The Players And The Game (17 page)

Hazleton opened his eyes. ‘It’s no wonder you can’t sell the place. But still, it is on your books, and you do get people asking about it.’

‘We do. But very few bother to go out and look at the farm after they have been told of its condition.’

‘You wouldn’t happen to have a list of the people who have asked about the property in the past few months? Or know whether one of them was a man named Giluso?’

‘I’m afraid there is no list, but I’m sure I should remember that name. The answer is no, Inspector.’

‘There’s reason to think the name is assumed,’ Hazleton said gloomily. ‘He might have used another. Or he may not even have looked at the place.’

‘I’ve not been much help, I’m afraid. Perhaps if I knew the reason for your inquiries – if you’ll forgive my curiosity.’

‘No reason why you shouldn’t know, as long as you keep it to yourself. There’s an old post box outside the property. We think it’s been used as a letter drop by a man we’d like to talk to in relation to the Allbright murder.’

‘I see. Did you ever trace the French girl who disappeared a little earlier? Because I am afraid I may have been the unwitting means of putting you off the track.’

‘I don’t follow.’ Hazleton looked at the estate agent with more interest than he had previously shown. Darling blinked at him.

‘At just about the time she disappeared I reported that a girl who had worked for me was missing, a Miss Brown. I saw a very pleasant young man, his name was Plender, and I think he made inquiries. Then Miss Brown turned up a little later on. I think she’d just decided to go home without telling anybody – a most inconsiderate thing to do – and I expect inquiries about the other girl were stopped as well. That’s what I meant by putting you off the track.’

Hazleton remembered tearing a strip off Hurley about it.

‘You did right to report it. Though of course three quarters of missing person reports turn out to be false alarms.’

In the hall they passed Isabel, drifting in the direction of the stairs. Darling came out of the house with him. It was dark now, the night warm and thundery, the sky pricked with stars. There was a scent of honeysuckle. Hazleton drew in a breath.

‘Lovely place you’ve got here. Peaceful.’

‘We’ve been here twenty years. It’s a good deal changed since I bought it, I can tell you. That barn was pretty well a ruin, and the house itself was fairly tumbledown. Would you like to see the barn?’

Hazleton excused himself. He had had enough of Mr Darling, who was amiable enough but impressed him as a considerable waster of time.

Twenty-one-thirty hours, Saturday evening. Back at the station, Hazleton and Brill considered what they’d got after chasing up to London and round the countryside. It didn’t seem to be all that much. They had found out how the man communicated with his victims – a plural which actually was not yet established – but they were no nearer associating him with Vane or anybody else, or finding out whether he had a female partner. Inquiries had been made about a car picking up a girl answering the description of Pamela Wilberforce in or near Station Road on Friday night, so far without result. Altogether, they knew a lot more, but it didn’t seem to help very much. Brill thought it was odd that nobody had seen the letters collected. The DCI disagreed.

‘This Giluso or Lugosi or whatever his real name is, has to be somebody who passed that way a couple of times a week, that’s all. He stops his car in the lane, strolls along to the box. If somebody happens to come along – the lane’s not used much – he turns his back on the road and looks over the fields. If not he opens the box, takes out his mail. Somebody with a car, probably somebody not tied to office hours. You can’t even say that for sure, because the letters may have been picked up at night.’

‘Somebody who knew the postman Rogers.’

‘Or got his name on some excuse, which wouldn’t have been difficult. Obviously he knows the locality, but we knew that already. That poor stupid sod.’

‘Who?’

‘Rogers. He’s most likely lost his pension, possibly his job, and for what? Twenty quid.’

‘He should have thought of that before he did it.’

‘Don’t be such a bloody sanctimonious bastard, Sergeant.’ Hazleton contemplated the envelope and letter sent to Rogers as though they contained some magic property which would be revealed by scrutiny. This, or something like it, proved to be the case. He pulled out the file of cards from Bert Norman, and began to look through them, then pushed three of the cards over to Brill and said, ‘Look.’ His cheeks were shining, his always slightly bulging eyes looked likely to pop out.

Brill looked at the cards, which included the one for Giluso, and then at the envelope and note sent to Rogers. The top of the ‘l’ in all the samples was very worn and almost invisible, and both ‘s’ and ‘t’ were slightly out of alignment. There could be little doubt that the index cards had been typed on the same machine as the envelope and note. Brill stared at them, dumbfounded.

‘But that means – it must mean she knows Giluso.’

‘It means I want to talk to her.’ Hazleton drew the telephone to him and asked the operator to get hold of Detective Inspector Murch at East Dulwich. He had already fulfilled the needs of protocol by telling Murch of the visit they had paid to Westfield Grove. Now he asked the inspector to pick up Bert Norman at once.

Twenty-two-thirty hours. The telephone rang. It was Murch. Bert Norman had packed and gone. She had taken all her clothes, and presumably the typewriter, since there was no sign of it.

