by Len Maynard
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Turner blustered but his face flushed.
“I think you do. Now, we could stand out here in the street and have a slanging match, or you can invite me inside so that I can talk to Geraldine.”
Suddenly all the bluster went out of him and Turner’s shoulders sagged, making him look a good ten years older. He pulled the door open wide and stood aside to allow Jack entry into the house.
“Who is it, pet?” Jean Turner called from the living room. Her face fell as Jack walked into the room. Geraldine was curled on the settee, her legs folded under her as she leafed through a magazine. She too looked up at Jack and her face froze in the expression of a startled deer.
“I’m not going back,” she said.
Jack smiled at her kindly. “And no one’s suggesting that you should. I just had to satisfy myself that you’re all right.”
“She’s better now she’s here.” Jean Turner gathered herself, ready to pounce to protect her granddaughter.
“We can’t send her back to that house,” Laurence Turner said in a more reasonable tone than he had adopted at the front door.
Jack walked across to an armchair. “May we sit down?”
“As you wish.” Turner planted his bony frame on a hard chair by the dining table.
Jack settled himself on a chair opposite the girl. “You gave us quite a scare, Gerry.”
A look of regret flashed across the teenager’s eyes. “I just couldn’t stay there. Hester said she would break my fingers.”
“Yes. I’ll be having words with Miss Gough.” He turned to Turner. “May I use your ’phone. I need to let my people know that Geraldine is safe.”
Fear flashed in Geraldine’s eyes and she grabbed her grandmother’s hand.
“Gerry, It’s okay. No one’s going to take you away from here. I can see you’re in a much better place.”
“Thank you,” Jean Turner said to him, gratitude in her eyes.
“But I must call this in. My chief superintendent will have my guts if I don’t.”
“The telephone is out in the hall. This way.” Turner led Jack out of the room and closed the door behind them. Once out in the hall he turned to Jack, his voice low. “You can’t guarantee that Geraldine won’t be taken away from us.”
“No, I can’t. But I’ll do my level best to see that Geraldine is settled with you. I can’t see her stepmother putting up too much of a fight, can you?”
Laurence Turner smiled tightly. “I think not.”
“Well. You look like the cat that got all the cream,” Annie said as Jack walked in that evening.
He told her what had happened at Laurence and Jean Turner’s bungalow.
“Jack that’s wonderful news.”
“All we have to do now is find out who killed Gerry’s father.” He picked up an overstuffed leather briefcase.
“What’s in there?”
“Homework.” He put the briefcase down on the kitchen table. “I asked Bob Lock to give me all he had on two villains I’m investigating. I wasn’t expecting this much.”
“It looks like they’ve been busy.”
“And then some. I think I’d best take this through to the back room, then I can spread it all out on the table and go through it.” He hefted the case again.
“Don’t you want to know how I got on today, with Barbara Painter?”
Jack looked at her vaguely for a moment, and then remembered. “Yes, sorry, the job at the bakers.”
“I got it.” Annie grinned. “I start on Monday.”
“That’s wonderful. Congratulations. Well done.”
“Okay, okay.” Annie put up her hands. “Don’t overdo it.”
“But I’m pleased for you.”
“Are you, Jack? Really?”
He dropped the briefcase to the floor and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her close. “Really,” he said close to her ear and kissed her cheek.
Annie swivelled her head until she reached his mouth. Planting her fingers in his hair she forced his lips against hers, kissing him passionately. When she finally broke the kiss he said, “Hey, you should get a job every day.”
“Thank you.” She snuggled her face into his chest. “I love you, Jack Callum.”
“Never mind that, woman. Where’s my dinner?” He pulled her tighter into him.
“In the oven.” She pushed him away and gave him a playful slap.
“Ouch! I am famished by the way. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“Patience, darling. All things come, etcetera, etcetera. By the way, on the way back from Painters, I called in at Howards, the electrical store in town. You know the one on the corner of Station Road.”
“I know it.”
“They’ll let us have a set for eight shillings a week. Both channels, BBC and ITV, a fifteen-inch screen.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s wonderful. If you go in there in the morning and countersign the rental agreement, they’ll deliver it on Monday.”
“That quickly, eh?”
Annie nodded her head excitedly.
“Hold on a moment. Before you get carried away, we’ll both be at work on Monday. There’ll be nobody here to let them in.”
“Joanie will be here. Avril doesn’t need her until later in the week.”
Jack shook his head. “Well, that’s that then. The end of civilization as we know it.”
“Oh, shut up, you old bear, and kiss me again.”
So he did.
“’allo, Eddie,” Francoise Somers said in her delicious French accent and kissed the air either side of Fuller’s cheeks. “Charles is in the games room. Come through.”
Francoise, Charlie Somers’ wife, was a slim beauty, who wore her light brown hair poker-straight and cut into a blunt fringe that just grazed her eyebrows. She had large brown eyes and a retroussé nose over a full-lipped and, Fuller thought, very kissable mouth.
How a grizzled old reprobate like Somers ended up married to such a beauty was one of life’s enduring mysteries.
