by HRF Keating
She obeyed, if to a limited extent, dropping back against the till but now unrelaxed.
The thoughts raced through her head. Here, with Gwendoline Tritton, gun in hand and evidently prepared to use it, here was proof enough of who had conducted the raid on Heronsgate House. Yes, that implacable eighty-year-old had conceived the whole plan, as soon as she had learnt that CA 534, the ideal formidable threat to use, was there to be seized.
And how had she learnt that one vital fact? Easy answer, now I know that she did. The very whereabouts of the CA 534 had been brought to her by this favourite of hers, Maggie Quirke. And how had Maggie learnt it? In bed with poor Christopher Alexander. By teasing and testing that wretched weak-willed boy. And, yes, she had done more than tease the information out of him. She must have got hold of his key to Dr Lennox’s smart silver-grey security cabinet. Probably had a duplicate made, and then at the break-in had pretended to jemmy the cabinet open so as to seal off the trail that might lead back to her. All easy enough.
And what had wriggling Christopher done afterwards? He had, even in his just-let-slip confession, drawn attention to the way the top cabinet drawer had been dented as it was opened.
Yes, every step clear now. Up to this moment. This moment with Gwendoline Tritton’s gun steadily pointing at me.
‘Well, Maggie,’ Miss Tritton said, ‘I thought it was about time I came to the rescue. I hope I’m not too late.’
From the corner of her eye Harriet caught a flash of white teeth as Maggie Quirke smiled in evidently joyous relief.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’ve arrived in the nick of time.’ A pause for thought. ‘I expect you saw someone nosing into the Mini outside. She’s a detective. They’ve got some crazy idea that I’m concealing something or other that they think’s important.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, I doubt if she’ll get in our way, not with what’s in my hand.’
‘But how did you manage to know where I was?’ Maggie asked then.
‘Oh, my dear, that was easy. This stupid woman here had the temerity to answer a call on her mobile thing right inside my house. My house.’
Indignation, however, did nothing to make the pointing pistol quiver by so much as a millimetre, though Harriet was watching it, hawk-intent.
‘And you heard on her mobile what was said to her?’
‘Better than that, my dear. I heard what she herself said out loud. Petrol station at this end of University Boulevard and I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
Harriet forcibly suppressed the blush of total shame that threatened to come shooting up.
How could I have been such a fool? How could I?
‘Not very difficult to realise what had happened to you then,’ Miss Tritton went on, drawing herself further up with a little jerk of conceit. ‘But it did take me some while to find a way of baffling those idiot police officers all over the house. However …’
Keep on with your self-praise, Harriet thought. Keep on and on with it. Until my moment is there. Or, perhaps, DC Hardy comes back in and sees what’s happening quickly enough.
But the gun was still directed at her own chest. A threat not to be taken in any way lightly.
‘However,’ Miss Tritton went on, the pride in her voice lapping out like rich cream, ‘before long I realised that those unpleasant intruders had been working their way up the house, dreadfully methodically, the poor fools, from bottom to top. So my nice old gun would still be there, in my bedroom, in the drawer of my table. Then it was simply a matter of getting it out and tucking it under my jacket. But do you know what I did next?’
‘No,’ said Maggie, hero-worshipping.
‘Hah. I picked up the phone beside the bed and simply called the car-hire company I always use. Send a car, a Rover if you have one, to The Willows, I said. Tell the man to stop outside and give a hoot on his horn. I’ll come out straight away. And my dear, it worked. Like a charm. None of those busily searching policemen noticed me quietly walking by. And here I am.’
Damn. She’s told her story. Gwendoline Tritton has put the world in its place. Now, what’s she going to do?
The answer came at once. Voice upraised as always.
‘Very well, get yourself ready, Maggie, and we’ll be off. I don’t think Detective Superintendent Martens will attempt to stop us. But, if she does, I won’t hesitate to put a bullet in her. When I was a mere child I shot plenty of dying dogs.’
