‘Go back to the beginning on an egg,’ Pollard commented.
‘Sir?’ Pike looked baffled.
‘I’m only thinking of where all this lands us, Pike. You’ve done extremely well, and I’ll see that the management knows about it. And congratulations to Mrs Pike, too, for her bit of help. We must be getting back to Stoneham now.’
When they were clear of the village he turned to Toye.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I think our best hope is to go home, and take a day off tomorrow to clear our heads. Then buckle down to the file again. We’ll go up on the midnight train.’
12.
Eureka!
Attributed to Archimedes in his bath.
Arriving at Paddington in the small hours, Pollard slept briefly at the Yard before returning to his home at Wimbledon for breakfast. He let himself into the house very quietly against a voluble chorus from the kitchen. For a couple of seconds he stood observing the scene unnoticed. His son and daughter in little blue boiler suits sat on either side of their mother, dividing their attention between their cereal bowls and urgent communication with her. Jane, also in blue, was engaged in a complex operation of listening, responding, inculcating the rudiments of civilized eating, and consuming her own breakfast. Three red-gold heads formed the highlights of the picture. Then Jane looked up, suddenly sensing his presence.
‘I’ll knock you up bacon and eggs in a brace of shakes,’ she said, when the tumult of excitement had died down. ‘Get them on to the next stage, will you?’
Later in the meal he announced that he was up against a brick wall, and had come home for a day off.
‘Super!’ she exclaimed. ‘The Blakes brought me fifty pounds of plums from Evesham yesterday. Now I can jam and bottle in a big way, while you take over the twins.’
‘Here,’ Pollard protested, looking round for the au pair. ‘Where’s Gianna?’
‘It’s her day off. You’re definitely for it. Just what you need to keep your mind off the case: you won’t be able to hear yourself think.’
In the event, strenuous nursemaiding all the morning followed by sleep in a garden chair during the afternoon proved an effective anaesthetic. It was not until the twins were bedded down, and supper had been eaten and cleared away that he found his thoughts drifting back irresistibly towards Kittitoe.
‘Yes, I think it might help to put the whole thing into narrative form,’ he replied in response to a suggestion from Jane. ‘I’ll just set out the facts without looking them in the face, so to speak.’
In a leisurely way, with frequent pauses, he filled in the complex background of the case, and gave her thumbnail character sketches of the dramatis personae. Finally he summarised the course of events. When he came to an end, Jane, who had been completely absorbed, put down her needlework.
‘You do put things over well,’ she remarked. ‘You’ve made all these people with their preoccupations and obsessions and what-have-you really come alive to me.’
‘You’re a good listener: it’s a rare gift.’
Pollard stretched, and recrossed his long legs, clasping his hands behind his head, a favourite attitude when he was wrestling with a problem.
‘If one of them is Wendy Shaw’s murderer,’ he said after a pause, ‘then he’s got preoccupations and obsessions I haven’t begun to discover. If she was killed by a complete outsider, well, God help us. There were masses of people staying in and around Kittitoe. Take Biddle Bay to begin with: it’s a much bigger place, bung full of hotels and boarding houses.’
‘You haven’t touched on motive.’
‘The only viable suggestion here seems to be that she was either killed by a psychopath or surprised a break-in. Plenty of robbery with violence blokes around, and quite a few psychopaths unfortunately. There isn’t much of a lead there, I’m afraid.’
‘We have been here before, you know,’ Jane said. ‘Up against a brick wall, I mean.’
‘True.’ Pollard poured himself out some more beer, and raised his glass to her. ‘Here’s hoping.’
On the following morning Pollard woke with a sentence clearly formulated in his mind… Wendy Shaw had no known contacts of importance in Kittitoe except Geoff Boothby, who’s out… Surprised, he began to evaluate it, but almost at once the alarm of the Teamaker went off, and Jane, a quick waker, was sitting up in bed. On a sudden impulse he decided to keep his waking thought to himself for the present. Discussing it in the turmoil of getting the household launched on another day might somehow blur it, he felt.
