The Burden of Proof

by Roderic Jeffries

  “I didn’t,” replied Fisher thoughtfully.

  “The firm she works for hasn’t seen her since Friday, and when she didn’t turn up Monday they assumed she was ill.”

  “Been able to trace any other boyfriends?”

  “There’s only Ventnor on the horizon at the moment.”

  “Anything else turned up?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “You’ll just have to start all over again, then.”

  “I don’t think that’ll do much good, sir.”

  “I, on the contrary, think it will, because it’s my experience that you youngsters never find the time to do a job properly first go off. Did she have a passport? Have you been on to Newhaven, Southampton, the airports? Has she received any letters from abroad recently?”

  Ritter shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It was so bloody easy to find fault when you sat in a chair. “We haven’t got that far, sir.”

  “Then might I gently suggest you do, just in case such highly orthodox lines of inquiries should bear fruit.”

  *

  The area of the search was extended. More hospitals and nursing homes were checked, others were covered again and photographs shown to the staff. Immigration officers at ports and airports were asked if they remembered seeing Margaret Stukeley. Almost to a person, they bitterly asked how anyone with an ounce of common sense could possibly imagine they’d remember the passage of a girl whom they’d not been asked to look out for, and then they laboriously searched their memories, the records, the forms, the passenger lists. No one remembered a girl of twenty-three, jet-black and slightly curly hair, deep-blue eyes, a round and very attractive face with generous lips, a figure that had all the right measurements.

  On Monday, July 16th, Superintendent Hancock called Fisher to his room shortly before the latter would normally have gone there to make his daily report.

  There was little feeling of sympathy between the superintendent and the D.I. Hancock was close to retiring and he made no secret of the fact that that day couldn’t come too soon. He’d lost all his hair and most of his illusions in the service of the police.

  “Morning, Fisher,” said Hancock.

  “Morning, sir.” Fisher noted, without surprise, the untidiness of the other’s desk. He sat down without being asked to.

  “H.Q.’s just been on the phone. Someone’s suddenly discovered the girl’s father used to be in the police force so they’re taking an interest in the case. Nothing new in, I suppose?”

  “No, sir.”

  The superintendent lit a cigarette. His fingers were stained a dirty yellow. “She’s been missing for how long now?” He looked at the calendar on the wall. “Nine days.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The superintendent flicked ash from his cigarette. He was an inveterate flicker of ash. “You told me the landlady said the girl was in a state Saturday morning?”

  “Ritter said that, but he also said the landlady was smart, and the smarter they come the more they remember when they learn there’s something to remember.”

  “Are you disbelieving she was in a state?”

  “I’m not saying either way, sir.”

  “Did the landlady go on to suggest the cause of the state?”

  “Men. She says the girl’s no better than they all are today.”

  “She sounds a sour old bitch. Can she name any of the men?”

  “No one other than Ventnor.”

  “The hell of this kind of work is that probably the girl’s enjoying herself somewhere and won’t thank us for interfering. Still, with H.Q. beginning to ride us, we’ve got to move. Are you handling the case personally?”

  “No, sir. There’s far more important work on hand.”

  “You’d better take over.”

  “Don’t you think, sir, that at the moment one of the others can cope?”

  “I don’t. Let me know as soon as you learn anything fresh.”

  *

  Fisher sat in the front passenger seat of the police Austin as Ritter drove through the slum area of Prestry.

  “Any chance of getting off Saturday afternoon, sir?” asked Ritter.

  “None,” replied Fisher.

  They went past a small factory and then crossed the road down to the coast. They were now out of the slums and into the semi-detached with pocket-handkerchief gardens.

  “My favourite cousin’s getting married Saturday afternoon, sir.”

  “Why try and make capital out of someone else’s misfortune?”

  “I’d half promised I’d be there.”

  “Then you’ll only be half a liar.”

  Ritter gave up and was silent for the rest of the drive.

  Mrs. Smith, Margaret Stukeley’s landlady, was a small, birdlike woman with grey hair and a hooked nose.

  “We’re inquiring into Miss Stukeley’s — ” began Fisher.

  “Found her yet?” demanded Mrs. Smith belligerently.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not? What’s the use of the likes of us paying our rates if you can’t do your job?”

  Fisher ignored the loaded question. “Have you been able to sit down and think where she might have got to?”

  “Me sit down? Who says I’ve any time to do that?”

  “Have you remembered any boyfriends of hers other than Ventnor?”

  “I know her kind. Hundreds of ’em. No better than she has been, as my dear old mother used to say.”

  “Have you met other boyfriends of hers?”

  “No. But I know.”

  Fisher looked across at Ritter and was annoyed to note the glint of amusement in the other’s eyes.

  *

  The couple walked hand in hand along the blackthorn-hedged lane. The sun was playing tag with some puff balls of clouds.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” said George Frey.

  Amelia Printley was not surprised by the suggestion that illogically presumed that what they were doing at that moment was not walking. Her gaze had already noted the broken gates that had been patched up with chestnut spiles and the curved brick wall missing innumerable bricks, the short overgrown drive and the empty house beyond. “I’m easy,” she said carelessly, “so we might as well stay here.”

