The Man Whose Dream Came True

by Julian Symons

  ‘I had nothing to do with that man being killed.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mobey winked again. ‘Mum’s the word. I admire you for it. Got a picture of her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Foster, that the name? Here’s Sandra.’ He produced a dog-eared snap of a girl in a bikini. ‘How’s that for a piece of homework? And she’s hot stuff. Look at this.’ Tony read a letter from Sandra in which she told Mobey in detail of the pleasures they were both missing. ‘Can’t wait to get back to it. What’s your piece like?’

  He found it impossible to talk about Jenny, but Mobey was not annoyed or disconcerted, considering this rather as a further proof of Tony’s superiority in sensibility as well as in the conduct of his affairs. He had an enviable certainty of his eventual release and talked continually about the splendid times he and Sandra would have when he got out.

  Tony was also surprised to receive a number of letters from women who had read details of the case in the Magistrate’s Court. Some called him a murderer and breaker-up of homes, but most wanted to start a correspondence and two suggested marriage after the trial. ‘If your heart is still free – and I do not see how you can have any feeling for that woman after the way she has behaved – I want you to know that there are real loving women in the world who are keen to get something exciting out of life,’ wrote a woman from Bedford who described herself as thirty years old and fancy free. Two or three letters asked for a signed photograph and one woman enclosed a lock of hair with the request that he should send one of his in return. He answered some of the letters and was annoyed when, apparently satisfied to have heard from him, the women didn’t keep up the correspondence. At the same time there was something undoubtedly agreeable in finding himself a celebrity.

  Upon the whole the days passed pleasantly enough. He seemed to have drifted out of life and did not feel seriously disturbed even when Mr Hussick came in and reported that their attempts to disprove Mrs Foster’s story had come to nothing. He looked forward to the trial with a mixture of excitement and distress. Distress because it would mean the end, one way or the other, of the hospital life that in some ways suited him very well, and also to the sessions with the psychiatrist which had continued and which he rather enjoyed. He did not allow himself to think what might happen after the trial ended if he were found guilty, and on the whole distress was submerged by excitement. It would be the first time in his life that he had ever really been given attention, and he felt the importance of doing his best in the witness box not only because (as Mr Hussick had said over and over) it was vital for his case, but because it was a real chance to show his true personality in public.

  One or two experienced prisoners, men with long records, had told him that you got a lot of fan mail during the trial, especially if you made a good impression. Perhaps among those letters there would be one from a beautiful young woman, sexually demanding in just Jenny’s way – he was unable quite to forget her – but a woman who really wanted all the things about which Jenny had only pretended. He called this imaginary young woman Lucinda, and the half hour in the morning that elapsed between the time he woke and the time they were called belonged to her. The trial ended with his acquittal, and she was waiting as he left the Court by a side entrance to avoid the crowd of screaming women who wanted to kiss him and to touch and tear his clothing as if he were a pop star. She moved over to the passenger seat of the sports car as he came out, he gunned the motor and they were away, driving down country roads, away, zooming at a forbidden speed down the endless lanes of the motorway, away, on and on until they reached the hotel where in the bedroom she imposed her body and her needs upon his own, using him as a man is traditionally supposed to use a woman. ‘Lucinda, Lucinda,’ he would whisper as he held her pillow body at this early hour of the morning when light filtered through the window into the ward and the man next to him moved and cried out in sleep. The hotel was only a stopping off place, on the following day they took the car over to Europe. When he asked where they were going she smiled and said ‘Everywhere.’

  Three days before the trial began he received a letter of a different kind. He had read two pages in the sprawling hand before he looked at the signature: ‘Fiona.’

  This is just to wish you good luck. Don’t know what it’s all about but it can’t be nice to be in jug, and I hope you get out. It was funny seeing you with Carlos that night. Claude Armitage introduced us and I took it from there. I told you I’d never go back, didn’t I? Do you know what Carlos likes most about me? I told him my father had a castle in Ayrshire but lost all his money, and he thinks I’m a nice class of girl. I thought I’d better not let on I knew you but I tried to stop Carlos doing anything. He was mad at you, said you had to be taught a lesson because you wouldn’t take a warning. I’d have tipped you off if I’d known where to find you. They don’t like it when people bilk and duck out, Carlos says he’d like to cut their you know what off personally. He’s nice to me. He runs a whole group of clubs for the syndicate and he’s put me in a flat off Curzon Street, just super. I sometimes go to the clubs but he won’t let me play, says he doesn’t want me getting into bad habits. He hardly lets me out of his sight, says he’d cut me up if he found me with anybody. Do you know you were one of my bad habits, or could have been. You can’t say I didn’t offer. Best of luck. I think about you.

  Chapter Six

  Dimmock dissected his grilled haddock with the care he gave to everything, first easing the large central bone away from the flesh, then meticulously attending to the smaller bones, pulling out one or two obstinate ones with his fingers, finally flaking away the succulent flesh from the skin and putting it into his mouth. He liked fish for breakfast, and had it three times a week. It was one of his few extravagances.

