Death of an Alderman

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘Not at all, sir.’

  ‘Good! Then that will leave you free to spend the evening with Putty.’

  ‘Putty?’

  ‘Putty. No competition tonight, see? I don’t know where you’ll find her. You mustn’t under any circumstances go to her house. Her dad would half kill you. Make a few enquiries round the caffs, and so on. But find her you must. And I can tell you, with Chick inside, and all sorts of rumours current about the nature of the charges, she’ll be beside herself. I want you to convince her of two things. Firstly, that the only way of clearing Chick is to find out the name of the real culprit. She might even manage that for us. Secondly, that it will put us on the right track if we can only find out who fed those cowboys that pack of lies. Because they didn’t invent that co-ordinated stuff about the moon themselves——it was cooked up for them, and well drilled. I think it’s probably even accurate——we must check up on that. Now Putty will worm that out of somebody if she has to fight for it with broken beer bottles. Get the drift, Shiner?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well——now get out of town. Get on a bus. Go and study the scenery. Only not the same bus that I shall be on. In short, Shiner——get lost!’

  ‘On my way, sir.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  After dreary hours of buses, the streets of towns similar but inferior to Fellaby, wiping steam from the window as the dusk came down, Wright came back to the High Street ready to step into the shadows on the approach of any beat-walking policeman who might recognise him.

  He knew that Kenworthy had been right to make sure that they steered clear of Rhys, Grayling and Dunne. They had no blind eyes to turn in Fellaby police-station. Once an event, a message, an arrest was logged, its timing was on permanent record for Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary who might descend at any moment for a routine check. They lived by the book, and the book was backed by a minute-to-minute record that could tell no lies. The moment Stanway could no longer be held, he could no longer be held. And the moment Wright or Kenworthy were confronted with their county colleagues, though there might still be subtle prevarication, there could be no lie direct. Hence there must be no confrontation.

  Wright sought out Lenny, and the cripple was peering from his doorway, not more than a dozen papers left on his stand. The afternoon’s history had not yet hit the headlines of a paper printed in distant Bradcaster, but there was a fudge in the Stop Press that had made an excuse for a placard.

  ‘Things are moving,’ Lenny said.

  ‘They’re moving right enough in one direction.’

  ‘Lost your boss again?’

  ‘No. I’m looking for a girl.’

  ‘Putty?’

  ‘You know, do you?’

  ‘It stands to sense, doesn’t it? Chick’s inside. Billy Burgess and Arthur Carter are inside. Larry Yarwood’s been inside and has been let go again. Who’d know the truth? Putty!’

  ‘Any idea where I might find her?’

  ‘I don’t know the number of her house, but I can tell you where it is.’

  ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea to go to her house.’

  ‘I don’t, either. They get the wrong idea, there, when one of you blokes knocks. Usually it’s to put the old man away for something or other, or because the neighbours have rung up to get a domestic row quietened down. Pots and pans flying about, on pay-night. Besides, old Pearson doesn’t hold with her having men friends.’

  ‘She certainly does seem a bit young for some of the things she’s mixed up in.’

  Lenny spat.

  ‘Young? What’s young mean? She’s as old as her brain, isn’t she, as old as her body? I don’t what-you-might-call know her——but I’ve seen her often enough, and she looks to me as if she’s ready for it.’

  ‘Where would you start looking for her, then, if you were me?’

  Lenny considered.

  ‘That might not be so easy, sergeant. Her friends won’t be her friends any more now, will they? And none of them are using the Saracen’s Head any more.——Course, you might go and stretch your ears in the Coconut Club. That’s if you’re not too particular what company you keep. I wouldn’t be seen dead in there, myself.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Wright said. ‘I think I know where that is.’

  ‘Second to the left off Railway Road.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Then he suddenly decided to go abundance on his confidence in Lenny.

  ‘Know anything about Lesueur?’ he asked.

  Lenny put on a plum-palated pseudo-aristocratic tone. ‘Not the society I usually keep, sergeant.’

