Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  They had done themselves proud. No inch of its surface, interior or exterior, had escaped their microscopic gaze. Petrella cast his eye desperately over the eight closely typed foolscap pages. Stains on the exterior had been isolated and chemically tested and proved beyond reasonable doubt to be in two cases ink, in one case rabbit blood and in one case varnish. A quantity of sisal-hemp fluff had been recovered from the seam of the left-hand cuff and some marmalade from the right-hand one. A sliver of soft wood, originally identified on the Chatterton Key Card as Pinus sylvestris, was now believed to be Chamaecyparis lawsoniana. In the right-hand pocket had been discovered a number of fragments of oyster shell and a stain of oil shown by quantitative analysis to be a thick oil of a sort much used in marine engineering.

  Petrella read the report in the Underground between Charing Cross and Highside. When he reached Crown Road he found Haxtell in the CID room. He had in front of him the reports of all visits so far made. There were two hundred and thirty of them. Petrella added the five he had completed that afternoon, and was about to retire when he remembered the laboratory report, and cautiously added that, too, to the pile. He was conscious of thunder in the air.

  “Don’t bother,” said Haxtell. “I’ve had a copy.” His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of proper sleep. “So has the Superintendent. He’s just been here. He wants us to take some action on it.”

  “Action, sir?”

  “He suggests,” said Haxtell, in ominously quiet tones, “that we re-examine all persons interviewed so far,” his hand flickered for a moment over the pile of paper on the table, “to ascertain whether they have ever been interested in the oyster-fishing industry. He feels that the coincidence of oyster shell and marine oil must have some significance.”

  “I see, sir,” said Petrella. “When do we start?”

  Haxtell stopped himself within an ace of saying something which would have been both indiscreet and insubordinate. Then, to his credit, he laughed instead.

  “We are both,” he said, “going to get one good night’s rest first. We’ll start tomorrow morning.”

  “I wonder if I could borrow the reports until then,” said Petrella, wondering at himself as he did so.

  “Do what you like with them,” said Haxtell. “I’ve got three days’ routine work to catch up with.”

  Petrella took them back with him to Mrs. Catt’s, where that worthy widow had prepared a high tea for him, his first leisured meal for three days. Sustained by a mountainous dish of sausages and eggs and refreshed by his third cup of strong tea, he started on the task of proving to himself the idea that had come to him.

  Each paper was skimmed, and put on one side. Every now and then he would stop, extract one, and add it to a very much smaller pile beside his plate. At the end of an hour Petrella looked at the results of his work with satisfaction. In the small pile were six papers: six summaries of interviews with friends or relations of the murdered girl. If his idea was right, he had thus, at a stroke, reduced the possibles from two hundred and thirty-five to six. And of those six, only one he knew in his heart of hearts was a probable.

  There came back into his mind the visit that he had made that afternoon. There it was, in that place and no other, that the answer lay. There he had glimpsed, without knowing it, the end of the scarlet thread which led to the heart of this untidy, rambling labyrinth. He thought of a nice red-headed girl and two red-headed children, and unexpectedly he found himself shivering.

  It was dusk before he got back to Herne Hill. The lights were on in the nice little house, upstairs and downstairs, and a muddy car stood in the gravel run-in in front of the garage. Sounds suggested that the red-headed children were being put to bed by both their parents and were enjoying it.

  One hour went by, and then a second. Petrella had found an empty house opposite, and he was squatting in the garden, his back propped up against a tree. The night was warm and he was quite comfortable, and his head was nodding on his chest when the front door of the house opposite opened, and Mr. Taylor appeared.

  He stood for a moment, outlined against the light from the hall, saying something to his wife. He was too far off for Petrella to make out the words. Then he came down the path. He ignored his car, and made for the front gate, for which Petrella was thankful. He had made certain arrangements to cope with the contingency that Mr. Taylor might use his car, but it was much easier if he remained on foot.

