Despite the Evidence

by Roderic Jeffries

  Kerr took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it. Vine accepted one, although there were still several in the pack the D.I. had given him and which was on the table in front of him.

  Kerr smoked for some time before saying, in casual tones: ‘You know something — that was a really neat escape.’

  Vine smiled.

  ‘They tell me the screws didn’t know much until it was all over?’

  ‘They didn’t know nothing,’ replied Vine proudly.

  ‘Quenton had it organised.’

  ‘Alf’s big.’

  ‘Funny he should take you along, wasn’t it?’

  ‘We was in the same number.’

  Even though they’d been in the same cell, thought Kerr, it was odd Quenton had bothered about anyone as insignificant as Vine. ‘Known Alf for long?’

  Vine shook his head. ‘Only since I was inside. ’E wouldn’t know me outside.’ He spoke without a trace of resentment: the social order was fixed and immutable.

  ‘Did Sails know Alf before?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘I suppose Quenton fixed everything right from the start?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Vine had sufficient intelligence to know when to appear to be co-operating, thought Kerr. ‘Has the planning been running a long time?’

  Vine shook his head. ‘No more’n a few days.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then someone outside must have done some sharp work?’

  Vine looked away. This was going beyond the point at which he was prepared to co-operate.

  ‘When did you first know what was in the wind?’

  ‘Couldn’t rightly say. Must’ve been about four days before the first break.’

  ‘First break?’

  Vine licked his lips, uncertain whether he’d been led into an indiscretion. ‘We was going over the top on Tuesday,’ he finally muttered.

  ‘So what went wrong to stop that?’

  ‘Sails got moved to another working party. Alf said as we’d got to wait until today when Sails was back.’

  ‘Alf and Sails made a couple?’

  Vine didn’t answer.

  Were they planning some villaining together as soon as they were out? wondered Kerr. A note must be sent to the collator about this friendship. ‘Alf must have had to work real hard to get the days changed?’

  ‘’E worked it through a screw.’ Vine was eager to give that information. Screws were hated, bent screws were hated even more, and there wasn’t a prisoner in the country who wouldn’t rejoice in betraying a warder.

  ‘D’you know the name of the screw?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You never saw Alf chatting hard to one?’

  ‘Never saw ’im chatting to any.’

  ‘Alf must have paid heavy for so slick a job?’

  ‘’E’s big.’ Vine spoke with sudden pride. It was really something to have gone over the top with a big-time villain, a leader of a heavy mob.

  The quiet, pleasant, chatty interrogation continued for a further ten minutes, when Fusil opened the door and looked in. He jerked his head to call Kerr out and a uniformed P.C. went inside. Fusil kicked the door shut with his shoe. ‘Anything?’ he demanded.

  ‘Two bits of information, sir, but they aren’t going to help us in nabbing Uden or Hagan.’

  ‘Sergeant Braddon’s not getting anywhere with Uden. Naturally Uden swears he’s no idea why Vine called at his place.’ Fusil yawned. ‘Let’s find some coffee and you tell me what’s news. Then we’ll go to bed.’

  ‘Can you hold Uden, sir?’

  ‘Not a hope. I’ve had his place searched and it didn’t turn up anything but a brassy blonde who Rowan reckons has been on the game since she first learned there were two sexes.’

  Rowan hated all tarts. Probably, he thought his wife had become one. Kerr yawned, even more heavily than Fusil had done.

  *

  Kerr had a quick, lively mind and this resulted in his tending to dislike any prolonged repetitive work so that when having to carry out such work — which was often — he had consciously to force himself to stay alert and not let his mind wander away to more pleasant pastures. As he went from house to house in George Road, which bordered the wall of the prison, asking the same questions of those inside, he found it more and more difficult to concentrate on what he was doing.

