The Man Who Couldn't Lose

by Roger Silverwood

  I trust that this assists you with your investigation.

  Yours truly,

  J. Willington-Atkins

  Professor Forensic Medicine MA, BSc

  Angel threw the letter down on the desk, ran his hand through his hair and bounced down in the swivel chair.

  Ahmed said, ‘Bad news, sir?’

  With a wave of the hand, he indicated to Ahmed that he could read it.

  He did so and then put the letter back on the desk. He didn’t know what to say. He decided to wait and say nothing. It was a sensible decision.

  Eventually, Angel said: ‘It does not assist us with our investigation, Ahmed, does it? I have had Joshua Gumme’s glasses at the opticians. There is nothing unusual about them. They are merely strong lenses that anybody might buy from a chainstore. They are not prescription lenses and they do not incorporate any filter. They would be excellent, I suppose, for sewing, knitting, reading and playing card games … so that you don’t miss any detail of the play … so that you can see the cards and the stake money clearly. But I fail to see any other part they play in aiding the wearer to win at the game.’

  He sniffed.

  Ahmed nodded.

  He reached down to the pack of cards, opened the box, took out the cards and began to feed them one by one from one hand to the other, looking at the back of each card in turn.

  ‘Now,’ Angel continued, ‘Professor J. Willington-Atkins has examined these cards and has declared that the backs of these fifty-two cards are identical in every particular in all lights and all filters. That totally rules out any possibility of an optical trick or marked cards. The face side has to be different, of course.’

  He turned the pack over.

  Ahmed frowned.

  ‘Why can you not accept, sir, therefore, that the cards are genuine?’

  ‘Because Gumme always won. He won consistently with these particular cards. There are more than a hundred packs of cards exactly like these in the printing room at the rear of the snooker hall. I don’t understand why they are kept in a print shop, if no additional printing or marking is required to be done to them. It beats me. Those packs are all brand new, as supplied by the maker. Furthermore, Gumme willed this particular pack to his son. And there was a note that accompanied the cards and the specs. Just a minute.’

  Angel squared up the cards and put them back in the box. Then he reached into his inside pocket and pulled out several used envelopes with his small writing scrawled all over them. He searched down several until he found what he wanted. ‘I wrote it down at the time, as I remembered it. It was in Edward Gumme’s father’s own hand. This is what the note said: “To my son, Edmund. Enclosed is the secret to making a fortune. Be persistent, be diligent and you too will become a very rich man. The rest will follow. Your loving father, Joshua Gumme.”’

  Ahmed looked at Angel intently. He was clearly moved. It was like being spoken to from the grave.

  Angel put the envelope back in his pocket. He reached forward for the pack of cards.

  ‘There is something different about these cards,’ he said, holding them between thumb and forefinger and waving them at Ahmed. ‘These cards hold the secret to Gumme’s amazing ability to win every time he played pontoon, and I mean to find out what it is,’ he said, then he pushed the pack into his jacket pocket.

  Angel drove slowly through the open gate up to the farmhouse door. He pulled on the handbrake, switched off the ignition and got out of the BMW. The cold whine of the Pennine wind was overtaken by the distant barking of Mrs Buller-Price’s five dogs. Then suddenly the front door of the house opened and the throng of excited canines burst out to greet him. He looked up and framed in the doorway nearly filling it, was the smiling proprietor herself. He acknowledged her with a wave of a hand, as he opened the car boot and took out a black polythene bag.

  Mrs Buller-Price’s hands went up and her face broke out into a big smile.

  ‘You’ve found my rings and my photographs and things, haven’t you? Oh, I knew you would. Do come in. I have a friend visiting me. She used to help me in the house years ago. Did you manage to recover everything, dear Inspector Angel? My photographs?’

  He smiled.

  ‘Everything on your list, Mrs Buller-Price.’

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful. Come in. Come in.’ She looked at the dogs barking around Angel’s knees. ‘Now, you chaps must be quiet. Settle down.’

  They did.

