Body of a Girl

by Michael Gilbert

  “Good God,” said Mercer. “Have you been talking to the papers?”

  “On the advice of Division,” said Clark stiffly. “I had a question and answer session with them. It was better than letting them make the whole thing up.”

  Superintendent Clark had admitted that Hedges had been arrested for assaulting a policeman. What had the policeman been doing? He had been questioning Hedges. What about?

  The Superintendent had side-stepped this one. Had it been anything to do with the discovery of a body on Westhaugh Island? The Superintendent had tried to slip this one, too. But had eventually admitted that it might have been not unconnected with it. Was it a fact that the police had now changed their minds and admitted that he had nothing to do with it? It wasn’t a question of changing minds. They had never formed any definite conclusion. It had been routine questioning. Did routine questioning usually go on for eight or ten hours and resume on the following morning? And did routine questioning often leave the man being questioned with a cracked rib and bruises all down one side of his body? The Superintendent had called this a malicious lie. Hedges had been examined by a police surgeon that same evening who could, if necessary, testify that Hedges was completely unmarked. Did the police, asked the reporter, always take such curious precautions after a man had been questioned? There was no answer to this. Did it not argue a guilty conscience? No answer.

  “You led with your chin to that one,” said Mercer.

  “You don’t seem to appreciate,” said Clark, in tones of cold anger, “that what I’m doing, to the best of my ability, is to cover up for you. You were entrusted with the investigation of a murder. You have made what it is charitable to call a complete mess of it. Not only are we no further on than when we started, but you have managed to bring the whole of my force into disrepute in the process.”

  “I don’t think that’s strictly true,” said Mercer. It was an added offence to Clark that when Mercer argued he argued without heat, as though the matter was theoretical, and hardly concerned him personally.

  “For God’s sake, of course it’s true. Look at that article.”

  “I didn’t mean that. It’s not our fault if the Press want to turn Sowthistle into a folk hero. They’ll drop him as quickly as they’ve taken him up. I meant about not being any further on. After all, I now know who the murdered girl was. I know how she was murdered, and why. And I know what steps the murderer took to hide his tracks afterwards.”

  Clark stared at him.

  “The real trouble,” Mercer went on, “is that three different deaths have got sort of mixed up. One murder, one suicide, and one that might be suicide or accident. In a way, it’s the murder that’s the clearest of the three. The girl concerned was a Miss Maureen Dyson. She used to work for Weatherman, as a litigation clerk. She tried to blackmail one of his clients. And it wasn’t the first time she’d tried it, in her short but evil career. Only this time she picked the wrong man. He drove her out in his car one evening, no doubt under the pretext of paying her hush money, took her to a quiet spot near Westhaugh Island, and strangled her. Then he stripped her, and laid her in a grave which I should imagine he had already dug and concealed with branches. It was mid-November and the summer love-birds would long ago have deserted the island. He had only to shovel back the earth with a spade, and pack it down. A good deal later, in the early hours of the following morning, I imagine, when there was no one about, he let himself quietly into Miss Dyson’s flat, with her key, drew all the curtains, turned on the lights and packed up all her stuff into a couple of suitcases and took them out to his car which was parked in the by-road which leads to the back end of the recreation ground. I think he had to make more than one trip. He was cool enough to do the job thoroughly. He forgot a few tins in the larder, and it was bad luck that he didn’t know that she had a good suit away at the cleaner’s. When he’d finished he turned all the lights out, and let himself out, locking the door behind him. He forgot to open the curtains in the bedroom, but he didn’t forget much else. I imagine he weighted the suitcases with rocks and sunk them in the river later on.”

  Clark considered this in silence. He was not stupid when it came to assessing evidence.

  He said, “Go on. What about Sweetie?”

  “Father Walcot gave me his version of that. It’s largely guesswork, but it’s psychologically sound, and it fits in with what we know of her movements. It goes like this—”

  At the end of it Clark said, “Then the handbag wasn’t put on the island as a plant to mislead us about identity?”

  “I thought so at one time. It’s still possible. But it’s not very likely. Sweetie disappeared in March. Maureen Dyson was murdered in November. A careful man wouldn’t hang onto an incriminating object for eight months on the off-chance of being able to use it for a murder he hadn’t even thought about. And this man was very careful.”

  “You’re jumping the gun. How do you know it was the same man involved in both cases?”

  “Assume for a moment that the man who was with Sweetie that night didn’t push her. Assume he just saw her fall in. He wasn’t to know that she’d been pulled down by the undertow. She might have been floating down the river. What would you have done?”

  “Run down the bank. Shouted. Tried to get help.”

  “You wouldn’t have driven quietly home and said nothing to anyone about it, ever.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Well, that’s what he did. And in my book it makes him a pretty ruthless sort of bastard. There’s no doubt that the man who killed Maureen Dyson was a ruthless sort of bastard, too.”

  “It’s pretty thin.”

  “Thin, but I fancy it’s true,” said Mercer. “I’m not greatly worried about it, because I don’t think we shall ever prove either of them.”

  “Then why the hell are you bothering about them?”

