Death of an Alderman Read online

  ‘“The Debtors’ Retreat”,’ Dunne said.

  ‘On the night of 23rd February, between 9.45 and 9.50, he was shot dead, at close quarters, with a Luger pistol. The dog was also shot.’

  ‘No witnesses?’

  ‘One or two neighbours saw him set out. No one saw any other character.’

  ‘Someone must have heard the shots.’

  ‘Nearly everyone on the estate. But no one went out. Too keen on the telly, I suppose. A routine patrol came from nearly a mile away. Barson was dead when he arrived.’

  ‘The Luger?’

  ‘Had been on exhibition in a collection of trophies given by local men to the borough museum. This had been broken into the previous night, between midnight and two a.m. Investigation has so far drawn a blank.’

  ‘You found the weapon?’

  ‘The morning after the crime, in a derelict warehouse about a quarter of a mile from the murder spot. Also various bits and pieces belonging to an adolescent gang that was known to use the ruin as a sort of headquarters.’

  ‘And,’ Kenworthy prompted, ‘the leader of this gang had been sent to Borstal the previous week?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘By Barson?’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Leaving how many associates still at large?’

  ‘None that we consider dangerous——though a few who might be noisy——including the ring-leader’s brother, a nineteen year old, Chick Stanway.’

  ‘Whom you’ve questioned?’

  ‘We’ve had him in. Big-mouthed, truculent——but soft. Been shooting his mouth off about what he’d do to Barson, ever since his brother was sentenced. But there’s no material evidence to connect him with the crime.’

  ‘But you could find a holding charge, if you wanted?’

  ‘On suspicion on at least half a dozen files. But we think, if he’s involved at all, that he’s more likely to incriminate himself outside than he is in a cell.’

  Rhys came triumphantly to his dramatic climax.

  ‘A much more interesting feature has emerged from our house-to-house questionnaires. It appears that during the week before the murder, some character was going round the town——particularly round the Carlton Estate——asking questions about Barson——his movements, his habits, his associates——anything he could trip people into telling him.’

  ‘You’ve a good description?’

  ‘Including Identikit.’

  Rhys removed a sheet from a folder and passed it to Kenworthy.

  ‘Not a local man?’

  ‘Positively not. And he operated in the guise of one of these door-to-door religious cranks——working in a few crafty questions about the neighbours.’

  ‘Get it out for maximum coverage as soon as you can. The press will enjoy it.——“The man with the feather in his hat”——’

  Rhys made a note.

  ‘That’s about all——’

  ‘This gives us one lead outside Fellaby,’ Kenworthy said. ‘Where else had Barson ever been?’

  ‘He did national service. He was too young for the war itself, but he was in Germany afterwards. Corporal in the R.A. S. C.’

  ‘Sergeant Wright.——Have that covered for us, will you?——And his job? What did that amount to? “Advertising executive” might mean anything.’

  Grayling spoke for the first time since Rhys had started his exposition.

  ‘Whatever it means, it enabled him to have a better standard of living than a chief superintendent——and to devote all the time he wanted to committee work. As far as I’ve ever been able to ascertain, he was a sort of middleman between advertisers and copy-writers. He sold space and then commissioned material to fill it.’

  ‘What was his firm?’

  ‘Futurco Publicity. Headquarters in Bradcaster. They have all the poster space in the Bradcaster buses, as well as a strong following in periodicals and local papers.’

  Kenworthy turned to Rhys.

  ‘Put someone on to that. We want every angle of his Futurco activities——his contacts, his women——everything——’

  ‘Very good, superintendent. Would you like to come over and see the Report Centre now?’

  Kenworthy suppressed a sigh and allowed himself to be led over to the tactical headquarters. He showed a polite interest in the telephone switchboard, the uniformed constables sorting statements, the minute-to-minute log of messages and operational orders.

  ‘This will be your desk.’

  Kenworthy tried to hide his distaste as he looked down at the article of green metal, regulation furniture.

