Toye conceded that it looked as though an attempt had been made to mislead them about the time. ‘I reckon you’re right about trying to get the chap traced,’ he said.
‘Magnanimous, that’s what you are,’ Pollard remarked. ‘Come on. We’re due at this boutique place of Mrs Gilmore’s in ten minutes. We go over much the same ground in a chatty way while watching out for any discrepancies over times.’
Tops occupied picturesque premises in one of Wellchester’s narrow medieval streets, and Toye had difficulty in finding a parking lot within reasonable walking distance. They arrived ten minutes late, and Lydia Gilmore was involved with a customer.
‘I won’t keep you more than a few minutes,’ she said, ushering them into a small office at the back of the shop. ‘Sorry there isn’t much room.’
They cautiously removed boxes of knitwear from two upright chairs and sat down, gazing about them. In spite of its untidiness the office gave the impression that the boutique was doing well. There were piles of expensive-looking cardigans and sweaters on a sheet on the floor, and a number of exotic evening blouses on stretchers hanging on hooks along one wall. As Pollard remarked that it was just as well that they didn’t cater for bottoms as well as tops, there was a sound of departure from the shop and Lydia Gilmore hurried in.
‘Sorry,’ she said once again. ‘I don’t feel somehow that this is a very suitable milieu for an interview with Scotland Yard, but it’s all I’ve got.’
Pollard reassured her while apologising for being late himself, and registering the tweed skirt and toning jumper she was wearing for Jane’s information at a later date.
‘We won’t keep you long,’ he promised her, and proceeded to take her over much the same ground that had been covered with her husband.
She answered his questions with a spontaneity which convinced him that she had not been primed over the telephone after his departure from Gilmore Constructions. Anyway, she wouldn’t have listened, he thought. Her account of the visit to Fairlynch on Saturday afternoon was identical with her husband’s in all essentials, and included diverting touches about the clothes worn by some women visitors to “Pictures for Pleasure”.
‘Standard wear for Wellchester Art Club members,’ she told him. ‘Navy blue slacks, sensible shoes and scarves and mud-brown anoraks, except for the one or two who come here, of course.’
‘Such as Mrs Ridley, I expect,’ Pollard suggested with a smile.
‘Actually she’s not a member, but certainly wouldn’t look like that if she was,’ Lydia Gilmore replied briskly. ‘No, she came in from the gardens just as we were going, looking absolutely Lady of the Manor in a very well-cut sheepskin coat. It was freezing in the wind on Saturday.’
‘It was getting late, too, I expect,’ he hazarded.
‘Oh, no. We went early as I had this supper party to get ready, and Malcolm wanted to view some programme. We came away about a quarter past three, actually.’
Katharine Ridley’s absence from the evening’s celebration had clearly been disappointing. Lydia spoke with warmth of her amusing gaiety on such occasions.
‘She’s a great person,’ she said. ‘She’s got tremendous zip and courage, and dignity too. I always think the way she’s stepped down from Fairlynch to living at the lodge without showing the least disgruntlement or self-pity is splendid. And she’s straight as a die, too.’
Pollard brought the conversation round to the break-up of the supper party, but learnt nothing new. Alix was a good kid and obviously hadn’t much liked leaving her grandmother in bed, so they hadn’t tried to persuade her to stay after about ten. It seemed the obvious thing to send some of the left-overs back with her for Professor Chilmark’s Sunday lunch, and to make Francis take some, too, as he was on his own. Katharine had been cooking for him, actually. No, Francis hadn’t seemed in the least depressed or worried during the evening — quite the contrary, poor darling.
‘So your guests departed in a body,’ Pollard remarked.
‘Well, not quite. Hugo Rossiter went a bit ahead as he didn’t want any food. He’s enslaved a widow woman from the village who looks after him and does him proud. All perfectly respectable, incidentally. His life is compartmentalised. Then Malcolm ran the others back when we’d got the food and a bottle of bubbly to perk up Katharine loaded into the car. It didn’t take him long. He was back before eleven, and actually helped me finish clearing up... Yes, Sonia, what is it?’
