Call for Simon Shard

by Philip McCutchan

  “Tell me what?”

  “That they’re hopeful, Simon — ”

  “Oh — yes. Yes, he did, but how often do they tell the truth? He said something about it all depending on…how much you had to disturb on the way into the tumour itself, whether the probing was long and tricky or not. In Beth’s case it was direct.” He put his head in his hands, seeing the worst: death, or a long period of total unconsciousness followed by a cabbage recovery, mindless and inert.

  *

  Shard stayed that night, relieving Mrs. Micklam. In the morning, back for breakfast, cooked by his mother-in-law, not as nicely as Beth, before she left to take over the vigil again. The fried egg was cold. While Shard ate, his father-in-law sat and watched, coughing gently. Shard hated being watched eating by someone who wasn’t also eating — didn’t know why, just did.

  Eric Micklam, like a ghost, stirred. “I suppose you’ll be at the hospital again later?”

  “Of course. But there is work to be done, you know.”

  “At a time like this — that’s hard, very hard.”

  “Yes. But even at a time like this — ” Shard broke off. What was the point? His father-in-law, protected throughout life as a bank manager, now retired, simply would not understand. Shard himself didn’t understand, half the time. Duty was often incomprehensible. He gobbled the leathery egg, disregarded toast and marmalade, not being hungry anyway, swilled coffee down fast, not even waiting for a cigarette, though he lit one on the way to the door. “I’m off,” he said to his father-in-law.

  “When’ll you be back, Simon?”

  He looked anxious, pinched, ill. Shard, feeling a touch of remorse again, answered kindly. “I can’t say for sure. I’ll try to ring if it’s going to be very late. And I’ll be at the hospital whenever possible.”

  He got his car out of the garage and drove to Heathrow. A frightening lack of concentration almost led him to a fatal accident just after he’d left home: sheer luck got him through. He sweated, having enough imagination to alarm him. God, he mustn’t go and kill himself on the roads…or in any other line of duty either! Beth was getting all mixed into duty-thoughts. A married cop always had split loyalties, of course…but brain tumours were especially nasty: a long convalescence was the very least of associated things. He had to organise that special, separate mind-compartment a damn sight better.

  Heathrow. A dirty day of low cloud and soaking drizzle, a real London welcome to strangers from under sunny skies, from the shores of sunlit blue southern seas, palms and soft breezes, tropic scents and radiant women. Shard and a detective sergeant mingled with a depressed crowd in plastic macs, with umbrellas and damp trousers, under a miasmic stench of stale air, tobacco smoke, urine and wafts as of London tubes. The first encounter with Swinging London was old crisp packets, dirt everlasting, shoddiness and bad service, with the world’s dreariest cleaning women adding to the muck and staleness with the cigarettes that drooped from their lips beneath lustreless eyes and dirty curler-concealing turbans as they broomed their hostile way around the legs of the travelling public.

  At a filthy, swimming table, Shard had a cup of coffee, listened to excited Bombay-Welsh chatter from a crowd of Pakistanis. A fat German hausfrau nearly dislodged his cup with her backside: Shard moved it out of range of other bottoms. Coffee finished, he looked at his watch and moved out with his companion to the spectators’ gallery, out into the drizzle. Things came and things went, roars of sound, Jumbo jets and smaller, the world’s airlines — British Airways, Pan Am, TWA, Air India, El…Qantas.

  When the flight came in from Sydney and taxied to the disembarkation point, Shard pulled out binoculars and watched closely as faces appeared through the entry port. A wave of disappointment: no bloody luck! Perhaps the bastard was having difficulty getting his tax clearance for out, though Shard would have thought he’d have that kind of point taken care of — and, of course, he’d only just entered, or re-entered, Australia in any case.

  Another wrong tree, barked up for too long?

