up quickly. I’ve been working with Mercer for nearly two weeks now, and I know less about him than when he arrived. He talks a lot, but he doesn’t tell you anything. And he never seems to be thinking of less than three things at once. You’d think handling a murder investigation would be enough to occupy a man’s mind. But when you think he’s thinking about Sweetie and old Hedges, he’s off on Prior.”

  “Prior?”

  “Chap who owned the Stoneferry Garage that went bust three or four years ago.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Now he’s started looking through all Sergeant Rollo’s old cases.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “I think he’s got a bee in his bonnet about Jack Bull.”

  “And yet,” said Clark, “he seems to be very friendly with him. Exceptionally friendly.” He picked up a typewritten slip from his desk. “That was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. Medmenham showed me this.”

  It was a report from the Station Incidents Book, contributed by P.C. Harper. It said that he had seen two men come out of the side door of The Angler’s Rest public house at twenty minutes after midnight. They were walking a little unsteadily, but were not drunk and had stopped under the railway arch to talk. There had been complaints about breaches of licensing regulations at The Angler’s Rest and P.C. Harper had been curious to see who those late customers were. One was easily recognisable as Mr. Bull. As soon as he saw that the other man was Detective Chief Inspector Mercer he had broken off observation.

  “I like ‘broken off observation’,” said Rye. “What he means is, he pissed off bloody quick.”

  In the C.I.D. room the telephone rang. Mercer put down the docket he was examining and said, “Mercer here. Oh, hullo Mrs. Prior. What can we do for you?” Then, “Where are you speaking from? A call box? Where?” And, “All right. I’ll meet you there.” He grabbed up his hat and went out.

  The Dolly Varden Cafe was a quiet place opposite the end of Fore Street. Mrs. Prior was at a table at the back of the nearly empty room. She had ordered two cups of coffee, and was making a pretence of drinking one. Mercer sat down beside her.

  “I thought it better not to come to the police station,” she said. “You know what small towns are like for gossip. It would have got back to Henry, and he’d never have forgiven me.”

  “Why not?”

  “He categorically forbade me to speak to you.”

  Like a breeze coming in at an open window, a tiny prickle of apprehension touched the back of Mercer’s neck. He said, “That was high-handed of him. Funny, because he didn’t strike me as a high-handed sort of person.”

  “He’s not high-handed,” said Mrs. Prior. “He was scared. Scared out of his wits. It took me a whole day to get it out of him. Even now I can hardly believe it. When I was out that afternoon two men called. They just said to Henry, ‘We hear you’ve been talking to the police. You mustn’t do it.’ Henry blustered a bit, and said, ‘You’ve got no right to come in here and say things like that to me.’ And then—” Mrs. Prior’s voice broke for a moment—“they frog-marched him into the kitchen, filled the sink with water, twisted his arms behind his back and held him face down in it. They held him there for about a minute. Then they let him go and said, ‘If you talk to the police again, we’ll hold you down for five minutes.’ Then they went.”

  “Could he describe the men?”

  “He can’t.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Does it matter which?”

  “I suppose it comes to the same thing in the end,” said Mercer. “Tell me, did you happen to notice a lush looking character in a Panama hat, smoking a big cigar, coming up your stretch of the river?”

  Mrs. Prior said, slowly, “Yes. I think so. The day you came. I didn’t notice the man particularly, but I noticed the boat. A twenty-footer with a diesel engine.”

  “That sounds like the one. Where would anyone hire a boat like that?”

  “It’s not a local boat. Up-river at Staines or Windsor. Or down at Teddington or Richmond. Or even further. It could have come up from London, or down from Henley.”

  Mercer said, “Thanks for coming to see me, Mrs. Prior. And will you give your husband a message. I shan’t trouble either of you again. You’ve told me all you could tell me, and I guess these men knew it.”

  “Then why did they do it?”

  “It was an exercise in fancy brutality. It’s their speciality. It was meant as a warning.”

  “I still don’t understand. If there’s nothing more he can tell you, and they knew that, what was the point of warning him?”

  “It wasn’t him they were warning,” said Mercer. “It was me.”

  He stopped at the pay-desk on the way out and asked the manageress if he could use her telephone. She said, “You’re our new policeman, aren’t you? I thought so. The phone’s in my office. Help yourself.”

  Mercer dialled the number of the Carcroft factory at Staines and asked for the manager. The manager said, “I’m afraid you can’t speak to Beardoe. He’s in hospital.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope?”

  “Not too bad. He broke his wrist.”

  “How come?”

