Clubbed to Death

by Ruth Edwards

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Seems to have been a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘Got any details on him yet?’

  ‘No. We’re hunting down contemporaries.’

  ‘But I still don’t get it. Surely…’ He looked at his watch. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘It’s half-past nine already. Didn’t we promise to see Robert?’

  ‘Yes. He’ll be waiting for us.’

  ‘D’you want to come along, Sammy? We’ll thrash this out.’

  ‘Only if you need me, sir. Don’t really think it’s my sort of thing. I wouldn’t have anything to contribute. If you don’t mind, I’d rather go home to my wife.’

  ‘Don’t say such things, Sammy,’ said Milton. ‘Makes me feel nostalgic. I haven’t seen Ann for six weeks. All right, see you tomorrow. Come on, Ellis. Let’s go.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  ‘Just a sliver, thank you. I don’t need feeding up any more.’ Amiss accepted the slice of pizza and nibbled on it delicately.

  Milton and Pooley, ravenous, got through several mouthfuls before resuming the story. By the time they’d finished their meal, Amiss had been brought up to date.

  ‘But I cannot seriously begin to regard that gentle old blockhead as a killer.’

  ‘Like riding a bicycle, remember?’

  ‘And you don’t know what he was like before the breakdown?’

  ‘Should know very shortly,’ said Milton, looking at his watch. His telephone rang seconds later. ‘Yes, right. What’s his number?’ He put the receiver down. ‘They’ve found someone who served with him. I’ll go next door and ring him from your phone, Ellis. I hate these bloody gimcrack things.’

  He shut the door behind him, leaving Pooley and Amiss in a fever of speculation. Within five minutes he was back.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Who would have guessed?’ He sat down and poured himself another glass of wine. ‘This fellow I’ve just been talking to, Wilson, was an NCO in training with Glastonbury, first in the Commandos and then in the SAS. Remembers him well because, he said, he was so gentle and yet so lethal. He was a brilliant technician, very attentive, never questioned anything, anxious to please, always did what was required of him.’

  ‘Just followed orders,’ said Amiss.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Did he actually kill people?’ asked Pooley.

  ‘Yes. He was involved in a number of desert raids. Wilson says he did his job like the rest of them. But he said one thing he did remember clearly about Glastonbury was that one always had the feeling he didn’t quite know what he was doing. He was just doing it.’

  ‘Sounds a bit like a psychopath,’ said Amiss.

  ‘No. I asked that. A psychopath wants to kill. Glastonbury didn’t enjoy it. He just did it to oblige his superiors.’

  ‘And the breakdown?’

  ‘Back to farce,’ said Milton. ‘Wilson said he recollected it vividly because of its sheer incongruity. Apparently Glastonbury went to pieces after a letter from home telling him his nanny was dead.’

  Amiss reached for the bottle. ‘Invalided out owing to death of nanny? Well, it must have made a first for the SAS. Even a last.’

  ‘This ties in with what I’d got from his librarian colleague,’ said Pooley.

  ‘You didn’t tell me about that,’ said Amiss.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t terribly significant, or didn’t seem so then. He was meticulous, obliging, obedient, pleasant, did any job that was within his capabilities scrupulously and efficiently.’

  ‘But wasn’t all there,’ offered Milton.

  ‘What his colleague said,’ said Pooley, ‘was that although he wasn’t in, he was much more useful than most of the people who were, as long as you never expected him to stray beyond his areas of technical expertise. Incapable of thinking for himself.’

  ‘And if he trusted you?’

  ‘He would do anything you asked. That’s what his fellow librarian said. That he was so obedient to his superior as to seem like someone who had been brainwashed.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Amiss. ‘Nanny has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘So, I expect, has Chatterton,’ said Milton.

  ***

  Amiss awoke at four in the morning with an idea about which he could do nothing for another three hours. He tossed and turned until after five o’clock when he began to slide into sleep. At that moment Sunil turned on to his back and burst into loud snores. With uncharacteristic venom, Amiss picked up three paperbacks and hurled them hard across the room. Sunil emitted a yelp and turned over, then stayed silent. Amiss fell fast asleep. When his alarm woke him at seven, he greeted Sunil monosyllabically and, pausing only to brush his teeth, leaped into his uniform and ran downstairs to a telephone. It took Pooley a couple of minutes to answer.

