GFU04 - The Cornish Pixie Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "Don't worry," the girl reassured him. "I tell you he was far too busy being flattered and struggling to play the unaccustomed role of the gallant himself. He was sweet. Those big fatherly ones are always a piece of cake."

  "Okay, then. We're on our way… Forgive me for being obtuse, April — but I'm afraid I still can't quite see why we're on our way, just the same. On this particular deal, I mean. What good is it going to do us?"

  She laid a hand on his arm. "Look, Mark," she said; "we're floating around in a bit of a mess, aren't we, not knowing what's a police job, what's our job, and who's involved in which?"

  "Too true."

  "All we know is that everybody seems to be involved in something. And the easiest way to sort out our own pigeons from those of the police — if indeed there is any difference — is to find out for ourselves precisely what everybody really is up to."

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  "Well, we happen to have a big advantage over the police here. They have to have a warrant before they search anything. And they have to have a good reason before they get a warrant. Because we work undercover, we can get in without a warrant—"

  "Illegally."

  "— illegally, as you say. But it's a much quicker way of finding things out, I think you'll agree!"

  "Oh, the point is taken," Slate said carelessly, "and all the principles accepted. It's just that I don't see this particular one, as I say."

  "The Bosustows, you mean?"

  Slate nodded.

  "Because they are obstructing the police, for one thing. According to your friend Curnow, the old man practically tries to stop them coming in every time they want to ask a question, doesn't he?"

  "That's true; he does. I've seen him being pretty unpleasant to Curnow myself."

  "And he never gives a straight answer, never volunteers anything, and only talks at all if it's dragged from him?"

  Again the agent murmured an affirmative.

  "Well, why?" April demanded. "You'd think he'd be only too glad to have the thing cleared up as speedily as possible. After all, she was murdered on his property, while she was working for him — and it can't be all that good for business having a permanent boy in blue at the gate, I imagine!"

  "True again. And I suppose the same thing goes for your other bird?"

  "The son? Certainly... We've got to find out what they're up to — and if it's connected with us in any way. At the moment we have a minor agent killed, possibly in the course of duty, possibly not; we have the possibility that she had discovered something going on at the DEWS station behind the town; we have the possibility that she was part of a jealous triangle — the other two members being the local squire and a stone worker. In the cast also are suspicious families, intruders in the night, people who roll rocks on cars, and at least one — possibly two — murderers. To say nothing of complaisant wives striking up acquaintances with us and then joining a queue of boys seeking to buy a non-existent pixie!"

  "To all of which must be added another possibility," said Mark. "That the said queue was in some way connected with a dope ring. It certainly looks as though asking for a black Porphyry pixie was, as you thought, a code. And the lucky winner was handed, not a pixie, but a black Porphyry light house — a secret compartment in which was filled with a mysterious white powder."

  "Well, there you are!" the girl said triumphantly. "There may be more than one mystery to solve here, and the sooner we start our process of elimination, the better... You did send the powder to an analyst, by the way?"

  "Yes. I had to send it to a firm in Truro. There didn't seem anyone suitable nearer. These people work for some of the big private investigation agencies and they're on the books of London HQ as being okay. I put it on the train at Helston just before lunch."

  "Good… Look, here's the hut the old man uses as a kind of general office. I saw the wife of the brother who was murdered staggering in here laden with books today — the big, brassy one, isn't it? — and if, as you say, she's the one who keeps the accounts, then we should be able to find out something or other about something in here!"

  Mark Slate drew a rectangular bakelite box from the pocket of his raincoat, moistened the four tiny suction cups at the corners, and clamped it firmly to the door of the hut over the lock — which was surprisingly robust for so flimsy a structure. He crouched down, switched on the pencil beam of a fountain-pen torch for the briefest of moments, and manipulated a pair of knobs with milled edges. A few seconds later, there was a distinctive, heavy click above the pelting of the rain. He stood up. "That's that one," he said. "There's only the ordinary mortice now — I think I'll borrow your twirls, if you have 'em on you, lovey."