  ‘But you’ll have heard things——’

  ‘Bastard! Runs this town——bastard!’

  ‘He ran Barson, too, I’ve heard somebody say.’

  ‘He put Barson to the top of the tree. That’s common knowledge.’

  ‘And Colonel Hawley?’

  ‘A proper gentleman. Not to be mentioned in the same breath. He got me off of doing time, Bill Hawley did.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘For non-payment of fines. Collecting betting-slips, before they changed the law. I wouldn’t pay up, because nothing’s worse than nothing, I thought, and I thought well, I’ll go and see what it’s like inside. And I had them beat, by God I did. They didn’t know what to do with me. Couldn’t queue up for my grub. Couldn’t slop out. So they put me up in the hospital. Bloody treat, it was: bars on the windows, but clean sheets and a nice little nurse, who waggled her bottom when she walked. Then Bill Hawley came back off a holiday, and found out where I was, and paid my fine, so they sent me home again, the bastards!’

  ‘Good night, Lenny.’

  ‘Good night, sarge.’

  The Coconut Club was in an area basement sandwiched between a second-hand clothes shop and the local headquarters of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. But Wright was saved from making an entrance by the sight of Yarwood, looking dusty and disconsolate, with one of his bottle-green epaulettes torn away, standing in the shadows outside the door. The youth started when Wright touched his shoulder.

  ‘All right, lad, don’t be scared. I don’t want you this time. I want Putty.’

  ‘Putty doesn’t come here any more.’

  ‘I don’t blame her. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Could she be at home, do you think?’

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘Could you get her to come out for me, Yarwood? I want to see her. There’s just a chance of getting Chick off——’

  Yarwood led Wright along dismal roads parallel to the shopping streets of the town, taking short cuts through the narrow passage-ways between houses. Theme music from the evening’s television programmes drifted from dimly lit windows across cluttered back yards. Yarwood did not say anything. He did not even speak about the direction they were taking. Twice he turned unexpectedly to right or left, so that Wright had to check his step suddenly and take long strides so as not to be left behind.

  Eventually Yarwood changed his gait to a long, sauntering lope, walking very close to the houses, even brushing the window-sills of some with his elbow, and began to whistle, loud, piercing and out of tune, a song that had climbed the popular charts some months previously. By a window at the end of a terrace he stood still for some seconds, bringing his whistling up to an orgiastic climax. Then he turned abruptly into a brick arched alley between the houses, speaking over his shoulder to Wright for the first time.

  ‘Keep your feet quiet!’

  They passed walled yards, down towards more houses on their left, on their right a couple of acres of untidy allotment gardens. At a corner of yard wall, where an unpaved lane separated the parallel backs of houses, they came to a standstill.

  ‘Keep under this wall,’ Yarwood said, ‘or they’ll see us from the house.’

  They heard a back door open, and footsteps crossed a yard. There was a noisy fumbling with the latch of an outside lavatory. A few moments later, qu
ietly and suddenly, a small figure joined them. She started back when she saw Yarwood.

  ‘You?——You’ve got a nerve! What do you want?’

  Then she caught sight of Wright.

  ‘Oh!——It’s you——’

  Disappointed, Wright surmised, because he was not Kenworthy.

  ‘If we want to help Chick,’ Wright said, ‘we’ve got to work hard and fast. Can we go somewhere to talk?’

  She spoke quickly to Yarwood.

  ‘Go and get Doris to come and call for me. It’s the only way I can get out. They’re watching me like hawks.’

  ‘Doris is down at the Coconut, with Stevie.’

  ‘I shall have to risk it, then. Must go and put a coat on, though. Don’t hang about here. Go right back to the Brow and wait for me on the corner.’

  She went back into the yard, gave the noisy hinges of the lavatory door more work to do and let herself into the house. Yarwood took Wright back to the main road, within sight of Mrs Sawyer’s paper-crossed window.

  ‘You know,’ Wright said, ‘you’re going to save us an awful lot of time and trouble if you come clean.’

  ‘There’s nothing to come clean about.’

