Surfeit of Suspects

by George Bellairs

  ‘We’ll have to wait until the experts get on it then. Meanwhile, I’d better get hold of some of the officials of the company and have a talk with them. Where are they all?’

  ‘Most of them are under the tarpaulin there, Tattersall. Three directors. There was a meeting going on when it all happened. I hear that the Chairman, Tom Hoop, and his son, Fred, the managing director, were absent. Old Tom’s in bed with the flu. I don’t know where Fred is. Nobody seems to know. His wife’s away from home and the place is locked up. He lives on the edge of the town; Burgoyne Road. I only hope they don’t find Fred among the ashes as well.’

  ‘Where’s the Chairman live?’

  ‘Two streets away from here. They tell me he hasn’t been told about this affair. If he had been, he’d have got up from bed if he’d been dying. He’s too ill to be disturbed.’

  ‘You seem very well informed, Garnett.’

  ‘When you’re working on a fire, you hear some funny things. The flames seem to mesmerise people and make them talk more freely. Some of them become quite indiscreet… I’d better be getting back to the fire. You’ll see that as little as possible is disturbed…’

  Garnett’s mouth opened wide in astonishment and the whites of his eyes shone in his blackened face. ‘Disturbed! Can you tell me anythin’ more disturbing than an explosion followed by a fire? The place is a shambles. Bricks, rubble, burning wood and papers. Water everywhere. You’ll be lucky.’

  ‘Keep your shirt on. I only want the experts who’re on their way here to find out what caused it all, if they can.’

  ‘Good luck to them, too. Are you imagining it was a put-up job?’

  ‘One never knows.’

  The doctor arrived as they were leaving and insisted on Tattersall returning with him. A little peppery man with a red nose and wearing a dinner jacket under his overcoat. He gave the three victims a cursory examination.

  ‘They brought me out of my lodge meeting to attend to these. They’ve been dead some time.’

  He indicated the bodies.

  ‘What good can I do? The cause of death is obvious. They were killed by falling masonry or the like… We’ll have them moved to the mortuary. Fix it up, will you, Tattersall? Get an ambulance along. I’ll go into things properly tomorrow and do a post-mortem on them. Good night.’

  Just like that! He was off back to his lodge.

  Outside, it was raining cats and dogs. They could hear the doctor swearing at the weather and then shunting his car and hooting soaked spectators out of the way. From the distance came the vigorous tapping of many hammers. Already people were boarding-up their damaged windows with cardboard and planks from the joinery works.

  Running feet and another sopping specimen entered the gatehouse. He seemed unaffected by the weather, although water was dropping from his felt hat and he looked as though they’d hooked him from the river.

  Fred Hoop. He was so like a drowned rat that Tattersall hardly recognised him.

  ‘Good evening, Mr. Hoop.’

  Hoop was too busy to return the courtesy.

  ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’

  Fred Hoop was tall and slim, with a thin nose like a scythe and a long face with a streak of dark moustache across his upper lip. A machinist, suddenly promoted to be managing director, he was touchy and bombastic.

  ‘I don’t want any lip from the police. I want to know what’s happened and who…’

  Then he saw the tarpaulin.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Three bodies from the fire.’

  Hoop made as if to uncover them and Tattersall held him back.

  ‘That will do no good. Fallows, Piper, and Dodd. It seems they were holding a meeting when the explosion occurred…’

  ‘Explosion? What the hell’s been going on?’

  ‘Don’t you know what’s been happening to your own business, Mr. Hoop? Where have you been all the evening?’

  Tattersall looked at his watch. It was 11.23.

  ‘That’s no business of yours.’

  ‘But it is. There are three dead men lying there. Their deaths have to be accounted for. The fire at your company’s offices started with a loud explosion. We don’t know what caused it, but experts are on their way to investigate it. Meanwhile, we’ve our own side of the investigation to make and I’ll begin with you, sir. Where have you been all night?’

