Turning over pages, he pointed out recurring small groups of items bought at giveaway prices, and resold at a handsome profit. Reference to Inspector Cook’s report showed that Annabel Brown attended auctions of the more modest sort and also bought second-hand goods from private individuals. Toye remarked that if she had been putting the screw on people to part with their stuff for next to nothing they wouldn’t be keen to come forward.
Pollard agreed rather gloomily and relapsed into silence, staring at a tradesman’s calendar in glorious Technicolor, portraying Beefeaters at the Tower.
‘Let’s recap,’ he said after an interval. ‘The inquest this morning was adjourned for a fortnight, for us to find out why Brown fell down that staircase and killed herself on Wednesday evening. We’ve been called in because there was a break-in and a theft of books as well, and it seems reasonable to assume that there was a connection. It doesn’t follow that X — the chap who broke open the cupboard — deliberately chucked her down. He could have shoved her unintentionally, in the course of a row. Or she may have slipped quite independently. I know Cook’s people couldn’t find any reason for an accidental fall, but the reports from the forensic lab aren’t in yet. Anyway, the obvious thing for us is to concentrate on finding X. ’
Toye agreed. ‘What about these chaps she’s been going round with in the hopes of hooking one of ’em?’ he suggested.
‘This is about the only conceivable lead we’ve got at the moment. Cook’s looking into where they all were on Wednesday night. Then there’s just the chance of getting something from this Mrs Pinfold tomorrow, I suppose. Then one can’t deny that Mrs Habgood could have been involved: she was virtually on the spot. A motive might possibly come out. But what’s nagging at me is that things don’t seem to add up where Brown’s concerned. Ever since Rex Lucas walked out on her she seems to have been hell-bent on the straight and narrow. Hard work, saving money and husband hunting. Why on earth did she suddenly go for breaking and entering and stealing books?’
‘If she was blackmailing people, she was already going crooked,’ Toye objected. ‘I reckon her savings weren’t mounting up fast enough, and she’d learnt enough about fences, earlier on, to be able to flog the books.’
‘Could be,’ Pollard conceded, still sounding dissatisfied. ‘Here, let’s knock off for tonight. There doesn’t seem to be anything more for us here.’
As he stooped to turn out the gas fire, Annabel Brown’s face, seen on his visit to the mortuary, came vividly to his mind. Even death had not quite obliterated its expression of anxiety and tight-lipped determination. A one-track mind, he thought...
Standing with his back to the mantelpiece and his hands in his trouser pockets, he watched Toye carefully filing the notes they had made.
‘I’ve got a nasty feeling that we’ll end up with a report of insufficient evidence to determine what led to deceased’s fatal fall, etc. etc.,’ he said. ‘Admission of failure, in other words.’
Toye replied that it wouldn’t surprise him, but added with his habitual caution that you never knew what you’d unearth, once you started digging.
Mrs Pinfold had pouched pink cheeks. She wore a bright blue jumper and her skirt was little more than knee length. Without reading it, Pollard retained the traditional image of an old age pensioner and was momentarily taken aback. Then he realized that she was frightened and also rather stupid.
‘I hope this early call isn’t inconvenient,’ he said pleasantly. ‘We wanted a word with you, and thought you might be going out for the weekend shopping, or to a morning job, perhaps.’
‘Oh, I don’t go out to work, not as a rule,’ she replied with a hint of umbrage. ‘I don’t need to. Please step inside.’
Pollard and Toye negotiated a three-piece suite which took up most of the small front room’s floor space, and waited while Mrs Pinfold switched on a heater.
‘Please to sit down,’ she said hastily, and perched uncomfortably forward in one of the armchairs. Pollard took the other, and Toye installed himself in a corner of the settee and took out his notebook.
‘Well,’ Pollard said in a friendly tone, picking up the thread of the conversation, ‘most of us can do with a bit of extra cash these days, can’t we? Let me see, you took charge of Mrs Lucas’s shop for three afternoons a week, didn’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ she said, eyeing him uneasily.
‘What did she pay you, Mrs Pinfold?’
