‘It was a Saturday,’ he muttered.
‘Yes. The 16th of November. So—on that evening—Geoff did the Major’s place. Any place would do, as long as he could do something violent there. And so you hadn’t got an alibi because you were at Milo’s place, Aces High, and something nasty happened there, so you were caught in a trap. You asked me to help you, but I’m sorry. I’ve let you down. I’ve come across the truth. But really, you know, you didn’t have to be so secretive about it, because the place was like a fortress, and there were none of your little holes in the window-frames. Nobody suspects you of anything Ronnie.’
I didn’t dare to allow the relief to stretch his lips into a grin because his face already hurt enough. All I allowed him to say was, ‘You done me just great, Mr Patton.’ He meant this sarcastically, I suspected, because it still wasn’t an alibi he’d care to use.
It was time to produce the pliers. I took them from my pocket and placed them beneath his nose on the bedcover. Then I gave him two minutes to decide what it meant. While he was doing that, I helped it along by reaching in again and putting his bunch of keys beside the pliers.
‘You’re a right bastard, Patton,’ he managed to say.
‘Good. Fine. We’re getting somewhere. Can you manage to say it or do I have to go on guessing?’
He could manage to say it, forced himself, because I might guess too much. He told it painfully and hesitantly, using his indisposition in order to account for periods of thought, during which he polished it to present a shiningly innocent facade to the escapade.
This, I felt, was how he saw it, as if it was not really related to his normal felonious activities. He had been doing no more than trying to right a wrong. Milo owed him money.
It had been a matter of £320. Ronnie was in a good position to know that Milo left the house empty from around eight-thirty until nearly six the following morning. Milo had not been averse to airing the wrongs that he had suffered. His wife had left him, and young Bryan...his opinion of Bryan had been blood-curdling. Ronnie had therefore been under the assumption that he was tackling an empty house. If he gave any thought to Bryan, he attributed to him his own reactions in a similar plight, which would be instant removal into the far distance. Bryan would naturally have gone to live with his mother, somewhere miles away. Or so Ronnie assumed.
It was thus that Ronnie, blissfully ignorant of what he was approaching but nevertheless doing so with his usual circumspection, had parked his car a quarter of a mile away, and had come in on Aces High by way of a number of gardens and garden walls. There was no sign of any lights in the house, he said, but perhaps he hadn’t been using his usual care, assuming the place to be empty. He just wanted to get inside, perhaps find a desk with cash in its cubby-holes, and depart. Failing that, he would pick up any small items he could dispose of easily.
He was cautious. If possible, he wanted to leave no traces of his presence, so he tried the easy way first. He used the pliers on the key in the back door lock. The door opened.
Milo had told me he’d locked the back door. If it was later bolted, he had assumed his son had done that. But Ronnie told it with an innocence that suggested he considered the point to be of no importance. Yet it indicated that Bryan had not bolted the back door.
Ronnie was then in the kitchen. He is not interested in kitchens unless he’s hungry, so he wasted no time there, but took the short corridor into the back of the hall. With his usual care, he checked the front door. It had a cylinder lock, not held open by the sneck, and was bolted top and bottom. He didn’t touch it, believing he would have no reason to allow for a rapid exit.
At this point I asked him what time it had been. He said it was somewhere after eleven-thirty, but he hadn’t been checking.
From the hall, he explored the downstairs rooms, one of which seemed to be an untidy office. But there was no spare cash hanging around. In one of the rooms he found a glass-covered showcase in which Milo had his collection of other people’s medals. That sounded typical. Ronnie, who knew something about medals, had his eye on a 1914-18 VC and a 1939-45 DFC, but he would have preferred to take something Milo might not miss for quite a while. So he continued his search. He mounted the stairs to the upper landing, which ran right across the stair-head.
It was here that he’d had an impression that something was wrong. It could have been a sound, a touch of draught—he couldn’t say. But from that moment he moved more cautiously, easing open doors to bedrooms, and seeing nothing that seemed interesting. Untidy beds, stripped beds. All this inspection, he told me, was by the light of a small, finely-focused torch. Then, at the end of the landing, with the torchlight directed downwards, he thought he saw a very fine vertical line of light ahead of him.
