Shroud of Darkness
Page 14
“By all means let us try to eliminate you in the same way I would try to eliminate any other contact—to use your own word, sir,” said Macdonald. “Where were you on Monday evening?”
“I was in this house: I have a small flat on the top floor, and apart from going out to the post, I was upstairs all the while, until I came down here to my consulting room about half-past nine on Tuesday morning. I was alone, for I have no resident servant.”
“Are there any other residents in this house?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Cox, who do the cleaning of the stairs and entrance hall, live in the basement. Dr. Glynn and his wife live on the floor below mine. They were not in—they stayed the night with their married daughter in Putney on account of the fog. Pm afraid there’s nobody to help to establish my presence here.”
“Did anybody ring you up during the evening?”
“No. I have a telephone upstairs—a party line which I share with the Glynns—but the number is not in the telephone book.
I rang someone myself, but that was at seven o’clock, so it’s of no relevance.”
“And if I were to ask you where you were early yesterday morning, I suppose the answer would be the same,” said Macdonald. “You were in your flat upstairs.”
“No. You’re wrong there,” said Garstang. “I work indoors all day, so if I’m to get any exercise it has to be before the day’s work begins or after it’s over. Yesterday morning the fog had cleared: it seemed a major miracle after these last few days of Stygian gloom. I was out before seven o’clock and I walked up to Regent’s Park and trotted three times round the Inner Circle, praising whatever gods there be for such symptoms of dawn as were vouchsafed to us. I daresay the milkman can corroborate my outgoing, the postman my return.”
Macdonald listened to the easy voice with no consciousness of ease on his own part. Wimpole Street was five minutes from Baker Street Station, Baker Street five minutes from Paddington, and Westbourne Park a few minutes beyond Paddington.
Still in the same easy, non-committal voice Macdonald asked: “Can you tell me where you were in the spring of 1941?” Garstang stared back at him and made no haste to reply: the faintest smile curved his mobile lips. At last he said: “Are you depending on a time reaction? We don’t find it very reliable unless the free-association business is developed very skilfully first. I admit your question surprised me, but I can see the connection. In March 1941 I was in Dijon—of all places in the world in that year of grace.”
A half smile lightened his sombre eyes. “I am not expecting you to take my word for it—though there’s no proof obtainable—but you might get them to disinter some of the records in M.I.5, if they still exist. I told you I was born in Germany: in the summer of 1939 I went to Vienna, to a professional congress, and thence on to Munich and Berlin. I contrived to stay in Germany, by means which I need not elaborate, until the autumn of 1940. I got some messages through to London—whose value was less great than I believed at the time. From September 1940 until July 1941 I was occupied in a very slow, very tedious journey, through Belgium and France and Spain. I eventually reached Bristol on July fourteenth . . . Quatorze Juillet, 1941. I then reported to London, to the gentleman who had originally suggested that I might be very helpful if I would co-operate with some of his agents inside Germany.” Again Garstang smiled. “It may have occurred to you that I look older than my years warrant: I take it that I’m younger than you are, but I don’t look it. That was a very ageing journey and I’m afraid it was quite futile so far as the authorities here were concerned—but we all took ourselves very seriously at the time. If you ask me to prove precisely where I was in the spring of 1941, I can only tell you that it’s beyond my powers. Most of those who befriended me—and many other better men than me—are dead.” Again he fell silent for a moment and then added, quite cheerfully, “I’m afraid from your point of view it’s all rather a mess. I don’t know exactly what’s in your mind, but from the trend of your questions I can guess to some extent.”
Macdonald laughed. “Then we’re both in the same boat,” he replied. “You said a short while ago that your job and mine have something in common: we both go trawling for our livings. We both ask questions and assess the answers in the light of our training and experience. You say you want to help in this enquiry and it’s plain that you’re well qualified to help. I suggest that you talk to Brian Salcombe, getting such information from him as you judge should help you to understand what state of mind Greville was in—and that I listen to both questions and answers.”
Garstang chuckled. “I like that,” he said. “It’s very astute, and it’s a sort of inversion of my usual practice. I usually assess the answers: you, in your turn, are going to assess the questions I ask. I have a feeling that if I were the criminal I should be in for a tricky spell.”
“But you agree to the suggestion?”
“Certainly I do: and if I succeed in evoking any information you haven’t already acquired, I hope you’ll give me due credit.”
4
When Jenkins and Brian Salcombe left the mortuary, they drove out of the borough of Paddington into the borough of St. Marylebone.
“I always say the air feels different the minute you’re across Edgware Road,” chuckled Jenkins, “but then I’m a Marylebone man myself: born in the High Street—my dad had a grocer’s shop. Marylebone’s my village, and we never had much opinion of Paddington. We’ll drive round Regent’s Park, round the Outer Circle—you’ll soon see what I mean.”
As they drove in that pleasant roadway between the newly painted Regency mansions and the lake where ducks were being fed by youthful Londoners, Jenkins “briefed” Brian for his next job—that of talking to Dr. Garstang. As though with a policeman’s sense of appropriate timing, Jenkins had Brian on the doorstep of 500 Wimpole Street at the very moment that Macdonald wanted him. It was all as neat as a conjuring trick, and Garstang seemed to realise it.
