He was better than his word. It was fifty minutes later when the second big sack of ice had been lowered down the shaft. As he was about to follow a shout came up to him.
“Can you get a portable wireless set?”
“Certainly,” said Hazlerigg. “You wouldn’t like a cocktail cabinet as well?”
“No – just a wireless. Only hurry. We want to get going before the Light Programme finishes.”
When Hazlerigg finally got back with the wireless – he had borrowed one from the nearest police canteen – he found that in his absence one or two changes had taken place.
A flex had been run into the shaft and a single bright, unshaded bulb illuminated every detail in the cavern.
The patient had been lowered very gently on to her back and wedged with huge wooden wedges against lateral rolling. She was covered from head to foot with ice packs.
The sapper was demonstrating something by means of a diagram he was drawing with chalk on the wall – but Hazlerigg got the impression that it was the old man who was really in charge of operations.
“I can’t explain it,” he was saying, “any more than I can explain about cows and milk. But they both like certain sorts of music. I know. I had to carry some gelignite half a mile once when it was in a very awkward frame of mind. I played to it all the way, on my mouth-organ.”
Hazlerigg twiddled a knob and an educated voice said: “The String Quartets of Purcell—”
“For God’s sake,” said Ticker. “That’s the Third Programme! Do you want to blow us all up? Try for Joe Loss.”
As long as he lives, Hazlerigg will never forget the final scene. The bright light, the intent faces of the two experts. Ticker Batson’s hand – long, muscular, and quietly controlled in its least movement – the hand of a brain specialist.
It was Ticker who did the cutting, and he used a long, oddly articulated saw with a thin blue blade which he had brought, furtively but lovingly, from an inner pocket.
“Whee-teedle-de-dee,” said the saxophone, lovingly.
“Zi-hing, zi-hing.” Ticker’s saw went backwards and forwards as steadily and smoothly as the arm of a metronome.
Then the last blinding minute when the wrench was put on and both men heaved together.
Chief Inspector Hazlerigg’s stomach turned right over as the big fuse came slowly off.
“That was Ticker’s last job,” said Hazlerigg. “He’s living on an annuity now. The U.0.P. bought it for him. I don’t know how much it cost them, but it was cheap at the price of what they’d have had to pay, in costs and damages, if that bomb had gone off.
“When I called on him the other day, I noticed a little gold cup on his mantelpiece. He tells me it was given him by the safe deposit people as a mark of their esteem for his efforts that night; which is quite funny, when you come to think of it.”
Manchester Sunday Chronicle, May 7, 1950.
SOMETHING LIKE HARD WORK
FASHIONS CHANGE FASTER than human nature. Fifty years ago the Scotland Yard detective was a big blundering booby with no imagination, no luck and size twelve boots: you remember Lestrade.
Nowadays he gets rather more of his just desserts.
Even his severest critics recognise him as a worker: a professional, who gets his results like other professionals more by perspiration than by inspiration.
What isn’t realised, even yet, though, is that in detection the hardest work can be the work that is done by the human brain. I cite the case of Miss Hatter.
Miss Hatter was a quiet old lady. She lived in Osbaldestone Road in Highbury and she occupied the floor of a house which had been built about the time of the Great Exhibition for an upper middle-class family and had been going slowly downhill ever since.
When it was first put up, Osbaldestone Road was a back street. Then, when they opened the new bypass and turned the northbound traffic into it, it became a highway overnight. And most of the front gardens were over-built with one storey shops and most of the quiet house-owners left, and the house got divided into flats, and people like Miss Hatter came in.
Miss Hatter didn’t mind the traffic that roared past her window. She was a little deaf, and she found it companionable. Also, as transpired later, she has another reason for liking it.
It was never suggested that she was odd – not even that she was a recluse, in the proper sense of the word. She said good morning to her acquaintances when she met them in the queues, and she was quite sensible, and her rooms were reasonably clean. She didn’t keep sixteen cats, or suffer from dangerous delusions, or anticipate the End of the World.
