“Would you recognize your work?” I asked him
He lifted his lip at my ignorance. “O’ course.”
“Then you come along with me, and we’ll squeeze along by the house. Then you can check.”
“It’s a long way round.”
“Shorter if I threw you over.” My patience was becoming strained.
He belched, and we began to walk, but it wasn’t a long way because there was a narrow gate in the fence a few yards along, and this led us out into the street. Then it was a short way back along Cash’s mangey drive and a squeeze past his rotting garage, and we were there.
He spoke with scorn. “It’s my work. My clips.”
We had our backs flat against the house wall, our noses six inches from the fence. “You’re sure?”
“Give over.”
“And it hasn’t been tampered with?”
“Not touched. You’re on me foot.”
“Not twisted or mangled in any way?”
“What’s up wi’ you? Can’t you see?”
“You may need to remember it. Now... suppose you start dismantling a section.”
“Ain’t got me tools.”
“Then we’ll go back for them. Your foot all right now?”
“You go back,” he sneered. Then he raised his voice to a shriek. “Jeff! Chuck us the clippers, mate.”
I just caught a glimpse of dumpy Jeff ambling away in the direction of the clippers, then I made my way back.
George was contemplating the window, with Ron Taylor, who had put it in and glazed it, at his elbow. Ginger was looking on critically.
“The side sections and the roof are all bolted together from the inside,” George told me. “The thing’s built like a fortress. Even the window’s steel.”
It was a four by three window broken into nine panes, the top, central one opening outwards. It was open at that time. None of the putty had set.
“Putty’s smeared,” said George, reaching out and catching my finger as I went to touch it. “The laddie here says he didn’t leave it like that.”
“As though I would.”
“And he’s got an idea about it,” George said, obviously not impressed with it.
Ron Taylor turned to me, perhaps searching for a sympathetic ear. Cash, who had been darting backwards and forwards following the action, gestured encouragement, nodding at me.
“It could’ve been done. Just. You see, these metal frames they’re screwed into the inside edges of the wooden surrounds through holes that we cover with putty when the glass goes in. Four screws. Right? So you can’t see ‘em. But if the putty was scraped out, you could get at them screws and undo the frame and lift it right out. Then get out that way, put it back, and put the putty back again. See?”
I saw. “You mean a deliberate means of creating a mystery? He’d do that would he? Was he a man like that?”
“Do anythin’ to make himself look big. Draw attention to himself. Get one up. Just his hammer, that’d be.”
“No,” said George decidedly.
“But it fits,” I protested.
“He’d have the tools,” Ron added. “He was wearing his overalls, and he’d got screwdrivers in the leg pockets. Could’ve done it.”
“Could’ve done it,” repeated Cash.
George cut in forcefully. “No. It’d be too difficult. It would mean one hand out of that window, reaching down and across. Scraping out putty and dropping none — d’you see any, Dave? No! And handling a screwdriver with what’d be the tips of his fingers... I’m not having it.”
“Would you rather have an impossibility?”
“I’d rather have logical behaviour. And getting this frame out from inside isn’t that.”
“We’ll see, George, we’ll see.”
And very soon we did, because two men with cutters and relish can demolish a fence in no time at all. They were rolling it sideways when I turned.
“It’s ready,” shrieked Lane.
I squeezed along. Even George, pulling in his belly in a way frightening to see, wasn’t going to be kept out. One after the other we reached the door. It opened inwards — Ron Taylor had shoved it open. We stepped inside.
It was bare and empty, apart from a large spanner lying on the floor. I looked at it carefully, and compared it by eye with the six large nuts that were holding the shed to its base. It appeared to be the right tool for the job, and when last seen had been in Fred Wallach’s hand as the shed dropped over him. There was no indication anywhere that the inside of the shed had been tampered with. The bolts that held the sections together were all in place, and the six big nuts appeared to be tightened down solidly. The floor surface was a plain, smooth concrete, with that glazed look it has when it’s fresh and not really matured.
