Betrayed by Death

by Roderic Jeffries

  The sitting-room had been luxuriously furnished: by comparison, Thompson’s bedroom was almost Spartan. There was a well-used chest of drawers and wardrobe, a bookcase, an iron-framed, institutional-looking bed, a rush-seated chair, a small bamboo bedside table, one leg of which needed to be propped up with a wad of cardboard, and a carpet that was virtually threadbare. The sole touch of extravagance was a very large framed colour photograph of the head and neck of a Pekinese.

  Fusil and Kerr searched the wardrobe first. From the contents, they put on one side a pair of grey flannels and a sports jacket. Fusil said: “We’ll be taking these along with us. I’ll give you a receipt.”

  “What d’you want them for?” demanded Thompson shrilly.

  “Traces. No one’s ever gone anywhere, met anyone, or done anything, without picking up traces.”

  “What kind of traces?”

  “Blood. Hair.”

  “There’s none of that on them.”

  On the floor of the wardrobe, resting on racks made from wooden rods fixed into solid wooden frames, were eleven pairs of shoes. One of a pair of yachting plimsolls — it was difficult to picture Thompson at sea — had dark brown stains on it, and a pair of very well-worn brogues had badly scuffed toe-caps. Kerr put these near the coat and the flannels.

  On top of the chest of drawers were an unusual number of toilet articles: three hair brushes, one of them silver backed, two combs, three nail-files, a nail cleaner, a cuticle conditioner, face creams, a deoderant aerosol, and a hair vitalizer. There was nothing of any interest in the drawers.

  They checked the titles of the books in the bookcase, searching for any which would have shown an unusual interest in sexual deviations: there was none.

  Between the bookcase and the door was a large wicker-work dog basket. “Is that for the dog we saw downstairs?” asked Fusil.

  “It’s Mitzy’s, yes.”

  Fusil said to Kerr: “When you’ve got the plastic bags, collect up some of the hairs from there.”

  “Why — why d’you want them?” asked Thompson.

  “We traced the Ford Granada which the murderer used when he tried to pick up Gerald Marn. There were a number of silver grey and tan dog’s hairs on the passenger seat.”

  “It couldn’t have been Mitzy. D’you hear me, it couldn’t have been.”

  Fusil ignored him and said to Kerr: “You’d better go down to the car and get the bags.”

  Kerr left. When he returned, he had in his hand half-a-dozen heavy-gauge plastic bags of varying sizes. He packed the trousers and jacket into large bags, the plimsolls and brogues into smaller ones. He then knelt by the side of the dog basket and carefully collected up a number of the hairs from the blanket and put these in a small bag. Each bag was labelled and initialled by him.

  They searched the second bedroom and then the bathroom. The bedroom was as luxuriously appointed as Thompson’s had been Spartan: the bathroom was tiled and the small bath and hand-basin were matching units in dark blue with golden taps. There was nothing in either room to interest them.

  When they returned downstairs, Mrs Thompson met them at the foot of the stairs. She stared at the bags Kerr was carrying.

  “Mrs Thompson,” said Fusil, “there’s a question I have to ask you: I’m sorry if you should find it a painful one. Is your husband still alive?”

  Her cheeks reddened. “I do not know,” she replied stiffly.

  “Does that mean he left you?”

  “Lay off Ma, will you?” shouted Thompson, suddenly showing a spirited antagonism.

  She held her head very erect. “He deserted his family.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Twenty-eight years.”

  “Thank you very much for telling me.” Why was it, he thought sadly, that so often the innocent were made to suffer at least as much as the guilty?

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Fusil arrived home just before midnight, Josephine was in the sitting-room.

  As he entered she said sharply: “I’ve a damned good mind —”

  “To pour me out a drink?”

  “To tell you exactly what I think. But when I see you looking so wretchedly drawn and tired —” The anger, the result of worry, drained from her voice. “All I want to do is hold you tight.”

  “So what’s stopping you?”

  She stood and hugged him to herself. “Bob, why won’t you, please, ease up on the work? You’ll kill yourself if you go on like this.”

  “Just for once, love, there’s someone more important than you, so I can’t do what you want.”

  “Who’s the someone?”

  “The eleventh boy.”

  “Stop trying to carry the entire case on your shoulders.”

  “Right now, I’ve no option.”

  “Because you’re so much smarter than anyone else?” she demanded, her sarcasm, like her earlier anger, caused by worry.

  He shook his head. “Because I’m prepared to take the kind of risk which others aren’t.”

  She released him and crossed to the television set, which she switched off. Then she faced him. “What are you telling me? That you’re going to do somthing which will raise all hell?”

  “It’s already done. Now it’s a case of phoning Menton and reaping the whirlwind. Jo, I want you to know something. I haven’t been madly reckless. I thought it all out very carefully, knowing how the repercussions could affect me, and through me the family. And I still decided I had to act.”

  “Then that’s good enough for me.”

  “The eleventh boy could have been Tim.”

  “Why ‘could have been’?”

  “Because for a while, at the very least, I’ve made certain, or as certain as anyone can, that there’ll be no eleventh boy.”