  Hoop took off his hat and shook the water from it. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him to bare his head in the presence of his three dead colleagues. Then he took off his spectacles and dried the water from them on his scarf. His eyes were dark and shifty and moved rapidly here and there as though he suspected listeners hidden behind the piles of sacks and packing cases littered about the room.

  ‘I called to see my father, who’s ill with flu. He’s in bed and very poorly.’

  ‘You haven’t been there all night, have you?’

  ‘No. I’m coming to it if you’ll let me. I left my father’s at about seven o’clock and went home. My wife has gone to her mother’s at Brantwood, so after I’d been home and made myself a cup of tea, I went to bring my wife back. When I got there they were having a meal and I joined them. About nine o’clock somebody called to say there was a fire at the works. They said they hadn’t been able to find me before. I hurried here right away. I thought the lot had gone up in smoke. Instead, it was just the office and the fire had been put out.’

  He sounded disappointed.

  ‘It seems there might have been a meeting of the directors going on tonight when the explosion occurred, Mr. Hoop.’

  ‘There was no meeting called and don’t you be thinking I’ve had anything to do with the fire. I know you’re wondering why, if it was a directors’ meeting, I wasn’t there and it’s entered your mind that I wasn’t because I was going to start a fire…’

  ‘Now, now, now, Mr. Hoop. I had no such thoughts. I simply asked if there was a directors’ meeting…’

  ‘Well, there wasn’t. Those three must have been arranging something behind my back. I don’t want to speak ill of them, and they lying there, but that’s what it looks like…’

  As though to ease his mind, two ambulance men arrived to take the bodies away. There was a policeman with them. They looked at the tarpaulin and one of them cocked an eye at Tattersall.

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve only brought two stretchers. Nobody told us there were three.’

  ‘Well, make another out of the tarpaulin and get a move on. It’s not decent leaving them lying here for hours.’

  Everybody’s nerves seemed to be frayed. Hoop tried to light a cigarette, but his matches were damp and he couldn’t manage it. Tattersall flicked his lighter.

  ‘Here, light it from this. We’ll go outside while these men are doing their job.’

  ‘It’s time I was getting home. I’m wet through.’

  Tattersall didn’t answer but led the way out.

  The rain had ceased and there was a damp, aromatic smell of timber on the air. The street lamps had gone out at eleven, but most of the houses in the vicinity had lights showing round the chinks of the boarded windows of the front downstairs rooms, where the occupants were presumably still discussing the night’s events. In Green Lane there was an acrid smell of burnt wood. The fire had been put out, but firemen were still scrambling among the wreckage and spraying the smoking ruins with a single hosepipe. Most of the spectators had gone home and the persistent hammering had ceased. Here and there a small knot of men, who couldn’t persuade themselves to leave, made a blacker shadow in the darkness of the street, hanging round extinguished street lamps as though, somehow, there was shelter there.

  Sergeant Jeal appeared out of the gloom. The firemen had erected two electric lamps focused on the demolished offices
and by the light of them Tattersall could see Jeal’s red face lined with soot.

  ‘The county experts are on their way, sir. They should be here within the next half-hour.’

  ‘You’d better wait with your men until they’re satisfied. I don’t think they’ll be able to do much in this light. If they want to leave it till daylight, put a couple of men on to see that nobody starts wandering about the ruins…’

  Tattersall looked around for Hoop, who until now, had been at his elbow, following him like a dog.

  ‘Where’s Hoop?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  Then they spotted him among the ruins, rambling disconsolately about, poking here and there with a piece of stick he’d picked up, bending to inspect the littered floors.

  ‘Go and get him out of that, Jeal. He’ll get hurt by falling bricks. We don’t want another casualty. If he starts to argue, tell him the police have taken charge. Carry him out if he won’t come under his own steam.’

  Jeal squared himself and went to execute his orders.

  Hoop didn’t argue. A man without much guts, known to be dominated by his wife, but prone to fits of childish temper if he didn’t get his own way. Now, he gave up without a word and joined Tattersall.

