The Long Arm of the Law

by Martin Edwards

  “Is Sam’s shop up for sale, then?”

  “That’s right. By order of his executioners. Stock and all.”

  “I don’t suppose Sam had all that stock left, the rate he gave it away,” said Petrella.

  Sam Martin, sole proprietor of Martins: Sweets and Confectionery, had been a figure known and respected beyond the immediate area of Southwark High Street and Friary Lane in which he had lived and carried on business for a decade and a half. A reporter on the local paper had christened him The Philanthropist of Friary Lane, and had run a story on him. His sweetshop had been a magnet to every boy and girl in the neighbourhood, for Mr Martin had a soft heart and a bad memory.

  “Talk about taking candy from a blind man,” said Bernard. “All any kid had to do was walk in, help himself, and say, ‘Pay you Friday, Mr Martin.’ I wonder he ever had any money left to buy new stock at all.”

  By coincidence the subject of old Mr Martin cropped up again on the following morning, when Superintendent Benjamin was paying one of his periodical visits to Gabriel Street.

  “Nothing on that running down case in Friary Lane yet?” he said.

  “Nothing at all, sir,” said Petrella. “It’s a bit of an odd business altogether. There’s not a lot of traffic in the Lane. And there are too many corners in it for anyone to get up a lot of speed. This driver seems to have come round the corner fast, on the wrong side, and hit Mr Martin in the back.”

  “Criminally careless driving.”

  “Almost more than that, sir. The nearside wheels of the car actually mounted the pavement.”

  Benjamin stared at him. “Are you making this out to be deliberate?” he said.

  “It’s difficult to say,” said Petrella. “The road was damp, but there were no skid marks. The car could have pulled over quick to avoid a cat on the other side. It’s the sort of daft thing drivers do. But it seems the car was going pretty fast. Maybe without lights.”

  “A getaway?” said Benjamin. “It’s possible. But no consolation to Mr Martin. I’d like to find out who did it, Patrick. He was a nice old man and well thought of round these parts.”

  “So I’m told,” said Petrella, and at this precise moment the telephone rang.

  For some moments he was unable to understand what was being said. When he had grasped the single essential point he interrupted his caller by replacing the receiver.

  “It’s a woman,” he said. “Seems to be having hysterics.”

  “So I gathered. What’s it all about?”

  “I’ll have to go down and see. Funny thing. You remember we were talking about Mr Martin’s place. Well, that’s where she was ringing from. She’s found something. In the cellar.”

  By the time Petrella reached the shop, Mrs Barrow, a grey-haired, button-eyed lady of sixty, had recovered her composure sufficiently to tell him what had happened.

  “Cleaning up was what I was doing,” she said. “Mr Warrender—he’s the agent—told me, ‘Scrub out each room careful. And be very particular to do the cellar.’ That’s what he said. Very particular to do the cellar because, in old houses like this, cellars are where there are smells, and there’s nothing puts a purchaser off like smells. That’s what Mr Warrender said.”

  By this time they had made their way through the little shop—the shelves stripped of stock, a few advertising cut-outs drooping from the walls, the till-drawer open and empty—and were standing by an open door at the head of a flight of narrow brick steps.

  “You go first,” said Mrs Barrow. “I’ll come with you and show you. After what happened I don’t really fancy going down there again.”

  The cellar was lighted by a single electric bulb. By its economical yellow light Petrella could see that part of the floor had been washed. A pail of water stood beside it.

  “I could feel the bricks were loose right under my hands,” said Mrs Barrow. “Several of them. So I thought—”

  “You thought,” said Petrella, going down on one knee, “here’s where old Mr Martin kept his cash box, with all his spare cash in it. So I’d better dig it up and hand it over to the police before anyone dishonest gets hold of it. Right?”

  As he spoke he was busy lifting and piling the loose bricks. Underneath, the cement had fallen away in the centre, leaving a long shallow depression. And at the top end of the depression he saw at once what had caught Mrs Barrow’s eye.