  “Then I don’t care what the repercussions are,” she said, with fierce pride for her husband. She crossed back to his side and kissed him.

  “I’d better get it over with and phone Menton. But not before I’ve had that drink.”

  “I hope he’s fast asleep and you wake him up from a lovely dream.”

  He smiled, for the first time that evening.

  When he phoned ten minutes later, Menton was not dreaming. A man who had never needed much sleep, he seldom went to bed before midnight, much to the annoyance of his wife.

  He listened to Fusil’s report, then said with cold anger: “You understand you should have reported to me the moment you were informed of the identification of Thompson?”

  “As I’ve tried to explain, sir, I decided that because of the danger of an eleventh boy I had to act immediately.”

  “That decision was not one for you to take.”

  But he’d taken it.

  “I’ll be down first thing in the morning to take command of the case.”

  This had become inevitable: it was still a bitter pill for Fusil to have to swallow.

  “I shall require a much fuller report on your actions.”

  Naturally. Menton could be certain how he had trapped Jones, but so far was unable to prove it. (If questioned on the point, Jones was not willingly going to mention the spoon. The fewer pieces of stolen property he admitted to having had in his possession, the better the chances of a defence of ignorance. If he did admit to having handled the spoon, it became his word against Fusil’s. Kerr’s evidence would then be decisive.) For someone of Menton’s character, this was galling. So the chance to force Fusil to admit that he had deliberately and knowingly ignored standing orders was not one he would forgo, whatever the motives had been.

  Menton’s cold, precise voice interrupted his thoughts. “In the meantime, you might reflect on the fact that your precipitate action has endangered everything whilst achieving nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Menton’s anger finally surfaced. “Well I damned well would!”

  “We’re certain Thompson’s the murderer.”

  “You can be certain of nothing.”

  �
��Then there are the specimens which will be at the lab first thing to-morrow morning.”

  “And if they all prove negative? What I can’t understand, however goddamn hard I try, is how a man of your experience can constantly and consistently refuse to understand that you’re part of a team.”

  And the thing which Fusil couldn’t understand — not that he tried very hard — was how Menton could not see that there were times when individual action might succeed where teamwork must fail.

  *

  Menton arrived early on Saturday morning. He brought with him Detective Chief Inspector Adams, a lean, hardy Irishman from Ulster who had an irreverent sense of humour and a regard for the absurd. Fusil’s room wasn’t big enough for them both to use, so they had furniture moved into the games room.

  Fusil and Campson were called in at ten o’clock, and the morning was spent in studying all the evidence in the light of a named suspect. It was not an optimistic meeting, and by lunch-time it had to be agreed that unless either Gerald Marn or Geoffrey Abbott, the van driver, were positively able to identify Thompson from a photograph, then his identification by James had not taken them nearly far enough.

  *

  The two D.C.s from A division turned into the semicircular road which ran through the new council estate which had doubled the size of the village. The younger man drove very slowly in first as they studied the names of the houses.

  “Seaview, The Leas, Homefield. Where the hell’s Three Oaks?”

  “Chopped down,” said the elder D.C.

  They continued round the curving road to find that Three Oaks was the last bungalow in the road, on the apex of a turning circle.

  They left the car and walked up the flag-stone path. The younger D.C. knocked on the front door. A woman in her early twenties, wearing a smartly cut dress in a very bright shade of red, opened the door, her expression discouraging in case they should be hoping to sell something.

  They introduced themselves and asked if Gerald were at home, explaining why they wanted to talk to him.

  “You’d best come in.” They entered the hall, and she closed the door. “He’s two houses down, with a pal. Look, d’you really have to talk to him about it again?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said the elder D.C. sympathically.

  “It’s just that — his dad and me have been trying to play it down and make him forget it. He was real upset, and small wonder. We were, too.”

  “I’ll bet. And somehow it seems to be just as frightening even when it’s all over, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded, grateful for his understanding.

  “The thing is, Mrs Marn, we want to see if Gerald can recognize a photo. We’re going to show him several of different people to see if he can pick out the bloke who was driving the car.”

  “You know who he is, then?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “If you do, kill the bastard,” she said violently.

  She showed them into the sitting-room, apologized for the fact that she hadn’t yet had time to clean up, and left. The younger D.C. picked up a magazine and leafed through it, the elder D.C. stared through the window at the fields, set out some hundred feet lower because the village was on a rise. Mrs Marn returned within five minutes, accompanied by Gerald who was obviously more excited than worried by this reminder of what had happened.

  “We’d like you to stay on,” said the elder D.C. to Mrs Marn, not that she had shown any signs of leaving. He spoke to Gerald. “I expect your mum’s explained, but I’ll still go through things again. We think we maybe know who was driving that car which stopped when you were wheeling your bike home and we want you to help us to find out if we’re right. What we’re going to do is this — we’ll show you a dozen photos of different blokes and you look through ’em and then tell us if you recognize the driver. Don’t rush things: take as long as you like.” He grinned. “My mate and me don’t care how long we’re away from the station.”

  There was no table in the room, so the elder D.C. took the photographs from the case he had been carrying and spread them over the settee. “Have a really good butchers.”

