by Mike Hollow
“Well?” asked Jago. “Did you get a good look? Was that the man you were telling me about?”
“Yes, sir,” said Price. “Like I said, I haven’t seen him for quite a while, but I’m pretty sure it was him. In fact as soon as I saw him his name came back, just like that.”
“And what was it?”
“It was Berry. Richard Berry.”
CHAPTER 29
The clock on the wall of the CID office showed ten minutes to six when the door crashed open and Cradock bounded back in. Jago looked up from his desk and scrutinized him.
“You look as though you’ve just tried to beat Sydney Wooderson in a one-mile race. Sit down and get your breath back.”
“Thanks, guv’nor,” said Cradock, collapsing onto a chair. “I’ve just run back from the church, hoping to catch you before you went home.”
Jago eyed the clock.
“At ten to six? You must be joking. You could have walked it and stopped off for a pint on the way and still found me here.”
“Well anyway, sir, I wanted to catch you, because I think I was right.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well, the place where George and Susan Fletcher got married is Emmanuel Church in Forest Gate, the parish church. The register there shows they were married on the twenty-seventh of July, like he said, so that all seems above board.”
“And the vicar in Wolverhampton?”
“Yes, he had a phone, and I got hold of him eventually. He had a look and said there was an entry in the register for Celia and Richard Berry, married on the seventeenth of February 1938. So that means Celia was telling the truth about the wedding, although the vicar did say he was fairly new to the parish and hadn’t actually conducted the wedding himself.”
“And what did the register say about the groom’s job?”
“The vicar said he checked the entry in the Rank or Profession section and it said ‘mechanical engineer’.”
“That sounds a bit grand for the kind of work George Fletcher said he was doing.”
“Does that mean you’re coming round to my idea that he and Richard Berry are the same person, then, sir?”
“Hold your horses – we’ll come back to that in a minute. Tell me what you’ve found out first.”
“Okay, so Richard Berry put himself down as a mechanical engineer. Now, Fletcher said he’s been working as a typewriter mechanic for the last nine years. That’s not exactly a mechanical engineer, but if Richard Berry was really George Fletcher, from what I’ve seen of Fletcher he’s not the sort to underblow his own trumpet.”
“Peter, I really do think sometimes I ought to write down the things you say.”
“Yes, sir. Anyway, I mean he’s not one to play down his own achievements. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’d decided to promote himself so as to cut a more impressive figure at the wedding.”
“Celia told me that when she met Richard Berry in 1937 he was doing some kind of factory job.”
“Oh, I see. So could that mean he wasn’t a typewriter mechanic? That would rather undermine my case, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” said Jago. “The way Fletcher describes it, a typewriter mechanic is someone who visits offices in a van, but I suppose they might work in factories too. Don’t forget, though: when he told us about his work he said he’d been a typewriter mechanic on and off, with the odd gap. So if you’re right, he could have been having one of those gaps when he met Celia. But anyway, at least we now have confirmation that Celia and Richard Berry were married when and where she said they were.”
“That’s right. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re married now, does it? Supposing they’ve got divorced since then?”
“I can see why you might imagine that. When I was with Celia at the dance she said she only wore her wedding ring for the same reason that she carries the photo, to fend the boys off – so if she found out he’d been having an affair she might have decided to end the marriage.”
“But then even if he was the same man who married Susan this year it wouldn’t be bigamy after all, would it? That whole theory would collapse. Shall I go to the district registry and find out whether there’s any record of a divorce?”
“No. You’d be wasting your time. Matrimonial Causes Act 1937.”
Jago recognized on Cradock’s face one of his attempts to make something reassuring out of what was essentially a blank look.
“Sorry, sir, I’m not completely, er… What does it say?”
“No divorce allowed within the first three years of marriage. She can’t divorce him until next year, even if she wants to. Celia is still married to Richard Berry, whether she likes it or not.”
“Right, I see. Sounds like she’ll have grounds for it when the time comes, though.”
“Yes, and that time may be closer than we thought.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean that while you’ve been out I’ve had a very interesting afternoon. I’ve had a visit from PC Price.”
“The War Reserve fellow who was with Stannard when they found the body? Stannard told me he looked as though he was about to throw up.”
“That may be a slight exaggeration, but the poor man was certainly disturbed by what he saw.”
“Shouldn’t have joined up if he can’t cope with the odd body, should he, sir? Some of these War Reserves are a bit of a joke, I think. Would never have got in the force in the old days.”
“The old days? You’re beginning to sound like Frank Tompkins. And don’t be so quick to judge him. He’s going through a very difficult bereavement.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Anyway, it turned out that it wasn’t the fact that he had to see a dead body – it was that when he saw it, he recognized her.”
“Really? Now that is interesting. How did he come to recognize her?”
“He’d seen her with an acquaintance of his last year. And here’s the really interesting thing: he named that acquaintance as Richard Berry.”
