Trick of the Mind

by Cassandra Chan

  “It would have been better if I hadn’t had to leave in the middle of it,” replied O’Leary. “We were just finishing our dinner when the call came in that you’d been shot.”

  “Oh,” said Gibbons, discomfited. “Sorry.”

  O’Leary grinned at him. “As well you should be,” he said with mock severity. “The least you could do is get shot during working hours instead of in the middle of my date.”

  “Very inconsiderate of me,” agreed Gibbons.

  “Actually, it’s worked out rather well,” said O’Leary. “Brenda is very anxious to soothe away the trauma I’ve experienced in seeing my friend lying all bloody in the street. I’m going to let her just as soon as I get a spare minute.”

  “Trauma? You?” snorted Gibbons. “I’m the one that’s traumatized. I’ve forgotten an entire day, damn it all.”

  “Yes, but you’re hardly in any kind of shape to be soothed by Brenda,” pointed out O’Leary.

  “All too true,” agreed Gibbons sadly. He had been feeling so ill that it had not occurred to him, but it didn’t take much thought to realize his sex life had just come to a standstill for weeks, possibly months, to come. “Never mind,” he said, impatiently pushing this thought aside. “Tell me what’s been going on.”

  “I don’t know much,” O’Leary warned him. “I’ve spent all day on Pennycook—as far as I can make out, Hollings is leaving me to solve the case on my own. God knows he doesn’t seem interested in anything I tell him.”

  “Well, I’m interested,” said Gibbons. “Tell me what you found out.”

  O’Leary smiled. “I got a break today, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I’ve been working on tracking down some of Pennycook’s old cronies, and I finally got hold of one of them today, a fellow called Reaney. He claims not to have had much to do with Pennycook in the last few years, and he didn’t have much to say to me at first, either.”

  “But your natural charm brought him around?” inquired Gibbons sarcastically.

  “That’s right,” said O’Leary genially. “That and the beer I bought him—I found him in a pub.”

  “And did he know who Pennycook was going to meet that night?”

  O’Leary shook his head. “No,” he said, “and I think I believe him. But he did finally say that Pennycook liked to indulge in a bit of blackmail when he got the chance. He called it his ‘pension fund.’ If you ask me, he had a go at blackmailing Reaney over something and that’s what brought their relationship to an end. According to Reaney’s daughter-in-law, he and Pennycook used to spend a fair amount of time together, though she didn’t know what they got up to.”

  “Didn’t want to know, more like,” put in Gibbons.

  “That’s right,” said O’Leary. “Willful ignorance can be a wonderful thing if applied rightly. Anyway, she claims there was some sort of dustup three or four years ago and Reaney hasn’t seen Pennycook since. As she put it, they went from being ‘bosom buddies’ to ‘hating each other’s guts.’”

  “Well, the blackmail gives you motive, at any rate,” said Gibbons. “It didn’t seem to me, reading this over”—and he tapped the report on his lap—“that someone would have murdered the old reprobate for the paltry contents of his shop.”

  “It would have seemed even less likely if you’d seen the place,” O’Leary assured him. “I dropped in on Mrs. Pennycook after I talked to Reaney, but she’s another case of willful ignorance. The police have always had it in for her Alfred—well, you know the drill.”

  Gibbons made a face. “All too well. What about the—nephew, is it? Frank Pennycook, I think it said.”

  “That’s right,” said O’Leary. “I had a go at him, too, but didn’t get much. He admitted that his uncle had some private business from time to time, but claims he was never let in on any of it. He says he had no idea that Alfred had an appointment that night, but if he had known, he would have assumed it was for something like blackmail. I’ve been trying to think if there have been any jobs recently that Pennycook might have known about and tried to get in on, but so far nothing’s come to me. Most of the people he knows are past active service, if you take my meaning.”

  “More to the point,” said Gibbons, “do any of them have enough money to pay a blackmailer?”

  O’Leary shrugged. “Not that I’ve noticed,” he answered, and then looked back over his shoulder as the sound of voices attracted his attention. “Is that someone else coming in?”

