by Bruce, Leo
‘Anyway you tell anyone you have to tell, otherwise keep it to yourself. As I say it’s not something you want talked about, is it?’
‘What about Liz? Do you think she’ll talk about it. To her friend Freda, for example?’
‘She’d be ashamed. I feel certain of that. Look at the way she wouldn’t tell me for a long time and then came out with it all of a sudden. She’s a funny child but I don’t think she’d ever talk to Freda Nustle, or anyone else. ‘Ark at them now, the way they’re enjoying themselves! That’s Mrs Donkin’s little boy they’re running after. They’ll have his big sister after them in a minute and she’ll give them what for. That’s children for you—they must be making a noise or getting up to mischief. Not that Liz is as bad as some, or Freda either. Only where it is, her mother likes a drop now and again and it’s not good for her with that indigestion she’s got. I mean she’s all wind and the last thing she should take is light ale. If I ever take anything, which is seldom, I like a drop of gin. That does you good, I always say, not these gassy drinks. But I suppose you have to keep off it on your job. It would never do for you to get muddled between one and another when you’re trying to find out the truth about anything, would it?’
Carolus was determined not to break the flow which he enjoyed. But Mrs Bodmin herself seemed to do so.
‘Well, I must See About something,’ she said. ‘This’ll never do. And you keep what’s on that paper to yourself, except what you have to tell the police. You’ll find it all there. Every word of it. And I only wish I didn’t have to write it, but sometimes you can’t keep things to yourself, can you?’
Carolus did not feel that an answer was necessary.
Chapter Fifteen
‘I’m having a few friends in this evening,’ said Carolus to Mrs Stick next day. ‘Perhaps we could have a cold buffet?’
‘Buffets, sir, I thought those were the places on railway stations where you get sandwiches.’
Carolus smiled.
‘We shall have sandwiches too, Mrs Stick. Only better ones I hope. You see I want you and Stick to come as guests.’
‘As guests, sir? Then who’s going to get everything ready, I’d like to know? Besides, it wouldn’t be Right.’
‘Mr Gorringer is coming,’ said Carolus encouragingly.
‘I shouldn’t mind that so much, not after we went on that cruise with him. Only, what I say is…’
‘You come, Mrs Stick, because tonight will be the last word on the case which you and Stick started me off on.’
‘You mean about that poor young boy that was killed falling off his motor-bike?’
‘You can put it like that. At least you know what I’m talking about.’
‘I daresay Stick will, he having a good memory for anything like that. He told me at the time he’d never forget accidentally getting hold of one of the boy’s hands and finding it like an icicle.’
Mr Gorringer was no more enthusiastic about the occasion in prospect.
‘While I appreciate your including myself in your audience, my dear Deene, I cannot but feel that on this occasion I have played a very minor role in your investigations. It scarcely merits the privilege you offer me.’
‘I might say that all you did on this occasion was to remind me of when term would start. But I shan’t do that, if only for the sake of your interest in other cases, I do hope you will care to hear the few details I have to give.’
‘Most assuredly,’ said Mr Gorringer. ‘Most assuredly. You will, I surmise, invite Hollingbourne since he was able to furnish you with certain details of the victim’s conduct?’
‘Hollingbourne has taken his brood to a holiday camp, I understand. Won’t be back till a day or two before term begins.’
‘Ah yes. Very appropriate,’ said the Headmaster ambiguously.
So it was to a small very mixed audience of Inspector Goad, Detective Sergeant Grimsby, the Sticks and Mr Gorringer that Carolus gave his recital of the case which he now considered completed.
‘As soon as I went out to examine the body which Stick had found I was convinced that things were not what they seemed. It was all too perfect a discovery to be true. You know how it is with evidence—you accept it or you feel there’s something planted there. There were here the marks on wrists and ankles to show how the boy had been taken to that point in the road on a motor-bicycle, the shorn hair, the nakedness—these things told me very clearly what I was meant to think. I, or whoever else came on the body would obligingly say “Yes. A young greaser with his hair cut short. A member of some town gang who has fallen out with the rest of them. A boy who has been deliberately humiliated and then murdered. To dispose of the body some motor-cyclist among them has tied his feet to the footrests and his arms about the rider’s waist and taken him across country to the place pre-arranged to dump his body. The police will immediately search for a young tearabout who owes the boy a grudge.” This was all so obvious that it made me turn in exactly the opposite direction, though I noted that Grimsby at first accepted the thing. “Been carried some distance on the pillion seat of a motorbike,” he told me flatly.’
‘That was in the first days,’ Grimsby reminded Carolus. But Carolus began speculating.
‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘that someone quite other than a hippy or anything of the sort, wanted to get young Carver out of the way, how would he go about it in a manner that would throw suspicion on someone else? Exactly as he did, I decided. The boy was already known to associate with a pretty poor crowd of villains in the making. What more probable than that he had fallen out with one group or the other? To be safe the murderer decided that both the skinheads and the greasers who had been Carver’s friends should be involved in his death and set about this by blackmailing the wretched owner of the discotheque frequented by Carver to bribe Phil White and Des Grayne to beat up Dutch, cut his hair and leave him in the cellar of the Spook Club tied up, naked, for someone else to kill. Not satisfied with this, before actually taking Dutch’s life, he arranged to bring Gil Bodmin to the scene in the hope that he would add his evidence of murder, Gil being regarded as the leader of the local gang of skinheads.
