The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  ‘Rather poor taste on his part, Inspector, if I may venture to say so.’

  ‘Perhaps it was, sir. However, it may be helpful to know about it if it comes down to trying to discover exactly what happened at that table when the lunch party set off for a stroll.’

  ‘No. No, wait, Inspector, you’ve forgotten something. Important, you know, to keep every thread in your hands.’

  A little frown gave added force to the rebuke.

  ‘The French gentleman, sir? The Conte de Charvey. I have made enquiries about him. It seems he was a slight acquaintance of Mr Flaxman’s and had put him in the position of being unable to withhold an invitation to the match.’

  ‘Had he indeed? A trifle suspicious that, eh? French fellow wanting to watch cricket. Unless, of course, he’s one of those froggies who seem to think the game is one of the secrets of British power. As I suppose it is, come to think of it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. However, I also learn from the late Mr Boultbee’s partner that Mr Boultbee knew something to the Count’s disadvantage. I have had a word with Fraud, and apparently they’ve been keeping a sharp eye on him.’

  ‘Fraud, eh? Why haven’t they informed me that a character of this sort has come to our shores? Eh? Eh?’

  ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say, sir.’

  ‘No. I dare say not. But... But do you think the fellow may have needed to get rid of someone who had come to learn too much about some underhand business of his? That sort of thing?’

  ‘It always could be, sir. But one ought perhaps to bear in mind that the murderer would need to have known Mr Boultbee’s habit of taking one of those soda-mint lozenges shortly after his every meal. But while all of the other four persons under consideration might well have been aware of that, it’s scarcely likely that a stranger such as the Count would be.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, Inspector, I take your point. Good man, good man. Yet, let me remind you, we shouldn’t put our French bad hat altogether out of the picture.’

  ‘No, sir. No, of course not. I will bear him in mind throughout the investigation.’

  ‘Hah. Yes. Yes, Inspector, you speak blithely enough of throughout the investigation, but let me tell you once again: this is a matter which has got to be cleared up in the very shortest of times. All right, this PC Wilkins, Watson, whatever, whom you seem to have such faith in, would appear, thank goodness, to have eliminated the hundreds of extremely distinguished persons who might conceivably have committed this appalling crime. But nevertheless the yellow press will, if they get half a chance, hope to draw public attention to - well, to even the highest in the land. So action, Inspector, action.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  * * * *

  When Inspector Thompson left the Commissioner’s office he had little hope that any amount of action would see the case concluded quickly enough to suit his chief. But, in the end, action proved to be what was needed. Directed more or less to go back to Lord’s, where by night and day a police watch had been kept, he made his way into the luncheon tent, everything there still preserved just as it had been when PC Williams had entered. Though convinced that it was only in the motives of the four people most likely to have committed the deed that the solution must lie, he nevertheless stood looking down at the stained white cloth of the table. A blank sheet.

  Or was it?

  Wasn’t there something there that somehow differed from Williams’ minutely accurate description?

  For more than a few minutes he stood there puzzling. What was it that seemed somehow wrong?

  Is it, he asked himself, the mere absence of that little tobacconist’s snuff tin from which the one deadly lozenge had, by chance surely, been plucked by that tight-fisted City solicitor? Nothing more than that? The tin itself, of course, had been sent to the fingerprint bureau at the Yard, and within an hour a report had come back to say that someone had scrupulously wiped the little shabby article clean of any possible clue as to who had flipped it open, taken out one lozenge - Wilfred Boultbee, so careful of other people’s money, was very likely to have kept count of his supply of the miraculous means of combating the intolerable pangs of indigestion - and added that one deadly other.

  No help there.

  And then... Then it came to him. What was missing from the scene as he looked at it now was an object PC Williams had described well, if with a touch of honest Welsh hyperbole. In the dead man’s hand, he had said, there had been a soiled white table-napkin clutched with demonic force. It had been, almost certainly, taken away with the body when it had gone for medical examination. But why had it been there on the table at all? It must have been left when the guests had risen from their places to go and stroll outside.

  But - could this be what had happened? - had someone still had it, perhaps in their hand, after all the debris had been cleared away by the waiters? And had they then let it fall on the table in such a way that it covered up Wilfred Boultbee’s little battered old tobacconist’s tin? That could, if what Williams quoted me from his notebook had it right, have accounted for the unusual circumstance of the dead man forgetting to take a lozenge immediately after eating.

  But which of them was it? Who had picked up that napkin, dropped it so as to hide the little tin, and then, of course, subtly urged Wilfred Boultbee out of the tent before he had gathered himself together enough to remember he had not taken a lozenge?

  Well, if that is what happened, one thing is clear. It’s very unlikely to have been one of the women. I can hardly see either of them - I can hardly see any lady - taking that rigid man by the arm and laughingly leading him off. So it must come down to one of the two cousins, each with motive enough. Because, as I tried to make clear to the Commissioner, the French count, whatever he’s up to in England, could not possibly have known about Wilfred Boultbee’s poor digestion. So which of the two is it? Which?