Fuller went through to the back of the house, guided by the clacking of snooker balls as they crashed into each other.
Somers was leaning over the baize, his hand forming a bridge on which to rest his cue as he attempted a difficult cut into the centre pocket. The table was a third full-size and had a slate bed, but Fuller could see the beads of perspiration on the older man’s brow as he leaned on the table and strained to make the shot.
“A dollar a frame,” Somers said. “Fancy it?”
Fuller laid two half crowns on the edge of the table. “Why not?”
“Go and grab yourself a cue while I frame up.”
The snooker cues were kept in a purpose-built rack in the corner of the large games room. He took one out and peered down its length, checking to see if it was true. Satisfied, he walked back to the table and picked up the chalk hanging from a length of string tied to the top corner pocket.
“You can break,” Charlie said, taking the blue chalk from him and screwing it against the tip of his own cue.
Fuller positioned the cue ball and lined up the shot. With a flourish he struck the cue ball and sent it rolling down the table to graze the end ball of the triangle of reds. The white cue ball spun away, hit the side cushion, bouncing onto the cushion at the far end of the table, where its momentum sent it back up the table towards him. It rolled to a stop just under the top cushion.
“Hmm” Somers said. “Not bad. Have you been practicing?”
“The result of a misspent youth.”
“Well, let’s see what I can do with this.” Somers bent to take the shot.
“Why did you send the photo to my guvnor, Charlie?” Fuller said as Somers drew back his cue. Somers glanced up at him and struck the cue ball down the table, where it cannoned into the pack of reds and sent the balls spinning across the baize.
“I thought it might help him.” Somers glared at the number of balls he’d i
nadvertently knocked into potable positions.
“Well, it’s certainly got him thinking.” Fuller bent to pot his first of four red balls. “Did the Met investigate the death of the bloke who took the photograph, Benny Talbot?”
“From what I remember, he fell under a bus on the Tottenham Court Road,” Charlie said.
“Yes, a number 29 to be exact, but did he have any help?”
“Do you mean was he pushed?”
“Yes.”
“There were several witnesses who saw him fall.”
“Credible witnesses?”
“I wasn’t personally involved in the investigation, but I believe so. It was deemed an accident, nothing more, nothing less.”
Fuller missed an easy black into the corner pocket, and Somers came back to the table.
“You know Jack Callum’s not going to let the photograph go,” Fuller said.
Somers glanced round at him. “Are you deliberately trying to put me off my stroke?”
“My five bob looks safe from where I’m standing.”
15 - FRIDAY
The door to the room opened and Francoise walked in carrying a tray containing a coffee jug and cups.
Eddie Fuller found it hard to drag his eyes away from her as she moved effortlessly around the room and deposited the tray on a coffee table in the corner. She gave the wooden and brass scoreboard a glance. “Who’s winning?”
“He is,” Somers said sourly.
Francoise smiled at Fuller and lit up the room. “Well done, Eddie. Charles hates to lose, and doesn’t very often.”
She pronounced her husband’s name the French way, making it sound both endearing and incredibly sexy.
“You’re a lucky so and so,” Fuller said when Francoise had left the room.
“And don’t think I’m not aware of it. I count my blessings every day.”
“How did you two get together?”
Somers smiled. “That was all thanks to Tommy Usher. She used to work for him?”
“As what?”
“As a whore, Eddie. She was nothing more than a common prostitute. Of course Usher always described his girls as escorts.”
“A rose by any other name is…”
Somers smiled. “Still a rose. Yes, I know. We’d been seeing each other, in a professional capacity and, believe it or not, we fell in love. She told Tommy, fearing that he’d be furious, that he might even stripe her, but he was as nice as pie about it and gave us his blessing. I suppose he figured he had a detective inspector in his pocket, and if it only cost him the services of a whore then it was worth it. I told the inquiry about it. So that’s not one of the skeletons rattling around in my closet.”
“You mean there are others?”
“Oh, plenty. But none that I’d lose any sleep over. So let Chief Inspector Callum do his worst, or his best. As I said before, the inquiry cleared me of any wrongdoing.”
“And as I said before, they weren’t in possession of all the facts.”
Somers potted an easy black and rested his fists on the table. “Listen, Eddie, I like you, so I won’t take what you say as personal, but what you saw, or think you saw, when you were my bagman, is open to many interpretations. I was working to get Tommy Usher off the streets, and I would have succeeded if God hadn’t intervened before I could make an arrest.”
“The stroke you mean.”
“Yes, the bloody stroke. Once he had that, his people spirited him away to a private sanatorium, first in Switzerland, from there, to Brussels. We lost track of him when they moved him to Germany.”
“And you believe now he’s back in the country, living in a nursing home, in the South of England?”
“Yes, Kent, like I said.”
“But it’s just an assumption. You don’t know that for certain.”
Somers shook his head. “No, but it would make sense. He always had strong family links to that part of the word.”
“So did you pursue it further?”
