Death in Albert Park (17 page)

“I hope you're successful. Good night.”

A very curious encounter, Carolus thought as he walked away from the house. Very curious indeed.

C
AROLUS
heard all he wanted from Turrell in half an hour in the Chelsea pub mentioned by Ribbing. They sat in a corner of the saloon in which there was too much of that fruity conversation laced with licentious wit of a kind common to the district. There were too many women with dogs, women dressed in popular versions of the season's designs, too many men with brush-like moustaches, and altogether too much brassy liveliness.

Turrell appeared to be the sort of man who belonged to this. He had not a moustache but he dressed the part, wore a regimental tie, and spoke in a rich plummy voice.

“But I don't
quite
understand,” he said when Carolus had introduced himself, “why you come to me.”

“You were a friend of Joyce Ribbing's, I believe.”

“I knew her. But what's that got to do with it? She was murdered by a maniac.”

“I am trying to find out a little about each of the victims.”

“Very praiseworthy, I'm sure, but quite useless. How can it possibly help you to identify the murderer?”

“I don't know that it will. But it might, and there's not much else I can do.”

“You might try to prevent another woman being murdered,” said Turrell with a touch of bitterness.

“I don't think another woman will be murdered,” said Carolus.

“So you've got a theory?”

“The beginnings of one.”

“And you think I can help you to build it up?”

“It's possible.”

“It all sounds rather forlorn to me. I've nothing to hide, of course. Every blasted Tom, Dick and Harry seems to know that we were having an affair. Even newspapers have practically said so. If you want me to tell you it's true I'll do so.”

Carolus hesitated.

“I think I understand how you feel,” he said at last. “It's hateful to have one's private life discussed all over the place. You must naturally think that your feelings for Joyce, and hers for you, are your own affair. I wasn't, believe me, trying to intrude on them.”

Then Carolus had one of those surprises which occasionally came to him from the middle of conversation. Looking at his glass and speaking very quietly, Turrell said, “I loved her.” He might almost have said “I killed her,” so unexpected was the simple statement.

“And she?” said Carolus.

“No. I'm afraid not. Or not enough. She had made it quite clear to me that she wouldn't leave her husband. I could never shake her on that though God knows I tried.”

Carolus waited.

“It wasn't money,” went on Turrell. “I have an income. Nothing enormous but probably a good deal more than Ribbing earned. And she had money. It wasn't her home, either. She loathed that ghastly suburb. And it wasn't that she was in love with Ribbing. It was just loyalty and—if you like—decency. She was what used to be called straight. Oh, I know we had an affair. But she would never let it interfere with her … home life.”

Without a word Turrell took their two glasses to the counter and came back with them filled.

“You don't want to intrude, you say,” he continued. “Then perhaps you've got more than you bargained for. I've told you a few home truths. Or wasn't that what you wanted? Were you going to ask me where I was on the night of the crime?”

“No. I wasn't going to ask you that,” said Carolus.

“The police did, believe it or not.”

“Could you tell them?”

“Yes. I was here till closing time, fortunately. Getting drunk.”

“And on the other nights?”

“What other nights?” asked Turrell rather vacantly.

“If the police were logical, after asking you about your movements on the night of Joyce Ribbing's murder they would have gone on to the other two murders.”

“I never thought of that. They didn't, though. It wouldn't have been much use. I've no idea where I was. At a show, perhaps. Or a party.”

“You weren't in Albert Park, anyway,” said Carolus, not letting it sound like a query.

“I've never been in Albert Park in my life. I suppose I've been somewhere near it on my way out of London.
Not far from Lewisham, isn't it? But to my knowledge I've never even been through it.”

“And of course you knew no one connected with the place except Joyce Ribbing.”

“I've met her husband, since. Otherwise no one at all.”

“You say you've driven through Lewisham. You have a car?”

“An old Jag. Why?”

Carolus looked rather uncomfortable, but turned the question to motoring, which absorbed them both for another five minutes, till Carolus left.

He felt greatly dispirited. His personal enquiries were finished and had brought him no nearer to certainty. It was true that if his theory could be made to hold water no other woman would be stabbed in Albert Park, but he had no measuring proof behind it and only the most circumstantial of evidence. Besides, even his theory did not mean that there would not be another murder and Heatherwell was a perpetual anxiety to him.

When he reached Crabtree Avenue it was between eight and nine o'clock, the time, approximately, at which all three murders had been committed. It was a gusty dark night and the street was deserted. Passing number 32 he continued up the slope till he reached the trees opposite the school gates among which the wife of the school caretaker thought she had seen someone move on the night of the first murder.

Carolus stood there a moment watching the empty street. A group of three left one of the houses near Perth Avenue and walked towards the lights of Inverness Road. Two boys could be seen on the pavement barging into one another playfully before they turned into one
of the houses in the lower part of the avenue. Otherwise Carolus could see no one.

But that did not mean the street was wholly deserted. In any one of those front gardens someone could be waiting, as someone had waited in all probability, at least on the night of the second murder.