  She closed the front door.

  ‘Come on through, Inspector. Would you please put the swag on the table in the kitchen? That’s wonderful. Thank you. It will be all right there. I’ll go through it later. By the size of it, you must also have Fifi, my pot dog. That’s wonderful!’

  ‘I’m afraid Fifi has suffered a little damage at her rear end.’

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I only looked at her face. I am so pleased to have her back. And all my other things. The photographs! You have no idea. Now please, Inspector, come through into the sitting room.’

  He stood at the door and saw a small elderly lady whom he thought he recognized. She was sitting near the fire holding a cup and saucer and balancing a plate on her lap. She looked up at him and smiled. He returned the smile and nodded.

  ‘That’s it,’ Mrs Buller-Price said. ‘I’ll get another cup. You like the chair Alistair Sim always chose. Please sit there, if you would like to … next to my friend. Oh, I must introduce you.’

  Angel smiled.

  ‘Alice,’ she said. ‘This is Inspector Angel, my very good friend.’ Then she turned to him and added, ‘Inspector, this is Mrs Gladstone.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said sweetly. ‘Are you a policeman?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Pleased to meet you, Mrs Gladstone.’

  Angel looked at her closely. Her face was familiar. He rubbed his chin. He couldn’t recall where he had seen her before.

  Mrs Buller-Price said, ‘Mrs Gladstone used to come and “do” for me, many years ago, when my dear Ernest was alive, didn’t you, Alice? You couldn’t get a more honest and conscientious help. We must have known each other forty-five years. We go on church trips together sometimes, don’t we, Alice?’

  Mrs Gladstone nodded.

  ‘Yes. Last month, we went to Whitby for the day.’

  ‘That must have been nice,’ Angel said, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘I’ll just get another cup,’ Mrs Buller-Price said, making for the kitchen. ‘Tell the inspector your good news,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘What you have just told me. I am sure he’d be most interested.’

  Angel looked at Mrs Gladstone attentively.

  The old lady smiled back at him.

  ‘Yes, well, you see, my daughter has bought a villa in Spain, and we are moving out there in November this year. So we won’t have to face another English winter. Isn’t that nice?’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ Angel said. He wrinkled his forehead. He’d seen her somewhere.

  Mrs Buller-Price returned with a cup and saucer and began to pour out the tea.

  ‘You’ll be coming back for the summers, won’t you, Alice? So we won’t lose touch.’

  ‘Oh, dear me, yes. I hope so. My daughter says she has to come back to work. Although the villa is paid off, she will still need to work to keep both houses going.’

  Angel took the tea. The memory segment of his brain was racing faster than the meter on a London taxi.

  ‘Help yourself to cake, Inspector,’ Mrs Buller-Price said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, selecting the thickest slice of Battenburg on the plate.

  ‘And what does your daughter do, Mrs Gladstone?’ Angel asked with a skilled, airy casualness he had perfected over years, as he bit off a measured mouthful of cake.

  ‘Oh, Gloria is a school dinner lady.’

  Gloria! It came straight to him. Of course! The old biddy was the mother of Gloria Swithenbank, whose house he had searched for Class A drugs only a week
ago.

  He beamed and thoughtfully reached out for another piece of cake.

  ‘A dinner lady? How very interesting.’

  TWELVE

  Half an hour later, Angel arrived back at the station. He made his way slowly up the corridor, his trouser belt feeling more than satisfyingly tight, the result of the intake of four scones and two additional thick slices of Mrs Buller-Price’s Battenburg.

  Ahmed recognized the footsteps and dashed to the open door of the CID office to catch him as he passed.

  ‘The super’s looking for you, sir,’ he said, biting his lip. ‘Sounds as if something has upset him.’

  Angel growled.

  ‘There’s always something upsetting him. Right, Ahmed. Ta.’

  He turned round, went back down the corridor straight to Harker’s office, knocked on the door and went in. The monster was at his desk apparently sorting through three large piles of paper. He glared up at him over his specs.

