Postman's Knock (Inspector Pitt Detective series Book 1)

by J F Straker

  I did not go to the cinema last Friday. After leaving Scott-Waterton at Victoria I changed my mind and caught the 2.48 train home, and was here when the postman called.

  I told you I was not acquainted with Laurie. That was true — but it so happened that Laurie knew me. Furthermore, he had good reason to hate me; although I do not intend to make public the reason, since it would involve a third person who is entirely innocent. When I opened the door to his knock on Friday afternoon he recognised me and forced his way past me into the hall. I objected, and he then told me who he was. A bitter quarrel ensued, which got us nowhere; and eventually he left to continue his round, voicing lurid threats of what he would do to me now that he had found out where I lived.

  After he had gone I was worried and uneasy, though not on my own account. I wanted to get the matter settled; I didn’t fancy the idea of just awaiting developments. So I got the car out and went after him. Just before I left the house the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver; but hearing Miss Weston’s voice, and not wishing to become involved in one of her long conversations, I replaced it without answering.

  I caught Laurie up farther down the road, explained the way I felt, and persuaded him to get into the car. We drove out to Coppins Point and walked up and down on the grass, arguing like mad. Both of us lost our tempers. I didn’t mind what he said about me, but when he started calling this third person the foulest of names I caught him by the throat to silence him. He was kicking and hitting me, but I was the stronger of the two, and I just held on to his throat. Then suddenly he went limp, and I realised he was dead.

  It is pointless to protest that I did not intend to kill him; but having done so I felt a strong desire to escape the consequences. Laurie had been an obstacle to my achieving something I greatly desired. Now the obstacle was removed it would be nice to go on living. So I dragged him to the edge of the cliff, bundled him over, and came home.

  During the struggle a small parcel had fallen from Laurie’s pocket. I picked this up before leaving the Point, and found later that it contained the brooch I had ordered for Miss Weston.

  As I could not hand it over to her as the original — she was expecting it to arrive by post — I made what I imagine was my one mistake. I gave it to her on Wednesday evening, pretending I had bought her another. It was a silly thing to do; but then I never imagined you would even begin to suspect me.

  I had not anticipated that the body would remain undiscovered for so long, but I was naturally delighted with the accepted theory that Laurie had absconded with the mail. I thought that made me absolutely safe.

  However, I was wrong; so I have taken this way out. But may I point out that I need not have satisfied your natural curiosity? I could have left you in complete ignorance of what really happened. In return for this confession, therefore, I would request that no inquiry be made into the cause of Laurie’s quarrel with me. It was a private matter which, if pursued, might bring sorrow and harm to an innocent person.’

  No signature was appended, but the words ‘Jock Carrington’ were typed at the bottom of the manuscript.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Pitt. ‘I liked the fellow.’

  ‘So did I,’ Dick agreed.

  ‘Maybe I liked him because he was such a damned fine artist,’ Pitt continued. ‘He was, you know. One of the best. I wonder why he typed his signature at the bottom of his confession? So unbusiness-like. Makes it completely valueless, really.’

  ‘Come to that, I wonder why he is wearing gloves,’ said Dick. ‘Ever known a man put on gloves before shooting himself?’

  ‘No.’ Pitt frowned. ‘I wondered about that too.’

  They were brown kid gloves, fur-lined. The Inspector bent to examine them more closely. The kid outside was free from bloodstains, but there were dark smears on the fur around the wrists.

  ‘The usual reason is to avoid leaving fingerprints,’ said Dick. ‘But Carrington wouldn’t have to worry about that.’

  He stared hard at the body. He was about to speak again when the arrival of further police interrupted him. Pitt gave instructions to the photographers, and then watched as the doctor examined the body.

  ‘Made a nasty mess of himself, hasn’t he?’ commented the doctor. ‘I’d go for poison myself. Mais chacun a son goat.’

  ‘When did he die?’ asked Pitt, ignoring this pleasantry.

  ‘Some time last night,’ answered the other, glancing at his watch. ‘Put it around eleven o’clock and you won’t be far wrong. Does that make sense?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said the Inspector, and meant it.