She just kept herself to herself.
One late afternoon, in early autumn, the ground-floor-front, not having heard Miss Hatter moving for nearly twenty-four hours, got alarmed and called the police. And the police said, oh dear, another of those, is it, and went back with the ground-floor-front and upstairs and opened the door – it wasn’t locked, you just walked upstairs and straight in – and they found Miss Hatter.
Only it wasn’t quite what they’d expected. It wasn’t a stroke or heart failure or cumulative malnutrition.
Miss Hatter’s head had been beaten in.
Quite early in the investigation Chief Inspector Hazlerigg – he was D.D.I at the time – put his finger on it when said to his Superintendent, “It’s difficult, sir, to believe that anyone could have been so completely alone. She has no family. Her father and mother are dead. Her only sister lives in South Africa – they sent each other a card every Christmas. She’s one or two acquaintances – shop and street acquaintances – nothing more.”
“What did she live on?” said the Superintendent.
“Dividends,” said Hazlerigg. He produced a thick, much folded bundle of multi-coloured script, and the Superintendent glanced through them.
“Good stuff,” he said. “Quite a lot of it, too. Well, this is one of the things the murderer may have been looking for.”
“He’d have had his work cut out to find them,” said Hazlerigg. “Unless he’d known exactly where to look.” He explained where his searchers had found them.
“Very ingenious,” said the Superintendent. “Wonderful ideas these old ladies get. You’d think they’d never heard of banks. Was she killed for these—?”
“I don’t think so,” said Hazlerigg. “After all, share certificates aren’t like bearer bonds. They’re not a lot of use except to the owner. I think she was more likely killed for cash.”
“Cash?”
Hazlerigg explained. “These shares would bring her in about five hundred a year. I’ve had her budget checked up as closely as I can. Her room cost her a pound a week – she spent about a pound a week on food. She never went out – except to shop and go to church on Sunday evenings. She didn’t give to charities. She hated holidays. She must have saved something like £300 a year – probably more.”
“How long had she been at Osbaldestone Road?”
“Ten years.”
“Three thousand pounds, probably in bank notes,” said the Superintendent thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose that could be quite a motive. I suppose she kept it in an old stocking. Did she have any visitors.”
“We’ve traced three, so far. Her landlady came up sometimes – to join her in a cup of tea—”
“It didn’t look to me like a woman’s crime,” said the Superintendent.
“No, sir. Then the vicar visited her about once a month.”
“Hmmm—”
“And a distant cousin, a Mr. Webb. He’s almost her only relative in London. He says he saw her last sometime in early summer. And before that, about Christmas. A big, beery person. I think he’s an insurance toot. Looked as if he could have done with the money, too.”
“Sounds more hopeful than the vicar,” agreed the Superintendent. “I suppose you—”
“Oh, yes. Nothing to go on at all. He lives in a basement flat at Muswell Hill. Keeps his own car. Comes and goes as he likes. He says he was in bed all that day and most of
the next – with flu.”
“Let me see now.” The Superintendent ruffled through the files. “It was pretty certain that she was killed on the evening of Thursday, wasn’t it? The day before we were called in?”
“Yes. Between four and six in the evening.”
“About dusk – and there was a bit of fog.”
“That’s right.”
“And there’s no reason to suppose that the murderer was someone who had visited her before.”
“Except that he seemed to know where the money was – if it was money he came for. There was no sign of a search having been made.”
“It’s a point. But he might be a visitor we haven’t found out about.”
“Yes.”
“Or someone who knew where the money was but hadn’t actually been there before.”
“Yes.”
“In fact, almost anyone could have walked in, in the dusk, knocked out Miss Hatter and helped himself.”
“Yes.”
“Then we haven’t really got anywhere at all.”
“Not yet, sir,” said Hazlerigg.
That was when the work started.
Everything in the room was taken out for scrutiny. Everything was listed and docketed and tested for fingerprints, and scrutinised and, if it looked interesting, photographed in several positions.