  A short walk took them both, pursuer and pursued, to the door of the King of France public house. Mr. Taylor went into the saloon. Petrella himself chose the private bar. Like most private bars, it had nothing to recommend it save its privacy, being narrow, bare and quite empty. But it had the advantage of looking straight across the serving counter into the saloon.

  Petrella let his man order first. He was evidently a well-known character. He called the landlord “Sam”, and the landlord called him “Mr. Taylor”.

  Petrella drank his own beer slowly. Ten minutes later the moment for which he had been waiting arrived. Mr. Taylor picked up a couple of glasses and strolled across with them to the counter. Petrella also rose casually to his feet. For a moment they faced each other, a bare two paces apart, under the bright bar lights.

  Petrella saw in front of him a man of young middle-age, with a nondescript face, and neutral coloured, tousled hair, perhaps five foot nine in height, and wearing some sort of old school tie.

  As if aware that he was being looked at, Mr. Taylor raised his head; and Petrella observed, in the left eye, a tiny red spot. It was, as the Colonel had said, the colour of a fire opal.

  “We showed his photograph to everyone in the block,” said Haxtell with satisfaction, “and they all of them picked it out straight away, out of a set of six. Also the Colonel.”

  “Good enough!” said Superintendent Barstow. “Any background?”

  “We made a very cautious enquiry at Joblox. Taylor certainly works for them. But he’s what they call an outside commission man. He sells in his spare time, and gets a percentage on sales. Last year he made just under a hundred pounds.”

  “Which wouldn’t keep him in his present style.”

  “Definitely not! And, of course, a job like that would be very useful cover for a criminal sideline. He would be out when and where he liked, and no questions asked by his family.”

  Barstow considered the matter slowly. The decision was his.

  “Pull him in,” he said. “Charge him with the job at Colonel Wing’s. The rest will sort itself out quick enough when we search his house. Take a search warrant with you. By the way, I never asked how you got on to him. Has he some connection with the oyster trade?”

  Petrella said, cautiously, “Well, no sir. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t. But the report was very useful corroborative evidence.”

  “Clever chaps, these scientists,” said Barstow.

  “Come clean!” said Haxtell when the Superintendent had departed. “It was nothing to do with that coat, was it?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Petrella. “What occurred to me was that it was a very curious murder. Presuming it was the same man both times. Take Colonel Wing – he’s full of beans – but when all’s said and done, he’s a frail old man, over ninety. He saw the intruder in a clear light, and the man simply turned tail and bolted. Then he bumps into Miss Martin, who’s a girl, but a muscular young tennis player, but he kills her, coldly and deliberately.”

  “From which you deduced that Miss Martin knew him, and he was prepared to kill to preserve the secret of his identity. Particularly as he had never been in the hands of the police.”

  “There was a bit more to it than that,” said Petrella. “It had to be someone who knew Miss Martin, but so casually that he would have no idea where she lived. Mightn’t even remember her name. If he’d had any idea that it was the flat of someone who knew him he wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. What I was looking for was someone who was distantly connected with Miss Martin, but happened to have renewed his acqu
aintance with her recently. He had to be a very distant connection, you see. But they had to know each other by sight. There were half a dozen who would have filled the bill. I had this one in my mind because I’d interviewed Mrs. Taylor only that afternoon. Of course, I’d have tried all the others afterwards. Only it wasn’t necessary.”

  There was neither pleasure nor satisfaction in his voice. He was seeing nothing but a nice red-headed girl and two red-headed children.

  It was perhaps six months later that Petrella ran across Colonel Wing again. The Taylor case was now only an unsatisfactory memory, for Mr. Taylor had taken his own life in his cell at Wandsworth, and the red-headed girl was now a widow. Petrella was on his way home, and he might not have noticed him, but the Colonel came right across the road to greet him, narrowly missing death at the hands of a motorcyclist of whose approach he had been blissfully unaware.