  April handed him a bunch of skeleton keys. After the third attempt, he gave a grunt of satisfaction and twisted the handle. The door swung inwards.

  The hut smelled of linseed oil and old books. It was stuffy and airless and the rain drummed exasperatingly on the asphalt roof. In the thin ray of light from the torch, they saw that it was furnished only with a scarred table, a swivelling office chair with the stuffing showing through a hole in the seat, a poorly made shelf full of reference books, and three steel filing cabinets, all of which were locked.

  "Oh, well — here we go again," Slate murmured, taking the bakelite device from his pocket once more. "Thank goodness this electronic monster leaves this kind of lock so that it automatically springs shut again when you close the drawer! There's nothing I hate more than going round un-picking locks that I've just opened, when I leave a place."

  Each of the cabinets had four drawers, and most of them — Mark saw as soon as he had opened them successfully — were full of files dealing with the normal day-to-day affairs of the circus: invoices, bills and receipts for goods purchased; cancelled cheques; wages slips; details of employment; insurance papers; Pay-As-You-Earn documents, and so on. One drawer, however — the bottom one in the cabinet furthest from the door — seemed to interest him especially. After a glance at the ledger nearest the front, he pulled out all the files and books inside and carried them over to the table.

  "Found something?" April asked. "You're the one with the diploma in bookkeeping. So if you have, you're on your own, mate!"

  "Books of the circus," he explained absently, subsiding into the old chair and shading the tiny flashlight with one cupped hand. "The kind that get audited and shown to Her Majesty's Inspector of Taxes... if you're unlucky. And there seem to be two sets, what's more. The plot, as they say, thickens."

  For some time, he worked in silence, opening ledgers and running a finger down columns of figures, rifling through pages in another book and comparing them with the entries there, jotting down an occasional note on a scrap of paper he had taken from his own pocket. April sat on the window ledge and watched the shaded beam of the light race up and down the ruled pages. From time to time, her companion gave a grunt — though whether it was of astonishment or of satisfaction she couldn't tell. Once he gave a low, long whistle — and once he erupted into a short bark of laughter, instantly stifled. Finally he shut the last book with a snap, leaned back in the creaking chair, swivelled himself round to face her and stretched his arms above his head.

  "Well, double-entry bookkeeping does have its advantages," he said; "especially when there are two different sets of books as well! But I've never seen anything quite like this before. Either the woman's mad, or she's a near-genius!"

  "The books are cooked?" she asked.

  "Not so much cooked as incinerated. There's absolutely no relation between the two sets. The ones they show to the auditors and to the tax people show a profit margin so slender that it's only just worth while their going on; the books presenting the real situation show that in fact they're rolling in money. All summer, while they're touring, the loot pours in; and even here in winter, mainly due to low overheads and few staff, they make a healthy little profit!"

  "No wonder the old man is always bleating about the lack of trade here in the winter! If he's tol
d me once that nobody spends in Porthallow, he's told me a dozen times!... The two sets of books are quite different, you say?"

  "Entirely. And yet, you see — if anyone made a spot check, there are certain sets of figures common to both, certain correspondences... It's quite brilliant: anyone with only the 'official' set, plus the genuine invoices and receipts and so on, would almost certainly pass them. I'd defy anyone to spot it first time — anyone who wasn't already suspicious, that is." He shook his head in reluctant admiration of the brassy Mrs. Bosustow.

  "Right," April said crisply, sliding from her perch to the ground. "So we know the old boy and his family had good reason to object to busybodies prying about in the circus, especially police busybodies: they were cheating the income tax authorities in a big way. I guess that lets the old boy out of our net."

  "Yes. It seems reason enough both for his surliness and his obstructiveness. What about the murdered son, though?"