“You mean Mary did know Berry? That would explain why she was shocked when she saw him in Celia’s photo, then. If she already knew him, it’d definitely be a surprise to find him in a photo that belonged to some woman she’d just bumped into, especially if that woman turned out to be his wife.”
“And especially as Price told me that when he saw her with Berry they were out walking and they looked, as he put it, on decidedly friendly terms. Which raises a very interesting possibility.”
“What, you mean they were –”
“Yes, it could indicate that Richard Berry was the man Mary had her affair with.”
“Did Price say when he saw them?”
“Yes, he said it was last year, in the summer, although he couldn’t say more precisely than that.”
“So that would tally with what Celia told you, then, that her husband left her in June of last year, and what Angela said about Mary telling her she’d had a liaison that ended when the war started, so presumably in September.”
Cradock rubbed his hands together in an expression of glee.
“It’s hotting up now a bit, isn’t it, guv’nor? Looks like our Mary and that Richard Berry were a saucy pair on the quiet.”
“If you can contain your excitement for a moment, there’s something even more interesting I can tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“I then took Price out so he could have a discreet look at a man from a safe distance, and he identified him as Richard Berry – and the man he was looking at was George Fletcher.”
“Amazing – so that means I was right about those two blokes, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Peter, it does. You’ve done very well.”
“Thank you, sir. So Fletcher and Berry are the same man. Well I never.”
Jago could almost see Cradock’s mind working. He smiled to himself as he waited for the next penny to drop.
“But then – oh, my goodness. That means Mary was having an affair with
her sister’s husband.”
“Not exactly: he wasn’t Susan’s husband at the time of the affair, but even so… In any case, I could kick myself. It was there all along, staring me in the face. I should have listened to Dorothy –”
Cradock’s face registered surprise, and Jago hastily corrected himself.
“I should have paid more careful attention to Miss Appleton. She said it this morning, when I told her about the two sisters in the case.”
“Said what?”
“She said, ‘Like the Boleyn girls, then.’”
“Sorry, sir, I don’t get it.”
“It means she hit the nail on the head without even knowing it. If I’d thought about those words for a moment I might have cottoned on sooner. Think of it: Anne Boleyn had a sister, Mary – the younger of the two ended up marrying Henry VIII, the man who’d had her sister as his mistress. We’ve got Susan and Mary Watkins, both in a relationship with George, or Richard, whatever his name is. It’s the same in both cases – there was one man in the triangle, husband to one sister and lover to the other. Only in the case of Henry VIII, both sisters knew what had gone before. It seems ours didn’t.”
“Was Anne Boleyn one of the wives who had their heads chopped off? I can never remember what happened to which one.”
“Yes, she was beheaded at the Tower of London – found guilty of adultery, incest, and treason, poor woman.”
“So with the Boleyn girls it was the wife who was the traitor, right?”
“Yes.”
“But in our case it’s not the same, is it? At least, not as far as I can see. It looks like it was the man. Is that why Mary said ‘He’s a traitor’ to Angela? I know you said that was later, not when she was looking at the photo, but if she’d discovered her lover was Celia’s husband it would make sense – he’d betrayed his wife. And if somehow Mary knew he was the same man as Susan’s husband, she’d have been thinking he’d betrayed two wives.”
“That could be it – unless there was also something much more serious going on that Mary knew about.”
“You mean if he was a proper traitor, as in high treason and off to the Tower?”
“Who knows? He’s clearly a man with secrets who knows how to lead a double life.”
“Talk about having your cake and eating it. So where do we go from here?”
“The main question is, did Mary know who her new brother-in-law was? If she really had discovered that George Fletcher was the same man as Richard Berry, how might she have reacted?”
“She could have tried to blackmail him by threatening to tell Susan he was a bigamist, couldn’t she? Or perhaps by threatening to tell Celia, now that she’d met her. Or to tell both of them, for that matter. After all, she did say, ‘He’ll pay for this.’ Maybe she meant that literally.”
“That’s possible. Alternatively, of course, if her dislike for her sister was deep enough, she might have just told her for the spite of it. What if Mary went to her sister and said, ‘That man of yours, your husband – I’ve already had him as my lover’? What would that do to Susan? That might have given Mary real pleasure. How would Susan have reacted to that?”
“You mean Susan might have…?”
“It’s within the bounds of possibility.”
“Crikey, guv’nor: what a mess!”
“Hell hath no fury, Peter.”
“What’s that?”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Shakespeare?”
“William Congreve, I believe, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, what Mary knew about George could have been a powerful weapon in her hands.”
“Could she have used that weapon against Celia too?”
“I don’t see how. If she didn’t know Celia before she met her at the dance, there’d be no obvious motive for Mary to want to hurt her. If anything, you’d think Mary might want to blackmail George in some way, because now she could tell him she’d met his other wife.”
“So are we going to bring all this up with Susan and George? And what about Celia?”