Suddenly, standing there, Carolus had a sense of identity with the murderer, as though something in his sub-conscious mind responded to the macabre impulses which had driven him out to kill. It was as though he understood those impulses, as though he too could start forward when a woman came out of the school gates alone, could follow her down the footpath and understand the mad excitement of plunging the knife downward. Deliberately mesmerizing himself into this, he stooped over the corpse in his mind, picked up the dead body and concealed it under the hedge. He almost felt the psychotic exaltation of the moment. But a few minutes later the reaction came flooding in and he looked down at his hands in horror as though to see if they were bloody.

That was it. The reaction. Within hours, perhaps within minutes of the act the murderer must have felt this exhausting disgust with himself and what he had done. More likely minutes—while he yet stood on the pavement outside the garden where the body lay. He would loathe not only the thought of that corpse but of himself, of his mania, of his brutality. Apart from the danger of being where he was he would feel the horror of being alone, he would look with longing at the lights of Inverness Road where ordinary people went cheerfully about their business.

As Carolus looked down Crabtree Avenue as though with the eyes of the murderer, he saw the bright lights of
the Mitre at its foot. So must the murderer have looked, and in looking have longed to be among other men drinking there. How better face this dreary and grim reaction? To hear voices, to drink cheerfully, to be surrounded by normal contented people, it must have drawn him irresistibly. Perhaps, if he
was
a local, some of them would be known to him. What more reassuring than to be greeted as he entered? Out of the blackness in which he had been astray, out of the night of sick fancies and maniacal violence, he could come to his own kind, to people who knew him and would never connect him with the demonic events of the night.

But how could he enter the Mitre? Impossible to have struck that blow without some bloodstains. Perhaps his coat…perhaps…

Carolus began to walk down Crabtree Avenue at a fast pace. That was it! A hope, anyway. For at the foot of Oaktree Avenue, on the far side of the park and opposite to the park-keeper's lodge, there was a prominent notice
Public Conveniences.
These were so constructed that sexual segregation began at the top of two separate staircases, euphemistically marked
Ladies
and
Gentlemen.
Did this useful institution contain an attendant? Did it supply its clients with a
Wash and Brush-up?
Was there running hot water? If the answer to all these was affirmative, Carolus might be on the verge of something more definite.

He hurried along Inverness Road and reached his objective. Yes, there was an attendant. Yes, there were wash-basins. As Carolus gazed round him he felt himself scrutinized by the attendant, a bad-tempered-looking gnome with an old pair of spectacles repaired with sticking-plaster who pulled at an empty pipe.

“Evening,” said Carolus.

“Um,” said the attendant curtly.

“I should like a few words with you. But perhaps you're tired of answering questions.”

“What about?”

Straight to the point, thought Carolus.

“About the night of the murders.”

The attendant blinked.

“Come in here,” he commanded, indicating his tiled den. “You may believe it or not,” he began impressively, “but do you know not one single soul has been to ask me anything about it? It's not to be credited, is it? All those police paid out of the taxpayer's money and not one of them been near me? It's enough to make you weep. With all I've seen and know about it, there hasn't been a soul come to me ever since it happened.”

“You didn't think of reporting what you knew?”

“Not me. If they can't trouble to come to me, I thought, it's not likely I'm going traipsing up to see them. They'll wake up to it sooner or later, I said, then they won't half be sorry they didn't think of it earlier.”

“Perhaps, yes.”

“It isn't as though they don't come down here. There's two of them in plain clothes up and down every night watching for Goings On, I suppose. As if I wasn't able to stop any Goings On there might be. I know my job. I very soon tell them, if I see any of that. Not that I'd get them in trouble like these two I was telling you about want to do. But I won't have any of that in my Convenience…”

“You were saying you noticed …”

“Yes. I did. I've got eyes in my head. I shouldn't be surprised if what I noticed on the two nights of those first murders wouldn't be enough to tell anyone straight
away who done them. Only not a single solitary blind soul's been to ask me about it.”

“I have,” said Carolus.

“Yes, but you're not the police. What I thought, what anyone would have thought, was that the police would be down the very day after it happened. But no. I might as well have been blind and deaf and dumb so far as they're concerned. And the papers are just as bad. You'd have thought they'd have wanted to put my picture in the papers five or six times over for what I could tell them. But not one has ever set foot in the place to ask me. It makes you think, doesn't it?”

“It certainly does,” said Carolus inevitably.

“I don't see how I can tell you,” regretted the attendance. “It's the police ought to have asked me. If I go and tell you I shan't hear no more about it and there I shall be. I might as well have not noticed anything.”

“What is it you want?” asked Carolus.

“Well, I could do with something, couldn't I, after all that trouble? Then again you'd think the papers would send someone. I've never been a witness in anything like a case before. The police don't like it that they've never had anyone up for Goings On in my convenience. They don't like that at all. They used to send a young chap down to try and start something and then grab them but I wouldn't have that. ‘No Goings On', I'd say before he'd had time to get anyone into trouble. So I've never been a witness.”

Carolus tried a five-pound note.

“Much obliged,” said the attendant, putting it away, “only I did think the newspapers …”

“If your information leads to anything I've no doubt
the papers will be interested,” said Carolus rather pompously. “What did you see?”

“It wasn't Goings On, or anything like that,” said the attendant. “Nor yet it wasn't anyone giving trouble which I often do have, when they've had a few. It was just this man.”

Carolus could not help it. “Which man?” he asked.

“This man who came in here just after each of the first two murders and had never been in before or since.”

“How do you know it was just after the murders?”