Time to Kill

by Roger Ormerod

  My flat door was on the catch again. I was getting a little tired of doors on catches; all I seemed to find behind them was trouble. I eased it open with a pessimistic finger.

  Elsa was sitting in my only easy chair. She had found the gin and Cointreau and was sipping more from habit than pleasure.

  It had been a bad day for Elsa. She was thin and fine-drawn, tensed to leap in any direction at the approach of further disaster. Her life had fallen apart. She was wearing a dark two-piece, traditionally tailored, and a jumper with a polo neck. She looked agonizingly appealing. Her eyes were dark and deep, and way beyond them there was a suffering she was still afraid to face.

  “How did you get in?”

  “I hope you don’t mind, David.”

  Mind? I was frantically grasping for the mood in which we had parted. She was calm and cool. I wanted to take her in my arms.

  “Of course I don’t mind.”

  “I didn’t...there wasn’t any reason to drive home.”

  “But how did you get in?”

  She raised her eyebrows with an effort to look at me directly. I looked away.

  “Mr Vantage gave me Geoffrey’s things. You know. There was a bunch of keys ... does it matter?”

  “It might.” I went to edge myself into the cupboard and draw water for some tea.

  “I knew all the keys except one. Now do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  A small silence built up. I flicked my lighter and lit the gas jets, put on the kettle, fussed around for a minute. Then I turned to face her, and surprised such a look of entreaty that I didn’t say it. Almost. But out it came.

  “You thought it might fit the flat door at Queens?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But it didn’t?”

  “I haven’t tried. When it came to it, I couldn’t go.”

  “Of course not.” I took her empty glass and put it on the ringed surface next to mine. “Leave it to Vantage, Elsa.”

  “You mean I haven’t got a right to know?”

  “But it turned out to be mine?”

  “It saved me going to Queens.”

  “There’s that.” I paused. I was making a lot of clatter hunting for cups and saucers without chips or stains. “Though it meant you had to come here.”

  “You want to know why I came.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Perhaps to see you.” She tried to smile.

  “You hoped I’d go around to Queens and try it?” She did not answer. “But when you got here I was missing, and it just so happened the key fitted...”

  “So I waited.”

  I put the crockery out on the table. “You can’t know what it’s like,” she said softly. “I try—try every second—to get it out of my mind. But it’s there all the time, hammering at me. Half the time I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing. Then I wonder if it shows. I can’t walk in the streets in case it’s shrieking out. That Geoffrey’s dead. I can’t think of anything else.” I turned. She was watching me with her eyes swimming, hope, despair, longing...I don’t know ...every expression of appeal was there in her face and eyes, even in the half-hopeless rise of her hands from her sides. I could have plunged in then, taken her in my arms, said something. Oh...I don’t know.

  “I’m afraid my crockery’s not too grand.”

  She looked as though I had slapped her.

  “Can I get you another drink?”

  She shook her head numbly. The kettle began its piercing scream for rescue. I went and poured it on to three spoons of broken pekoe and stirred it madly to drown the noise of her sobs.

  They were her own, private tears. I had no place there.

  I took as long as anybody could reasonably take brewing a pot of tea. I stirred it and fussed with it, and in the end it turned out too strong. Not that it mattered, because neither of us noticed the taste. I don’t think Elsa finished hers.

  She put her cup and saucer on the floor. By that time she was quite calm and handling it serenely.

  “I want you to find her, David.”

  “There’s very little to go on.” I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Is that what you came for?”

  She ignored it. “I don’t know what there is to go on. I just want you to find her.”

  “Vantage will do that, if anybody can.”

  “No...you. I want to meet her, see her, speak to her.”

  “There’s a woman’s prints in the flat. Absolutely nothing else.”

  I was watching her carefully, and I’ll swear that no expression reached her eyes. “But you’ll know what to do.”

  “Fingerprints are not much use unless they’re on file.” I got up and put her cup and saucer on the table. “Or unless they belong to somebody close to the victim.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “You mean you don’t want to?”

  “I’m not on the case. I haven’t got access...”

  She was looking at me consideringly. I wanted to turn away.

  “But that’s not the reason, is it?”

  Women! They always pin you down. I got up again to find the pipe I’d left behind in the morning. “What’s the use of it? Digging down, ferreting amongst the dirt. Produce the girl—then what? Do you go round for a social shindig? The casual conversation, all edged round Geoffrey. No, Elsa...” She opened her mouth. “No, I can’t do it. There’s only more distress that way. Let it lie. Elsa—you want to let it lie.”

  She gave me a gentle smile that chopped me down to size.

  “I’m sure you could do it, if you wanted to.”

  I took a firm grip on my temper. She was just heading straight into trouble, but surely her persistence couldn’t be intended to persuade me she knew nothing about the flat at Queens. She was too guileless to present such a bluff.

  Then abruptly I realized that my anger was against myself, for not trusting her. So what if there were indications in the flat? I thrust the thought into the background, yet when I conceded to her I couldn’t completely hide the reluctance in my voice.

  “I’ll try.” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.” Then she spoke in an entirely different voice. “It was that man Kyle, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why haven’t they arrested him?”