  ***

  Dr Summerson, the Home Office Pathologist, made his report personally to Petrella three days later.

  “It’s an interesting case,” he said. “One of the most interesting I’ve ever dealt with. And I’ve still got a lot more work to do on it. But I can give you one or two facts to be going on with, if you like. It was a woman. Not less than twenty-five, not more than thirty-five. Height, five foot six, give her an inch either way. Bad teeth. Two wanted filling and one with a broken cap. And she may have had arthritis in her left hip.”

  “How long has she been there?”

  Dr Summerson said, “After all that time it’s impossible to be accurate to a year or so. But my guess would be at least fifteen—perhaps twenty—”

  Petrella’s face fell.

  “Twenty years old,” he said. “I’m surprised you were able to give us anything at all.”

  “Height’s easy enough,” said Summerson. “We found an undamaged right humerus. Apply Pearson’s formula, it gives you quite an accurate result, you know.”

  “I suppose so,” said Petrella, who had no idea what Pearson’s formula was. “What about age?”

  “More difficult, I admit. You can tell a certain amount from the bones, and a bit more from an X-ray of the bone fusions. It gets more difficult as the bones get older. That’s why I gave you a bracket of ten years. The dental work’s the only reliable method of identification after a lapse of time like that.”

  “If we can find her dentist. And if he’s hung on to his records.”

  “That’s your job, not mine,” said Dr Summerson. “However, that wasn’t what I really came to tell you. There was something rather more important.” He put his hand in his coat pocket and pulled out a small glass specimen case which he laid on the table.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Petrella looked at the tiny white fragment. It was clearly a piece of bone of some sort, roughly the size and shape of a match but broader and flatter.

  “No idea,” he said.

  “A number of quite experienced doctors, if they were honest, would say the same.” He opened the box, picked up the bone fragment delicately, and laid it on his palm under the light.

  “It’s the upper horn of the wing of the voice-box. And the interesting part about it is that it has been fractured about a third of the way up. You don’t need a glass to see that.”

  “No,” said Petrella. “I can see it’s been broken. What does it mean?”

  “It means,” said Dr Summerson, “that although this young woman has been fifteen or twenty years in her grave, it is quite clear how she died. She was strangled. Probably, though not absolutely certainly, by manual strangulation.”

  “Twenty years!” said Benjamin, when the news reached him. “Who had the house before Martin?”

  “It used to be a barber’s shop,” said Petrella. “A one man show. I’ve found out his name, and that’s about all I have found out. Harry Foster. He started up in the mid thirties. As far as I can gather, it was never much of a place, always on the verge of closing down. Then the war came. That can’t have done it much good, either. But Foster didn’t finally give up until the autumn of 1944. That was when his wife was killed. The flying bomb that wiped out the Pantheon Cinema at Balham.”

  “I remember it,” said Benjamin. “A direct hit. About ninety dead. Not a great many of them were identified, really. The building caught fire after the bomb hit it.”

  “So I gathered,” sa
id Petrella.

  The two men looked at each other. “No good jumping to conclusions,” said Benjamin. “I’ll try to find out from Central if there’s an insurance angle to this. That’s the sort of thing they can do better than us. You see if you can find out where Foster is now.”

  ***

  Sixteen years is not a long time in the life of officialdom, but it is long enough for files to be put away in boxes, and boxes to be placed in remote storage depots. It is long enough for senior officials to retire and for the memories of junior officials to fade.

  It was therefore some little time after the moment when Mrs Barrow lifted a loose brick out of the cellar of No. 36 Friary Lane that two things happened. Superintendent Benjamin received a letter from the Claims Manager of the South-Eastern Insurance Company confirming that seven hundred and twelve pounds had been paid to Mr Harold Foster on 10th December 1944 in respect of a policy on the life of his wife, Merlith Foster, who had been killed by enemy action on 2nd October 1944. And on the same day Petrella finally ran Mr Foster to earth.