  Captain Andrews, the ruined man? The victim of the carnage which the civilised nations of the world have inflicted on one another? A man, you might say, with nothing to live for. Had he, as a last wild bid to acquire a decent income, murdered his tight-fisted, implacable trustee? A bid to free his wife from the daily toil of grubbing together enough to make their lives possible? Easy enough to feel sympathy for a man who had done more than give his life for his country, a soldier who had given all that made life bearable, had been left with the prospect of years ahead carrying round with him the body that the war had gassed out? Yet, if he has been driven to the last extreme of murder, he has to be brought to trial for it. Let judge and jury find what extenuating factors they can.

  So, the Hon. Peter Flaxman? What about that typical example of the new, pleasure-devoted, careless world that seems to have come into being in the wake of all the horrors and deprivations of the years between 1914 and 1918? Is he a new breed, and a by no means pleasant one? A breed of self-seeking, hedonistic young people, uncaring of all below them in the social hierarchy? And is that, when you come down to it, what brought about the demise of a man altogether opposed to such a way of life? An old man who, you could say, represented all the virtues, all the strict morality, of an age on the verge of extinction?

  Which of those two men is it - all but certain that one or the other of them put that deadly lozenge into Wilfred Boultbee’s little tin - who in truth conceived that deadly scheme? Isn’t the balance, however unfairly it might seem, equal between them? Each with the same obvious motive, each with opportunity enough, each offered the same easy means of finding a solution to their problems?

  So which?

  And only one answer. Startlingly plain, once one ceases to look at the human complexities and turns a steady gaze on the simple facts.

  Captain Andrews, poor devil, has hands that constantly tremble, shake to the point, as Williams vividly recalled for me, of hardly being able even to hold a cigarette when he desperately wants to inhale the tranquillising smoke. I cannot for a moment see Captain Andrews carrying out that little necessary piece of legerdemain under the starched white table
-napkin.

  So, if it isn’t the one, it must be the other. Simple. Appallingly simple.

  Right, I’m off to see the Hon. Peter Flaxman in his rooms in the Albany.

  Or do they insist you have to sayjust Albany?

  Whichever. It’s there that I’ll arrest the murderer of Mr Wilfred Boultbee, City solicitor, repository of a thousand secrets and tight-fisted representative of an age that’s going, going, gone.

  <>

  * * * *

  John Harvey

  Drummer Unknown

  There’s a photograph taken on stage at Club Eleven, early 1950 or perhaps late ‘49, the bare bulbs above the stage picking out the musicians’ faces like a still from a movie. Ronnie Scott on tenor sax, sharp in white shirt and knotted tie; Dennis Rose with his trumpet aimed toward the floor, skinny, suited, a hurt sardonic look in his eyes; to the left of the picture, Spike Robinson, on shore leave from the US Navy, a kid of nineteen or twenty, plays a tarnished silver alto. Behind them Tommy Pollard’s white shirt shines out from the piano, and Lennie Bush, staring into space, stands with his double bass. At the extreme right, the drummer has turned his head just as the photo has been taken, one half of his polka-dot bow tie in focus but the face lost in a blur of movement. The caption underneath, reads DRUMMER UNKNOWN.

  That’s me: drummer unknown.

  Or was, back then.

  In ten years a lot of things have changed. In the wake of a well-publicised drug raid, Club Eleven closed down; the only charges were for possession of cannabis, but already there was heroin, cocaine.

  Ronnie Scott opened his own club in a basement in Chinatown; Spike Robinson sailed back across the ocean to a life as an engineer; and Dennis Rose sank deeper into the sidelines, an almost voluntary recluse. Then, of course, there was rock ‘n’ roll. Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ at number one for Christmas 1955, and the following year Tony Crombie, whose drum stool I’d been keeping warm that evening at Club Eleven, had kick-started the British bandwagon with his Rockets: grown men who certainly knew better cavorting on stage in blazers while shouting, ‘I’m gonna teach you to rock,’ to the accompaniment of a honking sax. Well, it paid the rent.

  And me?

  I forget now, did I mention heroin?

  I’m not usually one to cast blame, but after the influx of Americans during the last years of the war, hard drugs were always part of the scene. Especially once trips to New York to see the greats on Fifty-Second Street had confirmed their widespread use.

  Rumour had it that Bird and Diz and Monk changed the language of jazz the way they did - the complex chords, the flattened fifths, the extremes - to make it impossible for the average white musician to play. If that was true, well, after an apprenticeship in strict tempo palais bands and pickup groups that tinkered with Dixieland, they came close to succeeding where I was concerned. And it was true, the drugs - some drugs - helped: helped you to stay awake, alert, keep up. Helped you to play an array of shifting counter rhythms, left hand and both feet working independently, while the right hand drove the pulse along the top cymbal for all it was worth. Except that in my case, after a while, it wasn’t the drumming that mattered. It was just the drugs.