A young blonde and with-it assistant put her head round the door and goggled slightly.
‘It’s the police station, Mrs Gilmore. They want to speak to Chief — Chief Superintendent Pollock.’
‘Pollard,’ said Lydia Gilmore with asperity. ‘Why is it that these girls simply never get a name right?’ she added as the blonde head hastily vanished. ‘There’s the phone on the desk. Shall I clear out?’
‘No need for that,’ Pollard replied, reaching for the receiver. He was being called by Inspector Rendell.
‘We’ve been trying to get you,’ the latter said. ‘Something rather important: you’d better come back to base, we think, Mr Pollard.’
Chapter 7
‘Some at least of the pictures nicked from the exhibition at Fairlynch have turned up,’ Superintendent Maynard informed Pollard and Toye as they arrived in his office. ‘Young Mr Peck rang in about twenty minutes ago.’
Pollard was briefly disconcerted. He realised that he had taken it for granted that some local contact of the man in the duffle coat had been unearthed.
‘Have they now?’ he said, straddling an upright chair and resting his arms on its back. ‘Where? This could be useful.’
‘They were found in a shed at the top of the Fairlynch woods, Mr Peck says,’ Inspector Rendell told him. ‘He asked for you, but as you were out he gave me the gen. It seems there’s a fence along the top of the ridge behind the house, a wooden posts and wire affair. The slope down on the far side belongs to the Fairlynch estate, but it’s let to a farmer called Hayes who uses it for grazing. Basing had noticed that the fence had been damaged by a branch being blown down on it last week, and he told one of the young chaps who work under him to go up and repair it this morning. After he’d been on the job for a while the lad felt like having a fag and went into the shed to get out of the wind. He looked round for something to sit on, and saw what he took for a black polythene bag full of garden rubbish. He gave it a kick, found that there was something hard inside, and opened it to have a look.’
Pollard groaned in anticipation. Toye gave a disapproving click of his tongue.
‘That’s right,’ Superintendent Maynard took up with heavy irony. ‘He yanked out some pictures, and wondered what they were doing there. Then after a bit something stirred in what passes for his mind, and he remembered the pictures on show at the Manor, and somebody having got in and pinched some, and the boss being found dead in the boiler house, and decided that he’d better take the ones he’d found down to Basing. Of course when he got back he couldn’t find Basing, and the Manor was locked up: they were all at the funeral at the crematorium here. So he took the bag of pictures into one of the greenhouses, and sat on guard beside it until Basing reappeared. Young Peck was fetched and had the sense to ring us. By then it was just on twelve.’
Pollard looked at his watch. It was now twenty minutes to one.
‘We’d better go out and get the bag, and run it back to be gone over for dabs, if you can fix that for us. Print the oaf who handled it and the pictures, and I suppose whoever did the hanging for the exhibition. We can get that from Mrs Ridley: the show seems to have been her brain-child. The pictures will have to be done too, of course.’
‘We can send someone out with you in a police car to bring the stuff back at once,’ Superintendent Maynard offered. ‘It would save a bit of time.’
‘That would be fine, Super. Another thing, have you got a large-scale map of the Fairlynch grounds? It looks as though this shed could be on a handy exit route from the Manor?’
An Ordnance Survey map was produced, and Pollard and Toye were on the point of leaving when Superintendent Maynard picked up a couple of newspapers.
‘Seen these?’ he asked. ‘They’ve got on to the car crash.’
The Monitor had a short paragraph reporting the crashing of a stolen car near Brynsworthy. This repeated that its driver, killed outright, had been carrying a British passport recently renewed at the British Consulate in Johannesburg which gave his name as George Palmer, his age as fifty-one and his birthplace as London. A description of the dead man was given. The paragraph ended with a request to anyone knowing his address in Great Britain to contact the police. The Flashback had devoted two columns to the accident under the heading ‘Mystery Man George Palmer’. It gave no additional information, the known facts being generously padded out with speculation of a somewhat sensational type.