  Gibbons glowered. “Probably my gorgon of a nurse come to torture me again.”

  But it was Bethancourt, smelling of rain and tobacco, and smiling tentatively. Cerberus padded at his side; he smelled of wet dog.

  “Hullo,” said Bethancourt. “Is this a special police conversation or can anyone join in?”

  “Come in, come in,” said Gibbons. “You remember Chris O’Leary?”

  “Yes, of course, good to see you again,” said Bethancourt, reaching out to shake O’Leary’s hand before sinking into the second chair. “Well, well, isn’t this jolly?”

  Gibbons glared at him.

  “Well, perhaps not precisely jolly,” amended Bethancourt hastily. “But a happy opportunity to compare notes and get all our minds on the same page so to speak.”

  “Do be quiet, Phillip,” said Gibbons. “Chris here was just about to tell me how my investigation is going.”

  “I did warn you I’d missed most of the news today,” warned O’Leary. “In fact, the only thing I heard was that Inspector Hollings had tracked down some bloke who apparently saw you getting out of a taxi at about half-eight on Tuesday night.”

  “In Walworth?” asked Gibbons.

  “That’s right. At the intersection of Walworth Road and East Street, or thereabouts.”

  “Eight thirty,” mused Bethancourt. “That leaves an hour and a half or so unaccounted for.”

  O’Leary gave him an odd look, but it was Gibbons who said, “How do you make that out? Chris here left me at a pub at half-six, and I turned up in Walworth at half-eight. That’s two hours difference.”

  “Well, yes, but you had to get from place to place, hadn’t you?” pointed out Bethancourt. “I don’t think it’s pushing things to say you spent fifteen minutes getting from the pub to wherever you went and another fifteen getting from there to Walworth. That’s pretty average for getting about in London.”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” said Gibbons grudgingly, “it does make sense. But what on earth could I have spent an hour and a half doing?”

  “You might have got a bite to eat,” suggested Bethancourt.

  “Not at any of the usual places, you didn’t,” put in O’Leary. “We’ve canvassed those—both the restaurants around the Yard and the ones near your flat. Your landlady told us which places you went to the most, but I don’t think we missed any. We had a small army out on Wednesday hitting every possible place.”

  It gave Gibbons an odd and rather unpleasant feeling, hearing about the kind of search he himself had conducted on many occasions, but which on this occasion was directed toward his own movements.

  “I was shot at about nine,” he said, ignoring the winces this statement caused in his listeners, “so I might still have been planning to pick up something to eat on my way home—it wasn’t that late.”

  “You could have run into someone,” said O’Leary.

  Gibbons shrugged. “I could have done almost any thing,” he said, sounding discouraged.

  “What you couldn’t have done,” said Bethancourt, “is run straight off to Walworth after talking to Chris here—getting from the Feathers to Walworth couldn’t take two hours unless you walked. I rather think this rules out the idea that you went off to check out a sudden inspiration about the Pennycook murder, don’t you?”

  “It does,” agreed Gibbons, who was annoyed that he himself had not grasped this immediately. “Not,” he added, glancing at O’Leary, “that we thought that was terribly likely.”

  O’Leary shook his head in agreemen
t.

  “No, I suppose not,” murmured Bethancourt. “Still,” he added, brightening, “it’s nice to know for sure.”

  Gibbons eyed him. “You seem to be in a suspiciously happy mood,” he said.

  “I’m trying to lighten the atmosphere,” replied Bethancourt.

  “The atmosphere doesn’t need lightening,” growled Gibbons, “it needs clearing up.”

  “Well, we’re all doing our best,” said Bethancourt. “It’s not easy without you, you know.”

  “Carmichael’s going nuts without you,” put in O’Leary.

  Gibbons smiled at these attempts to cheer him, but it was a halfhearted expression. He didn’t care if they were all finding it heavy going because he resented their having the opportunity to investigate when he did not. The fact that most of the time he felt too awful to think about anything but his personal well-being did nothing to alter this sentiment, and he was in enough of a pet that the illogic of it all left him unmoved. Then he frowned as a thought occurred to him.