The question evoked a desperate resistance. ‘I don’t see as you’ve any call to ask me. Earnings is private, so long as you keep under the limit, and that I did.’
‘This is it,’ Pollard said. ‘You see, as the police officers carrying out the inquiry into Mrs Lucas’s death, we’ve been through her papers and account books.’ He paused deliberately, and bluffed. ‘What was the hold she had over you, Mrs Pinfold, that you agreed to work for her under those conditions?’
To his relief she made no attempt to challenge his knowledge of the terms of her employment, but gaped at him, as if stunned by police omniscience. Then she began to sob, her face puckering. ‘Soon as I knew she was dead, I thought... I thought I’d be safe, an’ n-now the p’lice knows...’ Bit by bit her sordid and pathetic story came out. The late Mr Pinfold had always seen to everything. After the traumatic experience of his sudden collapse and death in the street just over a year ago, she had at first found coping with life on her own completely unnerving, and developed a whole range of irrational dreads, such as noises in the night, burst pipes and the electric going on fire. Worst of all had been the fear, stimulated by continually rising prices, of not being able to pay her way. She had taken to going round the supermarkets for special offers, trying to save a penny here and a penny there...
‘Suppose we help you over the next bit,’ Pollard suggested. ‘Did you suddenly, one day, without really thinking what you were doing, slip something into your shopping bag instead of the store’s basket?’
Mrs Pinfold gave him another stupefied stare at this penetration. ‘I’ll never know what came over me,’ she gulped. ‘Tin of chopped ham, it was. The small size.’ Apparently, no one had noticed, but just after she had gone out into the street there had been a hand on her arm. She had swung round in terror, and found herself looking at Annabel Lucas. Too agitated and inexperienced to threaten a counter-charge or parry questions, she had fallen an easy victim to blackmail. Her unpaid servitude had started immediately, to last for almost a year.
‘I made out to the neighbours I was doin’ it for the money and for a change from bein’ on me own, like. Oh, God, sir, don’t take me to court now, along o’ what I did. I’ve been through ’ell.’
‘Listen,’ Pollard said. ‘Shoplifting’s an offence, and you know you did wrong. But Mrs Lucas was the only witness of it, and she’s dead. You’ve nothing to worry about now.’
The fresh colour had ebbed from Mrs Pinfold’s face. It was tear-stained and blotchy, and her age had abruptly asserted itself in its sagging contours. A woebegone figure, she looked at him incredulously. ‘But you knows — and ’im.’ She indicated Toye, impassive in his corner.
‘We couldn’t care less about your slip-up,’ Pollard said robustly, ‘could we, Inspector? We came to see you to find out what sort of a woman Mrs Lucas was, and you’ve given us some useful help. That wasn’t her real name, by the way. She wasn’t married to the man who came down from London with her. She was Annabel Brown.’
The information had an astonishingly tonic effect on Mrs Pinfold’s collapsed morale.
‘The dirty tart!’ she exclaimed, hitting back in satisfied consciousness of her own status of honourable widowhood.
Pollard hastily cashed in with questions about the running of the shop, callers and letters, but learnt nothing new. On the previous Wednesday, Annabel Brown had arrived by car at half-past eight in the morning and had summarily ordered her victim to go back with her and take over for the whole day.
‘Any letters by the second post?’ Toye asked.
‘So that was the last time you saw Annabel Brown?’
‘Last time to speak to, it was.’
There was an electric silence.
‘But you saw her again?’ Pollard asked, trying to keep urgency out of his voice. ‘When was that?’
‘When I was cuttin’ through Moneypenny Street on me way to the Women’s Circle. Wednesday evening it meets, up to the Methodists. Nice and warm in their ’all, and the minister makes you welcome. Shakes your ’and when you goes in...’
‘What time was this?’ Toye demanded, no longer able to restrain himself.
After a good deal of circumlocution, Mrs Pinfold decided that it was between ten- and quarter-past six. The Women’s Circle met at half-past, and first comers got the seats by the radiators. It was just as she turned into Moneypenny Street that she saw Mrs Lucas, as she called herself, come dashing out of the shop, slamming the door shut after her. Then she’d gone running off towards the High Street like a madwoman.