  It had been a search which got nowhere at all until Petrella had the idea of calling on old Mr Martin’s lawyers. They had produced to him the original deed conveying the shop in Friary Lane to Mr Martin. It had been signed by Harold Elwin Foster. And the signature had been witnessed by an Agnes Marion, described as a spinster.

  Miss Marion was, happily, still alive and remembered Mr Foster and his wife quite well. In 1944 she had been living next door to them in Friary Lane. She had also, it transpired, run into Mr Foster subsequently. She couldn’t just remember when, but it was well after the end of the war. They had talked for a few minutes, and Mr Foster had revealed that he had set up shop again, this time in north London, in Highside.

  No news could have been more welcome. Petrella had served as a constable and sergeant in the Highside Division, so co-operation was assured. It was badly needed.

  On the face of it, it should have been easy to trace a man, of whom they already had a description, thought to be operating a barber’s shop in a known area of north London. In practice, it proved curiously difficult. There seemed to be a lot of barbers, mostly in their middle fifties, and mostly born Londoners. In the end, Petrella packed Miss Marion into a police car and took her on a tour of the likeliest prospects.

  It was at their second call, a modest establishment functioning under the name of J. Walker, Gents Hair Stylist, that they found him.

  “That’s him,” said Miss Marion. “That big nose. Like a bird. The Albatross, my sister and I used to call him. Do you want me to go back in and say hullo? Wouldn’t he be surprised?”

  “I think we won’t surprise him just yet,” said Petrella. He helped Miss Marion back into the car. “I’ll get the driver to take you home. And I can’t say how grateful I am.”

  “What’s he done?” said Miss Marion. “He must have done something. You wouldn’t bring me half across London in a car if it wasn’t important, would you?”

  Petrella said, “If I told you he had done something, would you be surprised?”

  “Not really,” said Miss Marion. “He was friendly, you know, with me and my sister. But it didn’t stop him trying to borrow money from us. He was that sort of man. Always enough money for smokes and drinks, but never enough to pay his bills.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be doing terribly well now,” said Petrella. Indeed, Mr Walker’s shop was a dismal little place.

  Petrella gave the police driver directions. As the car started to move, Miss Marion poked her head out of the window and said, “Good-bye. And I haven’t overlooked it.”

  “Overlooked what?” said Petrella incautiously.

  “That you’ve wriggled out of answering my question.” Miss Marion waved her hand and the car drew away.

  When it had disappeared round the corner, Petrella went into the shop. He was overdue for a haircut, anyway.

  Two days later, Petrella, Superintendent Benjamin, and young Mr Meakin from the Public Prosecutor’s Office discussed Mr Walker, alias Foster.

  “There’s not a lot to go on,” said Benjamin. “Lots of people change their names. Nothing criminal in that. All the same, I don’t see that we can leave it where it is.”

  “We daren’t,” said Petrella. “He’s married again. At least, he’s living with some woman. We haven’t found out whether they’re married or not. There seems to be a bit of doubt about that.”

  “You’ve met her, Patrick?”

  “I’ve said good morning to her. A nice motherly woman. Five or ten years younger than Foster. We don’t want her to end up under the cellar floor, do we?”

  “But good heavens,” said Mr Meakin, “what reason have you to suppose—?”

  “If what we’re all thinking is right,” said Benjamin, “the first Mrs Foster didn’t die in an air raid at all. Her husband strangled her and buried her in the cellar. We must suppose he did it because he was desperate for the money. He couldn’t even sell the house and clear out until he’d paid some of his debts. Now it looks as if he’s beginning to be hard up again. He got away with it once.”

  “What evidence is there,” said Mr Meakin, “that the corpse in the cellar was Mrs Foster?”

  “Only presumption, I agree. She was twenty-eight and, according to her dressmaker’s records, was five foot four inches. That’s close enough to Summerson’s estimate.”