There should not have been a light at all. He’d approached the house from one side, and not, as he would have done with an occupied house, walked all round. Milo could have left a light on by mistake. This was probably a bathroom. He approached the door with extreme caution, torch now switched off. The line of light, an eighth of an inch across, ran along top and bottom of the door as a fine wedge, and down one edge. He had to know whether somebody was in there, in case it meant a rapid retreat. He touched the door gently. It opened a fraction, then stopped.
He knew then that somebody was inside, because the bolt was fastened. He could hear no sound. But that door might open in front of him at any second, and Ronnie, whose nerves had been toughened by years of this sort of thing, was suddenly scared to death by the situation. It could even be Milo, not gone this evening to his club. The thought of Milo abruptly facing him...He turned and scuttled away, as fast as he could while maintaining silence.
I took him through this part of it again. It didn’t vary one iota. I asked him how long he’d been inside the house by that time. He said about twenty minutes. Not more. I nodded for him to continue, aware that Amelia, at my side, was tensely silent.
He had headed for the back door as briskly as he could, now without using his torch. He closed the door behind him, and from ingrained professionalism he locked it with the pliers. From there, he’d headed for the front of the house, intending to make a rapid return by road to his car. But at that moment Milo’s Jaguar had turned into the drive, proving that it hadn’t been him in the bathroom.
So Ronnie changed his mind, and took the rear garden route. He hadn’t even paused to grab a handful of medals. Or so he claimed.
It had been, for Ronnie, a dead loss of a night, because, not so very far away, Geoff had been throwing a vase at the Major’s face, and Ronnie was left with an alibi that he dared not use. Later, when he heard what had happened at Aces High, nothing would have extracted it from him.
Nothing but a pair of cunningly contrived pliers, that is. I reached over, picked them up and slid them back into my pocket, along with his keys, which I thought I might need again.
‘Heh!’ he complained weakly, obviously now in some pain from the exercise of his facial muscles.
‘I might need them, Ronnie. You never know.’
We left him, worried but in some way relieved.
On the way home in the car we discussed it, of course. ‘Richard,’ said Amelia, ‘I can’t see that you’ve gained anything.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. Ronnie’s story is that the bathroom door was bolted. Milo told me he crashed through the door—I don’t remember his exact words. But a man of his weight, moving fast and in a sudden panic, would take out a bathroom door bolt without breaking his stride. So all right. Did he, or didn’t he?’
She moved uneasily on the seat. ‘You’re going to ask him that?’
‘It may not be necessary. No. But there’s another point, the question of the bolts on the back door. Certainly it wasn’t bolted when Ronnie locked it behind him with his magic pliers. But it was bolted when Ken checked it later.’
She seemed annoyed that she couldn’t understand my point. ‘So?’ Then she twisted in her seat. Sheba was staring over my shoulder, as she so
often does, and Jake, attempting the same thing, had fallen off the rear seat. She reached back, picked him up, and put him on her lap.
‘So...who bolted it, and when, and why?’ I asked. ‘The obvious reason for doing such a thing would be to make absolutely certain that Bryan’s death was accepted as suicide. Why would that be necessary—unless it wasn’t suicide?’
She was silent for a while, then she asked quietly, ‘And does that matter to you? I mean, the death of a triple rapist, and a rapist-murderer as well...’
I glanced at her. Her frown of concern was unwelcome. ‘I’m not at all certain about the last one, love, that’s the trouble. It just doesn’t fit the Bryan you discovered.’
Silence.
‘Well—does it?’
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘No.’
‘Then there has to be somebody around whom it does fit.’
Silence again.
‘Doesn’t that follow?’ I asked.
She sighed deeply. ‘I suppose so, Richard. I suppose so.’
CHAPTER TEN
It was now clear that the programme I had laid out in my mind would have to be revised. Things turned up; plans needed adjustment. The visit I had intended to Francine Dettinger at Beaudesert Park would now best be postponed until I’d had another chat with Milo himself. It would not be pleasant. He would be aware now that I was in no way working on his side, and that anything he said would probably be taken note of and used against him. This was a facility I now enjoyed as a non-serving officer of the police, but it could just as easily prove to be a drawback.