  ‘His mother’s grave,’ said Amiss.

  ‘His what?’

  ‘You heard. At Highgate. We couldn’t fathom where the stuff was kept. Must have been befuddled by wine. Don’t you remember Glastonbury’s gardening?’

  ‘Good Lord, how could we have forgotten? This answers lots of problems.’

  ‘Storage space.’

  ‘Privacy.’

  ‘Probably protective clothing. Since he doesn’t keep any gardening tools at the club, he must keep them at the graveyard.’

  ‘Thanks, Robert. I expect we’ll see you this morning.’

  ‘You’d bloody well better. My nerves are in shreds.’

  ***

  The sun came in through the windows of the Rochester Room, its brightness at odds with the mood of the three men inside.

  ‘I wish one could get desensitising injections,’ said Milton.

  ‘Me too,’ said Pooley.

  ‘At least nobody will hang him,’ said Amiss.

  ‘No. But he’ll have to end up in Broadmoor or somewhere and he’ll be separated from Chatterton, who is not mad, just wicked.’

  ‘Well, be that as it may,’ said Milton, ‘we have to get started. Robert, you must leave. Ellis, get Chatterton. He should have reached the saloon by now.’

  Chatterton looked perfectly cheerful when Pooley ushered him in. ‘Hello again,’ he said. ‘What a lot we seem to be seeing of each other.’

  ‘Please sit down, sir. Would you care for some coffee?’

  ‘No, thank you. I’ve just had some. How may I be of assistance?’

  ‘You’re a man of considerable intelligence,’ said Milton, ‘so I don’t propose to drag this out or even lead you into it gently. We know that you have run up an enormous debt in Monte Carlo, that you’re smuggling drugs in order to work it off, and that Glastonbury killed Trueman, Meredith-Lee and Blenkinsop at your instigation and using the techniques he learned in the SAS.’

  Chatterton placed the tips of his fingers together and rested his chin on them. He looked squarely at Milton. ‘Would you care to produce some evidence for these interesting allegations?’

  ‘Certainly. Here is a sample. Glastonbury’s fingerprints were around the heel of Trueman’s shoe, something we didn’t know until yesterday, yet he had not been near the corpse. His mother’s grave contains a great deal of weaponry, including dynamite. For your part, we know about your Monte Carlo activities in detail, and on the home front, we have, for instance, a witness who saw you at one o’clock in the morning after Blenkinsop’s death in the library in search of the murder weapon.’

  ‘QED,’ said Chatterton.

  ‘QED.’

  Chatterton threw his head back and gazed at the ceiling for a couple of moments. ‘It certainly sounds as if you’ve done for poor old Boy. The grave’s a real clincher. You’ve obviously got a lot less on me. However, I was never one of those stolid, dogged mathematicians who was prepared to spend half his life working out proofs. Trouble was, I wasn’t gifted enough to be the other—the intuitive—kind with much success. So I’ll spare all of us the long-drawn-out arguments over evidence. I could deny all knowledge and leave you to interrogate Glastonbury, but well though he’s done
so far, he wouldn’t last long in the face of the kind of pressure you’re likely to bring to bear. Therefore I’m prepared to say, “It’s a fair cop, Guv’nor” and fill in the details, if you’ll do me one favour.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Let me break it to Boy.’

  ‘Very well. I agree. Now I fear I must deliver a formal caution before you begin.’

  ‘About my words being taken down and used in evidence against me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please let’s take it as read, Chief Superintendent. I abhor meaningless ritual. You can probably trace that back to those thousands of meals at High Table which were preceded by the mumbling of grace by our atheist Master. I have my failings, but I’m not a hypocrite.’

  ‘Please note that the caution has been given, Sergeant.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘You’re very smart for a policeman, aren’t you? My bad luck—or judgement. One tends to assume all you chaps are seriously thick.’

  Milton kept his expression solemn.

  ‘Now you’ve already got the gist and you won’t be needing much detail. Boy and I will plead guilty. In his case it should be possible to argue diminished responsibility.’