Hazleton thanked the inspector, put down the telephone, and cursed. They could and would try to trace her movements. They would no doubt find a taxi-driver who had taken her to a railway station, and there the trail would probably end. Should he have taken her in that afternoon? There had been no obvious grounds for it, but it was in a state of dissatisfaction with the case and everything connected with it, including himself, that Hazleton went home and dropped into bed. It had been a hard Saturday.

Sunday. In the best part of Rawley a day to mow the lawn, clip the hedge, weed the flower beds. A day for golf or tennis, nine holes or a couple of sets, drinks in the club house, then home to lunch. At eleven o’clock Paul Vane appeared at the tennis club, already, as Peter Ponsonby said, a little under the influence. He could not be deterred from playing in a mixed doubles, could hardly hit the ball, and half-way through the first set fell over and grazed his cheek. Peter took him home and talked about it afterwards to a few appreciative friends.

‘Really rather
grim.
You know his wife has left him? He told me that on the way back. He asked me in, and the place is really a bit of a shambles. He just doesn’t know how to look after himself, I know of course some men don’t, and can’t bear to be alone. But then another thing is that he seems to have some sort of persecution mania. He said the police were trying to fix a crime on him that he’d never committed, and that he’d never touched Louise – as though I’d suggested anything different. And he kept talking about how horrible dead bodies are. I mean, it was eerie. Go round and see him? Oh, I don’t think I’d advise it. Do you know, when I said I wouldn’t have a drink and suggested he might have had enough, he positively ordered me out of the house.’

At lunchtime Paul rang up the Parkinsons. Alice talked to him, although her mother warned her not to do so. She put down the receiver after a few sentences. ‘Abuse,’ she said calmly. ‘Nothing but abuse and bad language. He was drunk. You’d think at this point he might try to exercise some measure of control.’

‘What did he say?’ Mrs Parkinson averted her head slightly, prepared for the worst.

‘Just rubbish. Something about not being able to forget the smell of a dead body.’

Her mother’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t suppose he really had something to do with that girl’s death? What an awful thing if it were true. Just think what people would say.’

In the afternoon Paul Vane slept. In the evening he started drinking again, opened a tin of luncheon meat and ate half of it, threw clothes into a suitcase for his visit to Grattingham Manor, and went on drinking.

He had been the subject of discussion at the conference held at County HQ on Sunday morning. Present: Sir Felton Dicksee, DCS Paling, DCI Hazleton. Paling was in favour of bringing Vane in again and interrogating him more thoroughly this time. He based himself on that original typewritten letter, repeating all the arguments he had used originally. He continued: ‘And that outing on Friday night when he deliberately shook off our man had some meaning, surely.’

Hazleton disagreed. ‘It’s true his movements on Friday night don’t check out exactly, but they don’t leave much time for killing and disposing of the Wilberforce girl. And who would Vane’s partner be?’

Paling put his fingertips together. ‘What about his stepdaughter, Jennifer?’ Hazleton barely refrained from a contemptuous snort. ‘I see you don’t think much of the idea, but she was the one who disposed of the typewriter, after all.’

‘A much better candidate would be this Bert Norman woman. She’s obviously in it up to her neck.’

Paling was enjoying this speculative wrangling, but Sir Felton listened with increasing irritation. Was it for this that he had given up a morning at the Athletic Club? ‘Action, gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘Less talk and more action. The Norman woman slipping through our hands, I don’t like that. What’s being done about her?’

‘We’re looking for a taxi-driver who might have taken her as a fare, and her description’s been circulated,’ Hazleton said stolidly. ‘London have found out a bit about her background. She’s been at the address where we saw her for around two months, maybe a bit longer. She lived there alone according to the neighbours. Men came there occasionally, but they were presumably those who were placing or answering adverts. She talked about one particular man named Alastair, but nobody seems to have noticed him. So perhaps she had no man friend, but wanted us to think she had.’ Sir Felton was about to interrupt, but Hazleton went remorselessly on. ‘Something else that’s interesting. The magazine,
Meet Up,
has been going for several months. Previously it was sent out from an address in Mitcham. That’s been checked, and it was an accommodation address, a general shop. The man there has been interviewed, and he says different boys used to come in and collect letters once a week.’

‘What’s interesting about that?’ Sir Felton asked.

‘Just that the Norman woman’s a recent importation. It looks as if she was a kind of manageress, not the person who really ran the thing.’

‘And where is she? And where’s this man who did run the filthy magazine, if he exists?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Sir Felton put his hands flat on the desk, and glared. He looked both ridiculous and ferocious. ‘The Allbright girl was murdered. The French girl was last seen in this district. So was the Wilberforce girl. I want a full-scale search for them both, Paling, and I want it mounted straight away. Every available man, every possible means. Everybody working flat out, going at full pressure. No criticism of any individual, but it’s something we should have done before. Agreed?’