  ‘Let’s hope I shan’t find too much use for it. Just now my main desire is to take a walk along the High Street before the shops close. You can come with me, Sergeant Wright.’

  But outside, he gave his sergeant a different instruction.

  ‘Shiner——I want you to run the rule over that museum break-in. Try to make out whether it was an amateur or professional job.’

  Chapter Two

  Wright spent a few minutes on the telephone, initiating enquiries into Barson’s army background, and then he broached the question of the burglary. He was accompanied to the museum not, as he had hoped, by one of the Fellaby men of his own or inferior rank, with whom he might quickly have struck up a working comradeship, but by Malpas, a plain clothes inspector, who handed over the field report with pointed lack of comment.

  The entry had been made by using sticking-plaster and a glass-cutter. It was a professional method, but one which any tyro could have picked up from detective fiction. The path outside the window was of loose gravel and had been disturbed by feet, but bore no recognisable imprints. Flaked mud had been found inside the museum, but it led to no useful conclusions. And the glass case that had contained the Luger had been broken open in the crudest possible way, its none too robust lid prised open with some sort of lever. It might have been the work of a jemmy, but a medium sized screw-driver would have done the job. There were no finger-prints.

  ‘So you see, sergeant, even Dr Thorndike’s little box of test-tubes wouldn’t have much to go on.’

  The museum was housed in what had formerly been an industrialist’s villa, to which the library formed a modern, single-storey annexe. The collection was grotesque and had little obvious relationship with the town and its neighbourhood. A moose’s head, badly stuffed and leering, presided over a wall decked with Zulu shields and assagai, and a moth-eaten badger cowered against the roughly painted background of a hedge-bottom. The Luger had been stolen from a side-room which contained an exhibition entitled Fellaby at War, starting with the early compressed iron rations of the South African campaigns, through a fully accoutred effigy private from the Somme, to stick-grenades and Nazi bayonet scabbards.

  The curator danced attendance on them, a little, bird-like man called Gill, who hopped about nervously, and was full of superfluous self-exoneration.

  ‘Of course, I blame myself, now. I had often wondered about the wisdom of leaving such an object on show. But it seemed a good deal more secure than some of the weapons that could be taken by anyone with half a brick from the gunsmith’s window in town.’

  The broken window had been roughly covered with a rectangle of ply-wood. Wright examined the scratches on the sill and floor beneath it, and then asked if he might remove the temporary covering.

  ‘Certainly sergeant, if you see any point in it. Every square inch of it has been gone over, you know.’

  Wright brought out a clasp-knife and loosened a few nails. The inspector stood by without offering assistance as he lifted the thin boarding to the floor. Wright examined the empty window-frame in prolonged silence, at one point pinching out a tiny splinter of glass between his forefinger and thumb.

  ‘What’s out there?’ he asked. ‘Bushes?’

  He pointed to the narrow strip of lawn beyond the outside path, already obscured by dusk.

  ‘Yes——and every damned spot has been gone over with a tape-measu
re, lens and dog. You’ll find nothing there, sergeant.’

  ‘Good,’ Wright said. ‘I hadn’t thought I would.’

  He began to replace the boarding, and tried to hammer home the nails with the butt of his knife. Gill came forward.

  ‘You can leave that to me, sergeant. I’ll go upstairs presently and fetch a hammer.’

  The curator was still hovering anxiously a few paces from them. Wright marvelled at the man’s fussiness, the restlessness of his eyes and fingers, and tension in his every movement. He was not old——only a little over thirty——but he was prematurely bald, slight in build, and looked like a bad novelist’s caricature of a fossil-collector.

  ‘Have we finished, sergeant?’ inspector Malpas asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you. Sorry to be such a nuisance.’

  ‘There aren’t any other bits of our previous work on which you’d like to back-track?’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve conveyed that sort of attitude, sir.’

  ‘You haven’t conveyed any sort of attitude at all. All you’ve produced up to now is that sort of work. You’ll be wanting to get back to your hotel now, I suppose?’

  ‘I’ll be wanting to report to superintendent Kenworthy, sir.’