  He ignored her answer and turned left, tugging her along with him. For a brief second, she resisted, then she capitulated. She did not believe in fighting the inevitable too hard.

  They climbed through the padlocked gates at a point where the wrought iron had rusted away and the chestnut spiles had been pushed in either direction to make a gap.

  They walked along the weed-covered drive and he put his arm around her waist. She giggled. His expression, which had been a trifle worried, cleared.

  “Never been over that place,” he said casually, as he came to a halt in front of the house and stared at the broken windows, chipped brickwork and the nearly tile-less roof.

  “Go on,” she retorted.

  “Honest.” The fingers of his left hand began to wander. “Always like old places, I do.”

  “Only when they’re empty?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Whatever you want it to.” She set up a token resistance to his continuous pressure that was forcing her nearer the house. “I wouldn’t mind living in a place that was like that, I wouldn’t.” She slowly allowed herself to be drawn toward the front door, which was still attached by the top hinge. “If someone fixed it up real nice, that is.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You any good at fixin’ things?”

  “Can’t do nothing with me hands.”

  “That’s a ruddy lie, that is!” She jerked his left hand away.

  They went into the hall. Rose-patterned wallpaper lay on the walls in strips — in places it had proved too firmly fixed to be torn away by the marauding children.

  “Let’s look at the back room?” he suggested.

  “Why not this front one first?”

  “The floor’s all
bust.”

  “Thought you ain’t never been over this place before?”

  “Intuition. I’m full of it.”

  “You’re full of something, but I’m much too much of a lady to put a name to it.”

  He guided her toward the room whose floorboards were not ‘all bust’. He opened the door and prepared to lead the way inside.

  On the floor was the body of a girl who was dead.

  Chapter 3

  Sketches had been made, the detective sergeant had taken photographs, notes and measurements were complete. The divisional police surgeon knelt by the side of the girl and studied her face. “Some sort of poisoning.”

  “Bit of a mess,” muttered the uniformed sergeant with distaste.

  “You don’t get poisoned without.”

  They heard a car draw up on the road and doors slam. Shortly afterward, Fisher and Ritter entered the room. Fisher took a photograph from his pocket and studied it. “It’s her, all right.”

  “Who?” asked the doctor as he stood up.

  “Margaret Stukeley. Been missing since the seventh. What’s the verdict?”

  The doctor lit a cigarette. “If she didn’t die from some form of poisoning, I’ll go back to medical school.”

  “What form?”

  “Apart from half a dozen it can’t be, the whole field’s wide open to you. The post mortem will give you the answer, but it’ll probably take them some time.”

  “How about a guess, Doc?”

  “Not from me, you don’t. Think I’m going to stick my neck out at this stage?”

  Fisher took a bottle from his pocket. “This was in her handbag — no useful prints on it so you can handle it.”

  The doctor took the bottle. “Aspirins. If it was full at the beginning it would have held enough to kill her.” He unscrewed the lid and smelled inside, shook the bottle until the residue in the bottom had collected together. “Something else has been in here, but I’m damned if I know what.”

  “Could it have been aspirins that killed her?”

  “I’m not moving one inch. Tell someone to have a very close look at what’s in the bottom of this.” He handed the bottle back to the D.I.

  The tall, thick-set detective sergeant who’d taken the photographs came into the room. “The place is alive with prints, sir. It must breed ’em.”

  “They’ll keep you busy then,” replied Fisher.

  “You want them all?”

  “Naturally.”

  “It’ll take a long, long time.”

  “You’ve got all night before you.”

  The detective sergeant heaved an obvious sigh, turned and left.

  Ritter, who was standing by the window, spoke. “Layton’s just driven up.”

  Fisher slowly walked around the body as he studied the dead girl and the ground about her. They had tested for footprints, stains, marks, but still he was ready to stare and stare in case something had somehow been missed.

  “How about letting me get my samples?” asked the doctor.

  “O.K. When you’ve finished, they can drive the body down to the morgue.”

  “Get that bottle to the lab as soon as possible. I’ll give you ten to one the solution’s in there.”

  Layton came into the room. He gave the body only a quick glance before he crossed nearer to the D.I. “You were right, sir. This was the south gatehouse to the estate. The people what were last in it left years ago and it’s been empty ever since.”

  “Does it still belong to the estate?”

  “As far as anyone knows, sir.”

  *

  The body was taken to the Prestry morgue by a van belonging to the firm of undertakers the police commissioned when no others were chosen right away by relatives. The pathologist, cursing the number of investigations he was having to carry out, arrived early Wednesday morning.

  The bottle that had been found in the dead girl’s handbag was sent to the laboratories at Scotland Yard. There, the scientists started the task of identifying the two ingredients of the mixture at the bottom of the bottle. One, obviously, was aspirin, but the other…?

  The pathologist solved both problems fairly soon after he’d started his p.m. “Girl was pregnant,” he said.

  Fisher, standing in one corner of the morgue and leaning against the tiled wall, nodded his head.

  *

  The men in the laboratories in London were told that the girl had been pregnant and they began to test for abortifacients. Very shortly afterward, they identified the second substance of the mixture as ergometrine maleate. They telephoned the news through to Fisher.