  April hesitated. "I still think we should have a look around," she said at last. "I know he was a member of the family and this crookery covers him too. But in my view he qualifies for separate treatment on two counts: as the brother of a murder suspect; and as a murder victim himself — whether or not the two are connected."

  "Okay, then. We'll go," Mark agreed. "You're sure her caravan's empty?"

  "Certain. The widow — your financier of near-genius — is spending a few nights with her sister-in-law. I helped her take over some of her stuff this afternoon. The caravan's at the other end of the—"

  "Yes, I've been there, if it's the equestrienne," Mark interrupted. "Her own caravan, the late Harry's that is, is the converted furniture lorry, isn't it?"

  "You could call it that — though I imagine the owner would hardly be flattered. The important thing about it, to us, is that there are shutters and curtains on the windows, so that we shan't have to be quite so careful about lights as we have been here."

  "Who's next door?"

  "By a strange coincidence, I am... on one side. The other side is just trees beyond a fence: the caravan's the end of the line on the side away from the road."

  "What, then," Mark said, "are we waiting for?" He replaced the books, slid shut the filing drawers, turned the chair back to face the desk, and held open the door for April.

  Ten minutes later, securely shuttered against the outer world, they were sitting at the table where Mark had seen Harry Bosustow going through his candid-camera negatives. The bow legged accountant who wore too much makeup had removed all her ledgers to the hut they had just left, Bosustow's own effects had obviously been removed by the police in the hope that they might yield a clue to his killer, and his wife clearly believed in tidying everything away before she went to stay with friends. In all the glittering array of highly polished veneer cupboards and drawers and shelves, there was neither a personal belonging nor a book nor a picture to be seen.

  "Well, I've heard of austere living quarters," Mark said, "but this is ridiculous! Come on: we simply have to something..."

  Together, they ransacked the place. They inspected the china and utensils in the immaculate kitchen; they investigated wardrobes; they turned over the neatly ranged contents of drawers. And there was nothing, nothing remotely suspicious, incriminating or even interesting. The private life of the late Harry Bosustow seemed to have been as sterile as his home.

  "But, good God, there must be something," Mark exploded at last. "I mean, the chap must have at least had a picture of his nephew or... Hey! That's odd! Now that I come to think of it, where are his photos?"

  "What photos?"

  "The ones he made his living from. The candid-camera stuff on the seafront and in the circus. Ma getting into a fishing boat to go out after mackerel; Pa having a go at the coconuts. There has to be a detailed filing system for those, with lists of names and addresses to match up with those on the counterfoils of the tickets the photographer gives the mugs after he's taken them. Plus descriptions, plus notes of money received and prints despatched. It's quite a performance — and it takes up a reasonable space."

  They went over the place again, more eagerly now that they had something definite to look for, and April soon found the cache in which all Harry Bosustow's photographic equipment was kept. Neatly stacked in docketed compartments and drawers and detachable trays, it lay in three lockers fitted beneath the bunk bed, hidden by the folds of a counterpane.

  "They must have had an efficiency expert to design this lot," Mark said as they lifted the equipment out and examined it. "Look how exactly everything fits. See, this slides just so far, and you can take out that — but it doesn't go far enough to impede the opening of this lid. Marvellous!"

  There were three cameras — a Rolleiflex, a Hasselblad and a Leica — several trays full of hoods and attachments and special lenses, a multiplicity of other gadgets and, in another locker, a series of shallow tanks and other dark-room apparatus, including a miniature enlarger. The third drawer was entirely filled with small packets of negatives, all labelled, and a series of notebooks relating to them.

  "There certainly seems to be enough there," April observed when they had laid all this out on the table and examined it. "And it looks innocuous enough"

  "I was just thinking, on the contrary, how very little there is," Slate replied. "So far as the library of negatives goes, I mean. These chaps have to handle a big turnover to make it worthwhile, you see. And they usually keep them for some while in case of reorders. You know what people are about holiday snaps!... Most of the wide boys use Polaroid cameras now, of course. They click the machine as you go past and then hold out one hand... and you, thinking a picture has been taken and you're being given the ticket, foolishly stop. Then they have you. They back you up, take a genuine photo, whip it out of the camera and give it to you — and there you are, stuck with the price! Our Harry seems to have favoured the older system, though."

