Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  “We’ll make a few micro-slides,” he said. “They’ll tell us anything we want to know. There’s no need for you to hang about if you don’t want to.”

  Sergeant Petrella disliked being told, even indirectly, that he was wasting his time. Let the truth be told, he did not care for Scientific Assistant Worsley at all. Worsley had the very slightly patronising manner of one who has himself been admitted to the inner circles of knowledge and is speaking to unfortunates who are still outside the pale. It was a habit, Petrella had noticed, which was very marked at the outset of a scientific career, but which diminished as a man gained more experience and realised how little certainty there was, even under the eye of the microscope.

  “All right!” he said. “I’ll push off and come back in a couple of hours.”

  “To do the job completely,” said Worsley, “will take about six days.” He looked complacently at the neat range of Petri dishes round the table, and the samples he had so far extracted. “Perhaps another three to tabulate the results.”

  “All the same,” said Petrella, “I’ll look in this evening and see what you have got for me.”

  “As long as you appreciate,” said Worsley, “that the results I give you will be unchecked.”

  “I’ll take a chance on that.”

  “That, of course, is for you to decide.” His voice contained a reproof. Impetuous people, police officers. Unschooled in the discipline of the laboratory. Jumpers to conclusions. People on whom careful, controlled research was usually wasted. Worsley sighed audibly.

  Sergeant Petrella said nothing. He had long ago found out that it was a waste of time antagonising people who were in a position to help you.

  He consulted his watch, his notebook, and his stomach. He had a call to make in Wandsworth, another in Acton, and a third in South Harrow. Then he would come back to the Forensic Science Laboratory to see what Worsley had got for them. Then he would go back to Highside and report to Chief Inspector Haxtell. He might have time for lunch between Acton and South Harrow. If not, the prospect of food was remote, for once he reached Highside there was no saying that Haxtell would not have a lot more visits lined up for him.

  All this activity – and, indirectly, the coat lying on Worsley’s table – stemmed from a discovery made by a milkman at No. 39 Carhow Mansions. Carhow Mansions is a tall block of flats overlooking the southern edge of Helenwood Common.

  Miss Martin, who lived alone at No. 39, was a woman of about thirty. Neither beautiful, nor clever, nor ugly, nor stupid. She was secretary to Dr. Hunter, who had a house and consulting room in Wimpole Street. She did her work well, and was well paid for it.

  The flat, which was tucked away on the top storey and was smaller than the others in the block, was known as a “single” which means that it had about as little accommodation as one person could actually exist in. A living room which was also a dining room. An annexe which served as a bedroom. One cupboard, called a kitchen, and another, called a bathroom. Not that Miss Martin had ever been heard to complain. She had no time to waste on housework and ate most of her meals out. Her interests were Shakespeare and tennis.

  Which brings us to the milkman, who, finding Friday’s milk bottle still unused outside the door of Flat 39 on Saturday, mentioned the matter to the caretaker.

  The caretaker was not immediately worried. Tenants often went away without telling him, although Miss Martin was usually punctilious about such matters. Later in the morning his rounds took him up to No. 39 and he looked at the two milk bottles and found the sight faintly disturbing. Fortunately, he had his pass-key with him.

  Which brought Chief Inspector Haxtell on to the scene in a fast car. And Superintendent Barstow, from District Headquarters. And photographic and fingerprint detachments, and a well-known pathologist, and a crowd on the pavement, and a uniformed policeman to control them; and, eventually, since Carhow Mansions was in his manor, Sergeant Petrella.

  Junior detective sergeants do not conduct investigations into murders, but they are allowed to help, in much the same way as a junior officer helps to run a war. They are allowed to do the work, whilst their superiors do the thinking. In this case there was a lot of work to do.

  “I don’t like it,” said Barstow in the explosive rumble which was his normal conversational voice. “Here’s this girl, as ordinary as apples and custard. No one’s got a word to say against her. Life’s an open book. Then someone comes in and hits her on the head, not once. Five or six times.”

