Killer in the Shade (2 page)

Two men came up the front path and the steps. He heard them speaking. The doorbell rang and was opened by the constable who had been wandering about the house. The voices grew more distinct before being lowered. A couple more minutes passed and then the door of the room opened and the constable seated opposite the doctor rose to his feet.

In the doorway appeared a thickset man with a beady bright gaze. Nothing about him suggested he had been roused from his bed by a phone call made less than an hour before. Behind him was
another man, just as thickset but taller.

‘It's upstairs, Bill. Take a look.'

Inspector Bill Hazard threw a fast look at the man seated with a filter-tipped cigarette in his mouth and left Superintendent Frank Drury to continue towards the seated doctor. Drury nodded to the constable, who followed Hazard out of the room.

As the door clicked shut he advanced towards the doctor, smiling and extending his hand.

‘Nice of you to wait, Dr Cadman.'

The doctor rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray he had been using, rose, and grinned.

‘I didn't have much choice.'

‘I know the feeling. I was in bed when the phone rang.' Drury waved the other man back into his chair and drew up another, seated himself, and felt for his own cigarettes. ‘I won't keep you long. But you're a doctor, so you can help me if you would.'

Cadman accepted a proffered cigarette and a light, and said, ‘I just made sure he was dead. I didn't touch anything or
make any examination.'

‘Good,' Drury nodded. ‘You don't know him?'

‘To the best of my knowledge I've never set eyes on him before I found him up there with a knife in his back.'

‘Just tell me how you came to find him, Doctor.'

Cadman repeated his story. It didn't take more than a couple of minutes. Drury sat as though digesting what he had been told before he asked, ‘Do you know what time the street lights came on?'

‘About five minutes after I left Olive Drive, where I'd delivered a baby. Must have been about five and twenty to three.'

‘And you got here when?'

‘Two or three minutes after that. Not more, I'd say.'

‘You've no idea how long he'd been lying there — dead?'

‘Only a rough idea, from the condition of the blood that had pooled and the warmth of the body. As I said, I made no examination. I mean — '

‘I know what you mean, Doctor,' Drury nodded thoughtfully. ‘How long?'

‘Probably less than half an hour.'

Drury nodded. ‘How much less?'

‘Difficult to say, and I've been here over an hour,' Cadman reminded the detective.

‘Could it have been just a few minutes?'

‘How few?' the doctor asked cagily.

‘Two or three.'

They looked at each other. What the detective was thinking became apparent to the man watching him. John Cadman cleared his throat before saying, ‘I sat outside for a few minutes debating whether to poke my nose inside.'

‘Glad you did.'

‘But it could have been only five minutes since he'd been struck down.'

Drury removed a tobacco shred from his lip, frowned at it. ‘That would make it about the time the street lights came on. Would you agree?'

‘I can only agree that it's possible. As I said, I made no examination.'

Drury rose. ‘Well, let's repair the
omission, Doctor, if that's all right with you.'

Cadman prised himself up from his chair, and said with a look of inquiry, ‘You're not bringing a police surgeon?'

‘Later, Doctor. Just now you're here, a doctor, and also the man who found him. I feel I shouldn't waste a unique opportunity.'

The two men stared at each other. The detective was smiling, but the doctor felt a stab of something he could only describe as fear. Could it be that Drury suspected him of being the killer and acting clever? It was a discouraging and depressing thought, and he found himself suspicious of the Superintendent's smile of encouragement.

‘I haven't had any experience of police work. I felt you should know,' he added lamely.

‘Most doctors haven't,' Drury nodded. ‘But you're a local man and, as I said, you're here. You could be very helpful, Dr Cadman, if you would.'

Put like that the other felt he was unable to offer further objection.

‘Of course,' he agreed. ‘Whatever I can do. I'd better get my bag of tools from the car. That's what I call them,' he explained when Drury looked surprised.

‘Yes, get your tools, Doctor, by all means.'