She’ll do it, Harriet thought. If she wasn’t mad before, she is now. Being in possession of that all-powerful threat in its little tube has pushed this egomaniac one step too far. She’ll do anything now to make sure her absurd Waggy gets its way. Her way.
So she had better be stopped.
It’s up to me. If I let the threat of that gun prevent me acting, then she’ll get away with it. She’ll go with bloody Maggie down to London. The pair of them will hide somewhere in all that mess of streets and, when they choose, they’ll make their way to some choice fertile spot somewhere and let loose that manipulated stuff. It could be the end of us all.
So, Gwendoline Tritton, you’ve got to be stopped. Now.
She looked at the gun, pointing at her steadily as ever.
But didn’t someone say something to me at some time about Miss Tritton’s gun? I’ve forgotten who, forgotten what. Totally forgotten.
Yes, I’m afraid all right. Fear, stupid fear, has driven everything out of my mind.
That gun. Pistol. It’s — it’s — If I knew, may be I could … It is a —
Blankness.
Then, in the depths, something at last stirred.
A vague outline of someone, a man, sitting in front of me and saying something about — about a gun. About Miss Tritton’s gun.
And … And, yes, he, whoever he was, called her, yes, ‘That woman’.
It all came back then. DI Weston at the station nearest The Willows, reciting the full tally of Gwendoline Tritton’s misdemeanours. One of which was being in possession of a firearm without a licence. A replica gun.
She stepped forward, hand held out.
‘I’ll have that,’ she said. ‘You’ve been warned before about keeping something of that kind.’
Gwendoline Tritton, face in a moment drained of life, simply turned the pistol round and thrust it out, butt-first.
The door of the tiny cramped office opened. DC Emma Hardy looked in.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ she said, from where she stood not taking in the situation, ‘but it’s no good. That box, or that tube, is nowhere to be found.’
Chapter Eighteen
Harriet’s first, totally inconsequential thought was a fine time for you to come in, DC Hardy. But at once it dawned on her that it would have made no difference if the poor woman had barged in two or three minutes earlier.
Yes, she might have had a go at Gwendoline. And she would have found, then, that gun was in no way menacing. But the news she brought with her would have been the same. That the CA 534 was nowhere to be found.
Perhaps it had never been here to be discovered. Perhaps ferocious Miss Tritton had never handed it to Maggie to sneak out of harm’s way. But, wait, she herself might have it with her now. Might have constituted herself personally to be the guardian of the threatening device she had been solely responsible, in her mind, for bringing into action. She could have simply taken it with her, along with her gun, when she went waltzing out of the house. It’s in all probability in the hire car out there, its uniformed driver staring respectfully ahead into space.
Must see. But, first, I’ve got something to do.
‘Gwendoline Tritton,’ she said. ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of being a person who is concerned in the commission of an act of terrorism. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
DC Hardy had got her notebook out, ready.
But Gwendoline Tritton evidently had no
thing to say.
Harriet turned her attention to Maggie Quirke, and recited to her the same by rote words. She, too, it seemed, had nothing to say, though something offensive had evidently been on the point of pouring out.
‘Right,’ she said then to Emma Hardy, ‘I think you’d better go out to that hire-car and see what you can find.’
‘Ma’am.’
There followed some fifteen minutes with all three women in the office looking at each other in fixed silence. Outside, voices were raised as the grey-capped driver of the Rover was persuaded he had no alternative but to allow his gleamingly polished vehicle to be searched.
Then Emma came back in.
‘Nothing, ma’am,’ she reported, voice deadened.
Harriet felt it as a blow. But no question of admitting defeat. As a last resort Gwendoline Tritton, old lady though she was, could be subjected to the same intimate search Maggie Quirke had endured. However, there was one more way left yet.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Then we must trust that DS Jones will make a find at The Willows, though it’s hard to see why what you called the treasure has been left there. Call him and ask what progress he’s made.’
Emma Hardy stepped out of the office to use her mobile.
