Kenworthy forebore to rebuke her for having shown a nil return on her questionnaire. She, for her part, accepted the discovery of her deception with neither shame nor the need for explanations. Perhaps she had spent a life-time dealing with setbacks as they came.
‘It’ll be about that Mr Warren that you’ve come to see me.’
‘He told you his name, then, did he?’
‘He wouldn’t have got in my house if he hadn’t.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve had a long series of shocks, Mrs Sawyer.’
‘I’m no stranger to them.’
There had been a Mr Sawyer, for he was shown in a family group, with Enid in the toddler stage, on her hands and knees, crawling away into long grass. It was not an artistic group, an enlargement from someone’s not very expert handling of a box camera. Mrs Sawyer had been brawny and upright in those days, not exactly a beauty, but mature, proud, comely, ripe for the picking. Her husband had been smaller, pale faced, sad looking, on holiday in a white open-necked shirt and well pressed grey flannels. Perhaps he had been impotent without knowing it, Wright thought; perhaps he accepted his lot philosophically, clinging to what was left to him, trying not to resent what he had lost.
‘What did Warren want to see you about, Mrs Sawyer?’
‘Edward Barson,’ she said simply.
‘He was prodding you for information, was he——trying to get hold of personal background, and that sort of thing?’
‘He got nothing out of me, Mr Kenworthy. I can keep my lips more tightly sealed than most.’
She was disinclined to unseal them now, still quietly assessing the reason for their visit, probing their good-will.
‘What excuses did he give for his curiosity?’
‘I didn’t ask him.’
‘But I know you must have been wondering why he was here. He didn’t try the old one about representing some religious organisation?’
‘He wouldn’t have got past the door.’
‘What did he say he was doing, then? Making hire purchase enquiries? Investigating an insurance proposal?’
‘He was a private detective. He made no bones about it.’
‘Did he say who he was working for?’
‘I took it for granted he was working for the other side——for the Labour.’
‘Has this sort of thing happened before, then? Have you had other callers like this?’
‘Never. But it didn’t surprise me.’
‘What didn’t surprise you, Mrs Sawyer? That his political opponents should be making enquiries about your son-in-law? Or that there might be something in his background worth enquiring about?’
‘I’m not one for play-acting,’ she said. ‘Barson was no good. You weren’t long in Fellaby, I’m sure, before you found that out for yourselves. There never was much good came out of Kenilworth Street.’
‘No. I gather that his environment was not ideal.’
‘It was no harder than my Enid’s——and she was worth four of him.’
‘This is our impression, too.’
‘I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad they pay detectives who can use their eyes and ears.’
‘Wouldn’t you put Warren in the same class?’
‘As you?’
‘No——as Barson?’
‘Set a thief to catch a thief.’
Wright was reminded that chief inspector Dunne had used the same phrase when talking of Barson’s chairmanship of the juvenile panel, but that the suggestion had never been developed. He leaned forward.
‘Mrs Sawyer——did you know Edward Barson when he was a boy?’
‘I knew of him. Everybody in Fellaby knew of him. But I never knew him. I wasn’t likely to. We had our own sense of pride on Hagley Brow. I didn’t meet him until he started courting my Enid. I was sorry she ever took up with him. I tried to tell her what he was, but you mustn’t say too much. You have to let them make their own mistakes. And she was fed up with me, fed up with this house——’
‘What sort of reputation had he as a boy?’
‘A real young hell-hound. Plague of the town.’
Kenworthy was leaning back, smiling a little, letting Wright take over the questioning for a few minutes.
‘But what sort of thing did he do? Something a bit beyond the normal run of boyish pranks, I suppose, like apple-scrumping and so on?’
‘There aren’t any apples in Fellaby, Mr Wright.’
‘No——but you get my meaning——’
‘He stole, he lied, he was destructive. And he always saw to it that others took the blame.’
The kettle began to sing. She edged it half an inch nearer the flames.
