Some time later he walked back into the town. As he was crossing one of the streets in the business section, a car slid up behind him and a spotlight turned on. The voice of Superintendent Bracher said, “It’s Dr Scotland.”
“Certainly it’s me,” said James irritably. “Am I breaking the law or something?”
“Not that I know of,” said Bracher.
“Then stop shining that bloody light on me.”
After a moment the light flicked off. He now saw that there was another police car at the far end of the street and there were two uniformed policemen farther up the pavement. He wondered what the trouble had been. He concluded that it was nothing to do with him. As it happened, he was wrong about this.
Earlier that evening Philip Rosewarn had let himself into the offices of his employers, Maxwell Gloag and Partners, by a side door. It was his first essay in crime. His mouth was dry and his heart was thumping. Gerald Gloag’s room was the largest in the building and fronted the street. He opened the door with the key Lucy had given him. He had brought a torch with him, but there was no need to use it. There was a street lamp almost immediately outside the window which filled the room with diffused light.
He turned to the desk. This was the critical moment. Just give the front a good tug and it will come open, Lucy had said. He tried it, and at the second attempt the front swung up, revealing a clutter of papers and books and two sections of drawers, one on each side of a space in the middle, which housed account books and was flanked by two pillars, each topped by an ornamental wooden rose.
“All according to the book,” said Philip. He grabbed the right-hand rose, which turned with a satisfactory click, and pulled. The pillar slid out, bringing with it a narrow vertical drawer. In the drawer was a ring with two keys on it. One was large and was clearly a safe key. The other looked as though it might be the key to a drawer or a small cupboard.
At this moment Philip heard footsteps coming along the pavement outside. The street, being in the business quarter, was little used at that time of night. Philip sank down into the desk chair. It was an unnecessary precaution, since the lower half of the window was covered with the fine wire mesh much favoured by old-fashioned professional firms. However, he sat tight until the footsteps had died away. Then he got up, went over to the safe, put in the big key, turned it and pulled open the heavy door.
The front of the safe had another pile of account books in it. More interesting was a steel drawer at the back. Philip tried the smaller key on it, without success. He then reflected that since the drawer was inside the safe, there would have been no point in locking it. He tugged it and, sure enough, it was unlocked. He lifted it clear of the safe and laid it down on Gloag’s desk to examine the contents at leisure.
He remembered that Bill had particularly wanted bank documents, paying-in books and cheque stubs. There were one or two envelopes with the name Barclays Bank on them, which struck him as odd, since the firm kept all its accounts with National Westminster. Then it occurred to him that this must be Gloag’s private account. There were also two clips of used chequebooks, held together by a rubber band.
He had got as far as this when he heard the car coming. It was coming fast. And it sounded like trouble.
He had very little time to think. He crammed the old chequebooks into his coat pocket, jumped for the door and raced along the passage. As he arrived at the top of the stairs, he could hear someone hammering on the front door.
He had reached the bottom of the stairs and was on the point of making for the side door he had come in by, when his mind started to work. Why should that policeman be hammering at the front door? He could hardly be expecting anyone to open it and, anyway, he was no doubt equipped with a key. Philip had done enough rabbiting in his youth to understand the technique. You put a ferret down the entrance to the warren and a net over the exit.
He swung away from the side door and raced back into the hall. There was a cupboard just inside the front door, used for coats and hats. It was shallow and the space at the back was full of old files, but he managed to insert his slender body into it and pull the door shut. As he did so, the hammering on the front door stopped. He heard the click of a key as the door opened and heavy footsteps, two men at least, coming down the hall and passing within a few inches of him. He waited until he was certain they were on their way upstairs, then opened the cupboard door and slipped out into the hall.
The front door had been left ajar. No time for finesse. He jumped down the three shallow steps outside and belted off up the pavement. The driver in the police car saw him and shouted. Then he started up the car and came after him. This was a mistake. There was a passage on the right of the road which was too narrow for motor traffic.
Philip dived down it and pursued a zigzag path through the side roads and passages which lay behind the business quarter. When he stopped to listen, he could hear nothing but the drumming of his own heart. His breathing steadied gradually. There was no sound of pursuit.
He thought that, with luck, he had not been recognised. He had disguised himself to the extent of wearing a pair of dark glasses and an old cap to cover his noticeable shock of light hair. The driver of the police car could hardly have seen more than his back as he ran up the street.
He removed the glasses, rolled up the cap and put it into his pocket and made tracks for the Black Lion, where he found Bill Williams alone in the private bar. Bill said, “Hello, Phil,” and then, “What have you been up to?”
“Do I look as though I’ve been up to something?”
“You look as though you’ve had the fright of your young life. Put a comb through your hair, straighten your tie and have a drink. Not beer. What you want is a stiff whiskey. Right? Now—tell me all about it.”
When Philip had told him, Bill said, “We might have thought of that. The cunning old bastard must have had his safe fixed with an alarm which went off in the police station. Do you think they recognised you?”
“I don’t think they can have done.”