  Gerald studied the photographs, looking from left to right. When he came to the fifth one he checked, frowned slightly, picked up the photograph and examined it more closely, then replaced it. He looked at the remaining seven, returned to the fifth one, picked it up a second time and held it at arm’s length. “I think — well, I think this is the bloke. But —” he found it difficult to explain himself — “I was in a bit of a state, being late and having a puncture and two miles to go. And when this bloke started talking, I didn’t notice all that much about him. Then everything happened so quickly and he drove off like the clappers —” He tailed off into silence.

  “Tell you what, Gerald, put the photo down and think back, hard as you can. Visualize his face. Now, was there any one feature that was specially noticeable? Was his whole face an odd shape? Maybe his ears flapped like a boy I was at school with who we used to call Elly, short for elephant. Were his teeth at all crooked — a touch of the Dracula? Did he have one of those square jaws which make you think of a caveman belting all the women with a club?”

  Gerald’s forehead creased as he concentrated on thinking back. After a while, he shook his head. “I didn’t notice anything like that.”

  The elder D.C.’s voice remained encouraging. “Fair enough. But thinking as hard as you’ve just been doing will’ve sharpened your memory. So now have another look at all the photos.”

  Gerald picked up the fifth one. “I think this was him.” But his voice wasn’t any more confident than it had been the first time.

  *

  Abbott lived in a stone-built cottage four miles from Barstone. He worked Saturday mornings, but not afternoons, and was watching the television when a detective sergeant and P.C. arrived just after four.

  “’Course I’ll help if I can,” he said immediately.

  Wood was burning in the open fireplace, and the air was spicy with the smell of smoke. Abbott switched off the television, then said: “Grab a seat and tell me exactly what I can do for you.”

  The detective sergeant explained the purpose of their visit.

  “Let’s have a butchers at the photos and I’ll see if I can recognize him.”

  The detective sergeant handed him a dozen photographs. He looked through them. “I’m going to say something straight off. Things happened so fast —. I was driving along: been out to the boozer for a couple of half-pints, the boss lets me use the van when I want. Then I saw in the distance a kid looking down at his bicycle and pretty obviously in trouble and a big car drawn up with a bloke in it, talking to the boy. I thought, Christ! that’s the murderer, trying to get hold of another boy. Never stopped to think it might be a friend of the boy’s parents, or someone who was trying to help and had no more intention of trying to murder him than I did so that I was going to look a right Charlie. I just drove straight at the car, headlights on full beam, shouting my head off. The car took off like it was a dragster. I made certain I got the number and —” he shrugged his shoulders — “like a mug I never took time off to get a butchers at the driver.”

  “You weren’t being a mug, Mr Abbott. You did a hell of a lot more than many other people would have done. Thank God!”

  “Only it don’t help you blokes right now?”

  “We don’t know where we are until you’ve checked through the photos. You may have seen more of him than you realize.”

  He looked slowly through the photographs. Then he went through them again, quickly, until he picked one out. “This face looks familiar. But, mind you, it’s nothing more than that: just familiar.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was eight-thirty at night. In two of the discothèques which were open it was nearly as easy to buy a reefer as a normal cigarette; at one of the bingo sessions in progress an elaborate swindle was coming to fruition; in a dock pub a steward called a fellow drinker a po
ofting Scouse and by way of reply received the four-inch blade of a sheath-knife in his stomach; a woman of nineteen, whose past two years had been an unmitigated hell, decided to commit suicide and tentatively cut her right wrist with a razor-blade, only to faint at the sight of her own blood; a gang of five men hi-jacked a lorry from the docks, expecting it to contain ingots of tin, only to discover it was loaded with cases of soup; one of a party of drunken yachtsmen fell into the river from a marina jetty and laughed and drowned . . .

  Menton, scowling, said: “Well?”

  Adams looked across the billiard-table, now covered with a sheet of chipboard.

  “We’ve been unlucky,” said Fusil, who sat in front of the table, to the left of Campson.

  “A case shouldn’t rest on luck.”

  That was nonsense and Menton knew it as well as anyone. Luck, either good or bad, played a part in almost every case.

  “Those two identifications aren’t even worth taking to court.”

  Fusil didn’t have the energy to argue, if indeed there was room for argument. True, both Gerald Marn and Abbott had identified Thompson, but any competent defence counsel would leave their identifications in shreds.

  “So where are we?” demanded Menton, with renewed pugnacity.

  “Where a policeman usually is,” answered Adams, trying to introduce a lighter tone, “in the deep and smelly end.”

  Menton did not respond. He slammed the palm of his right hand down on to the sheet of chipboard. “We’re getting nowhere fast because you, Fusil, managed to forget or ignore every goddamn thing you’ve ever been taught.”

  “We still have to hear from the lab, sir,” said Fusil tightly.

  Menton stared at him with an expression of louring dislike on his face. “Why in the hell couldn’t you have stopped to think?”

  Adams coughed. Menton should not have become so critical in front of Campson.

  Menton pushed his chair back and stood. “At the moment, we can’t do anything more than redouble our efforts to find someone who’ll admit to having seen Thompson away from his home on each of the nights the boys disappeared.”