‘This is fine,’ Pollard said, perusing both reports. ‘It ought to bring in something, over and above the phone calls from Lands End to John o’ Groats by people who’ll imagine they’ve seen Palmer. But of course your chaps are our best bet for picking up his trail, Super,’ he added tactfully.
Over sandwiches in a bar he studied the inch-to-a-mile Ordnance map of the Spireford area with Toye.
‘Manor Farm,’ the latter said. ‘Down in the valley on the far side of the Fairlynch ridge, and on a farm road which comes out on the road from Spireford about a mile north of the village. Easy enough to cut up through the woods, dump the pictures in the shed, drop down to the farm road and out to a pick-up car waiting where it joins the road from Spireford. A posts and wire fence wouldn’t be any obstacle, and anyway it was down in one place. And it was full moon last Monday, so there’d have been enough light Saturday night.’
Pollard sat frowning and absently rotating his glass. ‘I’ll buy all that,’ he said after a pause, ‘but you’ve got to remember that Rendell’s boys haven’t been able to find anybody who saw or heard a car on that road in the small hours of Sunday morning. Suppose the original idea was to take the portrait down to Manor Farm for the rest of the night, and get it away later? What about this man Hayes? As a tenant farmer of Heritage of Britain he’d come up to the Manor to pay his rent, and discuss repairs and whatever. Could he have somehow managed to take an impression of the library key? Peck might have been called away from a conversation they were having in his office, and left the safe open where the spare keys are kept, or his key ring on the desk. It doesn’t sound in character, I admit, but people do slip up.’
Toye conceded that something of this sort was a possibility, and agreed that Hayes’ activities from midday onwards on Saturday had better be looked into.
‘Also his finances and local reputation,’ Pollard added.
‘If Hayes is X,’ Toye went on, ‘surely his wife must know about it? I suppose he could have had an accomplice for the actual robbery, though.’
Still frowning, Pollard shifted his position and rested his arms on the table.
‘What’s so infuriating about this ruddy case is the way we have to keep switching to a fresh lead before we’ve followed through the one before. The Mrs Ridley-George Palmer business is still in mid-air, and we haven’t interviewed either her and young Alix or the artist bloke Rossiter about the Gilmore’s party on Saturday night. And there’s still the problem of the library key, and why the hell whoever wanted the portrait didn’t break into the lodge when it was unoccupied in the Christmas holidays, and make off with it then.’
‘What do you think’s behind dumping the pictures in the shed after taking the trouble to nick them?’ Toye asked after a pause.
‘It seems to me that there are several possible explanations. It was a lunatic move to snatch up a collection at random like that, and X may have thought better of it by the time he’d sweated up to the top of the ridge with them. The hut was a handy place to drop them. On the other hand, he may have expected to be able to pick them up later. It’s important to remember that at this stage he hadn’t a clue that Francis Peck was going to die as a result of being locked in the boiler house, and that he himself would be facing a homicide charge. So he wouldn’t have expected Fairlynch to be swarming with police the next day. And then, as I said, at Professor Chilmark’s, there’s the possibility that the whole business started off as a rag or some crackpot protest gesture, and that there was never any real intention to steal either the Ridley portrait or the other pictures, the idea being to annoy either Mrs Ridley or Heritage of Britain.’
‘You mean that the pictures in the shed were meant to be found.’
‘Yeah. Even if the grounds weren’t searched, they’d have been found by Basing on his next tour of inspection, of course. Here, we’d better get cracking. The chap who’s coming out with us will be waiting.’
As the two cars drew up outside Fairlynch Manor, Kit Peck appeared in collar and tie. Pollard got out and apologized for having to carry on with the enquiry on the day of the funeral.
‘It’s O.K.,’ Kit replied. ‘I came down because I thought the HOB people were arriving. Two of the Central Committee were at the funeral, and they’re due here this afternoon to discuss temporary arrangements for running the place, and my mother’s plans. They’re being very decent to her... You’ll have come about the pictures Bill Manley found, I expect? We’ve got them locked up in one of the greenhouses with Tom Basing on guard. Shall I take you round?’