‘Mrs Pinfold, why didn’t you tell the policeman who came to see you on Thursday about this?’ Pollard asked her.
‘He never arst, only what time I shut the shop and went ’ome,’ she replied, sounding aggrieved. ‘Anyways, I were that cold an’ tired I never give it a thought, seein’ as we ’adn’t spoken.’
In order to forestall comment on the interviewing technique of the local force by an outraged Toye, Pollard got hastily to his feet and engineered a speedy departure.
‘Feeling better, now you’ve blown your top?’ he inquired, as they got into the Hillman. ‘This is our first real break, you know. We’ll get Cook to have Mrs Pinfold’s statements checked, but I swear she told us the truth on all counts. We know for sure now that Brown was a blackmailer, but what is a damn sight more interesting is that headlong dash out of the shop. How does it tie up with the break-in? Let’s have a look at the street plan.’
Toye produced it. It showed that the garage at which Annabel Brown had left her car was roughly five minutes’ walk from the shop.
‘According to Cook, she turned the car in for its check-up just on six,’ Pollard said. ‘So she got home at roughly five past. Between ten and quarter past, Mrs Pinfold sees her belting out and heading for the High Street. How long would it have taken her to get to the Athenaeum?’
Toye objected that there was no proof that she had gone straight to the Athenaeum, but if she had, she would have landed up there about twenty-five past six, keeping up a good pace.
‘Well, let’s assume she did. If she crashed down that staircase while Mrs Habgood was beating up egg whites somewhere about ten to seven, that leaves — say — twenty-five minutes for Brown to go to ground behind the oil tank, crawl about on the floor by the table, and finally go up to the gallery and decide which books to pinch. How’s that for timing?’
They agreed that it seemed a feasible programme.
‘Right,’ Pollard said. ‘We’ll go on from here. The thousand-dollar question is what sent her tearing out of the shop again so soon after getting home.’
They ruled out a return to the garage to fetch something left in the car. It shut at six, and she could not have expected to find it still open at nearly twenty past.
‘Message?’ Toye suggested. ‘There wasn’t a phone at the shop but somebody could have dropped a note in the letterbox after Mrs Pinfold went off at five.’
‘A message from X?’ Pollard said thoughtfully. ‘In some agreed code, saying that the break-in was on? If so, why did she hang about behind the oil tank when she got to the Athenaeum? I wonder if she had blackmailed X into doing the job and was checking up on him before going in for some pickings herself?’
Toye thought this an ingenious but complicated idea. Besides, would Brown really have wasted time crawling about looking for an earring, or something, when she got there?
‘God only knows what extraordinary things people do,’ Pollard replied with feeling. ‘Look here, time’s getting on. We’d better go round to the library and see how the boys are making out over dabs and whatever.’
Strickland and Boyce had just finished testing the trompe-l’oeil for fingerprints. They reported that it was plastered with them at the spot where you gave it a push to go through. Most of the dabs were a man’s, different from any they’d found so far; but a set of X’s, in his rubber gloves, were superimposed. There were none of Annabel Brown’s on the library side, but some on the boiler house side, with X’s, where they’d pushed the door to go in.
‘She didn’t need to go out again, of course,’ Strickland concluded succinctly.
‘What I can’t get over is why she didn’t wear gloves,’ Toye said.
‘Thought she’d be able to wipe clean everything she’d touched?’ Boyce suggested. ‘People haven’t a clue that it’s next door to impossible.’
There was a sudden shout from Pollard, who had gone through the trompe-l’oeil into the boiler house.
‘What do you make of these?’ he asked, as Toye and the two technicians crowded in.
He pointed to two parallel white scrapes on the flagged floor, at an angle of roughly forty-five degrees to the boiler, and quite close to it. They were about sixteen inches long, and eighteen inches apart.
Toye bent to examine them more closely.
‘Fresh, from the look of the rest of the floor,’ he said.