  It was the absence of light that puzzled him. If Carrington shot himself at eleven o’clock the previous night, why were all the lights in the house switched off? Would a man do that before committing suicide? Would he prefer to shoot himself in the dark?

  ‘He might,’ said Dick, when Pitt put the question to him. ‘It might help to bolster up his nerve. Easier to pull the trigger if you are not actually looking down the spout. But the other lights — those in the passage, for instance — I don’t see why he should bother to switch those off.’

  Pitt walked over to the table by the fire and once more perused the manuscript in the typewriter. Something green, protruding from under the paper, caught his eye. He picked it up.

  It was a local railway timetable for December.

  He flicked over the pages. Yes, there was a 2.48 all right. And a 5.47, the train by which Carrington had previously said he had returned. Nothing wrong there. And yet…

  ‘They’ve checked the gun for prints,’ said Dick. ‘Clean as a whistle. Of course, if he hadn’t used it for some time and was wearing gloves when he picked it up last night…But all the same…’

  Pitt looked at him. ‘You don’t like it, eh?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Those gloves, and no lights…no prints, either. It couldn’t be a plant, could it?’

  ‘It could, Dick.’ The Inspector’s voice was gloomy. ‘It nearly always could. But I don’t know.’

  He knelt beside the body again, lifting one arm to examine the glove more closely. Turning back the gauntlet, he exposed a smear of blood, about two inches long, on the fur inside. There was a similar smear inside the other glove.

  ‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ he said, as he stood up. ‘There’s no blood on the outside of the gloves, none on the carpet except round his head. So how the devil did it get on the inside?’

  ‘Looks like he had some blood on his thumb when he pulled the glove on,’ said Dick. ‘That would account for it, wouldn’t it? The blood would come off on the fur.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. But how the—’ The Inspector stopped. For a moment he stared wide-eyed at his brother-in-law. Then he snapped his finger and thumb briskly. ‘By God, Dick! So it was murder!’

  Sergeant Ponsford gazed at him doubtfully.

  ‘Why would he have blood on his hands before he shot himself?’ demanded Pitt. He bent down and removed the gloves, exposing the white, tapering fingers. There was no cut, no stain. ‘See? And even supposing he had, it would come off on the first glove but not on the second — because he would be putting on the second glove, no matter which one it was, with a hand that was already gloved!’

  ‘By golly, so he would!’ It was a childish expression which escaped the Sergeant only in moments of deep excitement, and one of which he was absurdly ashamed. But now he did not even realise that he had used it.

  ‘And why isn’t there blood on the outside of the glove?’ Pitt continued. ‘One hand would be on the trigger, but the other would be well up the barrel to steady it. With his face the mess it is there ought to be blood on one of them.’

  Dick nodded. ‘Yes. But even so — murder or suicide — I still don’t see why he should be wearing gloves.’

  ‘Whoever shot him wasn’t wearing gloves,’ said Pitt. ‘After the murder he rubbed the gun clear of prints. Then he realised that, if Carrington was supposed to have shot himself, his fingerprints ought to be on
the gun. So he put gloves on the corpse — and the lack of prints is explained. Ingenious, eh?’

  ‘It would have been all right if he had taken care to clean the blood off his own hands first,’ Dick agreed.

  ‘He probably didn’t notice it until too late. It was only on his thumb — not on the fingers, I imagine. Maybe he cut himself, or maybe it’s Carrington’s blood. We can have the blood-groups checked.’

  ‘The lights,’ said Dick. ‘They must have been switched off by the murderer before he left the bungalow. Lights left on all night would have attracted attention. And now we know why the signature on Carrington’s supposed confession was typed.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Pitt. ‘The confession. We had better have the typewriter keys checked for prints. Is it possible to type properly with gloves on, I wonder?’

  ‘They would have to be damned thin, I imagine,’ said the Sergeant. ‘More likely he just cleaned the keys and left it at that, hoping we’d make nothing of it.’