  On this morning he ate his haddock unhurriedly, followed it with one piece of toast and two cups of tea and then said to his wife, ‘If I sit here for ever I shan’t get to Timbuctoo for lunch, shall I?’ He had a number of such phrases, some of them nonsensical, like ‘Lovely bit of haddock, brought up in a high class paddock,’ or ‘Every healthy growing nipper should eat each day a nice grilled kipper.’ The fact that on this morning he responded to his wife’s query about the haddock only by saying that it was very nice showed him to be unusually preoccupied.

  ‘You’re all packed ready. I’ve put in an extra shirt and socks.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear. I’d better be getting off.’

  Dimmock got up from the table, brushed his teeth, brought down his shabby suitcase, got out the old but still reliable little car, kissed his wife, and drove away from the semi-detached house in Wembley where he had lived for twenty years, ever since the war ended. He had gone in for a teachers’ training scheme after being demobbed, but with a couple of small kids it just hadn’t been possible to make ends meet and he had never been sorry that he gave it up to go into his present work, which wasn’t exciting but provided a steady living. Now the kids, a girl and a boy, had grown up and married and Dimmock was getting on, in his fifties, with his wife the same. In a way he hadn’t got much to show for his life, but then look at it another way and why should you want anything more than a decent comfortable house and a bit of garden, a couple of kids who’d never been any trouble, nice neighbours who never poked their noses into your affairs, and a good programme to watch on the telly? How many people had as much, especially in other countries? And when people had more – here Dimmock would make the point forcibly to his wife or to a neighbour if one happened to have come in for a glass of beer – did it make them happy? ‘Not always, not by any manner of means. And I know what I’m talking about,’ he would say.

  He knew what he was talking about because, as his wife said, he was a detective. Or as Dimmock himself put it, he was an operative in a firm of inquiry agents.

  Most of the work was humdrum, concerned with chasing up bad debts or trying to trace crooks who had been practising confidence tricks or long firm frauds. He had been taken off divorce
work because some of the cases had shocked and disgusted him, and at the Second To None Agency he had long since been classified by Mr Clarence Newhouse, who owned it and was known to Dimmock as the Chief, as a willing workhorse, a man who was not too bright but would never fiddle his expenses or produce an imaginary report about footslogging when he had been propping up a bar all day. Such virtues are rare in the lower ranks of detection. If Dimmock was asked to find a missing woman last seen in Birmingham he would go on doggedly looking until he found her or was called off the trail. The fact that almost all disappearances are voluntary never depressed him. He would say that human nature is a funny thing, and be ready to get on with the next job. In his twenty years as an operative he had suffered violence only three times, the most serious of them being at the hands of a woman who beat him over the head with an umbrella and then threw him downstairs when he suggested that she should return to her husband.

  Dimmock was assigned to the Foster case only because an operative named Berryman had been suddenly taken ill. Berry-man would have known all about the case, whereas the Chief had to explain most of the details to Dimmock. However, the assignment was straightforward enough. He was to check up on the movements of Mrs Foster with the idea of disproving her story of what she had done and where she had been on the night of her husband’s murder. He was also to see what he could find out about her relationship with her cousin, Mortimer Lands. As the Chief explained all this Dimmock nodded again and again.

  ‘It’s likely you’ll find that the police and the defence solicitors have made inquiries already. Use your loaf when you ask questions.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s something out of the way for us, a murder inquiry. Bit of excitement for you.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Newhouse gave up in despair. He looked at the long lugubrious face with the two deep lines carved in it and thought, oh well, at least he’ll go through the motions.

  There is a kind of routine laid down in such cases, and Dim-mock followed it. He booked in at the Commercial Hotel, drove to Byron Avenue and past the house, found the nearest shopping area and began to ask questions. He found the grocer and the butcher who delivered to the Villa Majorca, produced a photograph of Lands and asked if they had ever seen him when they called at the house. They had not. He drove round until he found the milkman, went to the Post Office and saw the postman who delivered mail at the Villa, and received similar negative replies. The postman thought he had seen a Triumph Vitesse parked in the drive, and Lands owned such a car, but the man could not be sure.

  Dimmock went back to the hotel, had two drinks before dinner, bought one for the barman, and asked where he should take a young lady if he wanted a good meal and a real slap-up evening. In town? No, not in town, out in the country, some really nice place where you could have a little celebration, no expense spared. With accommodation, the barman asked slyly, and Dimmock admitted that that might be an advantage. He got the addresses of three country hotels and three restaurants. Then he went in to dinner, which was thick cornflour soup, roast lamb, and treacle pudding without very much treacle. During dinner he read the local paper and got a couple more names from that, one a restaurant and the other a country club. If Lands and Mrs Foster had gone out together, there was a good chance that they had used one of these places.

  After dinner he made out his report in the bedroom. There was no writing desk or table and he wrote in a chair with a pad on his knee, in the firm copperplate hand he had been taught at school. At the end of the report he detailed the day’s expenses. calculated at so much a mile for the car, and including the pub lunch for which he had obtained a bill. Then he undressed, considered having a bath and decided against it because he thought that two baths a week were enough for a man of his age, put on his pyjamas which were silk, another of his little extravagances like fish for breakfast, and went to bed. He was not depressed by his failure to find out anything. He was only doing a job.