  “He fell downstairs. Concussed himself. Messed his face up a bit too. If you want him badly, he should be able to see you in a day or two.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Mercer. He made a note of the name of the hospital, paid for the call, and walked out into the High Street. On his way back to the station he found himself doing things which had been second nature in Southwark, but had been left behind him when he came to Stoneferry. Like walking in the middle of the pavement, and taking an occasional look in a shop window to see whether anyone was crowding him.

  The C.I.D. room was empty. There was a message, in Rye’s vile handwriting, on a piece of paper pinned to the front of his table by a paper knife. It said, ‘The boss wants you. Panic stations.’

  Mercer looked at the message for a long minute, his eyes abstracted, his thick body rocking gently, from heel to toe and back again. Then he drifted out, along the passage, and into Bob Clark’s room. The Superintendent said, “There you are. I’ve been looking for you. We’re in a mess.”

  Mercer said, “Oh?”

  “We’ve got the adjourned inquest on that girl coming up on Monday and we’ve lost our main witness.”

  “Lost?”

  “Dr. Champion. He died this morning. He collapsed at home. Just after breakfast. He was dead before they could get him to hospital.”

  “Do they know what it was?”

  “An acute coronary, they think. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. He’d got high blood pressure,
and he’d been overworking for years. He was due to retire next month, actually.”

  Mercer said, “Poor old sod. Anyway, it was quick.”

  “Yes,” said Clark. “And it’s left us in a devil of a mess.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mercer. “But I don’t see it. Naturally we can ask for a further adjournment now.”

  “Certainly. But what are we going to do with Hedges meanwhile?”

  “Ah,” said Mercer. “I take your point.”

  “If the inquest had gone as planned we’d have got a positive identification. That would have been enough to justify holding him. But if we’re going to charge him with murder, we’ve got to do it next time he comes up. Otherwise we can’t possibly oppose bail. There’s a lot of feeling about that already. And once he’s out, God knows if we shall ever see him again.”

  “I don’t think we should see him again.”

  Clark looked at Mercer. He said, “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

  “I’ve never believed that Hedges murdered Sweetie, but I think he knows something about it. Either he had a hand in it, or he saw her being killed. Or being buried. Or thought he did. As long as he was taking the rap, as long as he was locked up here, he was safe. Let him out and I wouldn’t give you sixpence for his chances.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating,” said Clark. But he didn’t sound happy.

  “Could we run him in for assault and put him inside for a month?”

  “I might have a word with Murray Talbot. He’d help us if he could. The trouble is, Hedges is something of a public character. The local paper has taken up his case. Did you see the article yesterday? Raking up all the old history.”

  “I saw it.”

  “There’s talk of briefing counsel to defend him. If they put up a real fight, I wouldn’t guarantee we could put him away. Throwing a punch at a policeman. It isn’t as serious as all that.”

  And the last thing you want is a Press crusade against you on the eve of your retirement, thought Mercer. Aloud, he said, “I’ve got a better idea. If you got a positive identification at the inquest, you think we could justify a charge?”

  “Coupled with the sale of the girl’s ring and what we’ve got by way of a confession. Yes.”

  “All right. We’ll ask Dr. Summerson to come down from Guy’s. He’s seen all the evidence. I sent him duplicates of everything, in case there was a laboratory angle to it. He’s seen all the photographs, and Dr. Champion’s notes.”

  “Summerson,” said Clark. “Summerson. Yes. That should do the trick. Do you know, Mercer, I think that’s rather a good idea.”

  Chapter Nine

  “And now, Dr. Summerson,” said the coroner, “are there any points with regard to the sex, height, age or physical condition of the victim which might help the jury to arrive at some firm conclusions as to her identity?”

  “I’ll deal with those points separately if I may, sir,” said Dr. Summerson. The Home Office Pathologist was a slight, spare, middle-aged man, nondescript at first sight, remarkable only when he began to speak.

  Most of the spectators had recognised him from his appearances in the Press. They were disappointed to see him step into the box without an assortment of gruesome anatomical specimens and armed only with a single sheet of paper.

  “I take it that there was no doubt as to sex?”

  “None at all. I entirely agree with the very careful notes on the subject made by the late Dr. Champion. The light build of the skull with its feeble superciliary arches and thin orbital margins would have been almost conclusive in itself. Taken in conjunction with the measurements of the femur and the humerus – particularly the head of the humerus – they place the matter beyond any reasonable doubt.”

  “Does he mean,” said the foreman of the jury, “that she was a woman?”

  The coroner, who was hardened to the ways of juries said, “That’s right. She was a woman.” The foreman made a note. The lady next to him had started feeling her forehead with the tips of her fingers. She was evidently worried about her orbital margins.