John Cadman reached the door before turning to say, ‘If this is going to take some time I think I'd better phone my wife. I wanted to earlier, but one of the constables suggested it might be better to wait until you arrived, Superintendent.'

‘He was being careful, that's all,' Drury admitted. ‘But this isn't going to take long. No need to wake your wife — that is, unless you wish to.'

Cadman frowned, still not easy in his mind at the way the detective was handling him.

‘No reason. I just thought — ' He broke off. ‘No matter. I'll get my kit.'

‘I'll be upstairs. Join me when you come in.'

It was as he walked out of the house to reach his car that John Cadman recalled those past occasions when he had imagined himself caught
up in a murder drama, a person of perception and unusual reasoning power, with unplumbed reserves of physical and mental strength, who was able to put the police right when they went wrong. Such thoughts had always been purest fantasy, but now he was involved in a murder case. The dream, the mental game of pretence, had become reality, and all he wished was to be back in his car an hour and a half earlier and driving past that open front door with the light blazing into the garden.

He was halfway along the garden path to the white-painted gate when he saw her. She was not much more than a shadow etched with light at the edges as she darted from one dark bush to the next. Her shoes made no sound on the lawn.

One moment she was moving, the next she was not there, but in that moment he had seen her face and read the fear in her eyes.

He didn't turn his head. He kept walking as though he had seen nothing, but he had trouble with his breathing,
and he tried to convince himself it had been a trick of the poor light, but he knew otherwise. She was there among the bushes. He had only to call to her and she would be discovered, but he knew he couldn't do that.

He reached the gate and went to his car, picked up his black bag and returned to the house without looking to right or left, though this time he did see the black letters on the top rail of the gate. They spelled out the name ‘Holly Lawn'. Probably the dark shrubs were holly bushes.

He walked upstairs, watched by one of the constables, and entered the room where Drury and his assistant were turning out the dead man's pockets. Someone had removed the knife from the man's back, and the doctor noticed that the man had a fair moustache. He looked round the room, seeing it clearly for the first time.

It was a first-floor room overlooking the rear garden. The paintwork was fresh and the curtains clean. There were two divan beds, both covered with candlewick
bedspreads of identical design. A padded chair was under the window next to a table with a reading lamp that had not been turned on. There was a hard-backed chair beyond the table with a paperback novel on it. The room had walnut wardrobes, matching in design, besides a large wall cupboard with sliding doors. There were two pictures on opposite walls. Both were still-lifes. In one corner was a wash-basin, with over its mirror some strip lighting and on the narrow glass shelf a bright green-handled toothbrush in a glass tumbler.

That was all he had time to take in, but his impression was of a comfortable bedroom where a man could settle to a good night's rest, and then Drury said, ‘Ah, Doctor, there you are. I've removed the knife. My impression is that whoever stabbed him knew something of anatomy. The blade reached the heart. Would you confirm that, please, and consider again when it is likely he died?'

‘I'll have to get some of the clothes off him,' Cadman said.

‘Of course. Bill, give me a hand with
him. He wasn't a lightweight, whoever he was.'

Fifteen minutes later the detectives and the doctor were in agreement about the time of death. It had very likely occurred as the street lights came on. There was also agreement about the ability of the killer, for his knife had reached the heart of the man stabbed in the back.

‘Take a look at it, Doctor,' Drury said, holding in a towel he had probably taken from the bathroom the bloodstained weapon that had been plunged in the unknown's body. He put it on the floor and added, ‘Now come downstairs and take a look.'

Cadman had closed his black case. He picked it up, nodded to Bill Hazard, and followed Drury out of the room and down the stairs and into another room opening off the hall. The door was opposite the door of the room where he had sat earlier. When he drew up inside the room he stood looking to where Drury was frowning at a finely carved cabinet of some well-polished dark wood with a plate-glass top. Under the glass,
set out on a ground of blue velvet, was a collection of nearly a dozen knives and daggers, ranging from thin-bladed stilettos to a large curved kris. There was one space unfilled. It was in the center of the collection.

