First Fix Your Alibi

by Bill James

  But, unavoidably, Ralph had to ask him in. Ember loathed discourtesy. Manse left his bike leaning against the target, which to Ember seemed another foul breach of decorum. Ralph couldn’t escape the impression that it ruptured the brilliant resemblance between his new sport and the grand conquerors at Agincourt many centuries ago. He felt that there was something plebeian and disorganized about a bike left leaning against anything, let alone an archery target with such glorious historic overtones.

  As they walked to the house Manse said in his special kind of English, ‘On the gate to the grounds I seen a plaque with what seems to me like outright Latin, Ralph.’

  ‘It’s outside and you’re right, it’s Latin, so I suppose you could call it outright, Manse. Low Pastures had a lord lieutenant living here at one stage, and at a different time, the Spanish consul. These would be educated people. One of them probably had the plaque installed. The gate itself has been renewed more than once, I imagine, but the plaque has survived. I feel it a duty to preserve it – make sure the screws don’t rust allowing the plaque to fall and possibly get trampled and broken.’

  ‘Of course, Caring had Low Pastures for a while, didn’t he, Ralph?’ Shale said. ‘But I wouldn’t think he put no Latin plaque there.’

  This was another dirty gambit from him. ‘I believe the plaque would have been there long before Caring,’ Ember said at once and in a very definite voice. A villain called Oliver Leach, known as Caring, because of his constant worried look, did live in Low Pastures at one time. Shale wanted to hint there was a rubbishy side to the house as well as a Spanish consul. Caring and Peter Chitty, both dead now, had been a middling successful robber team. ‘The Latin means: “A man’s mind is what he is”,’ Ralph replied. ‘Or “The mind of each man is the man himself.” Cicero.’

  ‘He did quite a lot of sayings, I believe,’ Manse said.

  ‘Yes, quite a lot.’

  ‘He knew how to put his finger on a great truth and write it nice and short. Them days, before TV or the World Cup, people had a lot of time for thinking about things and getting their ideas down on papyrus, as jotters were called then, unless they was galley slaves,’ Shale said. ‘It would be hard to argue against them remarks about a man’s mind.’

  ‘Yes, Cicero could be pretty sharp, I gather,’ Ralph said.

  ‘If a man didn’t have a mind he wouldn’t know he didn’t have a mind because he wouldn’t have anything to know it with. This would leave him in quite a situation,’ Manse said.

  Ember saw that the blather was meant to slow things down a little so the real reason for the Manse visit could be gently eased into the conversation later, not hurled at Ralph immediately, perhaps annoying him, perhaps even offending so much by the bluntness that he would reject any further Waverton discussion. Shale was what was called in some occupations ‘a progress chaser’. That is, someone sent to speed up work on some job. Manse had sent himself. The job was Waverton. The worker was Ralph, or should be.

  Ralph took him into the house. Ember wondered whether this property had ever seen anything like Shale in his pedal-power outfit. Perhaps there had been fancy dress parties, popular among the landed gentry in the Victorian period. Or the Spanish consul might have liked get-togethers with a theme from his own country and asked people to come as matadors or flamenco dancers. But Low Pastures would be more used to people clothed formally for business or ceremonial occasions in the city, or booted and spurred after hunting. Manse had at least taken the helmet off as a gesture of respect.

  They went into what Ralph referred to as the Round Room, because of its curved walls, with a huge window at one end giving a view of the distant sea. The room had a four-leaf mahogany table, big Edwardian armchairs, the frames re-covered in moquette, a chesterfield, also moquetted, and a mahogany chiffonier.

  ‘I won’t offer you a Kressmann Armagnac, Manse,’ Ember said, ‘it might affect your balance on the bike, but I’ve got some tomato juice.’ He brought a bottle from the chiffonier and a couple of glasses. Ralph poured for both of them.

  Manse gazed at the art around the walls. ‘I’m a pre-Raphaelite man myself, as you probably know, Ralph. Dante Gabriel Rossetti I can’t get enough of, not to mention Burne-Jones. Brotherhood. They had a brotherhood. I love that idea. Say one of them runs out of blue – they done a lot of blue for women’s dresses – yes, if DG was out of blue one of the others would get around to the Arts and Crafts shop and bring a couple of tubes of blue for his mate, like “Compliments of the Brotherhood”.’ He took a long pull at the juice. ‘Waverton, Ralph,’ he said.