  ‘You may have beaten Kenworthy and Rhys, but you’ll not beat Putty.’

  ‘Putty can say what she likes. She can’t alter the truth.’

  A courting couple passed them, on their way out of the built-up area, huddled ostentatiously together, an aggressive gesture to the world outside themselves. It seemed a very long time before Putty came——quick, brittle footsteps in the night.

  ‘Let’s go Fellaby Moor way,’ she said. ‘There won’t be so many nosy parkers.——Now what’s all this about? What did you want to go and put the coppers on to Chick again for? They’d finished with him, hadn’t they——had him in and let him out again?’

  ‘Putty——you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. We was talking, Arthur and Billy and me. And it was Billy’s idea. Chick’s all washed up anyway, he says. So why should we have the down on us, too?’

  ‘Marvellous!’ she said. ‘You were supposed to be Chick’s friend.’

  ‘Yeah, but——’

  ‘Yeah, but nothing. I reckon you’re the one who thought it up, to go and grass on him. That’s why they’ve kept Billy and Arthur and let you go.’

  Wright did not try to correct her false reasoning. It would be better to let her find her own devious way to a conclusion.

  ‘Well, go on, then——what did you tell them?’

  ‘Only what they knew already. What Chick said in Wardle’s, when Barson sent his brother down.’

  ‘Well, what did you want to remind them of that for?’

  ‘The point is,’ Wright interposed, ‘we need to know who told them to spill the beans——who fed them the story they told.’

  ‘What story? He says he only told them what they knew already.’

  ‘Go on, Yarwood,’ Wright said. ‘Get it off your chest.’

  ‘That Chick had always said he was going to get the Luger——just as a mascot——’

  Putty thought deeply. They had stopped walking, and were standing in the shadows, beyond the town’s last lamp.

  ‘Well?’ she asked Wright, seeing no further line of thought.

  ‘Yarwood will tell us the whole story, if we wait long enough. He also said that Chick had plainly said he was going to break in and get the Luger to kill Barson. That’s not even true, is it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s true.’

  She spoke with a touch of heart-felt sadness.

  ‘It’s true. Chick said it more than once, and dozens of people heard him. He was always talking big.’

  ‘In that case,’ Wright said, ‘I can only say Chick’s in real trouble.’

  She retorted angrily.

  ‘I know Chick’s in real trouble. You haven’t brought me out just to tell me that, have you?——Where’s Kenworthy, anyway?’

  ‘He’s out——following up another line.’

  Wright was worried. Why on earth should Kenworthy think that Putty could derive any sense out of this impasse? She was only a bit of a kid. She wasn’t even leaving school till Easter. And yet he had an uneasy feeling that Kenworthy would have teased a useful response from her.

  ‘So what?’ she said. ‘We might as well all go to bed.’

  ‘But you’re not with me,’ Wright persevered. ‘Chick said he was going to get the Luger——but he didn’t actually do the break-in, did he?’

  ‘No. He didn’t. I’m certain of that.’

  ‘How certain?’

  ‘Dead certain. I should have known about it if he had. He couldn’t have kept it to himself. And he couldn’t have done it, anyway. The job was done with a glass-cutter, wasn’t it? Chick couldn’t have used one of those. He’s, too clumsy to put an electric light bulb in without breaking it.’

  ‘But Billy and Arthur both say he did it. They say they were with him just before, tried to talk him out of it, actually stood in the Wakefield Road and saw him working on the window.’

  ‘That’s just a pack of lies!’

  ‘I know it’s a pack of lies. You see, Kenworthy and I have bedrock proof that the museum wasn’t broken into at all——it was broken out of, which is a totally different thing, and which Billy and Arthur weren’t to know. I don’t think Yarwood told more than the truth——as far as he saw it——but the other two were put up to telling a tissue of lies.’

  ‘They could have made them up for themselves,’ Putty said, ‘just to get at Chick.’

  ‘We don’t think they did. It was all too carefully worked out. Details like what phase the moon was in——’

  Putty stamped her foot and turned round, so that she was facing the town again.