  It was a grey, raw day, with heavy clouds that pressed down towards the grey earth: it was not actually drizzling but the air was damp and people were coughing and sneezing and wheezing with bronchitis. The woman at number 45 was thin and bony, her hair was in curlers, and she sniffed with disturbing regularity. When he said he was a policeman she gave him no time to ask questions but launched into a bitter complaint that from the moment of the prison escape she hadn’t had a moment’s peace, what with the police, the reporters, the TV people, and the public who came and peered into her front room. As her husband said . . .

  It was disturbing to learn any man had willingly married her, thought Kerr gloomily. Had her husband been fooled by youth? Or was he a man without dreams, who’d never realised that life wasn’t meant to be one long bout of misery? Had no one told him that life meant the sun, warmth, beauty . . . A yacht, dazzling white, teak decks honey-coloured: slipping through the azure sea: the sun, a golden orb in dazzling blue, warming tanned bodies: lithe, long-legged, smooth, shapely bodies: women with the deep glow of natural passion, women eager to open their arms, to give, uninhibitedly, primitively, scorchingly. . . .

  ‘So what do you think?’ she demanded.

  He stared at her, surprised. What had happened to those magnificent bronzed bodies?

  ‘Well?’ Her voice became even sharper.

  ‘I’d think so,’ he said.

  ‘You’d what. Let me tell you . . .’

  It was another five minutes before he was able to discover she had seen nothing of the escape or anything else of significance. He left, walked up the tiny front garden on to the pavement and along the few yards to the next small wooden gate. He knocked on the door of No. 47. The occupant was, by happy contrast, friendly, cheerful, twenty-five, and good-looking if a trifle too plump for his taste. She asked him if he’d like a cup of tea and he accepted with grateful thanks. She led the way into the kitchen.

  ‘I wasn’t here when the escape was on,’ she said, as she pushed the bowl of sugar across the table. ‘Bert — he’s my husband — had said he’d like chops for supper, so I went along to the supermarket to buy some. When I got back here it was like a circus was on — people and cars everywhere.’

  ‘Sorry to have bothered you again, then,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to find out if anyone saw anything at all that’ll help us.’ He stirred his tea and drank.

  ‘Were they important prisoners?’

  ‘One of ’em was a bit of a tough.’

  ‘Is he the one the news this morning said was recaptured?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’ Kerr took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘Care for one?’

  ‘Thanks a lot. Can’t stop smoking, I can’t, whatever the doctors say. Still, as Bert keeps telling me, if you stop doing everything that’s bad for you, life’s not worth living.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s true enough.’ He struck a match for them both.

  She inhaled and blew out the smoke. ‘Is that right that a big lorry was used for getting the prisoners over the wall?’

  ‘It was a pantechnicon — you know, the kind of vehicle that moves furniture.’

  ‘D’you know what colour it was?’

  ‘A darkish brown and it had the name of Gentry and Pauls on the back . . . What’s up, Mrs. Weston?’

  She hesitated. ‘I don’t know, really. . . . It probably sounds so silly.’

  ‘In this sort of job, nothing’s silly.’

  ‘It’s like this. A couple of days before the escape there was near a crash in the road outside and one of them was a big brown furnit
ure van. I was clearing up in the front room and was looking out of the window when I saw this sports car pull out sudden and go straight in front of the van, which had to brake real smart. When I heard it was a big brown furniture van used in the escape I started wondering. . . . But as Bert said, being a couple of days before, it can’t really mean anything, can it?’

  ‘It most certainly can,’ he said quickly. ‘One of the things they’d have had to do was discover the height of the wall. Just tell me everything you can about the incident.’

  When she’d finished, his sudden excitement died away. True, she’d seen a brown pantechnicon and the odds were it was the one in question, but she hadn’t noticed the driver and therefore couldn’t begin to describe him. They weren’t going to get Uden or Hagan this way.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, noticing his disappointment.

  He smiled. ‘Don’t worry. No one else in the road has noticed half as much as you.’

  ‘But if only I’d stopped to really look at him . . . Ah, well!, as my mother always used to say, what you didn’t do then, can’t be done now. How about another cuppa?’