  ‘Can you find your own way? I’ve had no tea, and I’m on duty tonight.’

  In fact, Wright was very eager indeed to find his chief, for he thought he had discovered something in the museum which ought to be reported without delay. But there was no sign of Kenworthy in the County Hotel. He was not in his bed-room, not in the dining-room, not in the lounge. The porter could not help him: if he had gone out, he had taken his room key with him. Wright walked over to the Report Centre and found the atmosphere there dispiritingly slack. A helmetless constable had a tin lid of cigarette-ends beside the idle switchboard and was now deeply absorbed in a who-dunnit. No one had seen Kenworthy since the afternoon.

  Wright strolled out into the drizzle-swept heart of Fellaby and within five minutes had walked the length of the main shopping street. The sodium lighting soon gave way to a row of dingy standard lamps and the rows of shops petered out into terraces of drab-bricked houses. A gang of youths came noisily along the pavement, ready to edge into the gutter any pedestrian who happened in their way. Wright crossed to the other side of the road and began his window-shopping progress back towards the town centre. He stopped outside the window of a small tobacconist who was also advertising agency tours to Majorca and the Dolomites.

  Suddenly a voice hailed him from a doorway where he could have sworn no man was standing.

  ‘You haven’t found him yet, then?’

  He turned and saw a macabre cripple, a man whose left leg was so withered and twisted that it was surprising he could move about at all, crouching behind a stand loaded with sodden newspapers.

  The whole town knew the men from London already. The wearisome comic scorn was beginning.

  ‘Found him yet? You know who it is we’re looking for, do you?’

  The newsman spat into the night.

  ‘I don’t mean him——I mean your boss. That’s who you’re looking for now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Have you seen him, then?’

  ‘He went into the Saracen’s Head half an hour ago.’

  He indicated a narrow-fronted pub opposite, on which the cohort of hooligans was converging.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Wright gave him a shilling for a paper that he did not want and went over to the pub. The bar had a scrubbed wooden floor, high-backed benches with tatty brown paint and layers of static cigarette smoke hanging across an atmosphere otherwise dominated by the reek of stale beer and human sweat. Most of the floor and chair space was occupied by a convention of louts of both sexes: young men with filthy clothes and sallow skin, but with immaculately washed hair that shoaled about their shoulders. And there were girls with lank blonde tresses that started from ill-concealed brunette partings and scattered dandruff about the yokes of absurdly short coats.

  Wright elbowed his way across the room, taking care not to knock against any outstretched mug of ale. Kenworthy was wedged against the bar itself, talking to four of the drinkers, one of them an enormously built specimen in a stridently opulent overcoat in silver-grey imitation fur that must surely symbolise leadership of the whole gathering. The other youth was wearing a type of bottle-green, early century mid-European uniform, with meaningless epaulettes and a long row of gun-metal buttons. But his face was anything but military——pasty and spotted——with a fawning admiration for his chief which robbed him of any personality of his own. The taller of the two girls looked from behind as if she might be a worthy mate for a minor chieftain, for her hair was a golden glory, and her figure went in and out in the right places and in the right proportion. But, seen full face, her skin was coarse and bloodless, her eyes tired and devoid of intelligence, her mouth weak and dissatisfied.

  The other girl was tiny, with pinkly made-up cheeks, warm brown eyes and hair neatly fringed. She was obviously deeply infatuated with the owner of the fur-coat, about whom every observable feature was gross. His hair was thick and black and grew down the side of his face in square-cut sideboards. Sweat was standing in huge beads on his forehead and trickling in runnels past his wide, fleshy nostrils. A glass containing a double whisky was almost lost against his enormous, bony knuckles. He spoke in a piping tenor that verged on the falsetto.

  ‘I mean to say, you’ve got your world, and I’ve got mine. It’s your job to find things out, and it’s mine to keep my fag-hole shut, isn’t it?’

  Kenworthy made room for Wright to put one elbow on the counter.

  ‘What’re you having?’

  ‘I’ll have a half of mild.’