The only fingerprints which came to light were Miss Hatter’s and her landlady’s, except for a broad and masculine looking set, which caused some excitement until they were proved to belong to the Superintendent, who had absent-mindedly placed one hand on the mantelpiece when viewing the scene of the crime.
Altogether a number of objects were unearthed which cast odd sidelights on the day by day existence of a solitary and religious minded old lady, but only one item proved in any way puzzling.
Inspector Hazlerigg sat in his office looking at it – or rather at them, for the exhibit was six thick exercise books. They were well thumbed but neat and legible. They contained about forty plain ruled foolscap sized pages, and five of the books were full (and the sixth almost full) of Miss Hatter’s neat writing.
“Do you think it’s some sort of code?” suggested Sergeant Pickup.
“If Miss Hatter was the emissary of a foreign power—” said Hazlerigg slowly, “I’m—I’m Dick Turpin.”
“What does it mean, then?”
“GR DAI WRG 9072 B WP 2436 BL CHE GG 909,” said Hazlerigg. “I tried it on the cypher people, but they couldn’t get anywhere with it – or they haven’t done yet. They’re still trying.”
“Looks too logical to be a cypher,” said Pickup. “I mean – it’s mad but it sort of looks sensible at the same time.”
“If you can make sense out of that—” said Hazlerigg irritably. He had missed his sleep for two nights and was beginning to feel it.
“RD TRI PBL 4208 TB GO 2323 BL FD 8 PR 9293.”
“What’s that you’ve got there,” said the Superintendent.
Hazlerigg climbed wearily to his feet.
“It’s those books, sir,” he said. “We found one actually under Miss Hatter’s chair and the others in a cupboard.”
“My goodness,” said the Superintendent. He was staring at the last five groups. “BL FD PR 9293. What a coincidence.”
“What is it, sir?”
“It’s me,” said the Superintendent.
His subordinates looked at him blankly.
“My car, I mean. A blue Ford-8. Registration number PR 9293.”
“A car watcher,” said Hazlerigg and Pickup simultaneously.
“I always wondered how she spent all her spare time,” said the Superintendent.
That was when they really got down to work.
“It’s all we’ve got to go on,” said Hazlerigg. “We’ll do it systematically.
He had the whole of the detective staff of the division at it, and it wasn’t long before the uniformed branch were called in as well. Anyone with a quarter of a moment to spare found themselves involved in Hazlerigg’s motor car game.
He early discovered that there is a great division in the ranks of mankind. Some know about motor cars. Others don’t.
Probationary Detective Constable Walkinshaw, for instance, immediately solved BL CHE. “Blue Chevrolet,” he said. “That’s the doctor’s little job. I’ve seen it up and down the streets this last six months. He had a grey Riley coupe before and before that a black drop-head—”
“You’re on,” said Hazlerigg and enrolled him permanently.
There were two hundred and twenty-seven closely written pages to be sorted out and interpreted.
“I wish she’d dated ’em,” said Sergeant Pickup.
“Well, we can place some of them from the doctor’s visits,” said Hazlerigg. “Get hold of his log book.”
“And the bus schedules,” suggested Pickup. They had soon spotted the difference between “B” and “TB.” “You see what I mean. The trolley buses have to keep to the same order, they can’t pass each other. But the petrol buses are sometimes ahead and sometimes behind—”
“Where’s it all going to get you to when you have worked it out?” asked Inspector Martin, who had come over from a neighbouring division on other business and had already overstayed his intended visit by more than three hours, and incidentally had covered himself with glory by identifying SG TV as “small green tradesman’s van” and a very mysterious entry H ? M 3 ? 24 as a motor hearse belonging to the local undertaker.
“I’ve no idea,” said Hazlerigg cheerfully. His eyes were gritty from lack of sleep, but he was lit by the invisible flame which warms a policeman with the inner certainty that he is on to something good.