His date with Toye at the Yard was for eleven, but he arrived an hour early to do some thinking on his own. After saying that he did not want to be disturbed, he settled down at his desk, wrote the sentence on a sheet of paper, and propped it up in front of him. Then lighting a cigarette, he leant back in his chair to consider it at leisure.
Penny Townsend had been emphatic about Wendy’s reluctance to go out and about in Kittitoe before the alleged girlfriend, actually Geoff Boothby, turned up. Therefore unknown contacts in the place could be ruled out. Suppose a psychopath, either a resident or a holidaymaker, had spotted Wendy, marked her down, and managed to find out that she was going to be alone in the bungalow on the evening of 20 August. Pollard came to the conclusion that, although improbable, this hypothesis could not be entirely ruled out. But a far more convincing one was that her murder was unpremeditated, and incidental to attempted robbery. But thinking on this line brought one up against formidable difficulties.
He drew on his cigarette, frowning deeply. Of course a break-in would have been easy enough. Even if the garden door had not carelessly been left unlocked, there were the windows. These were casements, he had noticed, and it seemed unlikely that all the top lights had been secured. Besides, it was a noisy night of wind and rain and a rough sea. The careful breaking of a pane of glass well away from the telly in the sitting room would have been a simple matter.
OK, Pollard thought, fine, but from here on it just doesn’t make sense. You’re landed with two types of housebreaker, and neither adds up. There’s the small chap who’s been keeping an eye on the place, and hopes to pick up any cash and jewellery that he can get his hands on. If surprised in the act he might knock someone out, but the idea of him strangling a defenceless girl, dumping her body in the sea, and clearing off without leaving the least sign of disturbance is fantastic. Or there’s the big chap, except that he wouldn’t come unless there was something removable which made the job worthwhile, and old Horner declares there wasn’t. And anyway, that type shoots its way out if cornered, and strangling’s an improvised sort of murder. Hell, I’ve been over all this a dozen times, and got nowhere…
Pollard shifted his position restlessly, and made a fresh cast. Taking the timetable of the events of the night of 20 August out of the file, he inserted the recently gathered information about Hugh Stubbs, Don Glover and Andrew Medlicott. The one thing that emerged from these additions was that it seemed highly probable that the murder was committed earlier rather than later. Between approximately 9.50 pm and 10.30 pm Geoff Boothby and Don Glover had both rung and knocked in vain, and Eddy Horner’s telephone call had been unanswered. Of course, there was the period between Don Glover’s departure and the return of the Horner-Townsend trio at 11.40 pm, about which there was no evidence in regard to the bungalow, but the earlier silence was very suggestive, and the PM report had said the body was in the water for ‘at least’ forty-eight hours.
Presently abandoning the timetable, he fell to staring at the sentence propped up in front of him, idly shifting the emphasis from word to word… Wendy Shaw had NO known contacts of importance … no CONTACTS of importance … no contacts of IMPORTANCE…
At this point his flagging interest was alerted. Had Wendy unimportant, perhaps trifling, contacts which turned out in the course of events to be highly significant? Pollard shut his eyes, and thought hard. The people who came in for drinks when she was a dead loss socially according to that bitchy little Penny Townsend?
He was just making a note to enquire into their identities when he also remembered the drinks party on the eve of the Kittitoe Fortnight. He checked his memory by referring to the file, and made a hasty list. Rule out the women, and you were left with five men: Boothby, Glover and Medlicott, all cleared, Jay and King.
He crossed off the first three. Jay … hardly, but he must check the time at which Marcia Makepeace joined him in the gallery at the film show. King…
After a timeless interval Pollard found himself surfacing, his pen still poised over Paul King’s name. Slowly and deliberately he put the pen down and sat motionless, reviewing the events of the evening of Wendy Shaw’s murder.