  The Inspector nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, that the confession fits so neatly with the theory we have built up? Almost as though the writer had read our thoughts. Miss Weston’s repetition of her conversation with us; no second brooch because he got the original from Laurie. It accounts for the time Laurie spent here, the Austin seen in Grange Road and at Coppins Point. It accounts for practically everything, in fact. And yet, if Carrington was murdered — and he damned well must have been — about all we can take for granted is that Laurie was strangled and thrown over the cliffs. And we already knew that.’ He sighed. ‘I almost wish we hadn’t been so inquisitive, Dick. Suicide would have been simpler.’

  ‘Much simpler,’ Dick agreed. ‘But as it is…What about the correspondence that’s been going on, Loy? The note to Bullett, the money sent to Mrs L.? And then there’s that anonymous billet-doux incriminating Heath. Who wrote those? If it was the same person as typed that confession, why didn’t he attribute them to Carrington? That would have tied it up nicely. No loose ends at all.’

  ‘He couldn’t think of everything,’ said Pitt. ‘After all, it must have taken a lot of nerve to sit down at that typewriter, with his victim’s body still in the room, and concoct even the shortest of confessions. Under the circumstances I think he did damned well. It was careless of him to leave that timetable there, though. It didn’t look right. He had to make sure that there was a train Carrington could have caught to get back in time. But had the confession been genuine, Carrington wouldn’t have bothered about such a detail.’

  One of the fingerprint men came over to report that they could get nothing from the typewriter. ‘Looks as though it has been cleaned up, sir. One or two smeared prints, but they’re not worth taking.’

  ‘All right,’ said Pitt. ‘But keep at it. This room, the hall — that’s where they ought to be.’ He turned to Dick. ‘The only prints we ought to find are Carrington’s and Miss Weston’s. Any others — well, they’ll need explaining. That’s one advantage of Carrington’s desire to keep aloof from his neighbours.’

  ‘There’s Bullett,’ Dick reminded him. ‘He was a fairly frequent visitor.’

  ‘Yes. I had forgotten him. Tell me, Dick — when you read that blasted confession, what did you suppose was the reason for the quarrel between Laurie and Carrington?’

  ‘Mrs L.,’ the Sergeant answered promptly.

  ‘Yes. So did I. And that fits, too. I always thought she had a boyfriend. Of course, it’s possible that Carrington murdered Laurie and then got done in by someone else. But I don’t like it. It’s untidy, somehow.’ Pitt paused to watch the removal of the body. ‘Who else, besides Laurie, would resent Carrington paying attention to Mrs Laurie?’

  ‘Well, there’s Miss Weston. She was keen on the chap. She wouldn’t like another woman muscling in. Made that pretty plain, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. And it was Miss Weston who supplied us with the two most damning pieces of evidence against Carrington. The second brooch — and the telephone call. What’s more, she volunteered them. She could have kept quiet about both, and no one the wiser. But she didn’t. She trotted them out without so much as a tiny dig from either of us. Either she hadn’t the faintest idea what harm she was doing her boyfriend or—’

  ‘Or what?’ asked Dick.

  ‘Or she did it deliberately, meaning to shop him. She could, in fact, have invented them both. It was her word against Carrington’s. And now, with Carrington dead, it’s all hers.’

  ‘You mean she fed us that fake evidence just to get us interested, and then killed him before he could deny it? Staged the suicide, wrote the confession? Good Lord!’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Pitt. ‘Didn’t she hint Carrington was cooling off? She knew he was going to the cinema, too. A cinema is a poor place to establish an alibi. It was a good bet we couldn’t trace him there, even if we tried.’

  ‘Bullett and Scott-Waterton also knew he was going to the cinema,’ Dick reminded him.

  ‘True. But only Dorothy Weston had all the information necessary to write that confession. And what motive would either of those men have? Scott-Waterton’s an art critic. He might slay Carrington in print, but not in person. And anyway, Carrington was a fine artist. As for Bullett well, it’s true he is now showing considerable interest in Mrs Laurie, but I wouldn’t say it’s his heart that’s involved. I’ve no doubt he’d have little compunction in seducing his friend’s girl if he got the chance, but he wouldn’t want her bad enough to commit murder. And anyway, he had never met the girl prior to Laurie’s death.’

