Murder is Suspected (C.I.D. Room Book 10)

by Roderic Jeffries

  Mrs Finch lived in Arlington Road and the drive took him fifteen minutes. The house surprised him. It was mean looking and in a poor neighbourhood — it seemed odd that the dead man should live in such surroundings, yet own a boat equipped with a very expensive outboard. He crossed the pavement and knocked on the front door, which directly abutted the pavement.

  Mrs Finch opened the door. Her hair was in curlers and her face was smudged with powder: her clothes were badly creased and she wore a pair of very worn slippers.

  Shocked with grief, Kerr immediately thought. “My name’s Detective Constable Kerr. I’m very sorry to bother you at such a time, Mrs Finch, but I’m afraid I must ask you a few questions.”

  “You’d best come on in, I suppose.”

  He went in. There was not much light in the hall, but he was still able to see the fluffs of dust which lay around. In the front room the windows were dirty, there was dust on the floor, one of the curtains was torn at the seams, and on the mantelpiece were two empty glasses and three empty beer cans.

  She said in a, sullen tone of voice: “I ain’t had time to clear up today. It’s like I feel I can’t do much, not with Andy gone.”

  Kerr was disagreeably surprised to note how insincere her words of grief sounded. Further, since the house could not have reached its present state of dirtiness and untidiness in just nine days, it was obvious that she had long since neglected it. She had not been shocked by grief into sluttishness as he had first surmised.

  She crossed to the nearest chair and picked up a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. “D’you want a fag?”

  He accepted a cigarette and lit a match for them. He asked her a number of general questions, which she answered in her flat, expressionless voice. Her husband had been thirty-one, they’d been married for eleven years (eleven long years, her mouth suggested), and he had worked for a haulage company so that his hours had always been irregular.

  Kerr’s questions become more specific. “Did he often go fishing?”

  “I wouldn’t know, would I? Sometimes he told me, sometimes he didn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t know nothing until he came back with a load of fish and expected me to cook ’em.”

  “Did you often go out fishing with him?”

  “Me? I can’t swim a stroke and no more could he. I told him he was a fool to keep going out in a boat when there ain’t nothing easier than falling over the side… I was right, wasn’t I?” She sounded close to tears and yet Kerr still had the impression that her overriding emotion was resentment, not grief.

  “There was a lifejacket in the boat — if he couldn’t swim, didn’t he usually wear one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did he buy the boat?”

  “Couldn’t be more ’n three months ago.” She walked over to a chair and flopped down into it. “He came back and said as he’d bought a boat so he could go fishing when he wanted. I told him, you’ve bought a boat when I ain’t nothing to wear and the house looks like a pigsty? And damp! D’you know what it’s like in the winter? There’s mould grows on the walls. And look at the furniture — if you was to offer it to a Steptoe, he’d laugh in your face… What d’you reckon the boat cost? Five hundred?”

  “I’ve no idea,” replied Kerr. The outboard alone must have cost several times that, he thought.

  “Five hundred would’ve done a lot.” She now spoke wistfully and her expression softened so that she looked younger and less used-up. “I could’ve had a new cooker and some decent furniture in here and the builder could’ve put some of that stuff on the walls what keeps the damp out…” Her voice changed tone. “Always throwing his money around, he was.”

  She stood up suddenly and hurried out of the room, to return with two opened cans of beer and a glass. She handed the glass and one can to Kerr, filled one of the dirty glasses from the mantelpiece for herself. “I’ll tell you something, mister,” she said, as she sat. “He used this place like it was a hotel. In for his grub and out again. ‘Going fishin’.’ Didn’t always come back with fish, though. He’d tell me they weren’t biting.” She stared blankly at the worn carpet. “He thought I was a bloody fool. Didn’t know Muriel had seen him coming out of a restaurant with a blonde. Straight out of the bloody bottle, Muriel said she was. And a face with so much make-up on it you couldn’t see what was underneath. Gawd! If I’d of been around…” She drank.