‘Got it!’ Pollard exclaimed triumphantly. ‘At least, I think so. Measure one of those stacking chairs, will you? Don’t touch the metal frame, whatever you do.’
The measurements coincided exactly. The topmost chairs from the two stacks were carefully lifted by Strickland and Boyce, and carried into the library to be tested for fingerprints. Clear impressions came up on the smooth metal, the result of handling them. In addition, the chair from the stack nearer to the boiler house inner door had another set of prints. Strickland straightened up and grinned.
‘Same rubber gloves as the chap wore to bust the cupboard open, sir,’ he said.
Boyce suppressed a whistle. Pollard straddled a chair, and rested his arms on the back. Toye remarked that you wouldn’t have expected the chap to sit down for a warm, seeing the job he’d got on hand.
‘I’m not so sure, you know,’ Pollard said. ‘It’s possible that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree by taking it for granted that he came in from the yard. Suppose he slipped through from the library, some time on Wednesday, and lay up all snug till the place closed? Of course, he had to get out into the yard when he left, but we’re assuming for the moment that Brown had fixed that, having had access to the key board in the flat.’
‘She was on duty all day Wednesday. On her own, some of the time, you’d think. A place like this wouldn’t have all that number of people coming in.’
Pollard, who had a photographic memory, screwed up his eyes.
‘Look over on that desk, Boyce,’ he said. ‘I noticed a book you sign when you come in to read or look things up. It might be worth finding out who was here on Wednesday. Somebody might have noticed who else turned up.’
Four members of RLSS had signed on the previous Wednesday. Pollard took the book and went in search of Alastair Habgood, whom he found in the office. The librarian looked strained and tired, but on hearing what Pollard had to say he was at once interested.
‘Good Lord, that possibility never struck me,’ he said. ‘Yes, Annabel was on duty all last Wednesday. My wife just relieved her for a short lunch break. May I have a look at the book?’
He took it and ran his eye over the last entries.
‘Of course, one doesn’t know when these people came in or how long they stayed,’ he went on. ‘J. B. Alton is in his eighties, and deaf. He comes to track down elusive references in “Ximenes”-type c
rosswords, and wouldn’t notice if the Grand Cham of Tartary walked through the library. F. Richards — now he’s a very worthy type from the College of Education, doing a thesis on local industrial archaeology. He’d have been down in the end bay on the right, and you can’t see much from there. R. J. Catterick’s not very hopeful. He’d have been at the map table with his back to the room, plotting the route for this year’s Railston.’
‘This year’s what?’
‘Sorry. An RLSS tradition, started by a chap called Railston in ’02. A ten-mile hike on Boxing Day, regardless of the weather. You’d be surprised what a crowd turns up.’
‘Great heavens!’ ejaculated Pollard.
‘Quite. It’s one of the rare occasions when I’m thankful for my groggy leg. The leader — Catterick, this year — has to make sure that they fetch up at a pub at lunchtime, and get back before dark, of course. No, I think your best bet is Miss Escott. She’d probably have been here most of the day. She’s writing a history of RLSS.’
‘Escott? Is that the woman Annabel Brown left with on Wednesday evening?’
‘Yes. She’s a member of the Founder’s family — a descendent of his younger son, I believe, and dead keen on RLSS and this place. She’s been working in London for a good many years, and came back to Ramsden when she retired recently. It’s been her life’s ambition, one gathers, and she bought a small house here a few years ago. Nice woman. I’m sure you’ll find her helpful and absolutely reliable. Shall I look up her address for you?’
‘We’ve got it in the file, thanks,’ Pollard told him. ‘We were going to interview her, anyway, as she left here with Annabel Brown on Wednesday night, but this line we’re following up on who was in here during the day makes her more of a priority. Before we go, could I just check up with Mrs Habgood about the lunch hour?’
Laura Habgood, called down to the office by the house telephone, came in with her habitual brisk cheerfulness, but Pollard noted the dark shadows under her eyes. She stated, without hesitation, that both Mr Alton and Mr Catterick were in the library when she relieved Annabel but both left soon afterwards. No one else had come in before Annabel returned from lunch.
Step in the Dark Page 7