‘Would you say that is where the weapon came from, Doctor?' Drury asked without turning his head to look at the man he addressed.

‘It would seem so.'

‘Yet the cabinet's locked.'

Cadman said nothing. Drury looked at him, and the doctor again experienced that feeling of not being trusted by the detective.

‘You saw no one leave, did you?' Drury asked.

‘No one.'

‘Nor anyone hurrying along the road as you turned the corner?'

‘No.'

‘Strange,' said Drury. ‘Damned strange. Wouldn't you agree, Doctor?'

‘I'm not a detective,' Cadman said, and disliked the sound of the defensive note in his own voice.

Drury gave him that sardonic smile he was coming to know.

‘That's right, Doctor, you're not.'

‘In that case, perhaps you don't need me any more.'

Drury nodded. ‘Not at the moment, Dr Cadman, and thank you for your assistance. I shall want a formal statement from you later. In the meantime, salvage what you can of the night. Nothing else you've thought of?'

The question came as Cadman was on the point of turning back to the hall and leaving. He jerked to a halt as though struck a physical blow.

What made the superintendent ask that question? Had he seen the girl in the front garden?

He recovered quickly and turned to say, ‘Only that I've been expecting your — what are they called? — technical crew. You know, fingerprint men and suchlike. They haven't turned up.'

‘They'll be along, Doctor. Usually I prefer to have a look round first without too many people in the way. Besides, I hate getting graphite on my fingers.'

Dr Cadman nodded again and left. He walked at an even pace to his car and did not look to right or left while leaving the front garden. He felt guilty at keeping from Drury the fact that he had recognized his nephew's fiancée at a most improbable hour darting like a phantom from bush to bush in the front garden of a house where only a short while before a man had been stabbed to death.

As he drove along Croft Avenue his mind was troubled for a number of sharply conflicting reasons.

Behind him in Holly Lawn he left a puzzled Frank Drury scowling at the broad back of Bill Hazard as the big inspector fingered his way through the contents of an open wardrobe.

‘I just asked him if he'd thought of anything else, and he jerked to a stop as though I'd shot him,' Drury said, a man puzzled by something he had witnessed that he could not explain. ‘What the hell do you make of that, Bill?'

‘He may have thought of something that had nothing to do with this killing, but your words reminded him,' said
Hazard, continuing with his search.

‘No, he turned to say he'd expected to see what he called our technical crew arrive. I saw his face. It was a put-off. He'd thought of something and was covering up. I can't think why.'

There was the sound of a car pulling in to the kerb in the street and the double slam of car doors.

Bill Hazard looked over his shoulder.

‘Here they are. I'd better get an ambulance moving in this direction.'

‘Yes, do that,' Drury nodded, ‘and then look up Dr John Cadman in the directory and take a note of his number.'

Dr John Cadman was finishing his favourite breakfast of bacon, egg, and tomato at a few minutes to eight. He made it a rule not to allow late-night calls to interfere with his daily routine and enjoyed as a consequence the reputation of a G.P. who did not rush his surgery hours.

His wife, still a pretty woman after twenty years of marriage to a husband who had broken nights, had heard of the discovery in Croft Avenue. Toast and coffee was all she would take for her first meal of the day, and she was sipping her second cup when she said, ‘I remember the house because of the name Holly Lawn. I always thought it a peculiar name, though it's certainly fitting.'

Her husband looked up from his plate and grinned one-sidedly as he said, ‘When I left the damned place, Judy, I could
have thought of several more appropriate names, none of them printable.'

‘Anything's printable these days,' she reminded him. ‘Though that doesn't necessarily imply it's readable.'

John Cadman's eyes widened as he stared at his wife, and his sardonic grin became suddenly lost. He had never ceased from being surprised at such unexpected but penetrating remarks his wife made without any warning. Their eyes met. She smiled and he nodded in a way she had come to know denoted vague approval for a reason she seldom understood. But after twenty years of what she deemed a successful marriage, she didn't feel that reasons were as important as they once might have been to a new wife anxious about the future.