  "You mean where they really do take you as you walk along and you can see the contact prints in the photographer's window the next day, and order enlargements from the ticket they handed you, if you want?"

  "That's it. Thus the paperwork — which the Polaroid boys avoid altogether, since their cameras develop and print automatically within a few seconds. I wonder why Harry B. should still..." He broke off and rifled through the closely packed rows of envelopes. "Let's just have a look at the sort of thing he was doing," he said, switching on his pocket torch again.

  Picking envelopes at random from all over the locker, he began glancing at the negatives they contained and then looking up the numbers in one of the books. After he had done three or four, he stiffened and bent forward with more concentration. "That's funny..." he murmured, relapsing into silence once more as he pulled still more packets from the file. And finally he turned to April, who had been waiting patiently all this time, and gesturing to the table top, where he had ranged the envelopes of negatives in two piles. Beside them were two notebooks. "What do you make of those? "he said.

  The girl took the flashlight and began looking through the negatives. The first pile were all 2.5" x 2.25", presumably taken either by the Hasselblad or the Rolleiflex. They showed a man walking along with a children's bucket and spade, a group of three giggling teenagers, several couples sheepishly smiling, and a three-generation family group on the quayside. The numbers on all of them corresponded with ordinary-sounding names and addresses in London, in the Midlands and in the North, all entered in one of the notebooks.

  All the second group were 35mm negatives from the Leica. In subject matter they were subtly different. They, too, were mostly couples — but whereas the first group were all exteriors, with people obviously aware that they were being photographed, the people in the second group looked for the most part too absorbed in each other to notice the camera. And some of them were in unexpected surroundings. Two showed couples sitting over drinks on what looked like a hotel terrace; one was a telephoto lens shot of a man and a girl on a beach; another showed a military-looki
ng man in a swimsuit holding hands with a lifeguard; the fifth, a picture taken by flash, was of a man and a woman sitting, with astonished expressions, in the back of a car. At the sixth, April paused: "But surely that's the landlord of the pub you're staying in! "she said.

  "Yes it is. But the girl in the bikini with him is not Mrs. Walker. Have you checked the second series against the other notebook? "

  "Not yet. I'll… Oh. They seem all to be in some sort of code."

  "They are. Probably names and addresses too — with a bit of time-and-place thrown in. And perhaps an amount."

  The girl looked up. "Blackmail?" she said softly.

  "That's the way it looks, doesn't it? There are two separate series of photos here. The conventional seaside snapshot ones, complete with names and addresses; just enough to make a convincing cover, but not enough to make a living, I can assure you. And the second series — all of couples, and, I surmise, all of couples who ought not to be together. You know — the wrong man with the wrong wife at the wrong time. That couple so innocently sitting on the terrace, for example: he's probably supposed to be on a business trip to Glasgow, and there he is with a strange woman at the seaside. You'll notice that most of them have a calendar in shot, or a newspaper, or something by means of which, with a magnifying glass, the date could be established."

  April made a grimace of disgust. "Spying on people with a miniature camera," she said. "It's about the lowest form of blackmail I can think of."

  "Yes — and it certainly gives us a reason for the man to have been murdered. I guess there are as many potential murderers as there are envelopes in this second series here! And talking of motive… I wonder if Harry could have been killed by a blackmail victim — and still be tied up in our affair?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, Sheila was involved in a triangle. One member of the triangle was married. Despite what his wife said to me personally, Sir Gerald Wright could in fact quite easily have wished to keep the friendship to himself... It brings up the possibility that Harry Bosustow was murdered by a blackmailee who was the illicit boyfriend of his future sister-in- law!"