  Out it came at last, the real reason for this wonderfully casual call! The obviousness of the scheming was so strong Ralph almost laughed. ‘Waverton?’ he replied.

  ‘Still with us,’ Shale said.

  ‘Certain unexpected developments brought delays and some confusion, Manse, although they seemed to have no basic connection with our project. There’s a philosophy about this kind of random snag and the need for us all to fight back and do our own thing, regardless.’

  ‘Is this Cicero?’

  ‘Later. Existentialism.’

  ‘Are we still as we were, Ralph – a brotherhood ready to aid each other in a major matter?’ Shale replied.

  Ralph didn’t fancy being brother to this freakish looking hamster clone, but he said, ‘Why shouldn’t we be still as we were, Manse? There might be blips in our approach, but blips are only blips, and can be by-passed, can be removed.’

  Shale gave a great beam of a smile that to quite a degree humanized his face. This transformation shook Ember, its force, its scale. His teeth were full-sized, not hamster teeth. ‘I knew – knew – you’d stand by me, Ralph. And I know – know – that when the time comes I’ll stand by you after the same honourable fashion.’

  ‘The problem hasn’t shifted, Manse,’ Ralph declared. ‘There still has to be recompense for the murder of your wife and son. Matters have to proceed as you and I want. The future for our two firms requires this.’

  And Ralph meant it. Even apart from the existentialist compulsion, it would be unthinkable, surely, to show himself scared or indecisive in front of this farcical two-wheel-fan. The point was, Ralph didn’t in the least consider he had been cowardly to dodge out at the Binnacle crisis when he saw all the police and ambulance activity. To withdraw had been wise, in fact, tactically brilliant. That did not amount to panic. But he considered it would be panicky now to make that incident a warning and discard any notion of seeing to Waverton. Ralph valued the soldierly comradeship he’d felt lately with those longbow lads at Agincourt. They hadn’t chickened because there were so few of them against so many.

  And Ralph must not chicken because of an inconvenient, irrelevant event at a rave. Just before the Binnacle hadn’t he reached a solid decision to do Waverton as per agreement with Shale? Up until then, he had felt very uncertain. To scamper back to that uncertainty now, or even worse than uncertainty, would be pathetic, a ghastly endorsement of those vicious labels, Panicking Ralph or Panicking Ralphy.

  Shale stood and put on his helmet. ‘Do you know, I got to admit I’d sort of given up believing you’d do it, Ralph. In fact, I thought of going down to the Binnacle that night because I’d heard he’d be there. Do it myself. In the crowd they get at them music nights I thought I might be able to slink in, then slink out when the attack was finished. But, of course, the spot became full of police and whatall, so I had to chuck it and get clear.’

  Ralph smiled. ‘You actually went there, did you? You must have missed half a night’s sleep.’

  They walked back to Manse’s bike at the target. Shale said, ‘Did you ever think of calling yourself Rafe not Ralph as some do, Ralph, especially upper-class people in the Household Cavalry and that sort of gang because – no offence – to ralph in America means to throw-up. The same sort of sound, what’s termed “echoic”, my daughter told me. So, someone might say, “I’m feeling a bit echoic. I think I’m going to ralph.”’

  TW
ENTY-NINE

  ‘I don’t know how you’ll view this, sir,’ Harpur said.

  ‘In which particular, Col?’ Iles said.

  ‘You come at things in a very … a very individual way occasionally. I’ve heard folk say after meeting you for the first time, “That’s an individual if I ever encountered one.”’

  ‘Are you saying in your usual slippery, bet-hedged way that I’m fucking insane, Harpur?’

  ‘What I have to ask myself, sir, is whether what we have here is a plus or a minus, a plus or minus as far as it concerns your quest,’ Harpur replied. ‘It’s as if in one respect your quest has been satisfactorily concluded, though without your direct participation. And yet, in another respect it means your quest can never be concluded in the fullest sense of that term.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Which what, sir?’

  ‘Term.’

  ‘Concluded.’