  “Any one of the blows might have caused death,” agreed the pathologist. “She’s been dead more than twenty-four hours. Probably killed on Friday morning. And I think there’s no doubt that that was the weapon.”

  He indicated a heavy, long-handled screwdriver.

  “It could have belonged to her,” said Haxtell. “Funny thing to find in a flat, though! More like a piece of workshop equipment.”

  “All right!” said Barstow. “Suppose the murderer brought it with him. Ideal for the job. You could force a front door with a thing like that. Then, if the owner comes out, it’s just as handy as a weapon. But it’s still—” – he boggled over using the word and its implications – “it’s still mad.”

  And the further they looked, and the wider they spread their net, the madder it did seem. Certain facts came to light at once.

  Haxtell was talking to Dr. Hunter, of Wimpole Street, within the hour. The doctor explained that Miss Martin had not come to work on Friday because he himself had ordered her to stay in bed. “I think she’d been over-using her eyes,” said the doctor. “That gave her a headache, and the headache affected her stomach. It was a form of migraine. What she needed was forty-eight hours on her back, with the blinds down. I told her to take Friday off, and come back on Monday if she felt well enough. She’s been with me for nearly ten years now. An excellent secretary, and such a nice girl!”

  He spoke with so much warmth that Haxtell, who was a cynic, made a mental note of a possible line of enquiry. Nothing came of it. The doctor, it transpired, was very happily married.

  “That part of it fits all right,” said Haxtell to Superintendent Barstow. “She was in bed when the intruder arrived. He hit her as she was coming out of her bedroom.”

  “Then you think he was a housebreaker?”

  “I’d imagine so, yes,” said Haxtell. “The screwdriver looks like the sort of thing a housebreaker would carry. You could force an ordinary mortice lock right off with it. As a matter of fact he didn’t have to use it in this instance, because she’d got a simple catch lock that a child of five could open. I don’t doubt he slipped it with a piece of talc.”

  “Why did he choose her flat?”

  “Because it was an isolated one, on the top floor. Or because he knew her habits. Just bad luck that she should have been there at all.”

  “Bad luck for her,” agreed Barstow, sourly. “Well, get the machine working. We may turn something up.”

  Haxtell was an experienced police officer. He knew that investigating a murder was like dropping a stone into a pool of water. He started two enquiries at once. Everybody within a hundred yards of the flat was asked what they had been doing and whether they had noticed anything. And everyone remotely connected, by ties of blood, friendship or business, with Miss Martin was sought out and questioned.

  It is a system which involves an enormous amount of work for a large number of people, and has only got one thing in its favour. It is nearly always successful in the end.

  To Sergeant Petrella fell the task of questioning all the other tenants in the block. This involved seven visits. In each case, at least one person, it appeared, had been at home all Friday morning. And no one had heard anything at all, which was disappointing. Had anything unusual happened on Friday morning? The first six people to whom this enquiry was addressed scratched their heads and said that they didn’t think anything had. The seventh mentioned the gentleman who had left census papers.

  Now Petrella was by then both hot and tir
ed. He was, according to which way you looked at it, either very late for his lunch or rather early for his tea. He was on the point of dismissing the man with the census papers when the instinct which guides all good policemen drove him to persevere with one further enquiry. Had he not done so the Martin case would probably have remained unsolved. As he probed it, a curious little story emerged. The man had not actually left any papers behind him. He had been making preliminary enquiries as to the numbers of people on the premises so that arrangements for the census could be put in hand. The papers would be issued later.