  There was such a long silence after this that Clark shifted uneasily in his chair and said, “Well?” He saw that the scar on Mercer’s face had turned livid. He had noticed this before, as the only outward sign of excitement or tension that Mercer’s impassive face would give; a tiny unconscious warning signal that you were trespassing on dangerous ground.

  Mercer said, choosing his words with evident care, “Why am I bothered about them, sir? I’m bothered on account of their connection with the third death I mentioned. The only one that’s really important, because it’s the only one that’s unforgivable. I mean the death of Sergeant Rollo!”

  “That was suicide.”

  “Yes, it was suicide.”

  “Then the only person who needs forgiveness is Sergeant Rollo.”

  “I wish that was true.”

  Clark was getting angry again. He said, “For God’s sake stop talking riddles. There’s no mystery about his death.”

  “There’s no mystery about his death. The mystery is why he agreed to say that he saw Maureen Dyson, with her suitcases packed, on the platform of Stoneferry Station, when he must have known it was a lie.”

  Silence.

  Then Clark said, but without much conviction, “He may have made a mistake about the date.”

  “He didn’t. He reported it on November 14th. The day we know Maureen disappeared.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” said Mercer patiently. “And so are you. You saw it in the ‘O’ book. I found it on your desk.”

  Silence again. Then Clark said, “Yes, I remember now. Perhaps you’re all wrong about what happened to her. There’s no direct evidence, after all.”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps she did pack up her things herself, and go up to London. And came back later and got herself killed.”

  “Why should she do that?”

  “I’ve no idea. But I’d rather believe that than believe that Dick Rollo was accessory to a murder.”

  “I don’t think it appeared to him like that at all. I think all he was asked to do was to tell an innocent-sounding lie. By someone he had ev
ery reason to oblige. I could make up half a dozen stories that would sound convincing—convincing enough to someone who wanted to be convinced. Let’s say Maureen Dyson had gone off with a married man. An old friend of mine. If the hue and cry could be held off – if people could be brought to believe, just for a few days, that she’d gone up to London – it would give me time to sort the tangle out. That’s all I want. Right? But, as the days went by, and became weeks, and months, I picture Rollo getting anxious. He couldn’t go back on his written report. But I’ll tell you something he did do. He made two trips up to Missing Persons, personally, to institute enquiries.”

  “He didn’t tell anyone here about that.”

  “No. He didn’t tell anyone. The suspicion was inside him, growing every day. Every police instinct he had told him he’d been conned into something serious. That’s why he gave way so easily when the crunch came. Do you think he’d have behaved like that if he hadn’t had a guilty conscience? An obvious frame-up! He’d have come storming in here and shouted the house down. But he couldn’t do it. He was half rotten already.”

  “Your imagination does you credit,” said Clark bitterly. “There’s just one tiny detail you’ve omitted. Who is this man who watched Sweetie Hedges drown? Who murdered Maureen Dyson and drove Rollo to suicide?”

  “I’ve been accused once,” said Mercer, with the half-smile which Clark found maddening, “of shooting my mouth off. This time, I’d rather be absolutely certain before I start naming names.”

  “But when you are certain, you will tell me?”

  The silence before Mercer said, “Yes. Of course,” was so long that it would have been almost less rude if he had said, “No.”

  There was a knock on the door. Massey put his head in. When he saw Mercer he started to back out. Clark said, very loudly, “Come in, Massey. Mercer and I have quite finished.”

  “It’s your decision of course,” said Murray Talbot. “But I think you’ll have to investigate. You can’t afford to let a situation like that get out of hand.”

  “No,” said Superintendent Clark. “But I wish we had something a little more definite to hang it on.”

  “Let’s sum up. First, he’s becoming very friendly with Jack Bull. Nothing wrong with that—in itself. Jack’s a good chap. But one wants to keep men like that at a proper distance. Not to spend the whole night boozing with them.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Then, when Massey looks like being on to that petrol pump attendant, Johnno, Mercer calls him off, at a rather critical moment.”

  “I’d say it’s pretty clear what Johnno was up to. He was off to flog the stuff he’d been stealing. Probably to his regular fence. It was bad luck that he lost him. Next time we’d probably have located him and we should have had our hands on the receiver.”

  “That’s going to take some explaining away. Let me top your glass up. I’m looking after the house tonight. Maggie’s out at her French class. Right. Next, you’ve had this anonymous letter. Nothing to show where it came from?”

  “Nothing at all. Block capitals, written on cheap notepaper. ‘If you want to know where Mercer keeps his wad, ask Mr. Moxon at the shop in Cranbourne Street.’ “

  “Have you done anything about that?”

  “We only got the tip-off this evening. We know Moxon’s. It’s a newspaper and tobacco shop. We’ve nothing against Moxon. Massey’s going over tomorrow to spy out the land.”

  “Do you think Mercer’s taking money on the side?”

  “He seems to have enough of it. Whenever he opens his notecase, I’m told, it’s bulging with fivers.”

  “Could be bluff,” said Talbot. “I remember a young officer in my regiment who was like that. It turned out that there was one fiver on top and a lot of lavatory paper underneath.”