The rest of the day now lay fallow. Milo, no doubt, would be at home. He would be awake in the afternoon. It would be best to tackle him then. I might even, if I played my cards right, be able to persuade him into a demonstration of exactly how he had gone through that bathroom door. But I didn’t want to give him one hint of why I needed this information, which meant that the best thing would be not to consult him at all on it. Not yet. First—so it seemed to me—it would be better to find a use for Ronnie’s pliers, but that would have to be when the house was dark and empty, which meant after he had left for his club.
My afternoon was therefore free, but it turned out that it had been planned for me. When we arrived home, Sergeant Rawston was seated at our kitchen table, along with another large and fierce character with bristling eyebrows, a neat moustache and dark, brooding eyes. At the sight of Amelia they rose to their feet.
Rawston introduced him. ‘This is Inspector Durrell,’ he said, I thought a little tentatively. ‘Mrs Patton and ex-Detective Inspector Patton, Inspector.’
Durrell shook my hand, but in a manner suggesting it was distasteful to him. He nodded and muttered to Amelia. I felt he was intensely uncomfortable, and anger was not far from the surface.
‘Do sit down,’ I said. ‘Relax. I see Mary’s kept you going with tea.’
Mary nodded to me, her lips pursed.
‘And you’ll stay to lunch,’ Amelia told them, as an instruction. She had sensed my reaction. I wanted to keep it all friendly.
Mary said, ‘I’ve already settled that. Nobody walks out of this kitchen with the smell of food behind them.’ She nodded. So there. And no fighting, gentlemen, please. I could read it in her expression. I winked, and she looked away.
‘I’ll just go and freshen up,’ said Amelia, catching my eye as she turned away. Now look what it’s come to!
I fetched across a chair, sat opposite them, felt the pot, which was still hot enough, and a cup and saucer was slid beneath my nose. I didn’t take my eyes from Durrell’s face. He was assessing me, deciding how to tackle it.
‘I’ve been to see Ronnie in hospital,’ I said chattily, stirring my tea. I was addressing this to Rawston. ‘He seems to trust me—I don’t know why. But I suppose, seeing that he asked me to help him over the Major Farrington break-in, he looks on me as his guardian.’
‘You didn’t bloody well guard him much when he got stabbed,’ said Durrell morosely.
‘I was seven floors up,’ I pointed out.
‘All the same—’
Rawston cut in. ‘Get anything out of him? I’d have been there this morning, only the Inspector—’
Nobody interrupted Durrell when he was speaking. His voice rose a fraction. He seemed to chew his words. ‘I was going to have you brought in, Patton. For questioning. But you were out here in the wilds, and it would’ve taken time. The sergeant persuaded me...’ He gestured embracingly. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea. You’ve been interfering. I don’t like it. I will not have it. Do you understand?’
I looked from one face to the other, Rawston expressionless, Durrell aggressive.
‘I understand perfectly,’ I said quietly, pausing for a sip of tea. ‘I understand that I may assist people who ask me for help. I don’t expect payment. And if I turn up anything that’ll help you people, you’re welcome to it. What I got from Ronnie—’
‘To hell with Cope.’
‘No, Inspector. No. You’re wrong. He’s linked with your case—the death of Bryan Dettinger—and he’s linked with the sergeant’s, the Major Farrington—’
‘I don’t care what he’s linked with, and we know he did the Farrington job. You have no right—’
‘I have Milo Dettinger’s express wish to have his son’s death proved as murder.’ I thought it diplomatic not to mention the fact that Milo had withdrawn that request.
‘It was suicide,’ he snapped.
‘I think not.’
‘The rotten little bleeder...’
‘Language!’ Mary cut in. ‘If you’re going to go on like that, you can get out of here right now. And go without your lunch.’ She nodded, frowningly severe. ‘For all I care.’
Durrell stared at her. ‘Ma’am, I...’
‘And it’s a mixed grill.’ So there.
To my surprise, Durrell suddenly grinned. It wasn’t a great success, but it was intended as a grin. ‘Ma’am, I apologize. But if you don’t mind I’ll stick to my opinions. I don’t like rape. I don’t like violence of any kind, but most of all I hate rape. Three, there were, and then the dirty little...then this rotten, twisted young man got out of prison and not only raped another woman, but killed her too. I’m sure you don’t want to know this. I don’t like to speak about it, but a man like that...Man! Tcha! A person like that has to be warped and depraved, and if you think I’m going to shed any tears when the sod...sorry, ma’am, it slipped out...when the young man committed suicide, then you can just think again. So I don’t feel happy to hear that some retired, second-hand copper wants to make out it’s murder. Not happy at all, ma’am. Do I make my point?’