  ‘Has his wife been told?’ Iles replied.

  ‘Garland sent Sergeant Pate and a couple of WPCs, one WPC to stay with their daughter, if necessary.’

  Harpur and Iles were on a hillside overlooking the city, not far from the remnants of the old viaduct, and not far, either, from the concrete anti-aircraft gun emplacements used in the war, another spot where Harpur sometimes rendezvoused in secret with his main and supreme informant, Jack Lamb.

  It wasn’t Lamb who had phoned Harpur a couple of hours ago, though, but the headquarters Control Room again. An inspector there said they’d had a frightened, only half-coherent call about the find from a pair of lads who’d been out after rabbits on Torson Steep at first light. Chief Inspector Garland had also been informed. ‘The ACC will want to know at once, too,’ Harpur had said.

  ‘Right, sir.’

  Denise, wearing a black, sleeveless vest she’d found in one of the bedroom chest drawers, and asleep alongside Harpur had snorted and whimpered at the interruption but didn’t properly wake up. Her sleeps usually took her ten fathoms deep where, she’d told Harpur, all her dreams were tinted indigo. She’d automatically pushed a hand towards the ciggies on the bedside table, two of them left ready, part out of the packet, but full unconsciousness got her again and stopped that. Her hand fell helplessly on to the duvet like a shot bird. Her fingers twitched as if they knew they’d been cast aside from their life work and furiously resented it.

  The inspector on the Control Room phone could and would make what he wanted of the background accompaniment to his conversation with Harpur. He reckoned he must have heard the bell more or less at once this time. Hazel and Jill hadn’t left their beds to quiz him on the reason for going out so damn early, possibly disrupting breakfast.

  On Torson Steep now, Iles said, ‘I think I catch your drift, Col.’

  ‘As to which particular, sir?’

  ‘As to how to regard this, one way or its very reverse.’

  ‘Tricky. I thought you might see what we have here as a kind of rough justice.’

  Iles pondered this for a second and then said, ‘I’m certainly in favour of that occasionally, or oftener.’ He was in civvies this morning, a long, admiral-of-the-fleet style ankle-length grey top-coat, a dark red woollen bobble hat, a vermilion scarf which might be the one he used to come flashing in front of Hazel before he gave up this incipient paedophilia. Jill had a theory that the scarf was not really to do with seduction tactics at all, but useful in hiding his comical Adam’s apple from the possible giggling multitudes.

  ‘You spoke of my quest, Col,’ Iles murmured.

  ‘True.’

  ‘As, indeed, it is. I find it praiseworthy that once in a while from your gravely limited vocabulary you will come up with exactly the right word.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘However, we don’t know, do we, what led to this killing, to which you’ll probably reply, “Led. Lead. What led to this killing was the lead in what could be two .45 rounds to the chest, fired from near enough for the blast to produce scorch marks on the jogging garment, backgrounding the blood.”’

  Harpur said, ‘Led. Lead, what led to this killing was the lead in what could be two .45 rounds to the chest fired from near enough for the blast to produce scorch marks on the jogging garment, backgrounding the blood.’

  ‘But I want to look wider, Col.’

  ‘This is so typical of you, sir. Width is your home ground. Why I mentioned individuality.’

  ‘My quest, as you justly call it, is to do with finding those responsible for the Shale deaths, Naomi and Laurent, on my Sandicott ground. On my fucking Sandicott ground, Harpur.’

  ‘Well, the chief’s ground, also.’

  ‘On my fucking Sandicott ground, Harpur. What’s in the brackets, Col?’

  ‘In the brackets? Which?’

  ‘What’s my rank?’

  ‘Well, Assistant Chief Constable.’

  ‘What’s in the brackets? What is it that defines this assistant chief?’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘You’ve triumphantly broken through to the obvious again, have you?’

  ‘You’re Assistant Chief Constable, and then, in the brackets, Operations: Assistant Chief Constable.’ Harpur drew two brackets in the air with his finger.

  ‘Brill, Harpur! And Sandicott is, I think you’ll agree, an operation. The chief? We can leave him out of it. He’s along the corridor playing with his budget. Yes, indeed, Sandicott’s an operation and it’s mine. But we cannot know as a certainty that this latest death is connected with those. It is connected in that all three resulted from bullet wounds. But it would be unwise to press the similarity further. I wanted to talk to him. The chance is gone.’