  “Good evening, Sergeant!” the old man said. “How are you keeping?”

  “Very well, thank you, Colonel,” said Petrella. “And how are you?”

  “I’m not getting any younger,” said the Colonel. Petrella suddenly perceived, to his surprise, that the old man was embarrassed. He waited patiently for him to speak.

  “I wonder,” said the old man at last, “it’s an awkward thing to have to ask, but could you get that coat back – you remember—?”

  “Get it back,” said Petrella. “I don’t know. I suppose so.”

  “If it was mine, I wouldn’t bother. But it isn’t. I find it’s my cousin Tom’s. I’d forgotten all about it, until he reminded me.”

  Petrella stared at him.

  “Do you mean to say—”

  “Tom stayed the night with me – he does that sometimes, between trips. Just drops in. Of course, when he reminded me, I remembered—”

  “Between trips,” said Petrella, weakly. “He isn’t by any chance an oyster fisherman?”

  It was the Colonel’s turn to stare.

  “Certainly not,” he said. “He’s one of the best-known breeders of budgerigars in the country.”

  “Budgerigars?”

  “Very well known for them. I believe I’m right in saying he introduced the foreign system of burnishing their feathers with oil. It’s funny you should mention oysters, though. That’s the thing he’s very keen on. Powdered oyster shell in the feed. It improves their high notes.”

  Petrella removed his hat in a figurative but belated salute to the Forensic Science Laboratory.

  “Certainly you shall have your coat back,” he said. “It’ll need a thorough clean and a little stitching, but I am delighted to think that it is going to be of use to someone at last.”

  Dangerous Structure

  Helenwood House was built, in the early years of the last century, by a successful Special Pleader. He built generously (for he had a wife and eleven children to house), in brickwork, cream-painted stucco and imitation Bath stone; and he surrounded his home with a garden and a high iron fence. Those were spacious days, when tea-brokers from Mincing Lane drove out to their mansions on Muswell Hill, and the nightingale sang on Highside.

  The years went past, Highside descended in the social scale and Helenwood House descended with it, but more slowly for it was insulated from the march of time by its high fence and by an ever-thickening jungle of shrubs and trees.

  Its barrister-owner died, but the complex settlement which he had made lived after him, and the tentacles of the law gripped Helenwood House more tightly even than the ivy which now enshrouded it. Had it been taken in hand in the twenties or thirties it might have been rescued, and opened up and turned into an apartment house (for which there is great demand in Highside), but by this time it was under the control of trustees and was occupied by two elderly ladies, and five cats. Buprestidan, the borer, and Anobium domesticum, the deathwatch beetle, made lodgement in the timbers; and, creeping out from the shrubberies, Polyporus destructor, curiously miscalled dry rot, cast its dripping cloak over the brickwork of the basement and reached up white and yellow fingers to make a meal of the ground-floor woodwork.

  The best thing for all concerned would have been a direct hit from Hitler’s air force, but where so many more useful buildings suffered Helenwood House remained, decrepit but intact.

  In the late forties it was inhabited by one old lady and seventeen cats, and the local authority toyed for a time with the idea of serving a dangerous structure notice on the occupant, and might have done so, had the old lady not quietly died, leaving only the cats to serve the notice on. The property then became the subject of protracted litigation.

  Detective Sergeant Petrella knew a certain amount about all this, as he knew a certain amount about most of the houses and people in his manor. To him Helenwood House was a place whose defences had constantly to be watched and strengthened against the incursion of children to whom the ruined house and rampant shrubberies were a fascinating playground; jungle and enchanted palace in one. And against tramps who would force one of the many broken and boarded-up windows and sleep quite happily in the basement, along with Anobium and Buprestidan.

  It was Mrs. Catt, Petrella’s amiable landlady, who called his attention to Helenwood House one morning when she brought him his tea.