  In a matter of months I progressed, if that’s the word, from chewing the inside of Benzedrine inhalers to injecting heroin into the vein. And for my education in this department I had Foxy Palmer to thank. Or blame.

  I’d first met Foxy at the Bouillabaisse, a Soho drinking club frequented by mainly black US servicemen and newly resident West Indians, of whom Foxy was one. He was a short, stubby man with a potbelly beneath his extravagantly patterned shorts and a wisp of greying beard. His ears stuck out, foxlike, from the sides of his head. A scaled-down Foxy would have made the perfect garden gnome.

  ‘Hey, white boy!’ he hailed me from his seat near the piano. ‘You here to play?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Forgot your horn?’

  For an answer, I straightened my arm and let a pair of hickory drumsticks slide down into the palm of my hand.

  A bunch of musicians, mostly refugees from some dance-band gig or other, were jamming their way through ‘One O’clock Jump’, but then a couple of younger guys arrived, and Foxy pulled my arm toward him with a grin and said, ‘Here come the heebie-jeebie boys.’

  In the shuffle that followed, Tony Crombie claimed his place behind the drums, and after listening to him firing ‘I Got Rhythm’ at a hundred miles an hour, I slipped my sticks back out of sight.

  ‘So,’ Foxy said, planting himself next to me in the gents, ‘that Tony, what d’you think?’

  ‘I’m thinking of cutting my arms off just above the wrist.’

  Foxy smiled his foxy smile. ‘You’re interested, I got somethin’ less extreme.’

  At first I didn’t know what he meant.

  * * * *

  The Bouillabaisse closed down and reopened as the Fullado. Later there was the Modernaires in Old Compton Street, owned by the gangster Jack Spot. Along with half a hundred other out-of-work musicians, I stood around on Archer Street on Monday afternoons, eager to pick up whatever scraps might come my way: depping at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley, a one-night stand with Ambrose at the Samson and Hercules in Norwich. And later, after shooting up, no longer intimidated or afraid, I’d descend the steps into the smoke of Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms where Club Eleven had its home and take my turn at sitting in.

  For a time I made an effort to hide the track marks on my arms, but after that I didn’t care.

  Junkie - when did I first hear the word?

  Applied to me, I mean.

  It might have been at the Blue Posts, around the corner from the old Feldman Club, an argument with a US airman that began with a spilt pint of beer and escalated from there.

  ‘Goddamn junkie, why the fuck aren’t you in uniform?’

  I didn’t think he wanted to hear about the trumped-up nervous condition a well-paid GP had attested to, thus ensuring my call-up would be deferred. Instead, some pushing and shoving ensued, at the height of which a bottle was broken against the edge of the bar.

  Blind luck enabled me to sway clear of the jagged glass as it swung toward my face; luck and sudden rage allowed me to land three punches out of four, the last dropping him to his knees before executing the coup de grace, a swiftly raised knee that caught him underneath the chin and caused him to bite off a sliver of tongue before he slumped, briefly unconscious, to the floor.

  As I made my exit, I noticed the thin-faced man sitting close by the door, time enough to think I recognised him from somewhere without being able to put a finger on where that was. Then I was out into the damp November air.

  ‘I hear you takin’ up the fight game,’ Foxy said with glee, next time I bumped into him. And then: ‘I believe you know a friend of mine. Arthur Neville, detective sergeant.’

  The thin-faced man leaned forward and held out a hand. ‘That little nonsense in the Blue Posts, I liked the way you handled yourself. Impressive.’

  I nodded and left it at that.

  In the cracked toilet mirror my skin looked like old wax.

  ‘Your pal from CID,’ I asked Foxy, ‘he OK?’

  ‘Arthur?’ Doxy said with a laugh. ‘Salt o’ the earth, ain’t that the truth.’

  Probably not, I thought.

  He was waiting for me outside, the grey of his raincoat just visible in the soft grey fog that had drifted up from the river. When I turned left he fell into step alongside me, two men taking an evening stroll. Innocent enough.

  ‘Proposition,’ Neville said.

  I shook my head. ‘Hear me out, at least.’

  ‘Sorry, not interested.’

  His hand tugged at my sleeve. ‘You’re carrying, right?’

  ‘Wrong,’ I lied.

  ‘You just seen Foxy; you’re carrying. No question.’

  ‘So?’ The H burning a hole in my inside pocket.

  ‘So you don’t want me to search you, haul you in for
possession.’

  Our voices were muffled by the fog. If Neville knew about Foxy but was allowing him to deal, Foxy had to be paying him off. If what he wanted from me was more back-handers, he had another thing coming.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  A woman emerged from a doorway just ahead of us, took one look at Neville, and ducked back in.

  ‘Information,’ Neville said.

  At the corner he stopped. The fog was thicker here, and I could barely see the far side of the street.

  ‘What kind of information?’

  ‘Musicians. In the clubs. The ones you hang around with. Of course, we know who’s using. It would just be confirmation.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the wrong guy.’