Death in Albert Park (23 page)

“I have been staying here during the school holidays.”

“Why?”

It was an understandable question in the circumstances. What sane man, it implied, would choose Albert Park for his vacation. But it left Carolus no escape.

“I was interested in the three murders which had taken place here.”

“Oh, you were? Interested. You consider yourself, perhaps, a criminologist?”

“I am an abnormally inquisitive person,” retorted Carolus calmly.

“Inquisitive about murder?”

“Often, yes.”

“Was it inquisitiveness which led you to visit the lodge of Albert Park in the small hours of the morning?”

“Oh yes.”

“And what did you expect to find?”

“Rather what I found. At least I feared that.”

“Are you calmly telling me that you expected the dead man to take his own life?”

“No. I expected nothing of the sort.”

“You are very evasive, Mr. Deene. Please tell me why you went to this lodge as you did?”

“I thought Slatter might be in danger.”

“Indeed. If that was so, why didn't you report the matter to the police?”

“It would have been useless. Dyke had made it clear that he wanted no information from me. I had no definite or concrete facts to give him and I have none now. It was guesswork, or instinct, if you like.”

“Guesswork told you that Slatter would take his own life?”

“Guesswork told me that Slatter would be murdered.”

The Coroner allowed himself a cold stare at Carolus, but did not pursue this point.

“At what time did you find the body?”

“Somewhere round four in the morning.”

“At what time did you report it to the police?”

“Five hours later.”

“What did you do during those five hours?”

“Slept.”

“Knowing a man was lying dead in Albert Park lodge?”

“There was nothing to be done about it.”

“Though you believed him to have been murdered?”

“Yes.”

“I find your conduct in many respects reprehensible. You appear to have regarded the tragic deaths of three innocent women an occasion for the exercise of your hobby. If you have not impeded the police in the exercise of their duties you have certainly done nothing to assist them. And when you came on the dead body of John Slatter, instead of immediately reporting it you callously went off to bed. It may be that you will have to answer for this in another court and I shall certainly see that the relevant documents are sent to the public prosecutor's office.”

A solicitor representing the dead man's family wanted to know what made Carolus think Slatter had been murdered and Carolus referred him to evidence already given that an autopsy had revealed morphine. There was no morphine in tablets of the kind Slatter was presumed to have swallowed. This had already emerged during the hearing of expert evidence and made very little impression now.

The Inquest continued and eventually an open verdict was recorded.

But the evening papers went to town on the Coroner's remarks to Carolus. “Schoolmaster Reprimanded,” they halloo'd. “Papers Sent to Public Prosecutor.” “Deene Believes Slatter Murdered.” “ ‘Callous' Behaviour of Criminologist.”

Carolus decided to escape at once from Albert Park and drove to Crabtree Avenue to collect his belongings from number 32. A group at the gate made him change his mind and he drove on, turning along Cromarty Avenue and down Oaktree Avenue he reached Blackheath and made for Newminster.

Here, he knew, a no less awkward situation awaited him. Mr. Gorringer was a regular reader of the evening papers and although none of them had actually mentioned the school's name he would regard this as ‘smirched' by the inclusion, in a most unfavourable light, of his history master. Then Mrs. Stick, who had so often threatened to leave Carolus when he had become involved in what she called his nasty cases, might really make good her threats. Her sister in Batter-sea, respectably married to someone ‘in the Undertaking', whose disapproval Mrs. Stick feared above everything, might already have read and telephoned. Altogether it was an unhappy prospect.

But Carolus was less seriously depressed by this, than by the belief that he had failed to prevent the death of Slatter and that even now he was leaving Albert Park with his hard-gained theory about all these murders unrevealed. If he was right, he was leaving a murderer free, and one who had proved that he would stop at nothing.

Moreover he was leaving the people in the suburb
behind him further disquieted. Several of them had trusted him with information and assistance in order that he might relieve their anxieties by identifying the murderer. Miss Cratchley, with whom he had talked on the phone, was bitterly disappointed in him. The relatives and friends of the dead women had seemed to have confidence in him and in some sense he had failed them.

His best hope was to formulate his case and somehow persuade the police to consider it, if they had not already come to similar conclusions. Only if they would do this could the matter be cleared up. He had not the power or the facilities for following the various clues which were in their hands—he was, he felt wretchedly, no more than a theoritician while they looked for hard proof. The raincoat, the knife, the cloth cap, the muffler and the spectacles, these were what could hang someone or send him to Broadmoor. Carolus could only suggest a line of enquiry. But he believed he was right and determined to set out his case as convincingly as possible. After that, it would be up to Dyke.

He was putting the car in the garage at Newminster when he saw his least favourite pupil awaiting him.

“Oh dear, oh dear, sir, you've done it now,” said Priggley. “ ‘Schoolmaster Reprimanded'. I suppose it had to come. But you've certainly raised hell this time.”

“Take yourself off, will you?”

“You see what comes of sending me away? You're simply not to be trusted with a murder, sir. I suppose while this character Slatter was being poisoned you were off on one of your wild chases in that rattler of yours. Collecting vital evidence, or something equally corny.”

Carolus walked past him but Priggley followed.

“You simply can't go on like this, you know. It's too
late for you now to be one of those steely-nerved, hard-faced tough boys who face danger every time they go near a case and leap about like crickets among the corpses. You can't do Raymond Chandler stuff. But what about Maigret? Your whole style's lacking in finish, sir. All you do is interview the dullest people and absorb the atmosphere, or something. It's too much.”