  ‘I suppose he and I seem an unlikely pair, but in fact we suit each other very well. At Cambridge I lived in a world of aridity and intellectual combat: it was nice to meet somebody who hero-worshipped me. Besides, we were sexually terribly compatible. I should think it will be a little hard for you, Chief Superintendent, let alone your young companion here, to imagine that almost fifty years ago Boy and I had a passionate sexual relationship. I can see you’re doing sums, Mr. Milton. It was not when we met first before the war, it was after he came back from North Africa, broken up by the death of his nanny. Risible, isn’t it? But not to him. He was a man who could form only intense, loyal, self-abnegatory relationships—his nanny, his parents, his sergeant-major and me. He always did what he was told.’

  ‘How did he get into the Commandos?’

  ‘Good with his hands and obedient. A definition of a good lover, as far as I’m concerned, although for the last couple of decades we’ve mostly just been friends. He’s not intellectually stimulating, dear old Boy, but one way or another, he’s the emotional centre of my life and his wittering hardly even gets on my nerves.’

  ‘Why did you do what you did, sir?’

  ‘Suggest that he kill Trueman? Gambling instinct, I fear. I was leaving for Monte Carlo, quite perturbed about what this new idiot secretary was proposing and convinced that the even tenor of our lives was going to be fatally disrupted. Boy could have financed us in a decent old people’s home, but that was not for me. Besides, I’ve never wanted to take his money. Sentimental old devil, am I not? So I had some coffee and a drink with him after lunch that day and gave him a little of what we used to call white snuff.’

  ‘That was?’

  ‘Cocaine. I’ve taken to that a bit over recent years. It’s an awfully good pick-me-up I find, especially at my age. It beats vitamin supplements, I can tell you. It certainly does wonders for Boy—livens him up no end. He knew not to talk about it. He understood about our secrets. It was a secret that we went to bed together and it was a secret that we took white snuff. I went up in the lift to my bedroom to pick up my passport and money and stopped by on the way down just to say goodbye again. He was sitting just by the lift. Then there was an altercation at the other end of the gallery and Trueman came in our direction looking cross. He stopped in front of us and said, “One can’t close one’s eyes to reality.” Almost his last words. Quite funny really. And I said, “Indeed not, Ken. And speaking of reality, there’s a very nasty crack in the plaster work in this pillar.” Trueman, eternally conscientious, switched his attention to the damaged fabric. I shuffled over, pointed out the worrying cracks—you could always rely on there being lots of these anywhere in the building—and summoned up Boy. All I had to do was gesture and whisper, “Get him, Boy.” That was what his sergeant-major used to say. He did very well. It was a lovely clean operation.’

  ‘Even fifty years on?’ asked Milton.

  ‘He had in a sense had frequent refresher courses. We used to have lots of Auld Lang Syne with an old SAS man called Selwood, a pal of his drops in from time to time, and anyway Boy’s always gone on rehearsing his skills. It’s a bit of a joke with us. You see, Boy wasn’t afraid of physical challenge himself. He worried about me, but where he was concerned, it was germs that made him anxious. Anyway, Trueman had gone, the others were responding to his scream from the other side of the gallery, and I was able to fade into the lift without being seen, merely taking the precaution of saying, “It’s a secret, Boy. Now, pretend to be asleep.”’

  ‘The debts in Monte Carlo, sir?’

  ‘Nerves and cocaine, I fear. I had taken a large risk, most impulsively and with absolutely no guarantee that the fingerprints wouldn’t be found or that Boy wouldn’t forget it was a secret and admit everything disarmingly. He had it in his sweet and simple mind that Trueman was dangerous, like the germs, so I hoped that would keep him guilt-free. But I took more cocaine than usual and, therefore, far more risks. Hence being down a million francs, hence smuggling heroin in a zimmer. Very good way of doing it, I may say. Quick swap in the gentlemen’s lavatory at Heathrow and I was clean as a whistle.’

  ‘The Admiral?’