  Clark laughed, and then said, “The money side would be the only real proof. He banks with the London and Home Counties. If we could get a sight of his pass-sheet it would probably clinch it.”

  “You’d need a judge’s order to make the bank open its books.”

  “And we shouldn’t get it.”

  “No. All the same, there might be another way. I’ve known Derek Robbins, the chief cashier, for twenty years. Derek and I play golf most Saturdays. If I told him the whole story, in confidence, he might be prepared to cut a corner for us. He couldn’t do it officially, of course. But he might let me have the information.”

  “Verbally—”

  “Of course. He couldn’t do it officially. The manager would be bound to be sticky.”

  “And you could pass it on to me, if it seemed to indicate—”

  “Exactly.”

  Clark said, “What I have to bear in mind the whole time is that I loathe the man’s guts. I’ve got to try not to let it influence me.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that, Bob. Once one knows the man’s a sadistic swine – you know – what you told Pat and she passed on to Maggie.”

  “In absolute confidence.”

  “Certainly. But I think it absolves you from any moral scruples at all. What we used to say in the army, if a man’s a bad’un get rid of him at once. By hook or by crook.”

  “The Police Force is different from the army,” said Clark gloomily.

  Chapter Seventeen

  On the same evening that Superintendent Clark had his conversation with Murray Talbot a number of other meetings and conversations took place.

  Venetia had fallen into the habit of looking in at The Angler’s Rest shortly after six o’clock every evening. The landlord, an old friend of regatta days, either shook his head, in which case she took herself off, or nodded it, when she walked through the public bar, practically empty at that hour, and into the private bar where Mercer would be waiting for her.

  They would then have not more than two drinks together, and Mercer would drive her, by different routes, to within walking distance of her house. These detours had tended to get longer, and on this occasion had ended under a group of poplar trees, in a side road a mile from Stoneferry, a spot which Mercer had marked down as suitable for the next stage in a seduction which he was enjoying all the more for its slow and stately tempo. Venetia’s mixture of inexperience and frankness made her more attractive than any girl he had yet encountered. He had not yet even kissed her.

  He was now sitting in the back of the car, comfortably pressed up against her. He could sense that she was excited about something.

  He said, “You remember the night we first went to that pub. When we ran into your brother in the bar. Did he say anything about it afterwards?”

  “He made one or two snide comments. I don’t pay a lot of attention to what Willoughby says.”

  “Who was the youth with him?”

  “I told you. One of the office boys.”

  “Does he often go out drinking with the office boys?”

  Venetia giggled, and said, “With one at a time. This one’s the latest. His name’s Quentin.”

  “Really?”

  “You needn’t worry about it. He’s over whatever age it is makes it all right.”

  “I wasn’t worrying,” said Mercer. “I was just thinking what singularly innocent old gentlemen our Victorian ancestors were.”

  “Innocent?”

  “Not personally innocent. In spite of their white beards and church-going, I imagine their personal habits were unspeakable. I meant the guys like Arnold who set up all that public school stuff, thinking it would be a bulwark of Church and empire.”

  “So it was.”

  “Maybe. But it was a hotbed of vice too. A training school in perversion. Can you imagine anything, in the world, more likely to turn an impressionable youth of eighteen into a raging homo than allowing him to beat, ceremonially and in cold blood, a boy of thirteen who he was probably half in love with already? It’s the most infallible sex stimulant known to science. It’s the sort of thing prostitutes allow rich, tired old men to do to them in discreet flats off Piccadilly.”

  �
�Do they?” said Venetia. “I didn’t know.”

  There was a long and comfortable silence.

  Then she said, “Have you ever beaten anyone? Hard, I mean. To hurt them.”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Oh, just something I heard.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I didn’t believe it.”

  “Then tell me what you didn’t believe.”

  “That when you were the head policeman in that place in the Persian Gulf, you used to flog people yourself. Men and women.”

  He could feel that the idea excited her.

  “What else did you hear?”

  “That once you—well—that you went too far, and the person you were flogging died.”

  Mercer said nothing, but she could see that he was smiling.

  “Is it true?”

  “Certainly.”

  “How—how did you do it?”

  “Oh, their wrists were tied together, and attached to a sort of pulley, and drawn up tight. Then they were stripped to the waist, and you beat them across the back.”

  “What with?”

  “With a sort of whippy cane. Who told you about me killing someone?”

  “I won’t tell you, until you’ve kissed me.”

  “It’s a stiff price to pay, but I’ll pay it.”

  He kissed her gently on the mouth.

  “My best friend, Cathy Moorhouse.”

  “Who told her?”

  “Her aunt.”

  “Who’s her aunt?”

  “I won’t tell you unless you kiss me properly … Beast, that hurt.”

  “You asked for it.”

  “I believe my lip’s bleeding.”

  “It’s an honourable campaign wound. If you were in the American army you could get a Purple Heart for it. Who is Cathy Moorhouse’s aunt?”

  “Maggie Talbot. Murray Talbot’s wife.”

  “Ah,” said Mercer. He let out a deep breath. It was like a full stop at the end of a long and complicated sentence. His arm slid up her back. He said, “This is where you take off your bra.”