“I did, but by the time I heard he was back in the country, the investigation had gone cold and my superiors weren’t keen on reopening it. The Chief Constable was of the opinion that the Met had ploughed enough money into bringing Usher down without much success. I think general thinking was that God had done their work for them. Usher was out of their hair without the need of a costly investigation and an even more costly trial. I suppose, as far as they were concerned, having Usher confined to a private nursing home was as good as having him in prison, without it costing the taxpayer a penny.”
“So everybody wins,” Fuller said.
Somers glared at him. “No, Eddie, nobody wins. What about justice? Where is the justice for the poor bastards Usher maimed, and for the ordinary people whose livelihoods were ruined and whose families he destroyed by his crimes? What about them? I joined the force to fight for people like them, the little people, and to see that thugs like Usher got what was coming to them.” There was passion in his voice.
“So that’s why you sent my guvnor the photograph. You’re hoping Jack Callum may reopen the case and get the result you wanted but could never have.”
Somers nodded and cracked the pink ball into the centre pocket. “That’s a dollar you owe me.” He grinned in triumph.
Fuller slid the two half-crowns across to him. “Why Jack?”
“Because he’s not part of the Met, so not tied by their hidebound thinking and, if he’s half the copper I’ve heard he is, he should have no trouble getting a result against Tommy Usher.”
“You hate Usher that much?”
Somers poured coffee into a tiny cup. “Listen, Eddie, the only good thing to come from my time spent in Usher’s company was Francoise. Everything else sits on my soul like an indelible stain that no amount of scrubbing will remove. Another frame?”
Fuller sighed. “Might as well, though I’d forgotten how good you are.”
“The police Southern area snooker champion, or had you forgotten that too?”
Fuller shook his head ruefully. “Go on then, you old rogue, frame them up.”
He sipped from his cup and nodded approvingly. Francoise certainly made good coffee. “Has anyone seen Usher since he had the stroke?”
Somers shook his head. “Nobody from my team.”
“Are you sure he actually had one, a stroke I mean?”
“There were witnesses.”
“Credible ones, like the ones who witnessed Benny Talbot falling under a bus?” Fuller said as he watched Somers break.
“What are you implying, Eddie?”
“Could Usher have faked it, just to get the Met off his back?”
Somers watched the cue ball roll back into baulk and gave a satisfied nod. “I must admit, that’s what I thought, initially. It was all too bloody convenient, but eventually we heard, from reliable sources, that the stroke was genuine. A doctor from Barts’ hospital, where the bastard was treated, spoke to my Sergeant, Bill Sampson, and told him that it was touch and go for Usher for seventy-two hours, and the doctor had no reason to lie. That, and the fact that Tommy Usher’s firm suddenly dropped off our radar, almost as if they had stopped trading.”
“Has another firm stepped in to fill the vacuum? Blast!” Fuller cursed as the cue ball cannoned off the black and dropped into the corner pocket.
“Careless. Seven points to me.” Somers adjusted the scoreboard. “You need to concentrate, Eddie.”
“I know. The underworld, like nature, abhors a vacuum. I would have thought they’d have been queuing up to fill Usher’s shoes.”
Somers shook his head. “The Richardson gang came sniffing around about a month after it happened, and we had them in the frame for a couple of post office jobs, but we never made anything stick and, after a few weeks, they dropped out of the picture again.”
“So, since Usher’s stroke, the South’s been crime free?”
Somers laughed and potted a red, followed by a blue, and then another red. “Don’t be so bloody naïve. There’re still
as many incidents, thieving, assaults, and the brothels are still making money. If anything, they’ve seen business increase since Usher left the scene, but there hasn’t been any significant gang related crime.”
“Don’t you find that odd?”
Somers rested the end of his cue on the floor. “Frankly, Eddie, yes I do, but my superiors take a different view. They don’t believe in looking a gift horse in the proverbial. As I said, there’s still a lot of villainy out there on the streets but, overall, the crime figures have fallen, so my bosses are cock-a-hoop. They’re toasting their success, the bloody fools.”
Fuller drained his coffee cup, poured himself another, and watched Somers build a break of thirty-five. “According to Bob Lock, our collator, Jack is looking into Albert Klein. Do you know anything about him?”
Somers looked at him askance. “Mr. Callum is a busy boy, isn’t he? First Usher, now Klein, what’s he trying to do, wipe out crime in the whole country?”
“Klein’s name came up and Jack’s following it up. I haven’t spoken to him about it yet. I wanted to have your thoughts first.”
Somers finished the break with a missed black that rattled in the jaws of the pocket. “Damn! Eddie, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Do you want to keep going behind your boss’s back? If I were Callum and I learned my sergeant had been consulting with his old DI, I’d string you up by your nuts and let the vultures have you for breakfast.”
“I’m just trying to be a good detective.” Fuller was stung by his old mentor’s criticism.
“Yes, I realize that. But, there are ways and means. If Jack Callum wants my help, he can come to me off his own bat.” He leaned over the table and attempted a difficult canon, missed it and swore again. “Divided loyalties, Eddie. Never a good thing in our line of work.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“Bollocks, you didn’t. Remember, I know you, Eddie. I know what a bloody good copper you are. And I know how bloody ambitious you are too. How old were you when you made detective sergeant? The youngest DS in the South, weren’t you?”