  “Because I’ve been stupid enough to give him an alibi.”

  “You have?”

  I turned to her. “I’m not enjoying it. I don’t get a great kick out of saving his neck. But that’s how it is. For now. If I get the time I’ll maybe put a dent in it. But just for now he’s got an alibi.”

  She looked at me consideringly, testing my seriousness.

  “How did you get here?” I asked. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No. No, of course not. I was just wondering.”

  “The Rover. It’s parked down the street.”

  “We’ll have to make some arrangement about the Jaguar.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know.”

  We were rapidly running out of small-talk. Elsa had said what she’d come for; to get me to look for the girl. There was nothing else to keep her. Nothing, anyway, that I could bring myself round to saying in the circumstances.

  I tried: “If there’s anything I can do...”

  “I’ll get the local garage to fetch it in.”

  I hadn’t meant that. “Anything else.”

  “You can find the girl.”

  I went down with her to the street. There was no orange Mini around. We walked along to the Rover.

  It is one of those backwater streets that you get in big cities, close enough to the main road for the diversion not to be worth it, far enough away from the traffic din to ease the pain. Along the opposite side of the street there’s a row of iron railings in front of a war cemetery or something. I’d never been through the gate; the place depressed me.

  Elsa had left the Rover on a double yellow line but she was in luck and no traffic warden
had come along.

  “You’ll let me know?”

  “If I get on to anything,” I promised. “I’ll give you a ring.”

  “Couldn’t you run over and see me?”

  “I could certainly do that.”

  She drove away. I watched her go. It was murder, watching her go. Then I climbed back upstairs, let myself in—it was a pleasant change, getting the chance to let myself in—and tidied up a bit. I opened a tin of sardines and had them on toast, and followed that with a chunk of fruit cake. You can see why I didn’t try to offer Elsa a meal. I did my bit of washing up. Elsa had been wearing a pink lipstick, though I hadn’t noticed it on her.

  I didn’t wash the glass she had drunk from. I wrapped it carefully in a clean handkerchief, carried it daintily down to my car, and drove to Central Office. I felt like hell.

  In the lab they were still working on the bloodstains from the carpet in the Queens flat. That’s an indication of how thorough Vantage was—who else’s blood was there but Geoff’s? Frank said hello, a little coolly I thought, and I put the glass down under his nose.

  “I didn’t think you were on the case,” he said doubtfully.

  “I’m not. Just imagine I’ve got a personal interest.”

  “Well...I don’t know.”

  Why the hell didn’t he know? “All I want’s for you to dust it for prints. You’re not doing anything else that matters.”

  “Does this?”

  “To me it does.”

  So he dusted it for prints. They came up beautifully.

  “Does the Super know?” he asked cautiously.

  “I’ve not the slightest doubt that he knows.” It was becoming more and more difficult to speak in a normal voice. “It’s just me who doesn’t know. Nobody tells me a thing.”

  So Frank took it from scratch and I didn’t give him any leads. He raised his head at last. Frank’s got a heavy head, it always seems to be hanging or nodding. “Who is it, Dave?”

  “You know damn well who it is. Stop being funny.”

  Elsa’s prints were the ones found in the Queens flat. There were no other women’s prints, only Elsa’s, which had been on several of the LP sleeves and on the spirit bottles.

  I said thanks very much to Frank in quite a normal voice and walked out of there as though I’d been beaten severely about the head. One or two people in the outer office nodded, but I hadn’t got time for them. I drove home. Just for a while I could think of nothing more to do.

  Except go out and look for the woman of course, the woman whose fingerprints were Elsa’s.

  It was around ten o’clock, and half a bottle of scotch later, that I decided it was too late to go searching for anybody. So I went to bed.

  6

  I dragged myself out of the tomb and told myself I was awake. The nightmare was still there. Kyle had been with me all night—Kyle and an alibi.

  I tried to soak the nightmare away with strong tea, but it didn’t work. I’d been sleeping for eleven hours, and for all the good it had done me I might as well have stayed awake. Then I sat and smoked and tried to remember exactly what Kyle had threatened. Because, after all, I was still alive. Or nearly so.

  Geoff had been an inspector at the time, and me a young detective constable, just recently switched from the uniform branch. Geoff was ‘Mr Forbes’ to me then, and as far as I could see there was no higher peak one could reach than Inspector—somebody very like Geoff.

  He was bigger than me, taller, broader, a tough character, and not overly awed by rules and regulations. There was only one thing Geoff wanted, and that was to catch the crooks. If his methods were not too ethical—so what? As I said, he’d got a private income, and I didn’t recognize straightaway that this had more than a little to do with his approach. I did not see, either, that he was not particularly liked by his colleagues, because they were forced to tread cautiously along the indicated line, whilst Geoff simply ploughed ahead and be damned to everybody. And Geoff got results.

  When I did, eventually, come to understand Geoff, it was much too late. I was already in a position in our relationship where I would have forgiven him anything. I was learning, myself, an approach to the job which was apt to get results, but no cheers.

  But, as I say, I was a young man, eager and anxious and not a little awed by my Inspector Forbes. So I was flattered when he singled me out for a special job. I imagined my eagerness had indicated my worth. I was wrong—I can see that now—he simply wanted somebody whose face was not known, and who was young enough to play the part.

