The End Of Solomon Grundy (10 page)

“The thing I really feel is that one’s got a duty.” Jack Jellifer sipped the new bedtime drink he had invented, a drink compounded of hot rum and lemon plus dashes of not one but two liqueurs to add pungency and puzzlement. “This has something. Shall I call it a Jellifer Goodnight?”

“I hope not.” Arlene, perched on the arm of a chair, studied him thoughtfully. “I think you’re being a bit of a nosy bastard about this, my old love. Now don’t get on your high horse, it doesn’t suit you. I like Sol.”

“So do I,” Jack said untruthfully. “But that’s hardly the point.”

“I should say it’s very much the point. Let the police do their own dirty work.”

“That’s an outrageous attitude.”

“After all, what did you see? Somebody in an old Alvis, you don’t know who it was.”

“How could I see? The hood was up.”

“Did you spot the number, do you even know Sol’s number?”

“Of course I didn’t look at the number. Why should I have done?”

“Well then.” She drained her glass. “If you ask me this drink is rather disgusting. Sickly.”

Jack Jellifer was not capable of being really angry with his wife, whom he prized as his most precious possession, one even more valuable, delightful and suited to his way of life than the fish painting, but this criticism of Jellifer’s Goodnight certainly annoyed him. He stroked the fleshy cheeks which in five years’ time would become jowls, and said, “There was no doubt at all about it being his car. It’s got a rent in the hood which I particularly noticed. I shall telephone the police.”

“You’re quite sure about seeing him on Saturday night with that woman, aren’t you?” Rhoda Paget said to her daughter.

“Of course she’s sure,” Edgar broke in.

“Edgar,” she said sharply. He was silent. Square and formidable, Rhoda confronted her daughter and repeated the question. Jennifer was unshaken.

“I couldn’t mistake him.”

“And you’re sure it was her, too? You saw them go into the house.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Rhoda’s manner changed to sudden, ferocious joviality.

“She only got what she deserved.”

When Rex Lecky got back from rehearsals that evening Peter Clements, with an apron round his slightly thickening waist, was cooking in the kitchen. Half an hour later he dished up a meal to which Jack Jellifer would have given qualified approval. Rex, however, had come back in a bad temper. He said that the scampi had not been properly unfrozen and were like bits of gristle, that the
entrecote
steak which followed had been overcooked, and he refused chips altogether as bad for the figure.

“But of course you don’t worry about that, do you, Peter?”

“Oh, really, you’re intolerable.”

“Not at all. just stating a fact. It’s important to me, not to you. Lucky you.” Peter defiantly shovelled more chips on to his plate. “In another couple of years you’ll be as fat as a pig, but what does it matter to a producer?”

“I refuse to be provoked.”

Rex showed his white teeth in a smile that made him look like some animal, a fox perhaps.

“Some people find fat men attractive. I can’t say I do myself.” There were nuts and fruit on the table and Rex cracked nuts with deliberate care, extracted them from their shells with delicate fingers, popped them into his mouth. “Sol Grundy, now, is a big man but he couldn’t be called fat. He’s just big all over. Tough.”

“That girl he had a row with at the Weldons’ has been killed.”

“So I see. The penalty of leading a wicked life.”

“Grundy was near there about the time she was murdered. I saw him. In his car.”

“How interesting.”

“He’s the sort of man who might do anything.”

“Now, Peter. You mustn’t let your feelings show.” Rex got up from the table, sat down on the sofa and picked up a book. Peter stared at him with impotent anger.

Unprogress

Forty-eight hours later, on Thursday evening, Manners sat in his office collating the reports from Ryan, Fastness, Jones, and two other detectives engaged on the case. He summarised them under several headings: Cridge Mews, Grundy, Kabanga, The Dell.