‘I’ll go and get the pot.’
‘Could be!’ Kenworthy said quietly, while she was out of the room. ‘Could be!’
‘You mean Lesueur?’
Kenworthy nodded.
‘She’s proud, she’s seen better days, she’s well set up here. She’s made a little palace of this hovel. She wouldn’t have wanted anything bigger or better, and she’s got enough savvy not to have pushed her luck by making embarrassing demands on him.’
She came back carrying a loaded tray, unable to put her stick to the ground. Wright hurried to help her.
‘You’re lucky I’ve got half a cake left. Bought, I’m afraid. I don’t do much of my own baking these days, my hands are so bad. But I don’t think you’d tell the difference. They use butter and fresh eggs at Ashmore’s.’
When she had given them plates and cups, Kenworthy took up the questioning again, smoothly, but at a faster tempo.
‘Mrs Sawyer——have you seen much of the Barsons since they were married?’
‘Less and less, as the years have gone by. Enid tried at first to get me to join in with their social set, but I soon scotched that.’
‘Enid, of course, continued to visit you up here?’
‘About once a month, that’s what it boiled down to in the end. What is it it says in the Bible?——“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife”.’
‘Did Edward Barson come with her?’
‘Perhaps just before Christmas, to bring me my present. This year it was sloppy blue bedroom slippers with blue rosettes on them. I put them away in a drawer and haven’t looked at them since. Apart from that, I didn’t set eyes on him from one year’s end to the next. I’d had my own way of letting him know where he wasn’t welcome.’
‘Mrs Sawyer, I’m sure you had. But no doubt you went down to the Carlton estate from time to time?’
‘Not if I could help it. Too many pairs of eyes prying to see what he’d married into. A Barson!——Still, I can only be sorry for her now. If she wants my company, she can have it. If she prefers to stay away, I’ll not thrust myself upon her. I’m only thankful that she’s been spared this new round of horror. Unless, that is, you people are going to rake it up and throw it at her——’
There was a short silence in the room. A coal fell sideways in the fire, and Mrs Sawyer shaped it up again with the poker.
‘What new horror is this you’re speaking of, Mrs Sawyer?’
‘Why, this new bit of jiggery-pokery of Barson’s,’ she said.
‘There seem to be so many.——Which one in particular?’
‘This woman. He was keeping a woman out at Kirby-le-Dale. At least, that’s what Mr Warren said.’
‘Warren told you that?’
‘He did. I thought that was his main reason for coming to see me.’
‘We’ve been hoping to keep that side of the story out of Fellaby,’ Kenworthy said, without a flicker in his expression. ‘We’ll still do our best.——Did Warren enlarge on the details?’
‘Not a thing——and I wasn’t interested.’
‘You don’t know her name?’
‘I couldn’t care less.’
‘But you don’t find it difficult to believe?’
‘I don’t find anything about Edward Barson hard to believe.’
Kenworthy rubbed his hands as they walked down to where the car was parked.
‘I said we were in business, Shiner.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t get it,’ Wright said.
‘Neither do I. And isn’t this just what we wanted? Up to now everything has been just too plain and logical. There’s not been a single discrepancy we could get our teeth into. You’ll never get to the bottom of a case like this until you unearth something that obstinately refuses to fit.’
‘Why on earth should Warren go dropping a clanger like that up on Hagley Brow?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest idea, Shiner.’
‘It blows holes in any blackmail theory. A blackmailer cuts the ground from under his own feet if he reveals his story prematurely.’
‘He does indeed.’
‘And Warren’s far too experienced an operator to foul his own nest.’
‘Indeed he is.’
‘He can’t have done it just for the sake of working a mischief.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘That wouldn’t have helped either Gill’s interests or his own.’
‘How right you are!’
‘And yet I’m inclined,’ Wright said, ‘to believe everything that old woman Sawyer told us. The sole reason for his visit was to put this particular cat amongst the pigeons.’