  Back to London. At the hospital, Beth no better if no worse. Next day, back to Heathrow after sundry botherings and proddings from Hedge: why wasn’t he liaising with Hesseltine over the vanished corpse of Tanya Gorukin? Why wasn’t he personally trying to pick up a track on the A30, following up any leads from the spot near Stockbridge where the body-snatch had taken place? Why wasn’t he this, why wasn’t he that. Shard’s head reeled, he felt like committing murder himself, clipping a Hedge. He began to wonder: was he obsessed with Heathrow, with flights in from Sydney? Basically, he was being propelled by no more than a hunch; but so often hunches paid off, so he stuck to the Heathrow run. And on the fourth day — hey presto: British Airways brought in the loot: the sharp-faced, well-dressed man himself, large as life and keeping his eyes alert.

  Vindication?

  That remained to be seen.

  As for Shard, he hadn’t to be seen: that was vital. He spoke to the man by his side, who was also using binoculars: “That one — going down the ladder ahead of the fat woman — got him?”

  “Got him, sir.”

  “Off you go, then. And good luck!”

  The man walked away, fast. Shard lingered in what was still a drizzle: London was waterlogging again, Christmas was coming. Shard sneezed — bugger Hedge, he’d caught his cold. He gave the inward Australians time to move through Immigration and Customs and disperse to cars and taxis: then he sauntered along to talk to British Airways. He produced his identification: British Airways produced the nominal list of passengers from the Sydney flight. Shard’s check showed just one name common to this list and the list Kennerlee had got for him in Dubbo — just one alone: Mr. Edgar Graver Tuball, home address Manly, destination address Piccadilly Hotel, W.1.

  Tew, Tuball.

  Shard had his clincher and knew it truly.

  *

  “Mr. Shard?”

  “Speaking. Go ahead, Alan.”

  “93 Longfellow Grove, W.14. That’s West Kensington.”

  “No Piccadilly?”

  Puzzlement. “What’s that?”

  “Never mind, just a thought. You’ve done fine. Still there, are you?”

  “In a kiosk up the road…up the grove! Out of sight. He’s still there too. What do I do, sir?”

  “Stay. I’m coming in now.” Shard slammed the handset down, wondered momentarily if he should inform Hedge, decided against it. He brought out his gun, checked the slide, pushed it back inside his jacket, thought of Beth and felt a shiver run down his spine despite a mounting excitement and a feeling he was getting there at last. He was on his way to the door when his scramble line rang. Cursing the delay, he took the call.

  “Shard.”

  “Depot.” He recognised the voice: a good copper named Tetley, also from “the factory” like himself. “Cable from Canberra in departmental cipher, now broken. Do I read?”

  “Yes, but fast, please.”

  “Right. They’ve been informed by Sydney police, I quote, two bodies brought up by dredger inwards of South Head, bodies weighted and sacked, throats cut, stomachs gutted. Identified as Ralph Petersen and Albert Bunt. Message ends.” A pause. “All right, Mr. Shard?”

  “All right,” Shard said. He put down the phone. His eyes were bright and hard. Aloud to himself he said: “All right for some — but not, I think, for Mr. Edgar Graver Tuball!”

  CHAPTER X

  Shard left his car parked some distance clear of Longfellow Grove and walked on to pick up his man by the phone box. It was raining still. It was the lunch hour, and the eating places overflowed damply into the North End Road, pinched faces under dripping umbrellas and gleaming raindrops on the high leather boots of the girls: London! Shard gave a shiver: maybe emigration was the answer, they could always use a dick from the Metro in Sydney — or could they? It was problematical, was that! But warmth and colour was a better bargain than sog and drear and staleness…

  He saw his man by the red box, gave a thumbs-up.


  “You going in, Mr. Shard? Or do I?”

  “Both. I did think of a tail, but there’s not the time left. Tuball may be too big for the field work anyway — he may just lurk behind a telephone. That’d get us nowhere. He has to be cracked open, Alan.”

  “You mean that, sir?”

  “I mean it, all right. Why?”

  “He’ll know how to protect himself, Mr. Shard. Legally.”