First of all, a late return from the expedition had thrown out the schedule for the rest of the day. On his own statement, supported by that of others, King had gone to the lab he was using as a dark room to finish editing the Fortnight Film, emerging for dinner, and after a further disappearance finally arriving in the assembly hall with the finished film at about 8.40 pm. This last time would be easily verifiable. In the meantime Eddy Horner and his daughter had left for Stoneham at about seven o’clock, and Wendy had spoken to Aunt Is on the phone at eight.
Much more exact timing was wanted for some of this, Pollard thought, tugging absently at his hair. When did dinner begin and end, for instance? How did King go to Uncharted Seas, if he were the murderer? On foot or by car? If the latter, he must surely have borrowed one without the owner subsequently discovering this: the dormobile was so conspicuous. Risky — much more likely that he went on foot, shinning up the bank near the drive gate to avoid going out into the road at all. But if he went and returned on foot, he must have left Uncharted Seas quite by 8.25 pm to get to the assembly hall by 8.40 pm.
Pollard’s mind flashed back to the timing of dinner that night. Another reason for seeing Marcia Makepeace. She had said that she was driving up to London today, Sunday, and had given him her address and telephone number. Too early to ring her, though. She’d hardly make it before midday.
After the recent period of stalemate he found himself being swept along in a positive torrent of ideas. The film editing, for instance. Had this been a pretext to account for King’s absence between dinner and 8.40 pm? Could the editing have been done beforehand, during the night, perhaps? Pollard had a vivid mental picture of the door at the rear of the school building, so handy for the labs and the Kings’ dormobile, parked where they could be sure of privacy, as Michael Jay had said… Of course, if there’d been any funny business of this sort, Janice King was in it up to the neck…
At this point another idea forcibly presented itself. If the film editing was bogus, it had been made to appear wholly convincing by the late return from the expedition. Had this been engineered in some way? If it could be proved that King had staged a hold-up, this would be conclusive evidence that he was planning something illegal. The firm supplying the coaches must be contacted, and Marcia Makepeace would know the name and address: she must be got hold of at the earliest possible moment.
As Pollard scribbled hastily on a desk pad, the door opened quietly to admit Toye, as always impeccably neat and dead on time.
‘Don’t start chucking your hat in the air,’ Pollard told him, ‘but it’s possible we’re on to something. Come and sit down, and I’ll tell you.’
By the time the ground had been covered Toye was showing barely suppressed excitement.
‘Fits like a glove,’ he said. ‘Start to finish.’
‘Here, easy,’ Pollard said. ‘Don’t get carried away. I admit that the details look quite convincing, but the whole thing doesn’t fit together, you know.’
‘I don’t think I’m with you, sir.’
‘I mean that it looks as though King could have engineered cover for a visit to Uncharted Seas all right, but what made all the scheming worthwhile, not to mention bumping off Wendy Shaw? We’ve found a way through one brick wall only to come slap up against another. However, we’d better concentrate on circumstantial evidence at the moment. The Kings themselves, to start with: past history, present affairs, especially financial — the lot. It would be a Bank Holiday weekend, but enquiries could get off the ground. You can set all this in train.’
‘Then there’s the coach hire firm,’ Toye suggested.
‘Yes. I swear that muddle over the time for starting back on August 20 stinks somehow. We want Mrs Makepeace for the firm’s name. Then there’s the business of the film editing. I’m a bit out of my depth here. Do you run a cine camera?’
‘Not on my pay, sir.’
Pollard flicked a switch.
‘Is Sergeant Boyce on today?’ he asked. ‘If so, get him along here, will you?’
‘I’ll find out, sir,’ a disembodied voice replied.
In a couple of minutes it announced that Sergeant Boyce was reporting immediately, and a couple more saw the arrival of the photographer of Pollard’s team. Boyce was a cheerful six-footer with fingers permanently stained with chemicals, and hair long to the limit of permissibility.
‘Good,’ Pollard said. ‘I’m glad you were around. I want some technical information which I ought to possess already. Better to keep one’s ignorance in the family.’
Boyce grinned broadly.