  “This fellow says he saw me getting out of a taxi?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” said O’Leary. “On Walworth Road and East Street.”

  Gibbons’s frown deepened. “I wonder why I took a taxi,” he said. “I usually only do that if I’m in a hurry.”

  Bethancourt and O’Leary stared at him.

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” said Bethancourt, who frequently took taxis himself.

  “I don’t normally take them myself,” said O’Leary thoughtfully. “Although …”

  “Although what?” asked Gibbons when this comment did not resolve itself.

  “Well, I was just thinking that it was a miserable night out,” said O’Leary, almost apologetically. “It was the sort of weather that I might have taken a taxi in just to keep out of the rain.”

  “Did you take a taxi to meet your date?” asked Gibbons.

  O’Leary shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “But I was picking Brenda up, so I had to.”

  “But there’s a financial element at work here, isn’t there?” interrupted Bethancourt. “I mean, that’s why the two of you don’t hire taxis that often—because it’s expensive, right?”

  Gibbons rolled his eyes. “Of course.”

  “So, you normally only take taxis when you’re in a hurry,” said Bethancourt, “or possibly when the weather is bad enough.” He paused for a moment, and then shook his head. “I can’t think of a reason you’d be in a hurry to reach Walworth by half-eight, not unless you had an appointment there.”

  He cocked his head in question at the others.

  O’Leary spread his hands. “You didn’t have a date,” he said. “You’d have mentioned that when we were talking. What else could you be running late for at that time of night?”

  “Maybe,” said Gibbons after a moment, “maybe I was just wanting my dinner and in a hurry to finish whatever it was I was doing. That and the weather might have made me decide to take a taxi.”

  “It’ll help a lot once we find the taxi driver and find out where you were coming from,” said O’Leary.

  “Well, we’ve already got a rough idea of where he could have come from,” said Bethancourt.

  “We have?” demanded Gibbons.

  “Perhaps I should have said we’ve got an outside limit,” said Bethancourt. “I mean,” he added as the other two men merely stared at him, “short of a dire emergency, there’s a limit to how much you would spend on a taxi, particularly if you just wanted to finish an errand faster.”

  “That’s true,” said Gibbons thoughtfully.

  “So how much?” asked Bethancourt. “How much would you be willing to spend for your own comfort on a cold night?”

  “Less than you,” muttered Gibbons, but this only produced an unrepentant grin from his friend.

  “All too true,” agreed Bethancourt, amiably. “I like to be comfortable. Come along, old thing, give us a number. Fifty pounds?”

  “God, no,” said O’Leary, startled by the idea of this sum.

  “Then how much?”

  “I don’t know,” retorted Gibbons. “It would all depend on how tired I was and how anxious I was for my dinner and how awful the weather was.”

  “The weather was dreadful,” said O’Leary. “I know, I had to stand out in it for more than an hour.”

  “Well, I still wouldn’t have spent fifty pounds on a taxi,” insisted Gibbons. He hesitated, thinking. “I might have spent twenty quid,” he said. “No more.”

  Bethancourt beamed at him. “There you go—that nicely limits how far you could have traveled. In fact, you couldn’t actually have been too far from the Yard. If we work backward, twenty pounds would get you from Walworth back over the river, but not a lot farther.”

  They were all silent for a moment. Then O’Leary shook his head.

  “I don’t see where that really gets us any further,” he said.

  “Well, no,” admitted Bethancourt. “It’s more that it rules things out.”

  Gibbons sighed. “It would help if there was anything to actually investigate,” he said. “Has it occurred to anyone else that Walworth has a very high crime rate? And that what happened to me might just have been an act of random violence?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Then O’Leary shrugged. “It’s occurred to everyone, Jack,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. If it was a random thug, we’ll find him, too.”

  “Yes, all right,” muttered Gibbons, but not as if he had great faith in the notion.

  In the quiet that followed, the sound of murmured voices at the door reached them, causing Cerberus to lift his head. In another moment, Carmichael appeared and surveyed the three of them with a smile.

  “Having a conference?” he said.