‘You do,’ Mary agreed. ‘Oh yes you do, but you don’t have to go on about it.’
‘And Mary,’ I put in, somewhat intrigued that Durrell had seized an opportunity to lay out his attitude in front of us, ‘Mr Durrell would not be at all pleased if I handed him Bryan’s murderer on a plate.’
Durrell’s grin was variable, it seemed. It was now evil.
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he demanded, his chin squared off.
I shrugged. ‘You’d hate to have to arrest the murderer of a rapist.’
‘And you’d love it?’ He was very close to sneering.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you’d better have a word with Ken Latchett about that. Tell him I said so. Tell him I trust you.’
He growled something, deep in his throat, looking down at his fists on the table. Then he looked up. ‘Which doesn’t mean I’m going to trust you, my friend.’
At least I’d be able to claim he was my friend! ‘Well now!’ I said. ‘If you don’t trust me, how am I going to expect you to believe any little titbits of information I’ve winkled out?’
‘I don’t want your titbits. Be damned to your titbits...sorry, ma’am. Put not thy trust in amateurs, I say.’
‘Amateurs! Let me tell you, Mr Durrell—or remind you if you’ve forgotten—that a few years ago I was doing your job.’
‘I know that.’
‘Not an amateur, then. A civilian with a bit of experience.’
‘I don’t want...I’m not going to have any civilian poking his nose into my cases.’ He glared fiercely. ‘Do I make myself clear?’
‘I hope,’ put in Mary, slipping it into the threatening silence after his declaration, ‘that you two gentlemen like kidneys.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rawston eagerly, being affable, attempting to ease the tension. ‘Love ’em.’
‘And you, Mr Durrell?’
‘What? Yes. Oh yes...thank you.’
‘So it’ll be kidneys, bacon, sausage, liver and beefburgers I made myself from real beef. Lemon meringue pie to follow.’
Durrell stared at her blankly, feeling his position was being undermined. He managed to pull himself together and say, ‘That sounds excellent, ma’am.’
She nodded, smiling, and glanced at me. Your turn, Richard.
Amelia walked in saying, ‘We’ll eat in here. I know you men will want to get it all said.’ She beamed around at us. ‘I’ll take the dogs for a walk, Richard, while you sort things out.’
I nodded, and returned to the task of filling my pipe. It required tender care.
‘Where were we?’ I asked. ‘Ah yes. Civilian. Used, I suppose, Mr Durrell, in a derogatory sense. Oh yes, it was, and please let me say this. There are advantages you haven’t considered in tackling these things as a civilian. People will say things to me they wouldn’t have said to Detective Inspector Patton. They can trust me, to some extent, at least to keep things to myself and not put everything into an official report, and to use my discretion. And just think! I don’t have to waste time with all that paperwork. More time is left for consideration and thought.’
‘I’m not going to listen to all this—’
‘Please yourself. Leave if you wish, and miss your lunch. Mary wouldn’t be offended.’ Oh yes, she would! I didn’t catch her eye. ‘But you ought to listen to the rest, Mr Durrell. Listen, at least. You don’t have to take notice of what I say, if your professional conscience forbids it. But just think about the freedoms I enjoy. For instance, I can twist an arm or draw a little blood. I can break into private property. I can make illegal searches. I can steal, I can pry, I can destroy. I can discover evidence and eliminate or distort it, in line with my own moral values. None of which you, Mr Durrell, would dare to do. That is what being a civilian does for me. You can tell me you’re not interested in what I might discover in this way. You can tell me to lay off, and I shan’t take any notice of you—but that’s fine. Now you’re here, though, and you’re a guest, so you’re staying in the kitchen until you’ve eaten. Then you can leave, and I’ll not have mentioned anything relating to the burglary at Major Farrington’s, or the death of Bryan Dettinger. Or even the rape and killing of Ruby Carter. Do I make myself clear?’
The Key to the Case Page 14