“No, not yet. I think I’d prefer to keep this to ourselves for the time being. We haven’t got many cards to play, and I don’t want to show them all this early in the game.”
“When you were talking to Celia about the murder, she said, ‘Your sins will find you out,’ didn’t she? What did she mean by that? Whose sins was she talking about?”
“That, I think, remains to be seen.”
CHAPTER 30
First thing on Tuesday morning Jago had received a phone call at the station from Dyers, thanking him for their drink on Sunday evening. He would have phoned yesterday, Dyers said, but he’d had a busy day – the Luftwaffe had attacked RAF Hornchurch. He added swiftly that no damage had been done. Jago took this assurance at face value and said he was pleased to hear it, but almost immediately found himself questioning in his mind whether what his old friend had told him was true. It sounded too much like the official reports of air raids in the press and newsreels – always more positive than the evidence of his own eyes.
That was the problem these days – what could you be sure of? He thought of Dorothy, and was troubled once more by what he’d seen at the dance and by what it was making him think. He braced himself in his seat as the underground train rattled deafeningly round a bend in the tunnel, and tried to put the picture out of his thoughts. He needed to keep his mind clear, especially today.
He wondered whether he was becoming too secretive himself. Dyers had wished him a good day today, but Jago had said nothing about what he was doing. He hadn’t told Cradock either – he’d just said he’d be out. Perhaps he would tell Cradock later, but it would depend on how things went.
He leafed through the morning paper. Today’s news was mixed. RAF bombers had attacked Hitler’s invasion bases overnight again, and the special invasion weather forecast said the Channel was calm. The king had broadcast on the wireless from an underground shelter during an air raid to announce a new medal, the George Cross, for civilian bravery. Goebbels had told his own radio listeners that Londoners were running about helplessly in the streets and screaming because of the air attacks. French and British warships had fought each other off the coast of Dakar after the local French authorities refused to surrender to General de Gaulle. J. Edgar Hoover had said there was a Fifth Column already at work in America. Two Japanese consular staff in Singapore had been arrested on spy charges. Local authorities were going to issue free ear plugs to people being bombed. Petrol was up by a penny a gallon from today, and West Ham were playing away to Clapton Orient on Saturday.
He closed the paper. At least no one could say there was no news these days. It was a far cry from the four-line reports on the local magistrates’ court proceedings that he’d been learning to write as a boy at the Stratford Express before the previous war took him away to be a soldier.
The train came to a screeching halt at Westminster tube station, and Jago got off. The wooden escalator rumbled and clanked its way to the surface and he walked out onto the street, catching the familiar rank odour of the Thames blown off the river by a light breeze. The weather was dry, and the fog that he’d seen when he woke four hours earlier was clearing. No doubt Dyers would be disappointed – he might have been hoping a touch of fog would keep the German bombers away.
It was a short walk to Jago’s destination, the distinctive building on the Embankment that had started out as one man’s vision for the largest opera house in Europe but had ended with him bankrupt after sinking forty feet of concrete and most of his funds into the foundations. Jago’s father had told him how grieved he felt as a singer – no opera tenor but a humble music hall performer – when in 1888 the project finally failed and the uncompleted theatre was demolished. How ironic it was that those costly foundations were the only part to survive, and upon them was constructed a very different establishment – and doubly ironic that while his father’s profession had never taken him into the original building, h
is own had brought him on many occasions into its successor. From what he had heard, the original visionary must have had a sense of irony too – the bankrupt Mr Mapleson had said that with such solid foundations, at least the cells below New Scotland Yard would be dry.
The headquarters of the Metropolitan Police hadn’t pleased everyone. According to one member of parliament, in architectural terms it was inferior to the Crosse & Blackwell jam and pickle factory on the opposite side of the river. Soon, however, it had become one of the sights of London. To Jago it seemed a solid and reassuring presence only yards from the heart of government. At the same time, those eye-catching horizontal bands of red brick and white Portland stone gave the building its own separate and unique identity, even through the London grime that coated them, while the round turrets at its corners added a whimsical hint of medieval romance.
There was nothing romantic about the inside of the building. The North Building, where Jago was heading, was a warren of unremarkable offices, many of which had seen better days. Within a few minutes he was at the door of one of these rooms, just in time for his meeting. He tapped on the door, turned the cheap-looking Bakelite door handle, and went in. The room contained several filing cabinets and racks of box files, and in the middle of it was a desk with a telephone, a perpetual calendar, a double inkwell, a desk lamp, and the usual two wooden trays – “in” and “out”, the former brimming with papers and the latter less full. Behind the desk Jago recognized the familiar figure of Detective Superintendent Arthur Ford of the Special Branch.
“Ah, welcome, John. Do come in and take a seat, make yourself at home. It must be a couple of years since I last saw you.”
“Nearer four, I think: my secondment to the Branch was in 1936.”