Clever girl, Harriet recorded. Cleverer by a good deal than the stupid woman who repeated Mr Brown’s directions to the petrol station here out loud in front of a suspect.
In less than a minute, however, the DC returned, crestfallen.
‘Ma’am, they’ve finished at the house and — and, ma’am, they found the box all right, behind a row of books on the top shelf of some sort of library. But, ma’am, it was empty. No treasure. None at all.’
Harriet caught, like a full-out blow between her eyes, the look of renewed triumph on Miss Tritton’s waxen face.
Damn, she thought, should have packed the horrid creature off to a cell as soon as I’d made the arrests.
She stepped out to the forecourt. The two PCs were sitting in their car, its doors open to catch the mildly warm Spring breeze, early sandwich lunches on their laps.
‘Sorry to spoil your rest,’ she called across to them. ‘But there are a couple of prisoners inside, and I’d like them taken to the nick at Waterloo Gardens. Say I’ll be along shortly to charge them.’
When the two under arrest had been led away — a last contemptuously sneering flash of white-white teeth from Maggie — she went back to disconsolate Emma Hardy.
‘I suppose that’s it,’ she said. ‘The finish. I should really have gone along to Waterloo Gardens with those two and seen to charging them. But I somehow still hope there may be somewhere where that test tube could be. You’re really happy that there’s nowhere in the Rover? Or in the Mini still?’
‘Ma’am, I’d up and resign if, at any stage, anybody finds anything in either of those two cars.’
‘You’re right. I know. I’ve seen you at work. But, here’s a thought. Can that woman Maggie have swallowed the test tube?’
Emma Hardy shook her head.
‘Not if it’s the dimensions I was given,’ she said. ‘One of the things we learn in training is what’s possible or not possible in that way. And I checked the other possible place of bodily concealment, as you saw.’
Harriet watched then as Emma began packing her search tools into their case, each item carefully put in its place.
Then a notion.
Simple, but blindingly obvious.
‘No, wait. We haven’t finished. Look, aren’t there a couple of small things still under the table there, right at the back? In all the excitement I hadn’t remembered them.’
Emma stooped down.
‘You’re right, ma’am,’ she said, hollow-voiced. ‘Two sort of little bags. What looks like a vanity zip-up, plastic, gold, or gold once. Pretty grimy, matter of fact. And then what must be her wash-bag. How could I have forgotten?’
‘All right,’ she said to Emma, ‘go ahead and do your stuff with each of them.’
Emma chose first to deal with the one that looked to Harriet to be the most likely, the scuffed little vanity bag. A fair bet that among all the bits and bobs Maggie would have needed to make herself look pretty, the brand new things and the all but finished ones, there could be, perhaps lightly disguised, that tube of darkly yellow oil.
Probably she’s right to pick on that first, she thought. Though, if it was me, I’d have gone for the least likely one, the wash-bag, so as to have all the more luck when it came to the cosmetics-crammed vanity thing, the last possible chance of all. OK, it’s superstition. But at a time like this superstition’s all you’ve got.
Yet, leaning intently forward, she watched Emma unzip the vanity bag, tip its contents out on the table and then, with active gloved fingers, sort rapidly through them. But, trained searcher as she was, before examining the objects she poked and pried at the lining of the bag itself.
‘Well, that’s out of the way,’ she said half a minute later. ‘Stuck fast to the outer plastic. So let’s have a look at the clutter stuff.’
This operation took longer.
Seeing Emma examining tweezers, nail file, little mirror, pressing and squeezing each brightly coloured tube, opening each pot and expertly wiggling a finger inside, Harriet once again admiring her thoroughness.
But, however miscellaneous the bag’s contents, it could hardly take very long to get it to yield up any secret. So it came as no surprise when Emma now turned round from the table.
‘Nothing.’
‘Try the wash-bag.’
Surely this was the last, last chance.
Emma carefully replaced the contents of the vanity bag before tipping out the items in the sponge-bag. They were not as many of them, a container of contraceptive pills, an ancient wash-cloth, a small ‘guest soap’ in a little egg-shaped plastic container, an orange plastic razor, a toothbrush, its bristles splayed out, a fat new tube of Aquafresh toothpaste, a round packet of indigestion pills.