  Petrella trudged down three flights of stairs (it is only in grave emergency that a policeman is allowed to use a private telephone) and rang up the Municipal Returning Officer from a call box. After that he revisited the first six flats. The occupants unanimously agreed that a “man from the Council” had called on them that Friday morning. They had not mentioned it because Petrella had asked if anything “unusual” had happened. There was nothing in the least unusual in men from the Council snooping round. Petrella asked for a description and collated, from his six informants, the following items. The man in question was “young”, “young-ish”, “sort of middle-aged” (this was from the teenaged daughter in No. 37). He was bareheaded and had tousled hair, he was wearing a hat. He had a shifty look (No. 34), a nice smile (teenaged daughter), couldn’t say, didn’t really look at him (the remainder). He was about six foot, five foot nine, five foot six, didn’t notice. He had an ordinary sort of voice. He was wearing an Old Harrovian tie (old gentleman in ground-floor flat No. 34). He seemed to walk with rather a stiff sort of leg, almost a limp (four out of six informants).

  Petrella hurried back to Crown Road Police Station, where he found Haxtell and Barstow in conference.

  “There doesn’t seem to be much doubt,” he reported, “that it was a sneak thief. Posing as a Council employee. I’ve checked with them and they are certain that he couldn’t have been genuine. His plan would be to knock once or twice. If he got no answer he’d either slip the lock or force it. He drew blank at the first seven. Someone answered the door in each of them. When he got to No. 39 I expect Miss Martin didn’t hear him. The migraine must have made her pretty blind and deaf.”

  “All right!” said Barstow. “And then she came out and caught him at it, and so he hit her.”

  “The descriptions aren’t a lot of good,” said Haxtell, “but we’ll get all the pictures from the CRO of people known to go in for this sort of lark. They may sort someone out for us.”

  “Don’t forget the most important item,” said Barstow. “The limp.”

  Petrella said, “It did occur to me to wonder, sir, whether we ought to place much reliance on the limp.”

  He received a glare which would have daunted a less self-confident man.

  “He would have to have somewhere to hide that big screwdriver. It was almost two foot long. The natural place would be a pocket inside his trouser leg. That might account for the appearance of a stiff leg.”

  Haxtell avoided Barstow’s eye.

  “It’s an idea,” he said. “Now just get along and start checking on this list of Miss Martin’s known relations.”

  “There was one other thing—”

  “Do you know,” observed Superintendent Barstow unkindly, “why God gave young policemen two feet but only one head?”

  Petrella accepted the hint and departed.

  Nevertheless the idea persisted; and later that day, when he was alone with Haxtell, he voiced it to him.

  “Do you remember,” he said, “about six months ago, I think it was, we had an outbreak of this sort of thing in the Cholderton Road, Park Branch area? A man cleared out three or four blocks of flats, and we never caught him. He was posing as a Pools salesman then.”

  “The man who left his coat behind.”

  “That’s right!” said Petrella. “With Colonel Wing.”

  Colonel Wing was nearly ninety and stone deaf, but still spry. He had fought in one Zulu and countless Afghan wars and the walls of his top-floor living room in Cholderton Mansions were adorned with a fine selection of assegais, yataghans and knobkerries. Six months before this story opens he had had an experience which might have unnerved a less seasoned warrior. He was not an early riser. Pottering out of his bedroom one fine morning at about eleven o’clock he had observed a man kneeling in front of his sideboard and quietly sorting out the silver. It was difficult to say who had been more taken aback. The man had jumped up, and run from the room. Colonel Wing had regretfully dismissed the idea of trying to spear him with an assegai from the balcony as he left the front door of the flats, and had rung up the police. They had made one curious discovery.

  Hanging in the hall was a strange raincoat.

  “Never seen it before in my life,” said Colonel Wing.

  “D’you mean to say the damn feller had the cheek to hang his coat up before starting work? Wonder he didn’t help himself to a whisky and soda while he was about it.”

  Haxtell said that he had known housebreakers to do just that. He talked to the Colonel at length about the habits of criminals; and removed the coat for examination. Since the crime was only an abortive robbery, it was not thought worthwhile wasting too much time on it. A superficial examination produced no results in the way of name tabs or tailor’s marks; the coat was carefully placed in a cellophane bag and stored.

  “I’d better have a word with him,” said Petrella.

  He found the Colonel engaged in writing a letter to the United Services Journal on the comparative fighting qualities of Zulus and Russians. He listened to the composite descriptions of the intruder, and said that, as far as one could tell, they sounded like the same man. His intruder had been young to middle-aged, of medium height, and strongly built.