  “Sure. We have to take a risk. You’re not working for the factory now, Alan. We don’t go all the way by the book, all right?”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “Then let’s get on with it, shall we?” They turned down Longfellow Grove. Grove it may have been once, but not for a very long time. Just a few sad trees in concrete, at the road-side. Houses, three storeys plus attic and basement, stone steps — once, they had been good property, the homes of more or less prosperous men in the solid pre-1914 years. Now, the tenantry had changed: carved up into flats mostly, with washing lines on the balconies in dry weather, and prams on the pavement, and babies crying. Plenty of persons displaced from the remnants of Empire, the Englishman’s burden-heritage that now reduced not his manpower by way of armies, but the value of his property, the new god of the new life.

  Shard said, “You take the back, Alan. There’ll be a service alley. Could be someone’ll use it…I’ll go in alone, front. I want you to watch.”

  “Stop anything that comes out?”

  “No. Turn yourself into a tail after all. You know how to make yourself inconspicuous. If I flush anything, it’ll come your way. All right?”

  The copper nodded.

  “I’ll go on slow, give you three minutes. Then I go in and ring.”

  They parted company. Shard continued ahead slow, while his man veered off right along a side road, a road that joined Longfellow Grove to the parallel street, and contained the entry to the service alley. Shard felt a tremor in his left cheek, a curious twitter of the nervous system that was inclined to visit him when he was unsure of his basis of action: as he still was to some extent. “Tew” was to him his clincher but it was not evidence, and Petersen and Bunt were dead. But Shard was working his original hunch on, working it on because time could be so short before something very final happened to Tanya Gorukin’s body, working it on because Hedge was on his back…it was not a lot on which to hang the cracking open of a villain of the size Tuball could turn out to be. The man behind all this just had to be big: but maybe Tuball was after all just another link. Shard wished there had been time to get Sydney police to check their records, but there hadn’t been and that was that. In any case, the result would probably have been a blank.

  Number 93.

  Just like all the others, but no empty clothes-line to dangle drops of rain over the balconies, no prams by the gate into the area. Shard ran lightly up the steps, hands in pockets. No card on the door, and just one bell: so, one house, no flats. Shard pressed the bell and waited. A woman came to the door, a hard-faced woman in the mid-forties, wearing a trouser suit. She lifted fair eyebrows.

  “Mr. Tuball?” Shard asked.

  “Who wants him?”

  “Just ask if he’ll see me, please. I take it he’s here?”

  “He’s here. Don’t know that he wants to be bothered, though.” She turned away as a step sounded behind her. “Here he is, he’ll say for himself.”

  Shard saw the sharp-faced man, still well dressed in a dark waisted suit. The face, the eyes, gave nothing away, but Shard felt instinctively that he was known to Tuball.

  “Someone wants me?”

  Shard said, “Just a word, if you don’t mind. In private.”

  A fractional hesitation, then a shrug and a laugh. “Come in, then, it’s cold and wet out there.”

  “Not like Sydney, Mr. Tuball.” Shard entered the hall.

  “No, not like Sydney. Funny you should say that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve just come from there. But don’t tell me you knew that?”

  Shard nodded. “I knew it, Mr. Tuball.” He saw a quick look pass between Tuball and the woman: some sort of hint, which the woman took. She went up the stairs leading from the hall, leaving them alone.

  Tuball opened a door and ushered Shard into a drawing-room. He said, “Perhaps you’d better tell me what you want, what your business is, Mr. — ?”

  “Shard. I think you already know, I’m a police officer.”

  A puzzled look. “Am I supposed to know that?”

  “If you didn’t, you let me in rather too readily. We always advise — ”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that. I think I’ll take a look at your credentials, Mr…Shard, did you say?”

  “Yes.” Shard flipped out his identification, then slid it back into his pocket.

  “What am I supposed to have done, then?” Tuball looked puzzled, a little angry, a good actor. He didn’t ask Shard to sit down. Shard brought out a packet of cigarettes and raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, smoke away if you want to kill yourself,” Tuball said irritably. Shard lit a cigarette, taking his time and looking closely at Tuball.

  Tuball asked again, “What am I supposed to have done?”

  “I think you alone can answer that, Mr. Tuball. Police officers don’t call only on law breakers…there can be other reasons. But if you have done anything…” He smiled.