  ‘Oh, Boy had his little stash of this and that in his mother’s grave. It made him feel secure. I used to arrange for it periodically to get topped up, or updated, as they say. It took very little to make him happy. He just wanted to know we would be all right if the revolution came. So we had the dynamite, the detonators, the protective gloves and the rest to deal with boring old Con Meredith-Lee. Boy does this sort of thing terribly well when he’s high. Ditto of course the job he did on Pinkie Blenkinsop. Although that confused him a bit at first because he thought Pinkie was his friend. However, once I explained that Pinkie was my enemy, there was no more problem. The trouble was that he was discovered too early—before I could burn the magazine. I’ve been worried about fingerprints, even though I rubbed the cover of the magazine thoroughly before discarding it. Any other questions?’

  ‘How long do you need, sir?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes, if you’d be so kind. I need five minutes to get to him and wake him up and ten minutes to explain.’ He retrieved his crutches and swung himself to his feet. ‘Thank you for being so civilised,’ he said. ‘I never expected that of the police.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid they’ll make a run for it, sir?’ asked Pooley, as soon as Chatterton had left.

  ‘Sammy’s got people on duty front and back and I just haven’t got the bottle to face Glastonbury before Chatterton’s done his stuff. Tell me when it’s time.’ Milton lay back and shut his eyes and said, ‘Why the hell couldn’t it have been Fagg?’ Pooley began to pace as quietly as possible, round and round the Rochester Room.

  ***

  Lurking in the corner of the Coffee Room, Amiss observed Chatterton walking through without police escort. He was about to seek an explanation when Gooseneck emerged from the kitchen, hailed him warmly and engaged him in conversation about what measures should be taken to render life at ffeatherstonehaugh’s more attractive to the staff. Amiss had no option but to be helpful.

  ‘Very useful, my dear fellow,’ said Gooseneck. ‘You’re quite right about tackling the accommodation immediately. Let’s go upstairs and take a look. This place is in such disarray that I should be able to get a troop of carpenters and painters in without our dear Colonel even raising an eyebrow.’ Unhappily, Amiss trailed with Gooseneck out of the Coffee Room and into the Saloon.

  ‘My God! What’s going on?’ said Gooseneck, for standing round the Saloon in positions of frozen horror were Ramsbum, Blitherdick, Sunil and Ng, all of them staring up at the gallery, on the balustrade of which teetered the great form of Glastonbury, pulling at an invisible object.

  ‘Now, Boy, now,’ called Chatte
rton’s voice, and with a huge heave Glastonbury summoned up all his strength to haul his friend alongside him. Chatterton’s remaining crutch clattered all the way down to the Saloon floor and Glastonbury supported his weight.

  ‘Jump, Boy. Now.’ And with his arms tightly enclosing Chatterton, Glastonbury jumped. Amiss turned his head away just too late.

  Epilogue

  ‘Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls?’ asked Pooley.

  ‘A colourful analogy, if not very apposite,’ said Amiss. ‘This wasn’t a struggle, and Chatterton and Glastonbury were friends, not enemies. And anyway this time neither of them’s going to return. Oh, Christ! I really wish I hadn’t seen it.’

  The three of them sat in Pooley’s flat, exhausted after a day of emotional turmoil.

  ‘Jim, why did you let Chatterton go?’ asked Pooley suddenly. ‘You were taking a frightful risk.’

  ‘I was giving him time to do what he did.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Doesn’t that happen with your humane detectives in crime fiction, Ellis? I simply didn’t feel I could put Glastonbury through the process of the law if there was an alternative. That may be criminal: I think it’s humane.’

  ‘But it’s got you in trouble.’

  ‘Not big trouble. Easily smoothed out. Very minor reprimand. Anyway, I don’t care. I’m more at peace doing it this way and somehow I can live with never becoming an assistant commissioner.’

  ‘I wish we could be celebrating,’ said Amiss. ‘Damn it. We got there, between us, and here we are, plunged in gloom.’

  ‘So cheer us up,’ said Milton.

  ‘I thought that was Ellis’s job. I can’t be very jolly, I’m afraid. It was all a very sad scene. I was even sorry for Fagg and Fishbane. They’re completely dazed.’ There was a depressed silence. Amiss jumped up, took the bottle, poured lavish amounts of whisky into their glasses and said, ‘Sod this. Time to look on the bright side.’

  ‘We’ve cracked the case,’ said Pooley.