“All’s well that ends well, then. Let’s have a look at what you’ve got. Not here, though. Better come round to my place.”
Back in Bill’s sitting room, Philip spread the loot on the table. He said, “I’m afraid these two lots of old chequebooks were all I could grab.”
“Don’t apologise,” said Bill. “You did very well.”
He was examining the cheque stubs, paying particular attention to their dates. He said, “The supermarket opened in Easter week the year before last. That’s about eighteen months ago. But the site must have been bought at least six months earlier. Maybe even a year before. If it’s here at all, it must be in one of these books.”
“What exactly are we looking for?”
“What we’re looking for is the payout. Gloag was fronting the deal, so the money would have been paid to him in the first place. Right? But the people who were behind him weren’t the sort who’d want their share in grubby banknotes. They’d want a cheque. So—”
Bill’s fingers had stopped moving through the cheque stubs.
“So?” said Philip.
“So . . .” said Bill softly. “Didn’t I once tell you that the spilling of blood and the passage of money were two things that could never be entirely hidden?”
“I can’t see much,” said Philip, who was peering over his shoulder. “What are they? Four cheques for twenty thousand pounds.”
“Four cheques, drawn on the same day, almost exactly two years ago. And four sets of initials. G.A. That would be Grant Adey, I imagine. L.D.S. Who other than Leo Derek Sandeman? A.B.D. That’s Arthur Balfour Driffield and, finally, a gorgeous bonus. H.C.B. None other than Herbert Charles Bracher. The Council, the press and the police. What a gang. What a lovely little thieves’ kitchen.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to blow them up. There’s the powder and the detonator.” He patted the chequebook fondly.
“You won’t be abl
e to say how you got hold of them.”
“You don’t understand the workings of the press, my lad. A fact is a wedge. The press is the hammer that drives it in. Suppose we suggest that these four men and Gloag used their position and official information to make themselves a hundred thousand pounds for a paltry ten-thousand-pound stake, what can they do? They can fluff and bluster, but if they took us to court, they’d have to stand up and deny, on oath, that they were paid twenty thousand pounds each on a certain day by their fellow conspirator, Gloag. Well, they can’t do it. Because it’s now a cold, provable fact.”
“How are you going to work it?”
“I’ll have to think about it. We’ll start with the easy bit. Show how little the gang had to pay for the site. Dr Scotland’s our main witness there. I’ll have a word with him first.”
A telephone call to the Chapter Clerk’s house produced the information that Dr Scotland was not there.
“He walked out, just before supper,” said Dora Brookes. “I don’t know where he went. Someone from London has been trying to get hold of him, too.”
She sounded worried.
“It’s quite all right,” said Williams. “This is nothing urgent. Tell him I’ll look him up tomorrow.”
Mrs Brookes promised to do this. She said to her husband, who had been listening to the conversation, “Why don’t you go to bed? You look all in.”
“It’s the weather,” said Brookes. “I always feel like this when it’s building up for a storm.”
“I’ll wait up for him,” said his wife. “You go on up.”
She had not long to wait. It was about half past ten when James came back. He said, “I felt the first drops of rain as I came up the path. I think the weather’s broken at last.”
Dora gave him the telephone messages. She said, “Williams didn’t sound too urgent. But the other message was from Dr Leigh. He wondered if you could come up to London as soon as possible.”
“Dr Leigh from the Poisons Unit?”
“That’s right. The man who was at the inquest. Not the one who gave evidence. The tall doctor who was with him. He said he’d found something that would interest you.”
“Did he say what it was?”
“No. He just said it was something interesting. I expect he didn’t try to explain it to me because he knew I wouldn’t understand it. You will go, won’t you?”
“Yes,” said James. Curiously, the possibility of saying “no” never crossed his mind.
Twenty
When James got to bed, he was very tired, but sleep evaded him. Every time he approached the verge, some cut-out mechanism seemed to operate. It was as though he was unwilling to trust his subconscious, being afraid of where it might lead him when he could no longer control it.
At last, when the approach of dawn was turning the windows grey, he did drop into a deep sleep, to be awakened by a hand on his shoulder. It was Dora Brookes. She said, “I do apologise for bursting in on you like this, Doctor, but I knocked two or three times and didn’t get as much as a grunt out of you. If you’re planning to catch the nine-o’clock train, you won’t have much time for breakfast.”
“A cup of coffee will be all I’ll want,” said James. He looked blear-eyed at his watch and discovered that it was already five past eight. When he had thrown his clothes on and got down to the dining room, he found that only one place was laid.
Dora said, “Henry’s not himself this morning. I’m giving him his breakfast in bed. He gets these migraines. Some of it’s the weather and some of it’s worry.”
“It’s been a worrying time for everybody,” agreed James. “And as for the weather, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.”