  Angel felt a cold east front coming direct from the Barents Sea.

  ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ Angel said gruffly. He thought if there was trouble coming, it might be a good idea not to seem to be on the defensive.

  Harker blinked, snatched off his spectacles and leapt up from his chair. ‘I most certainly do,’ he snapped.

  Angel’s eyebrows shot up. He was surprised at the extent of his antagonism. He couldn’t begin to imagine the reason for it.

  ‘Sit down,’ Harker barked, pointing to the chair facing the desk. He then reached forward to a small pile of papers under a glass paperweight depicting an ancient scene of a scaffold in Strangeways Prison. Angel could see that from beneath it, the superintendent’s blue, bony fingers were pulling out a sheet of A4 with the words, ‘National Police Laboratories’ printed at the top. He pulled the document out with a flourish and thrust it at him.

  ‘What’s that all about?’ he snarled, his hand quivering.

  Angel quickly glanced at the paper. It was an internal invoice charging Bromersley Police Force £40 for full-colour optical tests on a pack of playing cards.

  ‘It’s self-explanatory, sir. I authorized it. It was necessary to try to determine exactly how the victim, Gumme, managed always to win every time he played the game of pontoon. I have a suspect, a Mrs Muriel Tasker—’

  ‘I’ve read all about her. Have those tests been helpful in progressing your case against this … Muriel Tasker?’

  ‘No. Not against her. The tests have made certain eliminations as to how Gumme managed to cheat everybody—’

  ‘Do we know Gumme cheated everybody?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir. I cannot yet prove it. But it seems very likely. Pontoon is mainly a game of chance and Gumme is reputed to have played games where he has won every single game in a sequence of two hundred games.’

  Harker seemed taken aback.

  ‘Really?’ he said thoughtfully.

  Angel noticed the dragon’s fire was abating.

  ‘If and when I can discover how he managed to cheat, I believe it will enable me to discover his murderer.’

  ‘Hmm. But it was her husband, James Tasker, who was the gambler and lost their house and everything, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, she seems much more vital and vindictive than her husband. But nothing is clear cut yet. They could be in it together. Incidentally, if I am able to prove that Gumme cheated the Taskers out of their property, then an appropriate claim will be able to be made against his estate.’

  Harker nodded slowly.

  ‘Of course. Coming back to this cheating business … Did you say Gumme won every game that he played?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But there is one proviso. I understand from his driver … manager … friend … I don’t know what to call him … Horace Makepiece, that Gumme wouldn’t play everybody. He always watched prospective mugs play other people first. But if he did play against them, then he would certainly win.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Harker said, leaning back in the chair. ‘Whatever could he observe by simply watching them play?’

  Angel shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Something psychological, do you think?’ asked Harker.

  ‘It’s something more practical than that, I think. Psychologists make mistakes: Gumme never did.’

  Harker rubbed his scratchy little chin briefly, then suddenly his face brightened.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said grandly. ‘We seem to have a classic case then …of a man who couldn’t lose.’

  Angel thought for a moment, smiled and said, ‘But he did lose, sir. He lost the biggest game of all.’

  ‘Oh,’ Harker said. ‘What was that?’

  ‘He lost the game of life, sir.’

  Harker smiled.

  Angel’s jaw dropped. He had seen the superintendent smile. Harker never smiled. It was thought to be a bad omen. It was said in the police canteen that every time Harker smiled, a donkey died!

  Ten minutes later, Angel came out of Superintendent Harker’s office and made his way thoughtfully up the corridor, content that he had dealt with old Grumble Bum satisfactorily and congratulating himself that he had not been provoked into saying anything he would have regretted. He had long since given up the prospect of ever reaching a sensible, cooperative relationship with the tyrant, so sustaining the existing sort of armed truce was about as much as he could hope for. Over the years, he had calculated a sort of allocation of info to pass on to the superintendent in reports or verbally, on a need-to-know basis. In that way, provided that he had judged it accurately, he would always – so far as his case work was concerned – have the upper hand.