  “There’s one thing,” said the Colonel. “I saw him in a good light, and I may be deaf, but I’ve got excellent eyesight. There’s a tiny spot in his left eye. A little red spot, like a fire opal. You couldn’t mistake it. If you catch him, I’ll identify him for you.”

  “The trouble is,” said Petrella, “that it looks as if he’s never been through our hands. Almost the only real lead we’ve got is that coat he left behind him at your place. We’re going over it again, much more thoroughly.”

  Thus had the coat grown in importance. It had improved its status. It was now an exhibit in a murder case.

  “Give it everything,” said Haxtell to the scientists. And the scientists prepared to oblige.

  That evening, after a weary afternoon spent interrogating Miss Martin’s father’s relatives in Acton and South Harrow, Petrella found himself back on the Embankment. The Forensic Science Laboratory observes civilised hours and Mr. Worsley was on the point of removing his long white overall and replacing it with a rather deplorable green tweed coat with matching leather patches on the elbows.

  “I’ve finished my preliminary work on the right-hand pocket,” he said. “We have isolated arrowroot starch, pipe tobacco and a quantity of common silver sand.”

  “Splendid!” said Petrella. “Splendid! All I have got to do now is to find a housewife who smokes a pipe and has recently been to the seaside and we shall be home and dry.”

  “What use you make of the data we provide must be entirely a matter for you,” said Mr. Worsley coldly. He was already late for a meeting of the South Wimbledon Medico-legal Society, to whom he had promised a paper entitled: “The Part of the Laboratory in Modern Crime Detection”.

  Petrella went back to Highside.

  Here he found a note from Haxtell which ran: “A friend of Miss Martin has suggested that some or other of these were, or might have been, boyfriends of the deceased. I am seeing ones marked with a cross. Would you tackle the others?” There followed a list of names and addresses ranging from Welwyn Garden City to Morden. He looked at his watch. It was half-past seven. With any luck he could knock off four of them before midnight.

  In the ensuing days the ripples spread, wider and wider, diminishi
ng in size and importance as they became more distant from the centre of the disturbance. Petrella worked his way from near relatives and close friends, who said: “How terrible! Whoever would have thought of anything like that happening to Marjorie,” through more distant connections who said: “Miss Martin? Yes I know her. I haven’t seen her for a long time,” right out to the circumference where there were people who simply looked bewildered and said: “Miss Martin – I’m sorry, I don’t think I remember anyone of that name,” and, on being reminded that they had danced with her at a tennis club dance two years before, said, “If you say so, I expect it’s right, but I’m dashed if I can even remember what she looked like.”

  It was in the course of the third day that Petrella called at a nice little house in Herne Hill. The name was Taylor. Mr. Taylor was not at home, but the door was opened by his wife, a cheerful redhead who banished her two children to the kitchen when she understood what Petrella was after. Her reactions were the standard ones.

  Apprehension, followed, as soon as she understood that what Petrella wanted was nothing to do with her, by a cheerful communicativeness. Miss Martin was, she believed, her husband’s cousin. That is to say not his cousin but his second cousin, or something like that. Her husband’s father’s married sister’s husband’s niece. So far as she knew they had only met her once, and that was quite by chance, six months before, at the funeral of Miss Martin’s mother, who was, of course, sister to her husband’s uncle by marriage.

  Petrella disentangled this complicated relationship without difficulty. He was already a considerable expert on the Martin family tree. Unfortunately, Mrs. Taylor could tell him nothing. Her acquaintance with Miss Martin was confined to this single occasion and she had not set eyes on her since. Her husband, who was a commercial traveller for Joblox, the London paint firm, was unlikely to be back until very late. He was on a tour in the Midlands, and it depended on the traffic when he got home. Petrella said he quite understood. The interview remained in his memory chiefly because it was on his way back from it that he picked up his copy of the laboratory report on the coat.