Everybody who lived in Cridge Mews had been questioned, in an attempt to find out whether the dead girl had really been a prostitute. The results had been unsatisfactory. Half a dozen people knew Estelle Simpson, and two couples had been asked up to drinks in her flat. They confirmed Seegal’s view that she was a friendly girl, one very ready to stop and talk. She had said that she was a model, and also that she worked for stage and television, without going into many details. Men had been seen going into her flat, and the one seen most often recently was readily identifiable as Kabanga, but as Ryan had already discovered, people who lived in Cridge Mews were not inclined to be curious about their neighbours. Seegal, Harrison and Mrs Roberts had been questioned again, but nothing much had been learned from them. Mrs Roberts was indignantly insistent that no man had ever been in the flat when she arrived in the morning. Seegal and Harrison repeated their ambiguous stories about the men who came to call on her. Both of them identified Kabanga as her most frequent caller when his picture was shown to them, but neither of them could be sure about Grundy. Seegal was inclined to think he had called occasionally, Harrison couldn’t be sure.

Manners sighed and moved on to the postcard, the prints on which had proved too blurred for any positive identification. Certainly they did not appear to correspond with Grundy’s, which he had obligingly provided on the sheets of paper he had handed to them. The handwriting, however, was another matter. Tissart, the handwriting expert, was prepared to stand up and say positively that Grundy had written the card.

Tissart was a short stout man who often gave evidence in cases that involved the identification of handwriting. His fees were considerable, and his evidence was always given with that absolute certainty of his own correctness that should in theory offer fine opportunities to opposing counsel, but in practice – as the great Spilsbury and others have shown – often overawes them. It was years since Tissart’s opinions had been seriously challenged in Court.

He frowned and puffed out his cheeks when Manners said that they had nothing more than a postcard to offer him.

“It’s very little, Mr Manners, but it may be enough. What about this little drawing, that’s this Guffy McTuffie, right?”

“Yes. And the chap who interests us is one of the creators of this strip. But I don’t think he does the drawing of it, only produces the ideas.”

“Hah. Pity.” Mr Tissart gave the impression that he would have welcomed the challenge of an identification by drawing as well as by calligraphy. He took the sheets of paper provided by Grundy. “And this is our guide, eh. Let’s see now.” He spent a quarter of an hour with the documents, measuring them and examining them under a magnifying glass, while Manners did other things. Then he straightened up, and wagged a finger. “You understand, Mr Manners, that the opinion I’m going to give you now is based on a quick examination, it’s subject to the tests I shall carry out in full detail. At the same time,
at the same time,
this opinion is the fruit of thirty years’ experience. And although I’m not the Pope, my opinion isn’t often questioned. Eh?” Here Mr Tissart laughed, as though he had made a good joke. Manners expressed his appreciation of the importance of Mr Tissart’s opinion.

“Now, Mr Manners, my opinion is—” Mr Tissart paused for a moment to puff and blow, “—quite shortly, that these documents were penned by the same individual. That is my opinion, sir.”

Manners ventured to say that there were very few words on the postcard. Was it really possible to –

He was interrupted. “The trained eye, my dear sir, the trained eye is a remarkable organ. What you see and what I see when we look at a sheet of handwriting is not the same thing. Take, for example, the word ‘same’, which is repeated three times in the card. Compare it with the two ‘sames’ on these sheets of paper, and you will see—” And Mr Tissart was launched on a tide of comparisons which Manners did not trouble to follow in detail, but which would he knew be immensely impressive to a jury when backed up by the twenty large albums of handwriting specimens which Mr Tissart brought into Court.

If Tissart’s view was accepted – and detailed examination had confirmed him in it – then Grundy had intended to meet Estelle Simpson (to call her by the name she had used in Cridge Mews) on Monday evening. “Same time, same place, same object.” No doubt the object was sexual intercourse, but what about the time and the place? The place might have been Cridge Mews, but if by any chance they had met somewhere else and had been seen, that would be an invaluable piece of evidence. Manners turned to the account of Grundy’s movements on Monday.

These had been closely plotted by Sergeant Fastness. He had talked to Mrs Langham and Miss Pringle, and also to the newspaper editor, Clacton. It was clear that Grundy had been in a very emotional state on Monday afternoon. Manners himself had talked to Grundy’s partner Werner, in Werner’s large ramshackle flat in Earl’s Court Square. A long-haired languid young woman, who was introduced only as Lily, poured them drinks and then sat with her feet up on a sofa looking at Private Eye.