  ‘Great.’

  She refilled his cup. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, if there’d been an accident the bloke in the M.G. was responsible. Talk about bad driving, coming out like that without warning!’

  ‘Did you say an M.G.?’

  She was obviously surprised by his tone of voice. ‘That’s right. My Bert says he’s going to buy one of ’em. Never will, of course, but it’s fun hoping. He says they’re the best sports car on the road, considering they’re so cheap. So cheap, he says!’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Over twelve hundred quid and he calls it cheap!’

  ‘Which model was this?’

  ‘Bert always calls it a M.G.-B.’

  ‘Can you possibly remember anything more about this car? Its colour, the registration number, soft or hard top, what kind of bloke was driving it?’

  She rested her elbows on the table and stared out through the window at the small back garden which was bounded by a wooden paling fence. She drew on the cigarette and let the smoke trickle out of her nostrils. ‘It was green,’ she said finally, ‘and it had a canvas top, like Bert wants. But I didn’t notice nothing more.’

  *

  Fusil drove down George Road as Kerr was leaving the last house his side of the cross-roads. Fusil pulled across the road, ignoring an oncoming car which flashed its lights in useless indignation, and stopped. He wound down the window. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  Kerr bent down to speak on a level with the seated D.I. ‘Nothing direct, sir.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘A Mrs. Weston at number forty-seven was looking out of her front room a couple of days before the break and she saw a brown pantechnicon come along this road and another car pulled out suddenly from the pavement and cut across the pantechnicon which forced it to stop.’

  ‘Measuring the height of the wall,’ said Fusil immediately. ‘Did she notice the driver?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Fusil swore.

  ‘But she did notice the car. It was a green, canvas-top M.G.-B.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Since the Jensen crashed, Tarbard has been running around in an M.G.-B.’

  Fusil swore again.

  *

  Kywood stalked across the floor in Fusil’s office, turned at the window, then returned to the desk. ‘In this division you’ve all got Tarbard on the brain.’

  ‘Only because he keeps turning up,’ replied Fusil.

  Kywood clenched his fist and hammered the desk. ‘You mean, you keep producing him like a rabbit out of a goddamn hat.’ He leaned both hands on the desk. ‘I told you earlier to stop twisting facts to suit your theories.’

  ‘I’m not twisting any facts.’

  ‘Stop finding Tarbard under every crime report.’

  ‘He owns a green M.G.-B.’

  ‘So do thousands of other people.’ Kywood suddenly lowered his voice and became the solid, experienced senior detective earnestly trying to lead a rash junior along the right paths. ‘I want you to see reason, Bob. Just tell me a few things — first, how do you know that the pantechnicon the woman saw was the one that was used for the break?’

  ‘We don’t, but——’

  ‘Second. How do you know the M.G. was in any way connected with the pantechnicon?’

  ‘I tried to make it clear——’

  ‘Third. How do you know the M.G. wasn’t exactly what it seemed to be — someone in a hurry who thought he’d get away from the pavement quickly, careless of who was coming along?’

  Fusil spoke stubbornly. ‘We can’t prove anything but it all fits.’

  Kywood’s anger prevented his being the solid senior detective any longer. ‘It only does that if you goddamn well choose to ignore all the probabilities.’

  ‘The episode fits Tarbard’s character too closely for it all to be coincidences.’

  ‘I don’t know what in the hell that’s supposed to mean.’

  ‘He’s really smart. If he wanted an accurate measurement of the height of that prison wall, by using the stolen pantechnicon, he wouldn’t be content just to stop it by the wall for a few seconds. He’d say to himself, “Security’s become the word, patrols have been stepped up outside as well as in, and some bright guard could see the stopped vehicle and guess what’s happening. But that same guard won’t be smart enough to think anything if a car pulls out and makes the pantechnicon stop by the wall and everything’s as natural as you like”.’