Harriet stood there, watching and trying not to watch, as Emma first dealt with the wash-bag itself and then tested each of its contents, however unlikely as a hiding place. Contraceptive pills, even felt at to make certain they were what they seemed to be, the hard-dried wash-cloth, carefully spread out, blade of the orange razor checked as being in place, top taken off the big toothpaste tube, now seen to be unused, its inner metal cap firmly in place, guest soap container opened and the soap sniffed at, however too small it was to conceal the CA 534 tube.
It must have been as long as ten minutes, ten conscientious minutes, before Emma stepped back from the table.
‘Blank,’ she said, looking straight at the calendar-covered wall in front of her.
‘Blank? Blank? But it can’t be.’
Yet she knew that can’t be was mere whistling in the wind. This was the end. The furthest possible distance had been reached. Ultima Thule, the cold region of utter hopelessness.
Then something tickled at the back of her brain. Something, not from the past, but from just a few moments …
White teeth.
Maggie Quirke’s white teeth, glinting as she gave me that last contemptuous sneer. But in the wash-bag there had been a big new tube of standard Aquafresh toothpaste, the brand I saw in Christopher Alexander’s little bathroom, his tube with the cap left off, the way at home the twins always left the toothpaste they shared uncapped. And beside it, on the spattered shelf above the washbasin, there had been Maggie’s own half-used teeth-whitening Arm and Hammer tube.
She pushed past Emma, was about to grab the Aquafresh, then, just in time, recollected what she had been trained years ago to recall about fingerprints. She seized a spare pair of Emma’s gloves and picked the Aquafresh up.
Yes, feels solid, just as a new tube should do but I think …
Only one way to find out.
She ripped off, with useless, fumbling gloved fingers, the little metal safety tab across the nozzle. Then, holding the tube, nozzle down, over the dirty old t
able, she squeezed it hard from its base. Squeezed and squeezed. On the grease-stained surface below a long snake of striped toothpaste descended and coiled itself into a slobby multicoloured mound.
And then stopped.
But the tube was still fat, though not as fat as it had been when she’d picked it up. There was something in it still.
‘Emma, you’ve got a thing that’d get this wide open?’
Without a word in answer the DC flipped open her tools case, selected a small pair of clippers, and got to work.
And there, a few moments later, on the table, a couple of inches away from the toothpaste mound, was a test tube, filled, it was plain to see, despite the dentifrice smears, with a thick yellow oil-like liquid.
Got it. Got it. Got the sole specimen there is of ultra-destructive CA 534.
She felt a wave of gratitude sweep over her.
I did it. I was given a task, almost against my will. And, despite the terrible ever-hovering thought of Graham dead, Malcolm appallingly injured, that task I carried out. To the end. I set aside the Faceless Ones’ directive pointing to dear old Ernst Wichmann. I ignored the opposition I got from king-of-the-castle Dr Giles Lennox. And, however unlikely it looked that a piddling outfit like WAGI could be behind that brutal raid at Heronsgate House, I kept them in mind. I saw through the story blarneying O’Dowd cooked up, eventually anyhow, and I leant on poor Winston Earl till he cracked. I took friendly daffodils to unfriendly Aunty Beryl and was rewarded with a statement that blew apart that fifteen-witness alibi. Finally I went head-to-head against truly formidable Gwendoline Tritton and at last had the pleasure of seeing her taken into custody. And now I’ve brought my personally allocated task to its end.
Or, almost.
‘Emma,’ she said to DC Hardy, standing there looking in some awe at the toothpaste-smeared deadly little test tube, ‘all the evidence here is ring-fenced for the prints on it, isn’t it?’
‘Certainly is.’
‘Then label it, like a good girl, and see that you take it, chain-of-evidence unbroken, to safe storage. There’s a major trial ahead of us.’
‘Will do.’