“I think I’ve got the hang of those odd little sections when none of the regulars seem to put in an appearance,” said Pickup. “I think they were times when she couldn’t sleep. There’s a big overhead street light outside her house, and she could play this game just as well after dark—”
“Of course,” said Hazlerigg softly. “They must be the all-night lorries coming into London. Check with the Road Transport people.”
This proved unexpectedly to be the first fruits of their work, because Road Transport identified all the lorries very easily except for one, an “S B V RT ?? 55” (which in Miss Hatter’s shorthand was a very small black van) and which proved to belong to an enterprising gentleman who ran stolen poultry into London for the early market, and was extremely upset when an accurate schedule of his movements was produced for him to explain.
“They can’t say we’re wasting our time,” said Hazlerigg. “Press on.”
They were getting good at it now. They could identify their “regulars” at a glance and dates, and even times of day were become increasingly certain.
The end came quite suddenly, as the end often does.
“Didn’t that chap Webb say he’d visited Miss Hatter in midsummer? What’s his car – an Austin-7 RHQ 3232? Here you are – June 15th – about tea time.”
“And before that at Christmas,” said Pickup. They found that one too without any difficulty.
“My God,” said Hazlerigg. “What fools we’ve been.”
In silence they turned back to the last book – the one they had found actually under Miss Hatter’s chair. It was the last entry but one on the last page.
“A 7 RHQ 3232.”
“And Webb,” said Hazlerigg, “was in bed all day with a cold, was he?” He reached for the telephone.
London Evening Standard July 11, 1950.
BALLOONS WILL BE RELEASED
LUIGIDONATELLO, A NATIVE OF CREMONA, a temporary citizen of Great Britain and an inhabitant of Bury Gate – which is part of Q Division in the Metropolitan Police District of London – was the only man whom Hazlerigg had ever heard speak of “the British way” as if he understood what he was talking about. This may only be one more example of the well-known fact that it takes a foreigner to understand an Englishman.
Hazlerigg was Divisional Detective Inspector of Q
Division at that time. He had held the post for nearly three days, and he was already beginning to experience the fascination of a first independent command; a command, moreover, of those peculiar streets and alleys, those blind courts and echoing railway yards, that ribbon of concrete which the embryo of the Great North Road, that grey, greasy serpent which the birthplace of the Grand Union Canal, and all the corners and pieces which make up one of the most difficult, most interesting, police districts in London.
Hazlerigg heard about Luigi on his first day in office. His temporary second-in-command, Inspector Hodges, appeared on duty with a yellow face and grey pockets under his eyes. In a less abstemious man these might have been the signs of a considerable hangover, but Hazlerigg knew Hodges well. He was a solid West Countryman, with a liking for draught cider and a head like iron.
“I can’t understand it,” he said, “but I’m never going to take a chance on Luigi again.”
“Who’s Luigi?”
“Italian. He runs a restaurant off Bury Market. The wife and I have been going there for months. At first I thought the food was a bit fussy – foreign, you know. Then I got to liking it.”
“An Italian restaurant,” said Hazlerigg incredulously. “In Bury Gate! Do they get any customers?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Hodges, “they do. I thought just the same myself when I saw the board go up. It was the sort of place that might do well enough in Soho, but not up here. The wife and I looked in as a bit of a joke. The food was so damned good we’ve been going back ever since – and so have plenty of other people, characters who normally use the fish-and-chip emporiums.”
“It doesn’t seem to have been too good last night,” said Hazlerigg. “By the way, how do you know it was Luigi’s food? It might have been something you had somewhere else.”
“It might,” said Hodges, “but it doesn’t seem—excuse me a moment, the ship’s still rocking.” He disappeared. When he came back ten minutes later, he was pale, but more composed. “I think that’s the last of it,” he said. “As I was saying, I don’t see what else it can have been, barring Luigi’s. I never had time for any tea yesterday, and my wife and I went straight there when I came off duty. She’s got it, too, worse than I have.”
The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries Page 4