  “As to height,” said Dr. Summerson, “again, I see no reason to differ from Dr. Champion. He refrained, quite rightly in my view, from any attempt to measure the skeletal remains as a whole, but applied Trotter and Gleser’s tables to the respective lengths of the humerus, radius, tibia and femur. Where all four of these bones are present and in unbroken condition the results have usually proved remarkably accurate.”

  “Dr. Champion said, between five foot three and five foot four.”

  “I would myself put the standing height as nearer to the latter.”

  “Five feet four inches high,” said the coroner, and the foreman wrote this down, too.

  “Fortunately for her,” said Dr. Summerson, “but unfortunately so far as the chances of identifying her are concerned, the body evidenced very few abnormalities or weaknesses. As you have heard, the teeth are in perfect order and show no sign of filling or capping. There is slight evidence that the two top incisors may at some time have been braced. However, there was one point which could assist. I observed that the first phalanx of the big toe of the right foot was deviated outwards and there was considerable exostosis of the outer side of the head of the first metatarsal bone.”

  The foreman looked pathetically at the coroner, who said, “She had a bony lump on the outside of her big toe.”

  “Something like a bunion?”

  “Not actually a bunion,” said Dr. Summerson kindly. “But there might have been a bunion there too. Very likely there was.”

  “Your point, I take it, Doctor, is that this deformity might have been noticeable in her shoe sizes.”

  “I think so. It must have been very difficult for her to find a standard pair of shoes which fitted both feet. She could, of course, have had them specially made. But failing that, she would have been driven to buy a different fitting for her right foot.”

  Superintendent Clark passed a note across to Mercer. “Anything on this yet? Local shops?”

  Mercer scribbled back, “I only got it from Summerson this morning. I’m sending a circular out today.”

  The coroner said, “Thank you, Doctor. Was there anything else?”

  The pathologist looked down deliberately at his notes. As he did so, Mercer, who was watching him closely, experienced an irrational feeling of alarm. Dr. Summerson had given evidence so often, before so many different tribunals, that he was, by now, a totally experienced performer, an expert witness, expert not only in his own field, but expert in the presentation of evidence, weighing the value of the flat statement, the full exposition, the one word reply and the throwaway line.

  He said, “There was one other point, sir. And that was the age of the victim. I mention it because it is the only point at which I find myself at variance with Dr. Champion. He placed her age, you will remember, as between eighteen and twenty-five. His notes make it clear that he based this on the closing of the sutures in the skull. As I expect you know, the skull, in youth, does not present a continuous expanse of bone. It is divided into sections, and the gaps between the sections are filled with a comparatively soft, gristly substance.”

  The lady next to the foreman was now running the tip of her finger across the top of her head. She thought she detected a soft spot, and missed a good deal of the evidence.

  “As you grow older, these sutures close and calcify, and since the closing takes place in more or less regular sequence, it can be a good guide to the age of a body. But it is only a rough guide. An error of five or even seven years would not be impossible. Recently, however, the work of such a pioneer as Gustafson has enabled us to be a great deal more accurate. Particularly if the teeth are in good condition, as was the case here. An estimate can be made which is dependent on six separate dental factors, perhaps the most important being the closing of the root canal and the increasing translucency of the tooth root. I have prepared a full note, sir, in case the matter wants looking into further on another
occasion, but I fear the jury might find some of the technical terms confusing—”

  The coroner said, “I fear the jury are somewhat out of their depth already, Dr. Summerson. We should be very happy if, for the moment, you would simply present us with your conclusions.”

  Dr. Summerson glanced down at his notes again, and then said, “I find it impossible to believe that this girl was less than twenty-three. I should be inclined to think that she was even older. Twenty-five or twenty-six at least.”

  Chapter Ten

  “So what the hell,” said Superintendent Clark, “do we do now?”

  “We start again,” said Mercer.

  “I suppose there’s no chance of upsetting Summerson. After all, it’s only his opinion. Dr. Champion said eighteen to twenty-five.”

  Mercer looked at him curiously. One of the tricks which growing older played on you was to make you less flexible. It stiffened up your mind as well as your joints. You couldn’t turn about as quickly as you used to. He said, “What good would it do? No one would believe it. We shouldn’t believe it ourselves. Besides, I’ve had a word with the shoe shop. Sweetie had perfect feet. She took a narrow fitting in number five shoes.”

  “So all the work we’ve done so far is wasted?”

  “I wouldn’t say wasted. It’s been aimed at the wrong target, that’s all. I’d still very much like to know who was dating Sweetie during the last month of her life.”

  “What the hell does it matter who was dating Sweetie? It’s not her murder we’re investigating.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  Clark stared at him. His face was an ugly mottled colour. Frustration and anger fought with curiosity. Before he could say anything, Mercer added, “You haven’t forgotten that we found her handbag, half-buried, on the island.”