  The old plan was working perfectly.

  He arrived at his office to find the door wide open and Ahmed there holding a clipboard and checking off coloured markers on two large maps on the wall behind the desk.

  ‘Aye – aye, Ahmed. What’s all this?’ he said, peering up at the maps.

  Ahmed turned round.

  ‘Sir?’ he queried.

  ‘I see,’ Angel said, moving nearer to the wall. ‘You’ve prepared a separate street map for each “walk”?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what’s the scale?’

  ‘Two inches to a mile, sir.’

  He nodded with satisfaction. That was big enough for him to read the street names.

  ‘And these small yellow stars I have stuck on represent the letterboxes,’ Ahmed explained enthusiastically. ‘I’ve written on each star the time it was to be cleared or emptied each weekday, Monday to Friday. And I’ve indicated in yellow, with arrows, the route and direction the postman had to take. You will see that the times progress by a few minutes each box. Now the first postman was attacked on Monday 19th at 7 p.m. out in the countryside. That’s this map on the left. And the second man was attacked on Thursday, 22nd at 2.50 p.m. That “walk” … detailed in the same way, on the map on the right. Now the actual letterboxes where the men were assaulted, I have marked, respectively, with much bigger yellow stickers.’

  Angel stared at the two maps and rubbed his chin. He liked what he saw.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I don’t know if you have any queries about it, sir?’

  ‘No, Ahmed,’ he muttered, absorbed in the detail. ‘Ta.’

  Angel ran his finger up and down the route marked out on the map and tapped thoughtfully with one finger, the yellow star representing the letterbox where the postman had been attacked on Thursday 22nd. He traced it round the map, reading the stickers, and then suddenly muttered, ‘Edmondson’s Avenue 12.45?’

  There was a short pause, then something remarkable happened to him. Realization dawned. He tapped his temple with an open hand, then turned round to Ahmed, his eyes staring.

  ‘Edmondson’s Avenue 12.45!’ he cried. ‘What an ingenious idea!’

  Ahmed looked anxiously at him. It wasn’t the DI Angel he knew and loved.

  Angel’s fa
ce was illuminated like a WIN on a one-armed bandit. His eyes glazed over as he imagined a line of six-foot blondes in sequin dresses, twirling pompoms, high-kicking their way through his office accompanied by a uniformed forty-five piece brass band.

  ‘Ahmed. Get me DS Gawber straight away.’

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  The girls and the band disappeared as quickly as they had come, but Angel’s heart was still banging away.

  ‘Yes. Yes. Get me DS Gawber,’ he snapped, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

  Three hours later, Angel was standing in his office in front of the maps. He was not a happy bunny. He was rubbing his chin and running the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip when there was a light tap on the door.

  Angel quickly turned round.

  It was Gawber. He came in quietly and closed the door.

  Angel raised his head and stared at him.

  ‘It’s all set, sir,’ Gawber said.

  Angel sighed.

  ‘Are they using a vehicle that looks like a telephone engineer’s van?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir,’ Gawber said. ‘I didn’t want to hang about with them. The fewer, the better.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. I hope they are not using that damned butcher’s van again.’

  ‘You worry too much, sir.’

  Angel shook his head and looked him square in the face.

  ‘If this op goes belly up, Ron, my career in the force will be over. For you, there’s no problem. You can just say you were obeying my orders. That would be right. And that’s OK. But for me, it would be finished. And I am not the sort of man that could ever get accustomed to walking an Alsatian round a builder’s site in the middle of the night, I can tell you.’

  ‘They’ll have that CCTV camera up there in no time, sir. They’ve done it a thousand times. Maybe more. They’re the experts. Might even be up there working now.’

  ‘You told him I wanted it to catch the face of the person and the package the instant it is being shoved into the letterbox?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that I want it in focus? I don’t want a blurred picture that some smart arsed barrister can argue is that of the ghost of Lily Savage and not Gloria Swithenbank.’