Kenworthy pushed open the door of the Zephyr.
‘That is the crux of the problem to which we have to apply our intellects in the next few hours.’
‘He might have wanted to provoke the woman’s husband,’ Wright persisted.
‘What husband?’
‘I expect she’s a married woman.’
‘Bloody clairvoyance, now,’ Kenworthy muttered. ‘What advantage do you think he’d derive from provoking the woman’s husband? The only advantage Warren ever seeks is material gain.’
‘Perhaps Warren was mixed up with this woman, too.’
Kenworthy only grunted. Wright saw that he was not being exasperating for the sheer enjoyment of it; silently and furiously the superintendent was thinking. Wright held his peace.
Once they were back in the Report Centre, Kenworthy was on tenterhooks for news of the sergeants he had sent out into Barson’s operational area. But they were in cars that were not equipped with radio, and there was no up-to-date news of them in any of the police stations that they might have visited.
Rhys came up and made another attempt to rid himself and his men of the burden of the questionnaires.
‘No! For Pete’s sake! Don’t you see that those questionnaires have now trebled in importance? Any odd remark that Warren might have let slip on anyone’s doorstep might tell us what we want to know. You can take the pitcher ninety-nine times to the well without breaking it. Visit some of these householders a fourth and fifth time, if it’s necessary to jog their memories.’
‘Superintendent Kenworthy, I shall not refer to these questionnaires again in your presence until on your own initiative you tell me to abandon them.’
‘You can go on with them for thirty years after I’ve closed the case, if you like, as long as you come up with something in the next twelve hours.’
It was early evening before the mobile sergeants returned. They had nothing to report.
‘Have you done Kirby-le-Dale yet?’
‘No, sir. Tomorrow morning.’
‘Tomorrow morning?——Tonight!——No, on secondthoughts, make it tomorrow morning. If you go tonight, you’ll have her husband on your shadows. And the pubs will be crowded tonight. Any questions you ask will stir up too much interest. Tomorrow morning, first thing, crack of dawn, my lad.’
‘Who is she?’ a sergeant asked.
‘How the hell do I know who she is? Do you think I’d be standing here, doing a Bones and Sambo act, if I knew who she was? Go and find out who she is, and when you’ve done that, go and find her. And when you’ve found her, I want her back here, as fast as a goose-dropping.’
Rhys came and sat at his desk, flaunting an armful of duplicated pro formas. Kenworthy beckoned Wright out of the room.
‘Let’s have an evening off, Shiner.’
‘Putty, sir?’
‘Alas, Shiner——I fear that the breach with Chick has now been healed. So I wouldn’t stand a chance.’
‘A fat lot there is to do in Fellaby,’ Wright said.
‘Go to the pictures.’
‘What’s on? Al Jolson? I think chief inspector Dunne is night duty officer for the rest of the week. I’ll go and chat him up.’
‘What the hell do you want to go and chat Dunne up for?’
‘I think he can tell us more than he already has about Barson’s boyhood.’
‘What are you thinking of doing Barson for now? Scrumping apples?’
‘Perhaps I’ll go and have another word with Lenny.’
‘Pity he doesn’t flog his papers on the towpath. There’s no telling what he might have seen.’
Wright kicked the side of his foot against the kerb.
‘Give it a rest, Shiner,’ Kenworthy said, ‘that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going upstairs to write a couple of post-cards, and after that I’m going to an early bed. Take my mind off it. Give the jolly old sub-conscious time and chance to throw something up.’
Chapter Fifteen
The next day dawned as one of those displaced precursors of spring that brought a new mildness to the air, a tingling of flesh, and expanses of blue sky above the slate roofs and television aerials of Fellaby.
Kenworthy insisted on taking Wright for a walk across the park. A gardener with a wheel-barrow was unchoking leaves from the grids of land-drains. A rook picked up a brittle black twig and flapped to an untidy nest at the top of a tree almost in the centre of the town.