  Kywood became crudely sarcastic. ‘There just happens to be one thing wrong with all that psychological clap-trap.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘You’re saying he went to all this trouble because he was so smart. But if he did, it’s precisely because of that that the incident was ever noticed. I call that being plain dumb.’

  ‘A clever man often makes the mistake of being too clever.’

  ‘If I were you, I’d write that down and study it — hard,’ shouted Kywood. Not being a man who knew when to stop, he added: ‘Real hard.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  At a quarter to five, just as Kerr was hoping that, despite all the activity, no one would find anything more for him to do, Fusil ordered him out to the Glazebrook factory. ‘And if that bastard Williams starts moaning you tell him that the few quid which have been nicked are just about as important now as a week-old flea bite.’

  As Kerr went down the back stairs, he remembered his orders for the first visit to the factory. ‘Use tact.’ Time changed things.

  Little had changed at the factory except that a plumpish, matronly, and wholly unexciting woman was at the bench where before the girl with twisted lips had worked.

  ‘I wondered if you were ever coming,’ said the works manager, as Kerr went into the office.

  ‘Sorry about the delay,’ replied Kerr breezily. He took off his mackintosh because the small office was so hot and stuffy. ‘We’ve been busy, though.’

  ‘I did hear you’d some trouble.’ The works manager no longer spoke with some slight hostility. ‘Have you got the other two prisoners yet?’

  ‘Not yet, but it won’t be long.’ Kerr sat down and took his notebook from his pocket. ‘Now then, this last lot of money. You said it definitely went in the meal break.’

  ‘That’s right. My cousin checked at eleven and it was there and again at twelve-fifteen and it had gone.’

  ‘We said to look for stained hands. Who’s the lady and has she tried to spin you any sort of a yarn?’

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  Kerr, astonished, looked up. ‘D’you mean that none of the women who were working here yesterday had stained hands?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But one of ’em’s got to have. Look, you do realise the woman might not have handled the notes for long and the stains might be quite small?’

  ‘I promise you, none of the women had any stains on their hands, large
or small.’

  Kerr tried to make sense of this and came to the only obvious conclusion. ‘Perhaps it was a man. After all, we were assuming that only a woman would nick anything from the women’s room. It’s possible a man might take the chance of nipping in — and yet . . .’ He spoke very doubtfully.

  ‘I thought of that and checked all the men’s hands as well. They were all clean.’

  ‘I suppose your cousin——’

  The works manager intervened. ‘Her hands were untouched. I made certain.’ He flushed, as if ashamed that this suspicion should have occurred to him.

  Bewildered, Kerr even took a quick look at the works manager’s hands — although he’d have had to be a complete fool to have handled the money.

  ‘The powder must have been useless,’ said the works manager.

  ‘It could just have been, I suppose.’ Kerr knew this to be most unlikely, but it would obviously have to be checked. He mentally ran through the facts. The money had been stolen from the women’s room and there was little doubt but that each theft had taken place during the lunch break. They occurred on Mondays, Thursdays, or Fridays. Logic said the thief had to be one of the women. ‘Is anyone away sick?’

  ‘Two women. But they’ve been away all week.’

  ‘When did you check the hands?’

  ‘After ringing you yesterday and then again this morning. I’ve made absolutely certain no one’s been left out.’

  Kerr fiddled with his pen. There was the further possibility that the money had been moved by someone very careful not to touch the notes with his or her bare hands, but who would go to such lengths unless knowing the money was powdered? ‘Where does your cousin live?’

  The works manager’s expression grew sullen. ‘I told you, she’s completely honest.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve got to check everything and everybody. You see, she could have mentioned something to someone.’

  Most unwillingly, the works manager gave the address.

  After writing it down, Kerr looked up. ‘That’s about it for the moment, then.’

  ‘You told me the powder would definitely prove who was the thief.’

  ‘I know, but unfortunately things don’t always go according to plan.’ Kerr spoke lightly. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get there in the end. Has Williams been giving you a bad time over this?’