  Fisher, sitting behind his desk, replaced the receiver and stared at the far wall. “So,” he said slowly to the empty room, “if there’s malice, we could have ourselves a case of murder.”

  *

  People who’d known Roger Ventnor for many years professed to be surprised by the change that had seemingly come over him on his father’s death. Old family friends called it miraculous — not because they thought he had been moved by a miracle, but because for the first time it looked as though there was a chance Reton Park Hall would continue to belong to the family.

  When Roger came down from Oxford, he moved into a first-floor flat in Chelsea — just off the Embankment — and there pursued pleasure with a frank and open fervour. In the beginning he tried to find a suitable job (for his spare time during the day) which would supplement the allowance his father gave him, but his enthusiasm in this direction gradually waned as more and more firms expressed resentment at his rather supercilious attitude to their work. He attended all the best parties and gave one of his own where the costume, de rigueur, was a bath towel. At this party one of the girls, who was a hopeful starlet and had seen a press photographer lurking in the background, dropped her towel. Her photograph appeared in one daily paper and two Sunday papers and a couple of magazines, and as a consequence she received several offers, none of them, unfortunately, of the kind she had been envisaging when she dropped the towel.

  Roger declared for socialism and the working state, against blood sports and capital punishment, and he delivered many strong words in support of unilateral disarmament. He went on one Aldermaston march, sat in several squares and was photographed on one occasion as he was carted off to jail by two hefty policemen. He had been quoted as saying that between Great Britain and greatness lay the curtains of the aristocracy, the capitalists, and mixed bathing.

  Reton Park Hall had been completed in 1630 and the Ventnor family had lived there from that date. They had never taken either their politics or religion very seriously and they survived the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration, where many less tolerant people ended up either bankrupt or dead, or both. By the time of the death of Charles the Second, their land holding had doubled in size and that without any suggestion that Edwina Ventnor had ever been over-familiar with the appearance of the king’s bed. The Ventnors were offered a baronetcy during the reign of William and Mary and a baronage in George the Fourth’s time, but on each occasion they refused the honour through an inverted snobbery that was not to become fashionable for many years.

  Immediately prior to the First World War, the Ventnors owned the twenty-thousand-acre estate, a house in London and another in Nice, they employed over twenty servants, and their bank manager lifted his hat to them. At the conclusion of the Second World War, they owned two thousand acres and employed no servants, and their bank manager was an all too familiar figure.

  Charles Ventnor would have given the estate to Roger, inter vivos, had the latter shown the slightest interest in it, and would thus, after the statutory five years which still applied then, have avoided death duties. But his wife died and left him mentally stunned and his son seemed to have been virulently infected with the madness of the age. Charles Ventnor died in possession of the estate.

  Roger had always laughed about Reton Park Hall: the tomb of the raj, the sticks, the refugee from the nineteenth century. But although no one
— sometimes not even himself — realised it, there was always a reservation to his laugh. The house was miles deep in the country, but it was the house that had been built for the Ventnors in 1630. Life down there consisted in planting cabbages, but the two thousand acres had belonged to the family for a very long time and they represented the period when they could stand on the roof of the clock tower and look across to the Prestry Hills and know that everything in sight was theirs.

  When Charles Ventnor died, Roger’s London friends expected him to sell the estate, if there should be anyone in the world fool enough to buy it, and to use the money to launch a party to end all parties. But nothing of the sort happened. Instead of being civilised about the matter, he went and buried himself in the country and was never heard of again.

  The decision had been quickly made, but the reasons for it were long standing. The love of the land, the love of the house, and pride in the family portraits and what they meant. When none of them belonged to him, he could jeer at them — when they did, he had either to work for them or suffer them to vanish into limbo. He decided, and discovered at first hand the depressing load of debts. The house and land were mortgaged, the bank account was deeply in the red, death duties were owing, and there wasn’t a stock or share in credit. He was advised to cut his losses and sell. But that was the one decision he could have reached from the opposite direction and he’d already come down against it. So he began to fight, to smile at the bank manager and explain that he knew one end of the seed drill from another and to murmur about bumper crops, to hold the building society at arm’s length, to face the howling jackals who administered death duties.

  ‘Fighting’ sounded fine, but the enemy refused to come out into the open and have a hand-to-hand scrap. One load of debts were expunged, but another lot appeared. Interest rates on one mortgage were somehow met and immediately more interest rates became due. Paradoxically, because the fight was so hard, he went on fighting. Reton Park Hall had to be saved.

  All work and no play was a hell of a sticky diet for anyone, no matter how dedicated. That was where Margaret Stukeley appeared. It was a strange and sometimes disbelieved fact that Prestry — as ugly a conglomeration of buildings and people as one could find south of Birmingham — had within its boundaries a number of artists who made it their permanent home. The town was even referred to as an art centre. People bought paintings there, sometimes. He’d met her at one of the art exhibitions, ‘The World of Tomorrow’. The L-shaped room had been hung with fifty-three canvases that had the effect on most viewers of making them hope that tomorrow would never come.