  ‘Billy and Arthur couldn’t have thought of that,’ she said. ‘They haven’t the sense. They haven’t a tea-spoonful of brains between them.’

  ‘So——somebody must have drilled them in what to say.’

  She wheeled savagely on Yarwood.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Honest, Putty. Billy and Arthur came to me. It was their idea from the start. I don’t know anything about anyone else talking to them.’

  She paid no further attention to him.

  ‘I’ll soon sort this out. I’m going back to town.’

  And then, as the other two fell in step with her: ‘No. On my own. I’m going to do this my way.’

  ‘We want to get this settled tonight,’ Wright said. ‘Where shall I meet you again?’

  ‘I’llring you at the County Hotel. I can use a call-box, you know.’

  Wright watched her resolute figure walk with firm steps across the yellow pool of light from the first street-lamp. He looked with loathing at Yarwood, who was standing, hopeless, a couple of yards from him.

  ‘Get out of my sight!’ he said. ‘I’ve finished with you.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was after midnight when Kenworthy returned to the hotel. Wright was waiting up for him. Putty had still not phoned.

  ‘I’ve just been over to the nick,’ Kenworthy said. ‘Rhys is still at it.’

  ‘You told him?’

  ‘Gave him back the bits of glass.’

  ‘Did he half murder you?’

  ‘On the contrary,’——Kenworthy looked pleased with himself——‘He saw the point. He had come, in a somewhat circuitous way, to some pretty clever conclusions himself. He’s a steady old plodder, is Rhys, and like many another cart-horse, he can pull a bit of weight. And he’s a damned good policeman. He knows I used him as a stooge to get Chick out of circulation, and he accepts that as his lot. And he took my hints about taking their statements. Burgess and Carter couldn’t speak to anything outside their brief. Hence, their brief must have come from an outsider. And Yarwood wasn’t in on that at all.’

  ‘But he’s charged the other two with complicity in the break-in?’

  ‘They’re sweating it out in separate cells. It’s a question of whose n
erves will break first. And Rhys has piled the brushwood on in the usual way. He’s still up, drinking station tea, waiting to see which will be the first to make a second statement.’

  ‘You know, sir, sooner or later he’s going to ask us why we haven’t checked the museum keys.’

  ‘We have. Before I left town this afternoon, I took that trouble. Gill has one. The caretaker has one. They carry a spare at the town hall. It doesn’t really help. Keys can be borrowed and copied. Lesueur may have kept one when he handed the premises over to the borough. Hawley may have one. We may have to do some intensive staff work on keys before we’ve finished. I hope not. It will be a wearisome old business. And how did you get on with Putty?’

  Wright told him.

  ‘And she’s not rung yet?’

  Kenworthy looked at his watch.

  ‘I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t put so much on her shoulders. She can handle the cowboys——but if she falls foul of the power behind the scenes, it will be a different matter. I’m going to phone Rhys and bring him over here.’

  Rhys was red in the face, as if his blood pressure was likely to be the first casualty in the battle. But he was a happy policeman; he thought he was on the verge of satisfaction.

  ‘I don’t think it will be long now. But I can’t help thinking that whoever put them up to it has them on a pretty tight lead.’

  ‘Well——let them crack in their own time.’

  Kenworthy explained that they were waiting for Putty, and why. He also sketched in rapidly the various developments with which Rhys was unfamiliar.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to draw your bow at Lesueur,’ Rhys said,——‘which it’s pretty clear you’ll have to——you don’t have to apologise for keeping me in the rear rank. I’m not the one to shirk my duty, but this sort of job is best done by a Londoner.’

  ‘I’ve just been having dinner with Lesueur,’ Kenworthy said, ‘and the Chief Constable.’

  Rhys whistled.

  ‘Incidentally, Shiner, you were very badly missed. Lady Lesueur asked most kindly after you——“that young man with the Cockney accent, who likes his food——”.’

  ‘Which reminds me, I’ve had damn all to eat all evening.’