  “‘Got a smart new car she had,’ Muriel said. ‘I wonder if your Andy was generous enough to give it to her?’ Proper bitch, that’s what Muriel is: loves passing on that kind of news.” She suddenly looked at him. “Are you married?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I bet you don’t treat your wife like my Andy did me? But you ain’t been married long, from the look of you. There’s plenty of time.”

  Chapter 11

  Fusil re-read the memorandum which Miss Wagner had placed in the centre of the blotter of his desk. Because of the rising incidence of crime it was no longer going to be possible to investigate all crimes: in future, all minor crimes were to be logged but not investigated unless there were special attendant circumstances.

  He swore. The perpetrators of minor crimes were often potentially the villains of tomorrow — and the only practical way of discouraging them from graduating was for the law sharply to teach them that crime did not pay. The law concerning young offenders had become soft beyond belief and now the police would not even be able to bring them to justice to suffer such penalties as still remained. Life would teach them that crime did pay. What the hell kind of future was being built? Few other officers would, he knew, feel as impotently angry as he did over this latest directive. He wished he could be like them and see his job from a far more impersonal view point.

  Kerr came into the room. “I’ve been out on the Finch case, sir. The coroner’s officer says the pathologist’s preliminary report will be that Finch died from drowning, almost certainly in salt water. But there was bruising to his right arm and contusions on his fingers and as far as I can make out the pathologist reckons that while the injuries are consistent with his falling over the side and then trying desperately to get back in, they also could have been caused in some form of assault.

  “I checked the boat. It’s new and the outboard is a one hundred and twenty h.p. Mercury. I don’t know for sure what an outboard like that costs now, but it must be a hell of a lot. Yet Finch lived in Arlington Road, near the docks, and the place is a bit of a slum. Looking at it, you’d say he couldn’t afford even a dinghy. His wife says he spent nothing on the house or her, but a friend of hers told her she saw him coming out of a restaurant with a tarty blonde. There’s the suggestion he might even have given the blonde a car.”

  “What was his job? Roustabout on a North Sea oil rig?”

  “Hendlesham Haulage Company. I’ve checked with them and he was one of their drivers. Over the past six months, his wages averaged out at eighty-one quid a week.”

  “I wish I could buy an expensive boat and outboard, take a girlfriend out to restaurants and maybe buy her a car, all on eighty-one quid a week.”

  “Me too, sir. It made me remember something. Finch had a small crescent-shaped scar on his right cheek.”

  Fusil picked up his pipe and fiddled with it. “You’re really beginning to interest me.”

  “According to his wife, he couldn’t swim. When he was picked up he wasn’t wearing a lifejacket, but there was one in the boat and one of the sets of tabs was torn away on one side… I got back on to the haulage company. They do a lot of dock work.”

  Fusil began to fill his pipe with tobacco. “You’ve done a good job.”

  Kerr was gratified because praise from Fusil was praise indeed. “Shall I see if I can identify the girlfriend and find out how much he actually did spend on her?”

  “I’ll handle that side. You stay with the boat and check it out: find out what it cost and where he bought it.”

  “Right, sir.” Kerr left.

  Fusil lit hi
s pipe. He tipped his chair back and rested his shoes on the desk. Some cases came in layers — this seemed it might be one of them. A man was drowned, when out on a fishing trip. He hadn’t been wearing his lifejacket, even though he couldn’t swim — not that people weren’t stupidly careless. One set of the lifejacket’s tabs had been torn, the man had suffered bruising and contusions. Accident or murder? Now, the layers had to be peeled back. The boat and outboard represented thousands of pounds. Had they been bought on h.p. or outright? There was a girlfriend, who might have been given a car. All on eighty-one pounds a week? A crescent shaped scar… A lot of drugs were shipped through the port. Finch might have discovered that one of his lorry’s loads included marijuana in one form or another and had decided to steal it and then push it. A hundredweight of good quality marijuana was worth something over fifty thousand pounds on the streets. But no hash baron was going just to sit back and see his business stolen away from him…

  Fusil dialled the morgue and spoke to the P.C. “You’re holding Andrew Finch… Yes. I’ll be bringing someone along for identification later on in the evening… Then you’ll just have to stay on duty, won’t you?” As always, when a case was beginning to bubble, he was indifferent to other people’s arrangements.