Carolus was nearly home.

“Oh, I've no doubt you know who the murderer is. You'll pull that name out of the bag all right. I give you that. But it's not enough, sir. We want surprises, escapes, dangers all along the line.”

“Who are ‘we'?”

“I should have said your fans until a short time ago. But they're falling off. You've disappointed them. The most you ever achieve in the way of sensation is a comfortably fast run in a car.”

Carolus prepared to enter his home and close the front door on this odious boy.

“Anyway you've had it this time. Gorringer's blowing his top. As for Mrs. Stick—you wait till you see Mrs. Stick. Even my merry humour couldn't draw a smile from her. She has got to Speak, she says. She has let it go too long. She might have known it would come to this. She was only saying to Stick. One way and another, sir, you're in for a very difficult day or two. Perhaps you had forgotten that the summer term, so called, starts tomorrow? Your colleagues will welcome you to the common-room, no doubt, after seeing that you have been publicly reprimanded. ‘Papers Sent to Public Prosecutor'. Gorringer will love that. But sir, why didn't you keep me with you?”

“I ought to have. You might have been murdered.”

“I could have saved you from the wildest of your
gaffes.
Why on earth didn't you report the thing when you found it? You had only to go to a telephone.”

“That didn't matter. What matters is that the murderer is still at large.”

“ ‘At large'. How Valentine Vox can you get? And which murderer, anyway?”

“There's only one,” said Carolus as though to himself.

“And you know him?”

“I know who it is.”

“Can you prove it?”

“No, but the police could.”

“Can you persuade them to?”

“I'm going to try.”

“Oh God! One of those interminable statements of yours, full of deduction and elegant phraseology. Why can't you catch one murderer at least on the job. Or chase him through the slums of Manchester or something? You need
action
to re-establish what reputation you once had.”

“It's not my line, I'm afraid, Priggley. Now run along, will you?”

“You'd better let me come in and face Mrs. Stick with you. I have more influence with her than you.”

“Oh very well,” said Carolus wearily and entered his house.

M
RS. STICK
ominously said nothing while she brought in the decanter and siphon and set them beside Carolus. There was perhaps a hostile flash in her steel-rimmed glasses and her thin lips were compressed to a faint pink line. At first it seemed that she would leave the room with her store of outrage, but at the door she turned.

“It's no good, sir. I shall have to Speak. I've seen what it says in the papers, and there's nothing for it but to give you a month's notice for me and Stick.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, Mrs. Stick. I thought you were both quite happy here.”

“So we was until you started larking about with murderers until we never knew from one day to another if you'd get your throat cut or what raggle-raggle would be coming to the house.”

“Do you mean me, Mrs. Stick?” asked Priggley innocently.

Mrs. Stick never took her eyes from Carolus and answered as though he had asked the question.

“No, sir, I don't mean the young gentleman as you very well know. Though what his father and mother would say to see him traipsing round after murderers I don't know. I mean policemen and poisoners and I don't know what ruffians who say they want to give you information so that my heart jumps into my mouth every time I hear a ring at the door. It's not to be borne, it isn't really and I said to Stick today, we shall have to Go, I said.”

“You can't do that, Mrs. Stick,” said Rupert Priggley. “Who's going to make a game pie for us like you do?”

“That I don't know. Though I say it, there's not many can turn out a patty derjib yer like I can, but you ought to have thought about that before. Now with the Judge telling you he's going to send you to prison …”

“Coroner, Mrs. Stick, and his threat was quite empty.”

“That's not what the papers say and your picture all over the
Evening Sentinel.
What my sister's going to think I don't know, married as she is to a most respectable party in the Undertaking.”

“I should have thought she was accustomed to mortality,” said Carolus, making a retort he had longed for years to pronounce.

“That's as may be,” said Mrs. Stick darkly. “But think of the Disgrace! It's bad enough your being mixed up in all those horrors without you being stood up in court and reprimanded and I don't know what. What the headmaster's going to say I can't bear to think. He's not going to let you go on teaching young boys like that if they send you to prison.”

“It would be difficult,” admitted Carolus. “But I think you're taking rather a gloomy view, Mrs. Stick. These things soon blow over.”

“Not with me, they don't. I was only saying to Stick, this is the end, I said. We can't go on working for a gentleman who's liable to be arrested any minute and even if he's not is disgraced in the papers. Flesh and blood won't stand it, sir.”

Was that a tear behind the flashing spectacles?

“Well, Mrs. Stick, you must do as you think right.”

“It's not so much that,” admitted Mrs. Stick. “It's all the Talk. I don't hardly dare put my head out of the door with what they're saying. As for Stick…”

“Yes, what about Stick?” asked Carolus who secretly believed he had an ally, if not a very powerful one, in Stick.

“He doesn't like leaving his garden after he's made it what it is, but there you are. I told him the other day, how d'you know you're not going to find a corpse when you're digging out there one of these fine days, I asked him. There's corpses enough in all conscience. It's a shame for him to have to give it up when he's so proud of it, but this time there's no two ways about it. Not after you being had up in court for interfering, sir. So I must ask you to take a month's notice and that's it.”

There was a break in her voice in the last sentence and she closed the door silently behind her.