Paling stifled a sigh. All this meant setting up a field HQ, directing things himself, being out of bed till all hours. He did not relish the prospect.

When Sally had a call from Sergeant Brill, saying that he would like to talk to her, she knew that she would have to tell her parents about Louise and Pamela and the letters. To her surprise they were more reproachful than angry, asking why she had not told them all about it earlier. Half an hour after she had told them Brill arrived, and asked her dozens of questions, mostly about things she might have forgotten, like whether Louise had said anything precise about meeting the man who had advertised, and whether she could remember any particular phrases in the letter to Pamela. She did her best, but as she kept repeating, she had told the inspector everything she knew. She did not like Brill’s manner, and she ended the interview in tears.

During the afternoon the laboratory reported on the type-writer used for the note to Rogers and the card index files. It was an Adler portable, not of the most recent kind.

A taxi-driver had been found who had taken a woman answering to the description of Bert Norman from East Dulwich to Leicester Square Underground station. There the trail petered out.

In the late afternoon police search parties started to make a search of Batchsted Farm and the surrounding area, and also to look wider than they had done previously in relation to Planter’s Place. Hazleton knew that such searches are not often successful unless you are looking in a specific area for something that is likely to he found there. However, it was the kind of operation he enjoyed, and he conducted it energetically. He kept in touch with Paling by telephone, which seemed all that was necessary at this stage.

During the afternoon, also, Brian Hartford went to see his wife. He found her much better than usual. She was lucid, seemed perfectly normal, and pleaded with him to let her come home. These were the worst times because, as he knew from the past, the improvement would not be maintained. Making promises that could never be fulfilled was agony for him, but still he made them. Later he saw the doctor, who said that recently she had been worse than usual, talking about men who climbed the wall by suckers attached to their legs, and got into her room.

Afterwards he met two American businessmen for drinks at their hotel. They represented the group that was interested in gaining control of Timbals, and it was understood that if they succeeded Hartford would replace Lowson. On this basis he had given them a lot of information which they could not have obtained otherwise, except by planting a man in the firm. The meeting was not satisfactory. There was a good deal of drinking, which Hartford disliked, and a lot of talk about the financial basis of a takeover and about the need to cut out dead wood. All of it was vague, and Joey Fiddick, the chief American representative, showed some fancy evasive footwork when he was asked about points of detail. Hartford went home feeling uneasy.

Among the routine operations to be undertaken during the search was the dragging and draining of the pond at Batchsted Farm. This proved, however, not to be a simple affair, because the pond was one of three connected to a spring. It was extremely deep, and special dredging equipment was needed. It was inevitable, of course, that Sir Felton should arrive just at the time that the ordinary dragging nets had proved to he useless. He sat on a shooting-stick looking grimly at what was being done, then went to talk to Hazleton, who was established in a motorised caravan.

‘You’re going to need divers.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, sir. It’s only a pond, after all, though it’s very deep. I’m on to the dredging people now, but it’s Sunday. They’ll have the machine here in the morning.’

‘Let me have that telephone.’ Sir Felton started barking into it like a dog, slowly thawed into something like geniality. ‘First thing in the morning,’ he announced when he had put it down.

Diplomacy was not the DCI’s strong suit, but he managed to refrain from comment. Sir Felton was annoyed to find that Paling was not on the scene, but just then the DCS turned up. He had decided that he must tear himself away from the Roman coins at least to the extent of visiting the area. He went off with the Chief Constable to Planter’s Place, where they watched men beating a way desultorily through fields, and poking about in ditches.

At eight-thirty it was becoming dark. Nothing had been discovered. Sir Felton had gone home long since, to swing on the parallel bars in his personal gym. Paling had returned to his coins, and to a new catalogue with some very desirable things in it. Hazleton called it off for the day.

Yet that was not the end of dead Sunday. It was a day which provided Ray Gordon with the first, and in fact the only, scoop of his life. He had taken a girl named Nita Lines on a mild variety of pub crawl, which ended at the Duke’s Children. She did not refuse when he suggested that they should go up on to Green Common afterwards. He parked the car, took a rug from the boot, and they started to walk. Green Common belied its name, since part of it was a wood. They had reached the outskirts of the wood when Nita stumbled and fell. He picked her up.

‘Oh, Ray,’ she said. ‘I fell over something. Soft and horrible.’

‘Never mind, let’s go on.’

‘I couldn’t till I know what it is. I just couldn’t.’

He cursed under his breath, and drew out his lighter. It illuminated branches and green leaves. He started to say there was nothing, then stopped. Where she had fallen the leaves had shifted, and the lighter showed the decayed flesh of a hand and arm. At the same time he became aware of a most unpleasant smell.

He took the girl back to the car, drove off and found a telephone box. The time was twenty-three hours fifteen minutes.

Then all the telephones began to ring.