‘So we come to the mysterious woman’s voice on the telephone. She it was who told Swindleton he was to get Phil and Des down to his cellar, she it was who rang Gil Bodmin at the Cattle Market, the meeting-place of the skinheads, and persuaded him to go to the cellar of the Spook Club after Dutch had been what was expressively known as “done up”. Of this voice each hearer said that he thought he had heard it somewhere and so on, but no one could identify it. We shall come to that again.
‘To go back to the suppositions that started the case for me. They were chiefly negative. I did not think that Dutch had been murdered by the teenage monsters of Hartington, though several of them seemed quite capable of murder. This for a time and purely by supposition put out of reckoning as suspects Phil, Des, Gil Bodmin and the most unpleasant of them all known as Trimmer. After that it became a question of motive. Who on earth among adults could want Dutch so much out of the way that he was prepared to adopt the difficult and dangerous scheme to kill the boy and put the potential blame on someone else? Who, and with what motive?’
There was a rumbling sound in the room caused by Mr Gorringer clearing his throat as he was accustomed to do when he wished to attract attention.
‘I perceive, my dear Deene, that you are about to name the villain of the piece. Let us therefore pause for a moment to prolong the period of our curiosity.’
‘By all means. Have a drink,’ said Carolus.
Mrs Stick spoke up.
‘Upon my word it doesn’t bear thinking about,’ she said. ‘To think that’s what you’ve been finding out about all this time! If I’d known what Stick had come on I’d have told him to leave it be.’
‘But I haven’t got nearly so far as Mr Gorringer supposes,’ Carolus said. ‘We are asking as yet no more than Who? and with what motive? To answer those questions took a considerable time and much e
xpert work by Detective Sergeant Grimsby. I did not even at once see that the obvious answer to the second question was the ugly word Blackmail. Dutch Carver was blackmailing someone and doing fairly well out of it. For although I quite believed that he was a pusher for Swindleton, disposing of odd quantities of cannabis, I did not think that Swindleton’s resources enabled him to put up any real sum in capital. He was blackmailing someone else, and I know one cruel truth about that. The blackmailee in this or in any other crime does not need to be rich. The poor wretch who is being held to ransom will find some means somehow to satisfy the blackmailer who has sufficient hold over him. It is the appalling part of this trade. A man will beg, borrow or even commit crimes to try the impossible task of buying off the greedy blackguard who holds him. So I did not necessarily suppose that I must look for a rich man as the murderer of Dutch. There were a number of possibilities.
‘When I began to think it might be somehow concerned with the little girl, Liz Bodmin, it narrowed it down somewhat but it was all very hypothetical. And Liz would not, or perhaps could not talk. There was pathos in the child keeping silence in loyalty to the young ruffian whom she thought to be alive, keeping a silence the breaking of which, had she known it, would have revealed the identity of his murderer. I felt bound for a time to respect that silence and approach the matter from another angle.
‘If, and you will note that we are still confined by the ifs, if Dutch was levelling blackmail, as I thought, on what grounds? Who was guilty of what? Before the legislation popularly known as the Abse Act had been passed there would not have been much doubt of it for Dutch was younger than what is so insanely called the age of consent, and so could both share the offence and levy blackmail from the other partner. But even a British jury with all their narrow-mindedness and prejudices would hesitate to send a man to prison for an act with such a hardened young rapscallion as Dutch Carver. If not queerness, therefore, what? The answer was close at hand. Someone had corrupted the child whose arrested development and freedom from maternal supervision made her singularly vulnerable, and Dutch had discovered it and bound Liz to him with the strongest bonds of secrecy.
‘So finally I came to the final “Who”, the one that could only be revealed by Liz herself. There were several possibilities if we remember the Moors murders, and how a woman was involved in those. I did not for some reason—perhaps a failure in my knowledge of sexual psychology—suspect a woman acting alone, but there were two women, both capable of vicious practices I believed, and both with a man who might be capable of sharing them, Connie Farnham and Flo Carver (or Estelle Delafont as she liked to call herself). The second one had a man friend, the coloured Justus Delafont who in spite of their protestations of freedom from colour prejudice, many English people would suspect. But what possible evidence was there to connect them with this filthy crime?’
‘A well-merited condemnation,’ put in Mr Gorringer. ‘I do not remember an investigation of yours, my dear Deene, which has brought you so near to the devil and all his works.’
‘Shocking!’ said Mrs Stick and her husband nodded agreement with her.
‘Revolting,’ said Grimsby.
But Goad, who knew more of the unpleasant manifestations of vice than any of them merely nodded in invitation to Carolus to continue.
‘I decided,’ he said, ‘to steal Skilly’s motorcar.’ This caused a certain disturbance in the room but Carolus remained calm.