‘Shoot, sir,’ he invited, ‘And I’ll do my best.’
Pollard folded his arms and rested them on his desk.
‘Take a semi-professional photographer attached to a travel firm,’ he said. ‘Part of his job is to film the activities of what I believe they call special interest holidays, and show the result at the end. Would a chap of this type be capable of processing his film?’
‘Easily, sir, especially if it was black and white.’
‘How long does processing take?’
‘About an hour and a half. Then the film’s got to dry off — probably less for that.’
‘When it’s dry, I take it you don’t bung it into a projector, and show it just as it is?’
‘Not as a general rule, you wouldn’t. Not if it was a public showing, anyway. It’s got to be edited, you see.’
‘This is what Inspector Toye and I are not clear about,’ Pollard said, ‘so let’s have it in words of one syllable.’
‘Well, sir,’ Boyce replied, ‘however nifty you are with a cine camera, you’ll have some poorish shots which you’ll want to cut out, or too many of the same subject. Then you’ll almost certainly want to do a bit of regrouping: have all the shots of the kids or the garden consecutive. You probably took them on different days, and filmed other subjects in between. All this means cutting the film, arranging the bits in another order, and splicing them with transparent adhesive tape. The combined ops are called editing.’
‘Finicky sort of job,’ Toye remarked.
‘It’s finicky, all right — takes hours. You want plenty of space, and a lot of spare reels to wind the bits you aren’t using on, especially if you’re dealing with several films at once, as your chap must have been.’
Pollard sat plunged in thought.
‘Well, thanks, Boyce,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve got the hang of it all now, although I can’t see exactly where it leads yet. I’ll probably be coming back.’
After Boyce had gone Pollard and Toye spent a few minutes drawing up a course of action. Then Toye departed to set going the enquiries about the Kings, and Pollard dialled the London telephone number which Marcia Makepeace had given him. To his surprise and gratification she answered in person.
‘I got off early,’ she explained, ‘before the traffic built up.’
On being asked if she could face a visit to the Yard, she replied that she was not in the least tired, and would gladly come if she could be of any help.
‘I expect you’re just going to have some lunch,’ Pollard said. ‘Suppose we send a car for you at half-past two?’
This being settled, he went off to get some lunch himself.
Afterwards, while sorting out his points for discussion with Marcia, he re-read Paul King’s state
ments at Crowncliff in the light of Boyce’s information about film editing.
The Fortnight Film must have been quite a lengthy affair, he mused, quite a number of cine films having gone to its making, and a lot of editing would have been needed to have made a coherent record of all the various ploys. King had presumably processed and edited as he went along. He had claimed to be dealing with the final film on the evening of August 20, the one which he had intended to process on Thursday night, and partly edit on Friday morning, completing its integration into the Fortnight Film as a whole after returning from the expedition on Friday afternoon. Had he actually done the whole job during Thursday night? Although sleeping in their dormobile, the Kings must have had access to the school building during the night, for bathrooms and loos. On the other hand there was the possibility of an old film being used…
Marcia Makepeace’s arrival broke in on his thoughts. As Toye ushered her into the room Pollard was once again struck by her air of confident happiness. Attractive, he thought, and so likeable, taking in her good figure and fine eyes, wide-set and steady in their gaze.
‘It’s good of you to come so promptly,’ he told her. ‘I won’t keep you long. Just a few points about times, to begin with. What time was dinner at St Julitta’s on the last night — August 20, that is?’
‘At seven o’clock, just as usual.’
‘Can you remember how long the meal took?’
‘Yes, I can,’ she replied. ‘A bit longer than usual, as it was a special effort to finish up with. The actual service of the meal was over by twenty to eight, but there were a few speeches and presentations after that. The dining room wasn’t clear of people until about five to eight.’
‘I expect timing is a problem with non-resident staff, isn’t it?’
‘It certainly is. There are overtime rates, for one thing, and quite apart from that, most of my women are married, and one doesn’t want to disrupt what home life they have.’
No Vacation From Murder Page 16