He had been conscious, as he lay awake, of the relentless drumming of the rain on the roof. It had stopped for the moment, but a solid bank of black clouds, mounting with ominous slowness behind the Cathedral, gave promise of more and worse to co”It’s something to do with the winds,” said Dora. “Tom Lister once tried to explain it to me. There’s one wind brings the rain in from the sea and there’s a different one off the escarpment that prevents it from going away again. The last time it happened, about twenty years ago, it rained for two whole days and nights without stopping and the river flooded and the chairs in the Cathedral went floating down the aisle. He showed me a photograph of it.”
“As long as I can get to the station without being drowned,” said James.
“I’ll lend you one of Henry’s umbrellas. If you get a move on, you ought to be all right.”
James had a call to make on his way to the station. He hoped it would not hold him up too long, and there he was lucky. As he was passing the front of the school, Penny spotted him from the window and waved. He waved back, and for Penny this was a sufficient invitation. She came bouncing down the path, dodging in and out of the puddles.
“And where is the promising young pathologist off to?”
This was a description of James which had appeared in the press when reporting the inquest and had been following James around ever since.
“I’m catching a train,” said James. “And I’m in a hurry, so cut out the crosstalk. There’s something I want to know and you can tell me.”
“Carry on, Sherlock.”
“Exactly how old is your father and when is his birthday?”
Penny started to say, “Why on earth—” but the look in James’ eye stopped her. She said, “He’s coming up to forty-two, and if you want to give him a present, you’re just in time. His birthday’s next Monday.”
“Thank you,” said James.
He looked, thought Penny, as though what she had told him was bad news, but that he had been expecting it. She said, “What’s it all about, James?”
“Can’t stop, or I’ll miss the train.”
He loped off, half running, half walking. Penny watched him go. She wondered whether she ought to say something about it to her mother and decided not to.
James caught his train with two minutes to spare and had time to buy a selection of the morning papers. It was when he reached the centre page of the Guardian that the headlines of the second leading article hit him.
Becket at Melchester, it said, with the subheading, Church Against State.
The writer had evidently been at the inquest, had been intrigued by what he had heard, and had snooped around the town a bit.
“The inquiry into the death of Archdeacon Pawle, who died at Melchester three weeks ago last Saturday, has reached a point at which the authorities must be wishing they could call on a quartet of knights and say to them, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ Unfortunately, such rough remedies are no longer available, and it seems that in this Cathedral city, with its ancient buildings and its medieval traditions, the Church is held in greater respect than the State. Dean Matthew Forrest has forbidden the inhabitants of the Close to co-operate with the police. They are to answer no questions and give them no assistance. ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ appears to be his attitude, ‘but to God the things that are God’s.’ Inside the Close it is the Dean, as God’s regent, who lays down the guidelines. This has resulted in a deadlock which the police seem powerless to break . . .”
“And that’s not going to please them,” thought James.
Dr Leigh was waiting for him in his office at New Cross. He greeted him warmly and said, “I apologise for dragging you all the way up from Melchester. Actually, I had two reasons. I’ll tell you about the second one later. It was Bill Gadney who suggested to me that we might tackle the very far end of the spectrum. I think he really wanted to see if our gas-chromatograph was all we had cracked it up to be.”
“At the very far end? Wouldn’t there be a good deal of distortion?”
“That’s what Bill thought, I don’t doubt. And it wasn’t an easy operation. We had to make dozens of micro-readings and compare the results.”
“Average them?”
“You could call it th
at, I suppose. It really meant rejecting the freaks and concentrating on anything that looked at all consistent. My principal assistant – do you remember Ron Highway?”
James laughed, for the first time on that dismal day. “Certainly I remember Ron. We used to call him the Armadillo. An armour-plated exterior and a long inquiring nose.”
Dr Leigh laughed too. He said, “Well, he got so keen on the job that I couldn’t drag him away from it. I should think he spent more than thirty working hours glued to that machine. And he did get some very interesting results.” Dr Leigh looked serious again. “Our results will have to go to the police, of course. I telephoned Bill last night and he suggested that I ought to have a word with you first. He’d have come down here himself, only he’s got involved with that mass food poisoning scare at Leamington. Here’s a summary of our findings. Acetone, butyl alcohol, iso-propyl alcohol and butyric acid. I needn’t tell you what that means.”
As James moved around to look at the paper on the desk, he became aware of two things. The first was that his legs felt curiously weak. The second was that he might be going to pass out.
Dr Leigh must have observed something, because he said, “What’s up, James? Are you feeling rotten? Sit down and take it easy.”
“Stupid of me,” said James. “I’ll be all right in a moment. The fact is, I had rather a bad night and I skipped breakfast.”
Dr Leigh opened a cupboard, extracted a squat unlabelled bottle, poured a generous quantity from it into a glass and said, “Put that down. It’ll warm your stomach and clear your head. No heel taps. There now. Is that better?”
“Much better,” said James, when he had got his breath back. “What is it?”
“Secret recipe of the Poisons Unit. We call it the corpse galvaniser. Before we do any more talking, we must get some food into you. I’ve booked a table for three at a little place round the corner. Bunny’s joining us there. It’s not far, but I think we’ll take my car. It looks as if we’re going to get a spot of rain before long.”
The Black Seraphim Page 21