Werner was a lively little man, agreeable to talk to. He said that Grundy had been upset by the interview with Clacton.

“Mrs Langham says that when you got back there was an argument.”

“For the first time, Superintendent, for the first time we have a quarrel. Generally we are very sympathetic, we are in rapport. That surprises you? We are different types, but we have a good understanding. Sunday afternoon I went to see him, I saw that he was worried, I said, ‘When anything bothers you I know it,’ and that’s the way it was.”

“But what could have been bothering him on Sunday afternoon? You didn’t see Mr Clacton until Monday morning.”

“No, but Sol is a temperamental man. When it comes to presenting a new idea, talking about a new series, he is jumpy.”

The answer seemed inadequate, but Manners didn’t press the point. “And on Monday?”

“On Monday – well, I have never seen him like it before. He shouted at me, said my drawing was poor, said we must start revising the series straight away. Now, this was foolish and I said so, you understand. To do something like this when you are angry, that is no good, but when I said this he didn’t like it. I turned round and he caught hold of me and pulled my tie. I am a good-natured man, Superintendent – isn’t that so, Lily?” Lily looked up, gave him a dreamy smile, returned to Private Eye. “But at that moment I was annoyed, really angry. I told him to get out, and he did. Then I left the office myself. The next day, well, we said no more about it. But you understand, although I am sorry he is mixed up in this silly business, I do not feel quite the same.”

“This silly business” – for Werner was sure that Grundy had had no connection with the murder. He had never heard of Estelle Simpson, he knew nothing of any extra-marital affairs that Grundy might have conducted.

“I do not believe he had such an affair. You know this place where he lives, The Dell?” Werner shuddered, a little exaggeratedly. “For me this kind of living is – well, it is not for me. But Sol likes it.” He looked thoughtful, amended this. “Sol accepts it. Marion likes it.”

“He hates it,” Lily said unexpectedly from the sofa.

“He only stays there because of that bloody woman.”

Werner laughed. “Marion and Lily don’t get on.”

“I don’t like English frigid bitches,” Lily said, and added, “If Sol’s in trouble I don’t blame him, I blame her.”

That was interesting but didn’t, Manners reflected, take him much further. At an interview in his office, Grundy had said that on Monday afternoon he had gone drinking in two or three Soho clubs. He had then returned to the office and had stayed there throughout the evening, except for a visit at about half past seven to a pub round the corner called
The Wild Peacock,
where he had eaten sandwiches. This was confirmed, and there was nothing to disprove his story that he had then returned to the office and stayed there until eleven o’clock – and nothing to prove it either.

Manners abandoned Grundy, and turned to consider Ryan’s report on Tony Kabanga. Kabanga had no alibi, in the sense that he would have had no difficulty in leaving his Clarges Street club for half an hour, time enough for him to have gone round to Cridge Mews and strangled the girl. But that presupposed a premeditated murder, and everything suggested that the crime had been carried out on sudden impulse. Kabanga’s clubs were well conducted, and appeared to have no association with prostitution. Neither his handwriting nor Werner’s bore any resemblance to that on the postcard. And Kabanga seemed so genuinely grief-stricken by the girl’s death – at one session with Ryan he had broken down in tears – that even the hard-bitten inspector was inclined to think him innocent.

There remained The Dell. From The Dell had come the statement of Jennifer Paget’s which, if it was true, proved that Grundy was associating with the dead woman. From The Dell also had come statements from a Mr Jellifer and a Mr Clements which placed Grundy’s car near Cridge Mews at about the right time. In the close community of The Dell, Manners felt, lay the answers to many of his questions, but this was no more than a feeling, and in any case what could he do about it?

To sum up, then: the case against Grundy rested on the handwriting identification, the car identification, and the word of Jennifer Paget. It was not enough. Manners had little doubt that Grundy had killed the girl, but unless some other witnesses came forward, or Grundy made some false move, or it proved possible to link him directly with the dead girl, there was little hope of charging him. After coming to this conclusion Manners put away the file and then, with no particular purpose in mind other than the thought that personal interrogation of Grundy might induce him to make some slip, he telephoned Marion Grundy and announced his intention of calling on her husband that evening.