  Chapter Seven

  Four women, Mr Hussick had said, it was splendid that they had four women. ‘Majority verdicts nowadays, you know, used to be enough to have one, now we need three. Ten to two guilty, nine to three innocent.’

  ‘Do you mean women are less likely to find me guilty?’

  ‘Depends on the case. Child cruelty, killing somebody at a road crossing, I’d want men. Men every time in a car case. But something like this I’d choose women. If we had eight women and four men–’ Mr Hussick raised his brows, clicked his tongue. Eight women and four men, he seemed to imply, would mean acquittal.

  The four women did not look very promising. One sat bolt upright and stared straight in front of her all the time. Another had a blue rinse and spent a good deal of time contemplating her nails. The third was pretty but fatuous, smiled often, and looked round the Court when counsel on either side made a point as though prepared to join in a round of applause. The fourth, older than the rest, an iron-haired woman in her sixties, produced a notebook and made so many notes that she might have been writing an article. At times she raised her head and looked hard at Tony for a period of seconds. He was uncomfortably aware of this gaze, which he found hard to meet. When he did stare back at her, his eyes dropped first. Would she take that as an indication of guilt?

  Mr Penny the jeweller was in the box. Where was the wart behind his ear? Surely it had been on the left side? How extra-ordinary that it seemed to have vanished.

  ‘He told me that it was a family heirloom.’

  ‘A family heirloom.’ Hardy repeated the words slowly, so that they should sink in. ‘He said that these links and pin were a family heirloom. And then?’

  ‘I asked if he wanted a valuation, and he said he might consider selling them. I offered eighty pounds. He said he wanted a hundred.’

  ‘A hundred, yes, did he say anything further?’

  ‘He said he needed the money, temporarily embarrassed were the words he used I think, and that nothing less would be any use.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘I’m not a hard man. He seemed to be a nice young fellow.’ Hardy waited, eyes cast down at the papers before him, foot tapping slightly. With a quick beam at Hardy, at the judge, the jury, Penny the benevolent said, ‘I said, I’ll take a chance, give you a hundred.’

  ‘Did he accept the offer?’

  ‘No. He said he’d changed his mind, put them in his pocket and went out. Couldn’t get out fast enough.’

  Hardy looked at his papers again, sat down. Newton slowly shuffled to his feet, rocked on his heels. Penny turned his head and Tony saw the mole. There it was, on the left side as he had thought. He felt relieved, as though the existence of the mole proved something.

  ‘Just one or two questions, Mr Penny, I shan’t keep you long. You say you are not a hard man. Would you say you were a charitable one?’

  The jeweller bristled, then gave a cunning smile. ‘I give a pound for my poppy on Remembrance Day.’

  There was a tiny ripple of subdued mirth. Tony looked quickly at the jury. Pretty But Fatuous put her hand over her mouth, Blue Rinse looked up in surprise and down again, Iron Hair wrote in her notebook. One or two of the men shuffled their bottoms uneasily. Newton went on rocking.

  ‘That isn’t quite what I meant. Did you think you were being charitable in offering a hundred pounds for this jewellery?’

  The smile vanished. ‘It was a business deal.’

  ‘Precisely. What would you think the links and pin were worth?’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to say.’

  ‘Perhaps I can help you. Would it surprise you to know that they had been valued at two hundred and fifty pounds?’

  ‘What they’re valued at–’

  ‘Just answer my question, would it surprise you?’

  ‘Black opals are unlucky, people don’t like them.’

  ‘Yes or no, Mr Penny.’

  The judge, lean and birdlike, looked over the top of half moon spectacles. ‘Answer counsel’s question, Mr Penny.’
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  Mr Penny’s mouth turned down in a pout. ‘No.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be surprised. So when Mr Jones took the things away he might have been hoping to get a better price?’

  ‘I offered what he asked.’

  ‘Quite. So if he had been just concerned with money he would have accepted. Wouldn’t you say that his behaviour was that of somebody who had discovered that an article he had thought worth five or ten pounds was in fact much more valuable?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘No no, Mr Penny.’ Newton scratched his wig, pulled it slightly askew. ‘Do you say so, that is the question.’

  Sulkily, still pouting, Mr Penny agreed. ‘He could have been.’

  ‘Supposing he had just been given these articles as a present and had named what he thought was an outrageous figure for them, that would explain his reactions, would it not?’

  ‘It might have done.’ Flaring up suddenly he asked, ‘Then why did he say he had to have a hundred pounds?’

  ‘I am not here to answer your questions, Mr Penny, but if he really wanted a hundred pounds why did he not take it when it was offered?’ And before Hardy could intervene to protest that this was a statement rather than a question, Newton sat down.

  Later that day Newton saw the accused personally, for the first and only time. He did so only because Hussick had said that the position ought to be made perfectly clear. The solicitor was also present.

  ‘I want to make sure that you fully understand the implications of this defence,’ Newton said. ‘Mr Hussick has already told you that extensive inquiries have been made to check your story without result.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We have not been able to find anybody to confirm your story that Mrs Foster drove you to the point where the launch was kept, known as Bensley Water–’