  Tuball said, “Look, I’m tired, need some proper sleep. If you’d just — ”

  “All right, all right. You’ve just flown in from Sydney, Mr. Tuball — ”

  “Yes — ”

  “And you arrived there, from London, only last week. A short stay.”

  “Yes.”

  “For what purpose, Mr. Tuball?”

  Tuball stared. “Look, that’s my business, and — ”

  “Please tell me what your business is, Mr. Tuball.”

  “I don’t have to answer questions. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Then you won’t mind answering questions, will you? I’m perfectly entitled to ask your business without giving you a reason. I’d certainly advise you to cooperate, Mr. Tuball. Well?”

  Tuball scowled, but said, “All right, then. I’m a company director.”

  “And your company is?”

  “Tuball Associates Limited.”

  “With offices in Sydney?”

  “No. With offices in London. To save you checking — my registered office is 43 Luxbridge Street, Strand.”

  “A solicitor’s office?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a sense an accommodation address. What is your company’s business, Mr. Tuball?” He paused. “Just to save me checking…”

  Tuball scowled again. “Various business enterprises.…property deals mostly.”

  “You’re a property developer?”

  “That fits. So?”

  “And the Sydney visit?”

  “To settle a deal.”

  “A property deal?”

  “Of course.”

  “In Sydney?”

  “Yes, in Sydney.”

  “Where, in Sydney?”

  Tuball lost patience: his face was furious and his voice loud. “What the heck’s it to do with you? I don’t have to ask police approval before I buy property in Australia, too bloody right I don’t — ”

  “I think,” Shard cut in, “that you’d be better advised to tell me all the same. I agree your rights, but sometimes, by sticking to them, we can be just as dead as if we’d been wrong, Mr. Tuball, to paraphrase a well-known epitaph…can’t we?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve no right to come in here and ask — ”

  Shard lifted a hand. “Mr. Tuball, I am entirely within my rights. You asked me in — I dare say you thought it wiser. I think you are quite a wise man, Mr. Tuball. I think you are taking care not to indicate any particular piece of property in Sydney that required your presence out there, because you know very well I can check. I think there was no pi
ece of property, Mr. Tuball. That is — not real estate. I think perhaps your company — or at any rate you yourself — find other and more profitable lines of business. Such as drugs. Trafficking in heroin, Mr. Tuball — ”

  “Drugs!”

  “With a few other things chucked in: murder for one.”

  Tuball’s eyes were blazing and he was breathing hard, his chest heaving. Shard was convinced he had given a nail a good true smack, right on the head. He proceeded with deliberation to seek out a few more.

  “There were five murders up by Narromine, Mr. Tuball. The Gilder station.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “That included two children, Mr. Tuball, two young children. Now, that’s nasty in every policeman’s book — ”

  “My God, Shard, you’re going to be sorry for this! I’m saying nothing, d’you hear? Nothing more at all. I don’t need to, not unless you charge me, and my solicitor — ”

  “Charge you, Mr. Tuball? Do you wish to be charged?”

  Tuball gasped. “I — yes — no, of course I don’t, I — ”

  “It does give you certain safeguards, Mr. Tuball, but if you’d rather not, then I won’t. Just a little talk for the time being.”

  “I told you, I’m not saying anything further.”

  “No? Well, well, never mind! I’m sure you’ll be aware that I had a nice long talk with Petersen, and Bunt too, one happy night in Sydney. Perhaps you’ll just tell me — ”

  “I’m going to tell you nothing.” Tuball’s face was as white as a shroud. “I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not going to say anything more. You’re crazy! This is a lot of trumped-up rubbish. I don’t know what your object is, but it’s clear you’re just trying it on. If all this happened as you said, why don’t you go for the people who really did it?”

  Shard didn’t answer right away. After a long look at Tuball he said quietly, “Oh, I’ll get there, Mr. Tuball, never fear.” He glanced at his watch, then looked back again at Tuball, staring him in the eye. “I’ll not trouble you further at the moment. There’ll be more questions at a later date. I assume you can be contacted at this address, at any time?”