  Gibbons, whose belly was beginning to ache quite intolerably and who had been on the verge of asking his friends to leave, immediately felt he could go on for a bit at the sight of his senior.

  “Do come in, sir,” he said. “You’re quite right—we were just discussing the investigation.”

  Both Bethancourt and O’Leary had risen at his entrance and were offering him their chairs; Carmichael took O’Leary’s with a nod, relegating the sergeant to the stool. He patted Cerberus absently as he sat, and then looked down at the Borzoi in surprise.

  “How the devil did you get the dog in here?” he demanded.

  “He chatted up my nurse,” said Gibbons.

  “I’m pretending Cerberus is Jack’s pet,” corrected Bethancourt. “Nobody seems to mind.”

  Carmichael shook his head in bemusement and returned his attention to Gibbons.

  “So how are you doing, lad?” he asked, a little anxiously. He did not add that to him Gibbons still looked like he was at death’s door, but the look in his eyes gave him away.

  “They tell me I’m healing up nicely,” answered Gibbons. “And my fever’s down.”

  “He’s making a miraculous recovery,” said Bethancourt firmly. “His medieval torturer told him so.”

  “What?”

  “Physiotherapist,” explained Gibbons. He firmly changed the subject. “How is the investigation going, sir? Chris here told me I evidently took a taxi to Walworth that night?”

  “That’s right,” said Carmichael. “Hollings found that out. We haven’t got hold of the taxi driver yet, but at least we now have some idea of why you went there.”

  The three younger men all looked surprised.

  “We do?” asked Gibbons.

  Carmichael glanced at O’Leary. “You didn’t tell them about the other taxi?” he said.

  “No, sir.” O’Leary shook his head. “I didn’t know about it. I just heard that there was a witness who had seen Jack arriving in Walworth by taxi.”

  “I see,” said Carmichael. “Well, there was a bit more to it than that, though most of it’s conjecture. Our witness was trying to catch a bus when he saw a taxi pull up and let out a fare—another young man, he said. Then he noti
ced you getting out of a second taxi half a block or so behind the first. The assumption is that you were following the first fellow, though we won’t know for sure until we get hold of the cabbie.”

  Gibbons looked a little dazed. “I wonder who it could have been,” he said.

  “Someone to do with the Haverford case?” suggested O’Leary.

  “But who?” said Gibbons. “And what on earth could they have been doing that would have made me so suspicious that I’d follow them all the way to Walworth?”

  No one appeared to have a good answer for this and there was silence in the room for a moment.

  “I can’t think,” said Bethancourt at last. “Unless you went back to check something out at the Haverford house. If someone were there before you, that would certainly be suspicious.”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see,” said Carmichael. “The taxi driver should turn up tonight or tomorrow, and then we’ll have a better idea. Meanwhile, I have something for you to investigate yourself, if you feel up to it.”

  Gibbons was considerably surprised. “Er,” he said, “I don’t know—that is, sir, I think I’m going to be in hospital for another few days.”

  Carmichael waved a hand. “It’s not that kind of investigating,” he said. “I just want you to get your bloody-minded cousin to tell you what she was up to on Tuesday night.”

  “Dawn?” said Gibbons, astonished. “What does she have to do with anything?”

  “That’s just what I should like to know,” Carmichael told him.

  Gibbons felt he must have missed some crucial piece of information because otherwise this made no sense.

  “I don’t quite see, sir—” he began, but Carmichael interrupted with, “I’m sorry, Gibbons, I shouldn’t have dumped that on you all of a sudden. It’s just that I’ve had a very frustrating day with the woman and am feeling a bit put out. Here, let me start at the beginning.”

  He recounted succinctly his various encounters with Dawn Melton, the evidence of both her phone and Gibbons’s, and ended with what he described as “the deluge of tears” that afternoon.

  “What’s more,” he added, “I have just come from Walworth where Mrs. Melton’s neighbor, one Edith Carlson, verifies that on Tuesday evening she sat with Mrs. Melton’s children while Mrs. Melton ran out to meet a friend. She was gone from about half-eight till a quarter to ten.”