“Dramatic fitness—or routine?” he enquired somewhat sardonically.
“You might call it guesswork,” rejoined Macdonald. “Since you have been good enough to put off some of your patients and give us your valuable time, I’m glad the guess was a good one, for no time will be wasted.”
They sat down in Garstang’s consulting room, the four of them: Jenkins, an unobtrusive amanuensis, sitting out of sight by the door: Macdonald near the window, Brian facing Garstang across the table. Listening for undercurrents, Macdonald was aware that the young farmer was distrustful of Garstang and prepared to dislike him, but so skilful was the psychologist’s manner of approach, so even and kindly and understanding, that Brian’s abruptness and slight aggressiveness faded out, to be replaced b,y a genuine effort to answer the questions put to him and to answer them fairly and fully. The two voices went on: Garstang’s deep, quiet, and gentle: Brian’s so much younger, so much less under control, anxious, and insistent.
Macdonald did not learn anything new from the first stages of the enquiry: indeed, the story as elicited by Garstang’s questions lacked the intense vividness of Mrs. Greville’s narrative, and Macdonald’s mind carried two parallel versions, so that some of the old lady’s phrases returned to him in a visual awareness.
. . He put him over his shoulder as he would have a sick lamb and brought him to me, and I fed him like a baby. . . .” It was later in the interview that Macdonald had no time for his own thoughts: Garstang was asking about the house Richard Greville had remembered in Cologne.
“You were on a road running south from the city, in the direction of Bonn? . . . You passed the remains of a modern church close to a civic building like a town hall, for instance, with pointed windows and a lot of elaborate carving, and reached a crossroads? . . . The lane was on the right, just beyond the crossroads, and the house had three gables, rather tall and narrow, and they were roofed with rather elaborate tiles?”
‘That’s right,” said Brian.
“And was there a wistaria growing up the house?”
“I knew it once. The pastor’s name was Baumgarten: he had lived there for years. He kept a small school for about half a dozen little boys, and his wife boarded some of them.”
“A school,” exclaimed Brian. “Then Dick must have been at school there—but why didn’t he remember? If he remembered the house, he must have remembered being there.”
“Not if he didn’t want to,” said Garstang quietly.
“But I tell you he did want to,” cried Brian.
“You’ve got to realise that we have ‘wants’ on different levels,” replied the other. “A whole lot of our behaviour is conditioned by wants, needs, desires—and fears as well—that never emerge into our conscious minds at all. The simplest way of understanding it is by admitting that we don’t forget to do the things we like doing, but we do genuinely forget things that bore and irritate and worry us, whether it’s paying bills, taking medicine, or writing duty letters. But let us leave the explanations until later, and get back to those last few weeks when you were in Germany. Did you and Greville invariably spend your free time together?”
“No, of course not. We didn’t always have the same duties, so we weren’t always free together, and anyway towards the end of the time Dick went broody. He didn’t want to go out: it was as though he were afraid to go out. That’s when I began to realise something had got to be done about it. Things were getting him down.” Brian suddenly thumped the table with his fists. “I wish I’d never done it, never interfered. If Dick had come on to the farm with me right away and cut out all the college business he’d have been all right. He suggested that, but I said no. I told him to come and see you and then go on to Reading. If it hadn’t been for what I said this would never have happened.”
“Something would have happened, and that something might have been worse,” said Garstang. “The strain on his mind might have led to more hideous disaster than you realise. You’ve nothing to blame yourself for—far from it. Now you were demobbed together and you went back to Devon together?”
“Yes. Dick went home to Moorcock and I got busy at Long Barrow.”
“Did Greville stay at his home the whole six weeks between demob and his journey to London last Monday?”
“All but a few days. He went to see his uncle in Wales: he borrowed my motor bike and had the heck of a time with it. Everything went wrong that could.”
Garstang sat in silence for a moment, then he asked, “Are you quite sure he went to Wales?”
“Yes. He told me so.” Brian’s chin went up and his eyes met Garstang’s angrily. “Dick’s never told me any lies—or anyone else, either,” he added.
“All right,” said Garstang. “Don’t get in a bate about it. But remember this: You could see for yourself that he wasn’t normal; I know much better than you do that he was living under an intolerable strain, and it’s quite possible that his whole character might have been affected by that strain.”
Brian looked at him angrily. “You’re trying to twist things to suit your own theories,” he protested. “It may be all very clever and very scientific—but I know Dick.”
“Nobody knows anybody,” said Garstang quietly. “All you know is what they want you to know . . . want with their conscious minds, that is.”
He got up, adding, “Thank you very much. You’ve been very patient and very helpful.”
“Thank you for nothing,” retorted Brian unreasonably.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“WE ROOT OUT some funny stories, one way and another,” said Reeves to Macdonald. “This yarn of yours about Garstang intrigues me quite a lot: one of the underground boys in wartime Germany . . . and I wonder how much M.I.5 really knew about his mental processes. He was born in Germany—what’s bred in the bone . . he ended in characteristically cryptic fashion.