  ‘What a mess. All the books have gone up in smoke and the safe’s buried under a lot of bricks and mortar. I don’t know how we’ll start to clean up this lot. Lucky it didn’t spread to the works and timber-yard. The men can, at least, make a start when they come in the morning. All the stock sheets and invoices have been burned too. I don’t know…’

  Tattersall was fed up with the steadily rising lamentations. It was beginning to rain again, too.

  ‘You’d better be off home then, Mr. Hoop. I’ll want to see you first thing in the morning, though. We’ll go properly into matters then.’

  ‘I’ll be busy all day tomorrow. You’ll appreciate that with three of the main men dead, a lot’s going to fall on me. And with my father ill in bed. I don’t know what’ll happen when they tell him about all this.’

  ‘I think you’d better call at the police station at ten in the morning, Mr. Hoop. We’ll resume our talk then.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Be there, sir. Three men have lost their lives in this fire and it started with an explosion. That puts it out of the normal run of such things. Good night.’

  ‘’night. Give me another light from your lighter. My matches are wet.’

  In the light of the small pale flame, Hoop’s features were dead white, his spectacles awry, his cheeks smeared with soot. He thrust forward his anxious face and pursed mouth to draw the flame to his cigarette. Then he went into the night without another word.

  It was then that Tattersall realised that he hadn’t enquired about the relatives of the victims. He sought out Sergeant Jeal, who had returned to the fire to post his men.

  ‘What about the relatives? Were they informed?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I did that myself. Things seem to be so much on top of us, I haven’t had time to report. Fallows lost his wife a couple of years ago and lives with an old housekeeper in a small house just a couple of streets away. She seemed a bit stunned, but didn’t shed any tears. I’m told his nearest relatives live somewhere in the neighbourhood. We’ll have to contact them later. No… All she seemed really concerned about was how she was going to get another job at her age.’

  ‘What about Dodd? He’s a family man, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Wife and two boys. They’re away from home. Gone to see their relatives at the seaside… Anglesey. We’ve asked the police there to let Mrs. Dodd know. I expect she’ll be back here as soon as there’s a train. Piper was an older man, with a married daughter. His wife and him live on their own a few minutes’ walk from here. Mrs. Piper took it bad. We got the doctor to her and then sent for her daughter. She’s gone home with her daughter, who lives on the other side of town…’

  ‘Thank you, Jeal, for looking after it. It’s a bad business.’

  Jeal nodded sympathetically. He looked like a circus bobby, with his helmet awry and dusty, his streaked face and his red-rimmed eyes. But there was nothing comic about him. He seemed to have acquired a new, sad dignity.

  ‘I’ll get back to the station, then. I don’t suppose there’ll be much sleep for any of us tonight. See you in the morning, Jeal.’

  ‘Good night, sir.’

  Tattersall made his way through the empty streets with pavements still wet and shining. Somewhere a clock struck two. Time seemed to have moved quickly. A car passed him travelling at speed and a dog began to bark.

  Next morning he met the experts who’d already made a cursory examination of the ruins of the company’s offices.

  No doubt about it, the place had been blown sky-high with dynamite.

  At noon, the matter was reported to Scotland Yard.

  Two

  Dead Broke

  ‘I suppose you’ll have to disinter this before you can pay the wages…’

  Littlejohn kicked the corner of a large old-fashioned safe which protruded from the debris.

  He said it more for something to break the tragic silence than anything else and tried to make his comment sound humorous. But he didn’t succeed.

  The little man standing beside him uttered a single syllable of contempt. ‘Hé!’

  He was the company’s book-keeper. A little chubby man, with a bald, orange-shaped head, flabby features and a pale pink complexion tinged with liverish yellow. He’d been up all night, wringing his hands at the disaster and there were dark bags under his eyes. He wore the symptoms of failure; a man who had probably started life with high hopes and ended in his late fifties as clerk in a bankrupt concern.

  ‘What does it contain?’