‘Isn’t it tonight that we’re sticking our snouts in the trough with Lesueur and the Chief Constable?’
‘It is. I haven’t confirmed it yet.’
‘Better do that. I can’t think of anything that’s likely to bemore vital——or more informative. And when you’ve finished phoning, come back and join me here. I’m going to sit and enjoy this exquisite sunshine. We can see from here when the cars come back from Kirby-le-Dale.’
When Wright came back, Kenworthy was sitting on a park bench with his newspaper on his knees. Within its folds he had his football pools coupon, on which he was filling in the Treble Chance.
‘O.K., Shiner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing new?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing in tone or subtlety?’
‘No. I only spoke to Hawley. He seemed to know all about it.’
Wright sat gazing at the lawn in front of him while Kenworthy inserted X’s in columns after periods of protracted thought.
‘One of my biggest problems, Shiner, is knowing the psychological moment to tackle Hawley. It’s got to come, and I’ve no doubt that it’ll be a rewarding interview, But the whole issue will be made or marred by the timing of it. If Lesueur’s as deeply involved as I think he might be, then Hawley’s the one man who might tip him the wink if we get too dangerously near the penalty area.’
‘Does that necessarily follow, sir? If Hawley wouldn’t support his boss over the demolition of a couple of slum streets, would he connive where murder’s concerned?’
‘Where murder’s concerned, Shiner, it’s fatal to lean too heavily on logic. I inspired a bit of chatter about Hawley in the County bar after I’d sent you to bed last night. He’s well thought of, and he’s a clever man. And the cleverest thing about him is the benevolent image. I don’t deny that that may be his natural temperament——but it’s a useful instrument of policy, too. And it works like a charm.——Hullo! Here they come!’
On the road which they overlooked, a dark blue Cortina slowed for the corner. Kenworthy tapped Wright’s knees with his newspaper.
‘Action, Shiner! But try not to look too eager!’
The plain-clothes men had put t
he woman in a sparsely furnished interview room. A woman police sergeant was sitting with her.
‘Mrs Monica Sturgess,’ she announced.
‘Stay with us, please,’ Kenworthy said.
‘I want my solicitor,’ the woman moaned.
‘Don’t play hard to get.’
‘I’ve always understood that a person under questioning is entitled to a solicitor.’
‘We’ll get him for you, then. But who’s going to pay his fee? Your old man?’
‘You win.——But get on with it. If I’m not back in Kirby-le-Dale by tea-time——’
‘You could be. Depends largely on yourself.——One question out of turn, before we start on track one: are you working for Warren?’
She was in her late twenties, raven black hair swept to one side and hanging over her right shoulder, translucent pale blue blouse cut low, exhibiting as much sex as the C. I. D. sergeant had given her time to deck out.
‘Who’s Warren?’
She was trying to assume an American nonchalance without extending herself as far as trans-Atlantic vowels.
‘We’ll come to that later. Name? Maiden name? Date of birth? Place of birth?’
‘I’m sorry I left my school reports at home.’
‘We’ll call for them if we need them. When did you first meet Barson?’
‘About six months ago.’
‘How? Where?’
‘He called to see my husband.’
‘Is he anybody?’
‘Brian Forshaw Sturgess. Born IIth October, 1928. Brown eyes, dark wavy hair, small mole over the right nipple.’
‘What does he do for a living? If he’s in the same line of business as Barson was, the answer is, not much.’
‘He’s a company director.’
‘That’s a common complaint. Whom does he direct, and in what direction?’
‘Several companies——subsidiaries, holding companies. I don’t know all the terminology. They’re all in the same group.’
‘Do they trade anonymously?’
‘Salamander Enterprises.’
‘Sounds imposing. What do they actually do?’
‘I don’t know any details. I’ve no head for business. Brian doesn’t discuss his work with me.’
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