He led the way round the side of the house. Tom Basing emerged from a shed looking constricted in his best suit. The polythene bag containing the pictures was carefully enclosed in a larger one to protect any fingerprints on it.
‘Did you handle it at all, Mr Basing?’ Pollard asked.
‘No, sir. There’ll only be Bill Manley’s prints on it, and the chap’s who put the pictures in it. You’ll be wanting to take Bill’s?’
Pollard replied in the affirmative, and a stentorian bellow produced a round-faced youth with china-blue eyes and ragged fair hair.
‘I’ve told Manley he’d no call to go fingering the bag and the pictures, but he did right to bring it down and keep the other chaps off it,’ Tom Basing said, combining censure with defence of a subordinate in the presence of a third party. ‘Now you’ll have to have your own prints taken, Bill, so that these gentlemen can sort ’em out. Look sharp, now.’
Bill Manley vanished into one of the greenhouses with Toye, and Pollard turned to Kit Peck.
‘We needn’t keep you any longer,’ he said, ‘and thank you for ringing so promptly this morning. But we’d like some more help from Mr Basing, and then to go up to the shed with Manley.’
Kit Peck went off in the direction of the front of the Manor, and Pollard asked if there was a path up to the shed.
‘Not to say a proper path,’ Basing replied. ‘Just a rough track through the woods, and it’s half hidden under fallen leaves and such. And if it’s footprints you’re thinking of, I came down it myself last Friday, and Bill Manley’s been up and down again this morning, trampling it.’
Toye and the youth reappeared, and a sample of the latter’s fingerprints was handed to the waiting constable to be taken back to Wellchester with the pictures. Basing suggested that the gentlemen might like to take a seat in the greenhouse, same as they had before.
‘You get on with your work till you’re wanted,’ he adjured Bill Manley.
When they were settled, Pollard began by enquiring what the shed was used for.
‘Nothing much,’ Basing replied. ‘Tell the truth, I’ve wondered what it was put there for, but seeing it’s there, we keep it in repair. There’s just a few oddments in it like some spare posts and coils of wire for the fence, and one or two planks and bits of rope. We keep a folding ladder up there for small jobs on the trees, but if anything more’s needed in the way of tools or materials we take it up. There’s no lock on the door: only a staple and hook.’
Toye asked if visitors to the gardens went up to the shed.
‘Well, there’s nothing to stop �
��em if they’ve a mind to, but it’s a pull up and I don’t reckon many get there. Kiddies do now and again, for I’ve found sweet papers inside.’
‘About this broken fence, now. When did you discover it?’
‘Last Friday morning,’ Basing replied without hesitation. ‘Friday mornings I go right round the place to see what wants doing, so as I can get the next week’s work straight in my head, see? The wind was something terrible last week, and I wasn’t surprised to find a branch down. It had landed on the fence up there, knocking a couple of posts sideways and buckling the wire.’
‘Did you go into the shed while you were up there?’
‘Yes, I did, to see if there was enough wire for making good, and there was nothing that shouldn’t have been there then.’
‘Did you go up again, or send anybody else up, between last Friday morning and this morning?’
‘No, sir, I didn’t. In the ordinary way I’d have sent Manley up Monday morning to put the fence straight, but everything being upside down because of the robbery and Mr Peck’s death, I didn’t get round to it. It’s been like that all the week, and still is,’ he added pointedly.
‘We won’t keep you much longer, Mr Basing,’ Pollard assured him. ‘We just want to check up on the chance that whoever was here on Saturday night went off over the hill and down the other side to a waiting car. The land over there is let to a Mr Hayes, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. The farm — Manor Farm, it’s called — is down in the valley, on a farm road leading to the road from Spireford.’
Pollard made a show of interest. ‘There’ll be dogs, of course. If a stranger was around in the small hours of Sunday morning they might have barked and woken somebody. What does the Hayes family consist of?’
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