  The man in the fur coat looked at Wright as if he did not exist.

  ‘You bastards know bloody well I didn’t do it, otherwise you’d have kept me inside, wouldn’t you? It stands to sense, doesn’t it? Once you’ve got your bloody knife into a family, they’ve had it, haven’t they?’

  The youth in the Moldavian hussar’s uniform sniggered.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Fur Coat said, ‘I wish I had have killed him, straight I do. If I get hold of the chap who did before you buggers do, I’ll buy him a Scotch.’

  ‘Oh, Chick,’ the little girl said, ‘you hadn’t ought to talk like that.’

  ‘Get knotted!’

  Wright picked up his glass, bringing it up to his lips with extreme care, so as not to spill a drop on the precious fur.

  ‘There’ll be a bit more room in a few minutes,’ Kenworthy said, ‘they’re all going to a dance.’

  Chick knocked back a fluid ounce of neat spirit in a gesture of magnificence.

  ‘Cripes, it’s hot in here!’ he said, and began to take off the fur, his neighbours scrumming together to create the necessary space for him to do so. To Wright’s surprise, he was wearing beneath the coat not merely a leather jerkin, but also a roll-necked woollen sweater. He looked down at the little girl.

  ‘What are you drinking, Putty?’

  Wright did not catch her reply, but the tattered matron behind the bar leaned forward in self-defence.

  ‘Here! How old are you? You’ve no right to be in here.’ Chick slapped the counter with the flat of his hand.

  ‘She’s eighteen today,’ he said, and those within earshot began to chant unmusically.

  Happy birthday to you,

  Happy birthday to you,

  Happy birthday, dear Putty,

  Happy birthday to you.

  When the singing had died down, Kenworthy touched her gently on the fore-arm.

  ‘What would you like, my dear?’

  ‘I’d like a cherry brandy.’

  Kenworthy nodded reassuringly across the bar.

  ‘It’s on me, landlady.’

  Chick rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.

  ‘Cripes! Drinking with the bloody bogies!’

  The girl picked up the glass and looked at the play of light through t
he liqueur. Wright thought that Kenworthy was taking a dangerous chance. For all her soft voice and liquid eyes, she was as common as gutter-scrapings, and she was nowhere near eighteen.

  Chick moved suddenly, so that he caught her with his elbow, and a few drops of the drink were splashed over her lapel.

  ‘You can drink with cops, or you can come dancing with me,’ he said, picking up his fur and fumbling with the sleeve. All round the bar glasses were raised and drained.

  ‘Oh, Chick!’

  Kenworthy looked at her benevolently.

  ‘Don’t let me influence you,’ he said. ‘I’m prepared to buy you an illicit drink, but one’s the limit, and my dancing days are done. I will, at least, see you home.’

  The girl looked uneasily at Chick.

  ‘You’ve had it,’ he said. ‘You had it the moment you took that drink off him. Now butter him up! I should worry! Every word he pumps out of you will help to put me in the bloody clear.’

  He swathed himself in the coat and turned his back on the bar. The coarse-featured blonde seized his right arm. The amateur hussar took a half step backwards. The gang stood up from their tables.

  ‘Right!’ Chick said. ‘Let’s go and break up the bloody dance-hall!’

  His friends made a gangway for him, and he led them jostling into the night. Putty was crying quietly, the tears grooving channels into her cheap cosmetics.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ Kenworthy said, ‘but you could do better than him, you know. One day, I hope you will.’

  ‘You’ve all got Chick wrong. That’s what’s making him worse than he is.’

  Kenworthy passed her the handkerchief from his breast pocket, and she dabbed the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Nevertheless, he did announce just now, to a collection of sputniks and satellites who look ready for anything, that he’s about to break up a dance-hall.’

  ‘He won’t,’ she said. ‘He’s always saying things. He never does them. He can’t dance——that’s why he has it in for dance-halls.’

  ‘He never does things? There’s a dossier back at the police-station that wouldn’t exactly win him a Sunday School prize——’