‘I doubt if I heard you aright,’ boomed Mr Gorringer. ‘To steal a motorcar?’
‘Only temporarily,’ said Carolus, ‘it was returned to the owner the next day.’
‘After you had gone over the boot with a fine tooth-comb,’ suggested Grimsby.
‘Exactly. As you had done with the cellar. You must forgive me for a small deception between professionals. I gave you the blond hair I found in the boot from my pocket-case, whereas I had found another hair in the cellar which I put between the pages of my diary. Both were specimens of the hair cut from Dutch but the one from the boot of Skilly’s car showed that Dutch’s body after his hair had been cut, had been shoved into the boot of the car, and presumably, driven across to the Boxley Road. This is what I suspected. The marks on wrists and ankles had been made quite deliberately to mislead whoever would find him. Besides I had thought when I first looked at the body that its hunched-up position, stiffened by rigor mortis, could be due either to the boy being tied on to a pillion and carried by the motor-cyclist, or could have been thrust into the boot of a car. I felt the latter was more probable for reasons I have given.
‘This was a good leap forward. I knew the murderer was one or two of three persons, or conceivably all the three. The choirmaster Leng, his friend and cousin-in-law Skilly, or perhaps in a minor role helping to cover up for her husband, Leng’s wife. What I needed to know was who had corrupted Liz, who had paid out blackmail to Dutch, and who had murdered him and attempted to put the blame on the teenagers. This person, I was convinced, was one and the same, though I have not discovered yet which of the other two had assisted him, if either. The voice on the telephone could be either that of Mrs Leng, or of Skilly who by the look of him might be able to give a fairly useful imitation of a woman’s voice. That, if he has not already done so, will be for Detective Sergeant Grimsby to discover. But the triumph is Mrs Bodmin’s. She it was who without apparently dampening the high spirits of her little daughter Liz, obtained from her the information that we all need. Inspector Goad and Detective Sergeant Grimsby are welcome to examine the curious and not I’m afraid quite literate script but from it they will discover quite certainly that the man who was being blackmailed and murdered his blackmailer, who pushed his naked corpse with hair duly cut to give the impression that other young men had been at work, was the supposed beneficiary of the dead boy, Warton Leng.
‘When you two policemen with your expertise which you have also made available to me, have tidied up the odd ends, I don’t see very much prospect of freedom for Leng for the next twenty or thirty years, though doubtless he will be able to play the church organ on Sundays.’
‘A most dastardly affair, and I for one am delighted that you have brought the perpetrator to justice,’ Mr Gorringer exulted.
‘What strikes me is the stupidity of Leng,’ said Goad. ‘Did he really think that any competent CID officer was going to be fooled by his wrist marks and ankle marks and cropped hair?’
‘It damned nearly fooled me,’ said Grimsby frankly. ‘With all the motor-bikes in the case I doubt if I should have suspected a car being used. And then what June called “just an ordinary car”, in other words not Leng’s but Skilly’s little Cortina. How wrong Roger was to think perhaps the best piece of evidence we had was the sort of bloody silly answer a woman would give.’
‘I should think so!’ said Mrs Stick. ‘To my mind it’s the women who should have all the credit in this case. Mrs Bodmin for finding out from her little girl who was to blame, June for noticing that car that drew up at the Spook Club to take the poor young boy away, and
‘Mrs Stick for persuading her husband to tell me of the corpse he had found. Yes, I quite agree, Mrs Stick. Only if we search farther back was not the boy’s mother in part to blame?’
‘Because she never bothered to bring the boy up, you mean?’ asked Mrs Stick nodding. ‘I’m sure we all agree with you there. We read in the paper every day of parents not caring about their children and here’s a case of it, if ever there was one!’
‘What about Mrs Bodmin?’ asked Stick joining in the discussion for the first time.
‘Well, she did learn better, didn’t she, in the end? Let’s hope the little girl will be brought up properly after this and not let run about on the streets after all we’re told on the telly about nasty old men with bags of sweets to tempt them. I know if I had a little daughter…’
‘Which you haven’t,’ said Stick somewhat obviously.
But Carolus himself was to have a nasty surprise before he could feel that the case was
quite completed.
‘Tell me,’ he asked Grimsby. ‘When are you going to arrest Leng?’
‘Oh come now Carolus. Don’t be naïve. Leng was charged with murder twenty-four hours ago.’
‘Really? On what evidence?’
‘Pretty much what you have given,’ said Grimsby. ‘You’ve been enormously helpful, Carolus, but don’t take the police for complete fools.’
‘Far from it, I assure you,’ said Carolus.
‘It is an excellent example of what I am always telling you, Deene. Let the cobbler stick to his last. Your duty is with Upper Fifth’s historical studies.’
‘Then perhaps we shouldn’t have so many murders about the house,’ said Mrs Stick.
‘Or so many whodunnits,’ said Inspector Goad, ‘and that to my mind would be a pity. Good night, ladies and gentlemen. And I may appropriately bid you to sleep well.’