“We seem to be collecting the usual series of variations and either-ors,” commented Macdonald. “Eve got a report from Fordworthy, who’s been checking up on Walter Burrow—Margie’s husband. He was away from home for three days altogether—Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Rumour has it that his wife’s absence at Moorcock was not unacceptable to Wally Burrow, and that he sought consolation with an old love. Which may be in character and yet remote from fact. But he’s sitting tight and saying nothing.”
“Could be . . .” murmured Reeves, “but I don’t see a farmer like Wally Burrow being snappy enough to use a London particular to such advantage: I reckon the chap who did it was a quick thinker.”
“What’s bred in the bone?” enquired Macdonald. “We’re getting incoherent, Reeves. Let’s get back to plain evidence again.”
The two C.I.D. men were having lunch in their own canteen: the advantage of eating there lay in the fact that they could be as incoherent as they liked, or the reverse. Nobody noticed what they said: there were too many odd conversations going on.
“Evidence,” echoed Reeves. “Take yours first. You let Garstang do the steering and the direction he steered in was what interests me. Accent on mental strain, tension, unpredictability: he opened up avenues leading to grim possibilities. He found a loophole in the timetable, so to speak, and stressed that anything might have happened while young Greville was supposed to be in Wales.”
“So it might—but we’ll get that one tidied up pretty soon,” said Macdonald. “I’m not quite happy about this Dillon girl, Reeves. I wanted to keep her out of it, but she’s very much in it. If she’d only remembered to tell me about that book to begin with it would have saved a lot of trouble.”
“She was thinking about the boy, so she forgot about the book,” mused Reeves.
“There you go again: the psychological approach—pure Garstang,” said Macdonald.
“I call it common sense and no fancy names,” said Reeves. “What are you thinking of trying out on Garstang next, Jock? I know you’ve got something along that line. You can’t keep him out of it.”
“I don’t want to keep him out of it,” said Macdonald. “He’s more useful in it. The next move is to get Sarah Dillon and Weldon to compare notes on the men they saw in the corridor of the train. The evidence they’ve given so far tallies: if they talk it over together they may produce something more definite which may connect up with your line of research. And since Garstang regards himself as responsible for Miss Dillon, I think it’s indicated that Garstang should be present at this consultation. So we are holding it at Garstang’s consulting room.”
Reeves sat and frowned. “Well—it’s your technique, not mine. There may be something in it: but for the love of Mike don’t get too much involved in the psychological approach or you’ll leave me standing.”
“That’s an unjustifiable aspersion, Pete,” retorted Macdonald. “If ever there was a chap who kept both feet on the ground, it’s me. But I’ve always found it worth while to let people do their stuff in their own way: give ’em a feeling of confidence and they often slip up. Now let’s have your findings.”
“My findings,” echoed Reeves. “In my experience crime grows and fattens on the sordid—and my lot’s plain sordid. Bert Lewis: a nasty bit of work if ever there was one, but everybody’s loved by someone. These flash boys have always got a girl. I found the girl: name of Mae Rosing. Hot jazz and painted like a houri: eighteen at the most and somebody’s dream of Arabian nights—but not mine. She’s mad that her boy friend’s done in, out for blood, and what she won’t tell’s nobody’s business.”
“I’ve often had reason to be grateful to you,” murmured Macdonald, “but most of all on occasions like this. You can tackle the Mae Rosings in a way I can’t.”
“I know the patter,” said Reeves. “If the old man had heard some of my language he’d have straight unfrocked me, as Elizabeth I said to the bishop. We won’t have any verbatims, but most of it clicks. Lewis was on that train. He was in with a dog syndicate in Reading, and he was broke—lost his own br
ass and Mae’s too—we were right there. Barney O’Flynn was on the train as well, and they were both at the Whistling Pig on Tuesday night. Barney spotted that Lewis knew something about what happened at Paddington—and let him see it. Mae Rosing knew that. She wouldn’t admit that Lewis had anything to do with Barney’s accident. Oh no. She told me a fine tale about how the boys were out to down Bert Lewis because he’d defaulted on them—but I didn’t swallow that little lot. All too complicated. As I see it, this is what happened. Henry Brown was in the pub, and Henry heard the word Paddington mentioned. He’d have been on to that like knife, and if he’d a ha’p’orth of common sense he’d have gone straight to his sergeant and told him about it. He didn’t—he trailed Lewis and O’Flynn and got coshed for his pains, poor silly juggins. That’ll larn him: we try hard enough to teach these young hopefuls not to go playing by themselves, but they will do it.”
“Their private Everests,” said Macdonald.
Reeves chuckled. “That’s about it. Excelsior, as we learnt at school. Well, where were we? Henry interfered and got his: but Barney O’Flynn knew enough to get Lewis pulled in, and Lewis meant to cash in privately on what he’d seen and no sharing. I reckon that was it. Knock Barney out and leave him where he’d be an obstruction when the lorry came to park as per usual.”
“As per usual,” murmured Macdonald, “or do we see daylight? It’s odd how often I get an idea when I listen to you babbling on, Reeves. You go your way and I go mine, and then something emerges which we might have recognised earlier on—but didn’t.”