  Geoff had been trying to trap Kyle for a long time. I don’t believe he had any particularly strong feelings about drug pushers and addicts, until we had to see to the funeral arrangements of a couple of heroin addicts. They’d been seen with Kyle, so Geoff wanted him put away. Maybe it wouldn’t cut down the demand, but he was certainly going to do something about the supply.

  But you need evidence. You have to prove he supplies the stuff and catch him with it on him. The hard stuff heroin. We knew he was supplying it, but we didn’t know how he did it. So somebody had to go in and find out.

  Kyle was a championship snooker player. That meant he spent all his time around billiard halls, and that was where he met his clients. I was no mean player myself. Come to think of it, probably nobody else fitted the part as well as I did. All it needed to round it off was to look like a drug addict. As I could only do that competently by going on the stuff myself I had to do a bit of acting. Geoff said I looked dissipated anyway, so maybe I’d get away with it.

  Though apparently I did not. Anyway, I’m a lousy actor. But Kyle did not bite. As far as I was concerned it was business with pleasure, because I’d got my eye on the Police snooker championships and I was getting all the practice anybody could hope for. I haunted the halls. Geoff kept me on the detail, though I did hear that he’d had to fight for it. But I kept at it every evening trying to get close to Kyle, playing him the odd frame or two, but niggling at him all the time with suggestions that I could do with a fix. Kyle didn’t know me; he didn’t want to know me.

  So I waited until he did. I knew by that time how he handed over. Or rather, when— but not how. He’d disappear into the gents with some horrible looking creature and they’d both come out looking a lot better and happier for it.

  But he wouldn’t slip me a fix.

  Geoff said pester him, so I did. It was Mr Kyle and Dave now, but nothing dangerous, nothing we could tie on to.

  All this time I’d been moving around with a laid-on system of communication with Geoff, if Kyle should nibble the bait. A lot of men wasted a lot of time.

  One day Geoff had me in. His face was like thunder. It had about run its course. Another week—then finish. The Commissioner had clamped down. So something had to be done, and quickly, and it needed somebody like Olivier to pull it off. But he was busy, so there was only me. So we gave it a try.

  After an evening of hanging around Kyle and bleating, and generally acting up like a goon bursting for a fix, I slipped him a note and left. The note said I’d be at his place at ten, the suggestion being that he’d maybe come across in the privacy of his rooms. At ten I went on up. He opened the door and made a show of trying to get rid of me. So I tried to seem aggressive enough to be desperate and at the same time plead enough to encourage him. Being Kyle he’d have to be sure he’d got a new customer worth bleeding to death, so I flashed a roll of notes and became nearly hysterical. A bit more of it and I’d have been weeping.

  Then he threw in his hand. He went into the other room and came back with a fix that would’ve kept me unconscious for a week. We’d got him. Or at least, I thought we had. I gave a signal to the police car down on the street, and while the heavy feet were pounding up the stairs I told him I was a police officer.

  It should have been the end of it. We knew the stuff was in the place somewhere, because he’d fetched some for me. But finding it was another thing altogether. Geoff sat and waited. I and two others searched.
Slowly Geoff became colder and more deadly quiet. Kyle sat calmly. He even smiled once or twice. He said something once and Geoff shouted for him to be silent. If we had to leave there with no evidence other than what he’d offered me he would have wriggled out of it like a snake.

  We had torn the place apart and found nothing. Geoff sat with tight lips and said start again. It was getting late. Kyle said it was time he was in bed. We started again. There was absolutely nothing. Geoff stood up. I thought for one minute he was going to tear Kyle into little pieces.

  Then I had a mental picture of Kyle taking one of those youngsters into the gents. It hadn’t occurred to me before, because it was so reasonable and acceptable, but he’d never released his cue.

  “His cues!” I shouted, and Kyle dived for the door. He didn’t get past Geoff, who hit him hard and clean.

  Kyle had three cues, all in cases. There was nothing in the cases except cues—we’d already looked—but we found that the butts of the cues unscrewed just at the line of the inset decoration. All three were hollow, and we dug out two pounds of heroin.

  That was when Kyle started on his threats. Geoff and I were the focus of them, and the threat was murder. He repeated it a number of times after that, the last in the box when he was sentenced. I have never seen such malevolent eyes.

  And I recalled now that I’d been involved equally with Geoff in the threat. So all right. Why didn’t he come out in the open and try it out on me? It would be better than this cat-and-mouse stuff, in which I was beginning to become a very tired and dispirited mouse.

  For my visit to Vantage I dressed carefully in my best Cheviot tweed and a white shirt and spotted tie. I may be old-fashioned, but I always feel less inferior in a clean white collar. I spent a little time getting a good shine on my shoes and put on a shortie jacket because there was quite a nip in the air. All this care was because I had a presentiment that I was going to have to make a good impression. The face in the mirror would have fitted the drug addict I’d presented to Kyle, but I couldn’t do much about that.

  I checked I’d got money with me, checked my keys, checked the door wasn’t on the catch, and left.