  ‘Why I said “tricky”, sir.’

  ‘And if we do know, or come to know, this death is connected somehow to the Shale murders we cannot look further, wider, or, most importantly, higher, because the entity who might have been persuaded, and/or plea-bargained, to help us in that is here, dead on a dirt path, where, ironically, he sought fitness, among the rabbits and their stalkers, the chest of his jogging suit a mess because of those previously mentioned .45 bullets.’

  ‘Didn’t I read in the press somewhere about south of the Thames London firearms gangs favouring .45 Smith and Wessons?’

  ‘We’ll be told if these rounds come from an S&W.’

  ‘This model is probably still available for purchase.’

  ‘Yes, probably.’

  ‘These various, competing, mutually cancelling items of information is why I selected that word, sir.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Tricky.’

  As in the Binnacle, a small tent had been erected around the body. The police photographer arrived and went inside. Nearby, in a parked police van, Garland was talking to the two youths who had made the find, their tethered terriers yapping now and then.

  An unmarked black BMW approached, Sergeant Pate driving. Rose Waverton and a WPC in the back. Harpur spoke through the front opening of the tent to the photographer, ‘Leave it for a little while. His wife, widow, is here.’ The photographer came out. Rose Waverton left the BMW and walked towards them. She looked as though she had dressed hurriedly – jeans, a cream crew-necked sweater under a black unbuttoned raincoat, flat brown shoes, no hat. Her nicely rounded face looked made for cheerfulness, but, of course, there was none of that present now. It had also been absent at first when she called at 126 Arthur Street following the gala. She said, ‘Harpur, didn’t you tell me the situation as regards Frank was simply routine and harmless?’

  Oh God, yes he had done that. Denise helped him make it sound authentic. And it had worked, for the moment. The aim had been kindness, only that. They’d wanted to ease Rose Waverton’s anxieties about her husband. They hadn’t really understood then what Frank Waverton’s role in all this had been. In fact, Harpur didn’t understand now what that role had been, supposing he’d had a role. Maybe someone somewhere knew, but if he or she existed that someone remained a mystery someone, undiscoverable so far even by Iles on his q
uest. The soothing explanation for the police interest in Frank Waverton that Denise and Harpur had given her – a ‘touchstone’ only, a ‘paradigm’ only-– had been short-termism: an attempt to reassure her then and there that Frank was no special target and would be available, if needed, for further love-making in the back of the Mercedes. Could anyone have foreseen then this swerve into havoc?

  ‘We’re very sorry, Mrs Waverton,’ Iles said, ‘but there have been developments. If you ask Harpur he’ll tell you. “Tricky.”’

  Harpur would have liked to tell her something more precise than that but couldn’t. These two visits – Mrs ‘Vaughan’ to view her dead son, Mrs Waverton to view her dead husband – he found depressingly, opaquely linked. What Denise has been able to tell Garland and Harpur about the Binnacle violence only confirmed statements from other witnesses. Denise could help Harpur now and then, but not with this.

  THIRTY

  At the Monty, Ralph Ember took a phone call in his upstairs office. Shale, voice quivering with warmth, admiration and friendship, said, ‘Congrats, Ralph. I’m not going to state no more for the usual very obvious reasons. But, remember, Ralphy, I’m in your debt, long-term or short. You’ll find Manse Shale don’t forget his obligations, but repays in similar, what you might say, coin.’

  Ember put the phone down, confused, almost dazed. When he’d heard not long ago that Frank Waverton had been found shot in the chest on Torson Steep he had assumed Manse must have finally tired of waiting for Ralph to act and had done what he said he’d thought of doing at the Binnacle: complete the job himself. No. Not at all. Not Manse and certainly not himself. So, who?

  During his university foundation year he’d heard of something called the deus ex machina in classical stage dramas, describing an unexpected intervention from outside that resolved all the problems created in the play, no matter how messy. Ralph had always admired those ancient writers. They produced their stuff ages ago, yet it could still apply to situations now, although they wouldn’t have had any idea of what ‘dawn jogging on Torson Steep’ meant.