  *

  Fusil parked outside Streeter’s house. He knocked on the front door and it was opened by Mrs Streeter, who asked him in. Streeter, who had obviously been interrupted in the middle of his supper, was far less at ease than she was. He stood in the doorway of the sitting room, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “D.C. Kerr came here the other day and asked you a few questions,” said Fusil.

  “Yeah. I told him everything straight, mister…”

  Fusil interrupted him to speak with easy friendliness. “There’s no question of that, Mr Streeter. The only reason I’m here now. is to try and take things a little further.”

  “How’s that?” Streeter finally came into the room and sat.

  “You remember D.C. Kerr asked you to identify a man from a photo and you said you might have seen him in the disco? Also that maybe this man started flying after he’d met a pusher with a scar on his face?”

  “I didn’t say it like that”

  “Let’s clear the air again. I’m not here to cause trouble — I accept completely that the moment you become certain anyone’s pushing, you very smartly do something about it. What I’m concerned in is trying to trace out the history of a man who’s been drowned. He could have been to your disco. If so, I want to know. That’s all.”

  “But what can I do now?”

  “Come with me to the morgue and see if you’ve ever clapped eyes on the dead man before.”

  “I… I’d rather not,” said Streeter, very nervously.

  Fusil was quietly amused by the irony of Streeter, tough enough to tackle anyone, being scared of looking at a dead body. “It’s not as bad as you think. Tell you what — I’ll buy you a double whisky afterwards.”

  “Mister, I’m due at work in half an hour…”

  “I’ll phone your boss and tell him he’ll have to do without you for a bit.”

  They left the house ten minutes later, after Streeter had hurriedly finished his meal. Fusil drove with his usual disregard for other vehicles and the journey took only twenty minutes despite the heavy traffic they met as they neared the docks.

  The P.C. at the morgue tried to express his annoyance at having been made to work overtime. He took a long time to check the identifying labels, then pulled open one of the middle cabinet drawers. “Andrew Finch, male Caucasian, delivered here on Monday. Post mortem carried out earlier today by…”

  “You can forget the commercials,” snapped Fusil.

  The P.C. muttered something as he pulled back the sheet. Streeter looked at the ballooned face, with popping eyes and tongue arced out of the mouth, and he swallowed very quickly and looked away.

  “D’you recognise him?” asked Fusil.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Then have another look. Move over here where you’ll see better.”

  Streeter’s last desire was to see the corpse any more clearly, but he obediently shuffled to his right and stared again at the dead man. “I can’t be sure, mister, straight I can’t. It looks like him and the scar’s the same. But I only saw him across the floor and with all them flashing lights what make people look strange…”

  “O.K.” Fusil turned to the P.C. “That’s it.” He smiled sardonically. “And thanks for staying on.”

  They returned to the car and Fusil drove half a mile to the Seven Seas, a pub which had not been modernised and on the ceiling beams of which had been pinned paper money from all over the world. Streeter said he’d prefer a beer to anything and Fusil ordered two pints of bitter.

  They sat at one of the stained wooden tables which had, when new, been decorated with central panels of ships of the line.

  Fusil drank, then said: “D’you think you could be any more definite about the date when you saw the man with the scar and the bloke from the photo together in the discothèque?”

  Streeter wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “There’s not a hope on that, mister. Like I told your bloke, it was two or three weeks back, but I can’t say any more exact.”

  “Think back, picture that evening as well as you can, and see if you can recall something which would place it in relation to other days. Did anything happen the night before or the night after which would let you fix either of those days definitely? Did you read anything in the papers which sticks in your mind?”