  Petrella said, “Could we bring him down for questioning?”

  “I don’t think anyone could criticise you for that,” said Mr Meakin. “After all, a corpse has been found in a house previously owned by him. I don’t see that he could object to being questioned.”

  Benjamin looked at Petrella, who said, “I’ll go myself, sir. I think it’ll be better that way.”

  ***

  It was four o’clock when he opened the door of Mr Walker’s shop. A youth with the look of an apprentice rose unwillingly from his chair, put down the comic he was reading, and stubbed out a cigarette.

  “Relax,” said Petrella. “I don’t want a haircut. Just a word with Mrs Walker.”

  “She’s in the back,” said the youth.

  Petrella went through the net-curtained, glass-panelled door, and found himself in the living-room. Mrs Walker looked up from her ironing and smiled uncertainly.

  “Is your husband in?” said Petrella.

  “Well, no,” said Mrs Walker. “He isn’t. What can I do for you? Didn’t I see you in the shop a day or two ago?”

  “That’s right.” Petrella produced his warrant card and said, “I’m a Detective Inspector, and I wanted a word with your husband.”

  Mrs Walker sat down abruptly, and there was a moment of silence in that shabby little room.

  Then she said, “He’s out just now. Shall I tell him—? What shall I tell him it’s about?”

  “I’d better have a word with him myself,” said Petrella. “When do you expect him back?”

  Mrs Walker looked vaguely at the clock on the mantelshelf and said, “Oh, about an hour. It might be more.”

  “No point in me waiting, then,” said Petrella. “I’ll look in this evening.”

  “You do that.” Mrs Walker was no actress.

  Before going, Petrella took a quick look out into the garden. The walls were high. There were other houses on both sides and no evidence of a back way out. He went out through the shop. The youth, still deep in his comic, hardly looked up.

  Petrella turned right, walked down the road, turned left, left again, and then once more to the left. He was now at the opposite end of the road, with a clear view of the shop door.

  As he waited, dusk fell. From time to time he stamped his feet gently. At six o’clock the shop door opened, but it was only the boy going home. Tired, no doubt, by his strenuous afternoon. Half past six. Seven o’clock.

  Once Petrella thought he heard raised voices fr
om inside the shop, but concluded that it was his imagination.

  Then the door opened and Mr Walker came out.

  His big face showed white under the street lamp. He swung on his feet and lurched off up the pavement. Petrella followed discreetly.

  His guess had been that Mr Walker would bolt. But Mr Walker had had plenty of time to pack a bag, yet he was carrying nothing. He was wearing a thin raincoat and no hat. And he was walking in the slow aimless style of a man with time to kill.

  They were climbing. Each of the little streets had an upward tilt to it. Petrella realised why when they emerged on the road which spans the Archway. He also realised what Mr Walker’s destination might be, and hastened his pace.

  The sound of his steps seemed to galvanise Mr Walker. He cast a startled look over his shoulder, ran a few shambling paces, and pulled himself up on the parapet of the arch. Petrella hurled himself forward, grabbed the raincoat belt, then the raincoat itself.

  Sixty feet below them the steady procession of headlights swept past. Up on the Archway the two men were alone under the black sky. Petrella slid his arms forward until they were locked round Mr Walker’s waist.

  “Not that way,” he said.

  ***

  “We’re holding him,” said Petrella, “on a charge of attempted suicide. He’ll probably deny it. I’m the only witness.”

  “And he’ll almost certainly be allowed bail,” said Benjamin. “If we are going to spring this thing on him it’s a pity, in a way, that he’s had a night to think about it. Better get on with it.”

  When Mr Walker was brought in, it was clear that whatever else he might have done during the long night in the cells, he had not slept. The dead white skin, the yellow eyes with the deep black smudges under them, the great beaky nose, teased Petrella with a recollection.

  Then he remembered Miss Marion. “The Albatross, my sister and I used to call him.” The likeness was almost startling.