  ‘You don’t rate him high morally, I gather,’ said Dick. ‘But I’d hate to think the girl did it. I rather like our Dorothy. And although they don’t come into these theories of yours, don’t forget that both Heath and Miss Fratton had reason to want Carrington out of the way.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Pitt assured him. There was quite a crowd in the road.

  As the police officers appeared they pressed closer to the gate, despite the protests of the constables on duty. As Pitt and the Sergeant fought their way through to the waiting car a woman caught the Inspector’s arm. Pitt was about to shake her off when he saw it was Mrs Gill.

  ‘I must speak to you, Inspector,’ she said urgently. ‘I know I promised to say nothing, but I didn’t know then that Mr Carrington was dead. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it?’

  The crowd was all about them. At the back of it Pitt saw the red hair of Miss Weston, and wondered at the pain in her eyes. He recalled the scathing tones in which Mrs Gill had referred to her, his own disgust at the girl’s casual attitude towards the fawning Miss Fratton. Even so, was she the kind of girl deliberately to plan and execute the scheme he had just discussed with Dick?

  Well, that must wait. He would deal with Miss Weston later. At present there was Mrs Gill. He pushed the woman ahead of him into the car. When they had left Grange Road he turned to her. ‘Now, Mrs Gill,’ he said. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’

  *

  Jane Laurie denied all knowledge of Carrington. She had never met him, she said, never even heard his name before. And she made it quite clear to the police officers that she resented their continued attempts to connect her with other men.

  ‘My husband’s dead now, so I can do as I please,’ she said. ‘But while he was alive I was a good wife to him, and I won’t have you or anyone else saying I wasn’t.’

  Pitt saw no reason to apologise, and told her so.

  ‘Well, you insinuated it, anyway,’ she retorted. ‘First Eric — first my previous fiancé, and then this — this other man. And I don’t like it.’

  Her indignation, real or assumed, became her. But the Inspector was not a susceptible man. He drew a photograph of Carrington from his pocket and showed it to her.

  ‘Have you ever seen that man before?’ he asked.

  She stared at it for a moment. ‘Why, yes,’ she said slowly. ‘Yes, I think I have. Who is he?’

  �
��Jock Carrington.’

  ‘Oh.’ But she did not seem surprised. ‘Well, I still haven’t met him. Not really. But once or twice I’ve seen him in the Close, and he’s followed me when I’ve been out. My husband was furious when I told him. But the man never spoke to me, never tried to get off. And as I said to my husband, you couldn’t object to his walking on the same pavement, could you? There’s nothing wrong in that, I said. But he still didn’t like it much.’

  ‘Did your husband ever see him?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Only a few days before he disappeared, when the man was walking up and down outside the house. He wanted to go out and tell him off.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t want a scene.’

  ‘And neither you nor your husband knew who the man was?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You never mentioned this before, Mrs Laurie.’ Pitt’s voice was stern. ‘Why not?’

  She had spoken of the man calmly, with little or no inflexion in her voice. Now her attitude changed. She was nervous, uncertain.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I expect I forgot. Or perhaps I didn’t think it was important. It isn’t, is it?’

  ‘Does Mr Bullett know about Carrington?’ asked the Inspector, ignoring her question.

  ‘I — I may have told him. I can’t remember.’

  ‘I can’t make that woman out,’ said Pitt, as he and the Sergeant drove back to the station, ‘but I’m damned sure I wouldn’t trust her an inch. A bloody little hypocrite, if you ask me. I only wish I knew exactly how she fits into these murders. Anyway, she gave something away. Her ex-boyfriend was named Eric. That may help to speed up the search for him.’

  ‘We’d better get hold of Bullett,’ said Dick. ‘He knew Carrington well. Maybe he can help.’

  They did not have to send for the reporter. He was waiting for them at the station. ‘What a dreadful business!’ he said. ‘I simply cannot believe it. Why on earth should Jock commit suicide? So far as I know, he hadn’t a care in the world.’