  Streeter drank. He put the glass down on the table and stared fixedly at the bar, then finally said: “No, mister, it’d be a lie to say anything else. I can’t remember nothing special.”

  “Sometimes when one’s trying very hard to remember something it refuses to come back until one stops trying. So if you suddenly get a brainwave, give me a ring at the station, will you?”

  “Sure, only I don’t think it’s going to work like that.”

  *

  Mrs Finch, as resentful and bitterly sorry for herself as before, identified her friend Muriel. Muriel Wodchewski was married to a Pole — not too bad a bloke for a foreigner. She was a friend, but she was also a gossip, a born trouble-maker, and probably a liar to boot…

  Muriel Wodchewski lived on the borders of Ascrey Cross, near the new technical college, in a detached house. The front garden was geometrically patterned with flagstones and rose beds and there was not a weed in sight. The house was spotlessly clean and tidy and even as Fusil introduced himself and explained the reason for his visit she moved to the right to readjust the hanging of a framed etching. She was in her late twenties, small and petite, with curly brown hair set above a heart-shaped face. She evidently could never resist becoming coy when speaking to a man.

  “Well, you know…” She had a way of looking at a person out of the corners of her eyes. “Boys will be boys, won’t they?”

  “So people often tell me. When did you see Mr Finch with this woman?”

  “Couldn’t have been more ’n a month ago. I was walking down the high street, keeping myself to myself, and I saw him as bold as brass coming out of the Miramar with this woman. That stopped me, I can tell you! Him coming out of the Miramar, where it costs you a quid to breathe the same air as the doorman.”

  “What was she like?”

  “If the front of her dress had gone any lower, she’d’ve caught a cold on her stomach. I can tell you, I wouldn’t be seen dead in a dress like that.”

  The effect would be wasted, thought Fusil un-gallantly.

  “They went down the road and I followed — I mean, on account of I was going that way I just carried on. You understand?”

  Fusil nodded. He understood.

  “One thing’s certain, they were real friendly. Andy had his arm round her and if he’d hugged her any tighter… Then they got into a car and drove off. I told myself, Muriel, it’s none of your business so fo
rget it. Then I went round to Pam’s and she was in such a state because Andy wouldn’t give her enough to feed ’em on properly, yet never stopped going on at her because the grub was poor. ‘Don’t you take that from him,’ I told her. ‘You’ve no cause to do that.’ She began to tell me Andy swore he couldn’t give her another penny for the house, so I told her that Andy could give her enough for steaks every day for a year if he stopped eating out at places like the Miramar. Of course, it all came out then.”

  “How did Mrs Finch take the news?”

  “Cried a bit and swore a lot, but if you want to know, I think she’d had her suspicions. A woman’s got to be real soft if she doesn’t have an idea when her husband’s knocking at other doors.”

  “Do you know who this other woman was?”

  “Never seen her before or since.” She examined the nails of her right hand. “It was odd, but Andy looked all clean when I saw him with her. Never seen him clean before… Shouldn’t speak like that, I suppose, with him dead. But it’s different talking to a detective, isn’t it? More like confessing to a priest.”

  That was one way of putting it. “Can you tell me what make of car they drove off in, or what its registration number was?”

  “You’re really asking something now! I never noticed the number and I wouldn’t have a clue what make it was. Most of ’em look the same. Still, this one was different.” She thought back. “It was one of them two seaters with no top and all old to look at, with mudguards and things. Yet it was as shiny as if it’d come out of the showroom the day before. A lovely dark green, just like one of my dresses. D’you think he gave it to her?”

  “I wouldn’t know, one way or the other.”

  He thanked her for her help, gallantly said he hoped he’d meet her again, and left. As he drove away, he wondered whether Mr Wodchewski really enjoyed life.

  He pulled up alongside a public callbox, dialled the station, and spoke to Braddon. “I’ve a job for you, Pete.”