  “Someone’s going to do what?” said Petrella sleepily. He had spent much of the previous night in unsuccessful watching of a warehouse and brought himself back reluctantly to the problems of a new day.

  “Do it up,” said Mrs. Catt. “Regardless of expense.”

  “That old mausoleum,” said Petrella. “It’d be cheaper to start over again than mess about with that.”

  “It’s a house of great character,” said Mrs. Catt, who had the sort of mind that believed in house agents’ advertisements. “Architect designed, on four storeys.”

  “It’s a death trap,” said Petrella, and finished his tea at a gulp. He had a lot of work to do that day. Most of it was connected with young Maurice Meister, who was fast qualifying as Highside’s leading juvenile delinquent. His current activity was “milking” telephone boxes, and he had a sideline in stealing from parked cars. Crime was the hereditary occupation of the Meisters. Maurice’s father was none other than “Bull” Meister, the suspected organiser of the famous mail-van robberies in which fifty thousand pounds’ worth of old pound notes, on their way to the pulping mills, had been diverted into the pocket of Bull and his gang. He was at that moment serving a three-year sentence, not for any of his more lucrative crimes but for cutting off the right ear of one of his subordinates with whom he had had a difference of opinion.

  “His mother’s just as bad,” said Petrella to Chief Inspector Haxtell. “I’d say she was running the Meister crowd herself now. Keeping it warm till Bull comes out again. What do you expect a boy like Maurice to do? Sell tracts?”

  “I expect him to behave,” said Haxtell, sourly. “And if he doesn’t, I expect you to tell him where he gets off. So don’t let’s have you getting soft about juvenile delinquents.”

  That evening Mrs. Catt re-opened the subject of Helenwood House.

  “What I was telling you,” she said without preamble, “it’s being converted. Into six self-contained apartments, of convenient size.”

  “You’re not thinking of moving, are you?” said Petrella. The thought was alarming. He knew that he would never find lodgings which suited him so well.

  “S’not me,” said Mrs. Catt. “S’my married daughter. They’ve been living with his family. S’not a good arrangement.”

  Petrella agreed. Highside, being within easy travelling distance of the centre of London, had an even more acute housing problem than most boroughs.

  “They’ve saved money, both of them. Not enough to buy a house, but then they don’t want a house. They want a flat.”

  Almost everyone in Highside wanted a flat.

  “How much are they paying?” said Petrella. He was wide awake, this time, and the implications of what he was being told did not escape him.

  “Each a
pplicant,” quoted Mrs. Catt, “is asked to put down the sum of five hundred pounds. Three hundred of which will be used towards conversion of the premises, two hundred being considered as rent for the first year.”

  “How many apartments?”

  “Six.”

  “There’s a catch somewhere,” said Petrella. “Work it out for yourself. I don’t say the house would cost much to buy. The owners would be glad to get rid of it. But there’d be legal fees and so forth. Say you did all that for a thousand pounds. Right? Well six times three is eighteen. That leaves you eight hundred pounds to develop the property with. Why, that wouldn’t deal with the dry rot alone.”

  The gloom on Mrs. Catt’s face deepened.

  “It did sound almost too good to be true,” she said.

  “Who’s the operator?”

  Mrs. Catt produced a piece of paper from her pocket, and the fact that she had it ready confirmed Petrella’s suspicion that his landlady had not introduced the subject of Helenwood House entirely by chance. He read:

  “Utopia Building and Development Projects Limited”.

  “It’s a good-sounding name,” said Mrs. Catt.

  “It sounds all right,” said Petrella, pocketing the paper. “But the only word I should believe in myself is the last one.”

  Scotland Yard possesses a small Company Fraud Department and Petrella knew Sergeant Brennan who was in charge of it. Brennan had spent his early years on a beat round the Old Kent Road. He had been promoted to his present job when his superiors discovered that he possessed the sort of mind that delighted in solving difficult crossword puzzles or in playing several games of chess simultaneously.