  ‘Old books. There’s no cash in it. In fact, there’s none about the place. We just scratched along, week after week, pleading with the bank for help to tide us over… Now, I guess it’s finished. With Dodd dead and out of it, the business’ll fold up.’

  He chanted it to himself, like a sacristan busy with the litany. There were little flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth.

  Tattersall had driven Littlejohn and Cromwell to the scene of the fire. He’d told them all there was to know, so far, and it wasn’t much. Just that the experts were of the opinion that someone had touched off the whole affair with a stick of blasting-powder. They’d taken away one or two bits and pieces for examination and promised to report later. Tattersall had left the Scotland Yard men to browse over the ruins and gone to court, where he was due to prosecute a gang who’d broken in a bicycle shop and, unable to find any cash, had wrecked the place and ridden away with a bicycle apiece.

  It was still raining. A cold drizzle which seemed to penetrate right to your bones. Green Lane, with its dark unkempt trees, looked a picture of misery. The police had driven away intruders and roped off the wreck left behind by the fire. The fire brigade had gone, leaving a mess of fallen bricks and rubble, with the burned wooden window frames, devoid of glass, mostly still in place. The whole building looked as if it had been hit by a bomb.

  Jeal and a young policeman who followed him about like an acolyte, were drinking tea in the gatehouse of the timber-yard. There were two lorries there being loaded with finished joinery-work, doors, window frames and cupboards, all unpainted and ready for fixing somewhere in a building estate. Work went on quietly as though everybody’s spirits had been stifled by the tragedy. Earlier in the day, Fred Hoop had arrived and laid off all the workmen of the factory. With Dodd out of the way, the mainspring seemed to have gone. Then, Hoop had taken himself off to see the insurance agent.

  Bugler, the book-keeper, continued his lamentations, talking to himself, if nobody else would listen.

  ‘I’m fed up. I’ve finished with this sort of work. The last place I was with went bust, too. I’m getting too old to keep
being pushed around. After this, I’m trying a new line. My sister’s husband, Albert, runs a betting-shop in the town and I’m going in with him. Perhaps you’ve noticed the place. Albert Scriboma. No? We talked it over last night. “Ossie,” Albert said, “Ossie, it’s time you stopped workin’ for people who pick your brains and then chuck you on the rubbish heap. It’s time you started thinkin’ of your future…” So…’

  Scriboma. What a name! Littlejohn could imagine the melancholy Ossie among the optimistic punters.

  Ossie took off his spectacles and slowly wiped the rain from them. Then he kicked the safe.

  ‘So, I’m off.’

  ‘Is there anywhere where we could have a talk? Somewhere where it’s dry and warm?’

  Ossie didn’t seem surprised at the request. He nodded and shook the rain from his hat.

  Littlejohn was fed up with scrambling about in the soggy ruins and was beginning to wish he’d accepted the gatekeeper’s offer of a cup of tea.

  ‘You can come over to my office, such as it is.’

  Ossie’s contempt for it was justified. He did his work in a shabby corner of the main workshop, glass-partitioned from the rest and heated by a small electric fire. The current had gone off in last night’s commotion, and it was cold and damp. Outside stood a large planing machine, surrounded by piles of wood chippings and then three lathes covered in timber dust. The atmosphere seemed deadened by the mass of sawdust and shavings outside and when anyone spoke it sounded like a crypt.

  There were two old wooden chairs in the room and Ossie told Littlejohn and Cromwell to sit down. He was in no mood for offering hospitality. He’d given up smoking and, in any event, smoking was forbidden among so much inflammable material. However, the young policeman arrived with three cups of tea, hot, strong, and very sweet, on a plank of wood. The bobby was scared of Littlejohn and his huge hands trembled as he passed out the drinks. This was his first encounter with Scotland Yard and he had an idea that if he acquitted himself well, he might be promoted before long. As soon as he was free of his burden, he sprang to attention, saluted in enthusiastic sergeant-major fashion and said, ‘Compliments of Sergeant Jeal, sir,’ although Jeal had nothing to do with it. Then he briskly left them.