There was no evidence left behind of Fred Wallach, no cigarette end — did he smoke, I wondered — no scrap of paper, no dropped tool. Not even the calico bag. Just the big spanner.
I looked behind me at the door. This, too, had a small pane of glass. Still there, but turned sideways, was the small piece of wood they usually fasten across the opening edge before transporting a sectional shed.
“The door was open.” I merely made the observation, but George seemed irritable.
“As it would be. They put it together a few feet away. They’d have to walk in and out, wouldn’t they?”
I said mildly: “Wallach would. Ron Taylor seems to have done the glazing.”
He grunted. He was examining the steel-plate strengtheners Wallach had put in the top and bottom corners, knowing the whole thing was going to be lifted.
“Did a good job,” he murmured. “A good job of disappearing.”
He looked at me with his eyes glazed. He had that stubborn expression on his big, heavy face.
“It gets you, doesn’t it!”
“George, for heaven’s sake don’t get involved. It’s not for us. It was done by some trick or other, maybe involving all of them. We don’t even know they’re telling the truth.”
“They were,” he grumbled.
“But George, if it’s as they say, we’re up against an impossibility. If Wallach bolted down those six nuts, then he couldn’t have got out. Not through the door, because the fence is undisturbed. Through the window, possibly... but it’d be quite a feat. So all right. Say he didn’t bolt it down, and they came back and lifted the shed off him. Then who did tighten up the nuts, and how did he get out? The only possibility would be a complex business from outside, taking the whole window out and carefully putting it back. And why? All that to create something weird and unacceptable!”
George shrugged, and scowled out of the window. “Whatever it was, he did it without any help from that lot.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I was talking to one or two of ‘em. Not one’d give him a light unless he was soaked in petrol. It was like that, Dave. He was like it. A loner. No friends... not men friends, anyway. He did it alone, Dave, I’m convinced, and he did it neatly.”
“By supernatural means — is that it? One good spell, and he went in a puff of smoke.”
He regarded me seriously. “They say,” he told me mournfully, “that he was muttering incantations all day.”
“What!”
“Something about laughing and shattering. No sense to it. All day he was on. Shattering and laughing, and somebody called Dick. Dick M something. Or Dick Haymes.”
“There was a Dick Haymes who was a singer.”
“It’s serious, Dave.”
“Come on!”
“They didn’t tell the police.”
“What’s to tell ‘em? This set up? They’d laugh their heads off.”
“Would they? Then why’s Ken Duxford around? He’s a sergeant now, I hear. I saw him stroll past, looking uninterested. Ever heard of C.I.D. strolling and not interested?”
I didn’t like the way it was going, and where it was taking George. “You’ll kick yourself...”
“Let’s
go and see the wife,” he said. “Let’s see if she’s told the police.”
Two
Vera Wallach had not sent for the police. She said that if there was a chance that Fred had gone for good she’d keep quiet about it, in case somebody brought him back.
She didn’t seem to be any great catch herself, a thin, acidulated woman with a lash to her tongue, even when expressing her indifference for Fred. She seemed to be about thirty. They had been married ten years, but there was no sign of children.
George and I just about filled the flat. It was on the third floor of one of those council blocks that surrounds a courtyard. This design ensures that all noise is confined and rebounds from wall to wall, a recipe for misery. Vera had kept the radio on, no doubt from habit, and to drown the cacophony of the kiddie-winkies at play down below. She had made the flat a frilly, feminine place, and no doubt the stains on the walls and ceiling were from a previous tenant.
The sitting room in which we were speaking to her was narrow and long, and she had the light pendant drawn to one side by a piece of string, concentrating it over her ironing board. Midday, and it was dark down that end. She was ironing feminine things, nothing of Fred’s. No sign, either, of Fred in the room, no motoring magazines tossed onto the settee, no house slippers by the broken easy chair. Perhaps it was not a place he cared to come home to.
I was letting George do the talking. George was well into it — interested, you understand.
“So you didn’t know,” he asked, “that they’re wondering about him back at the site?”
The site was two miles away.
She thumped the iron down on a pair of blue knickers, and its green light flickered. “Nobody’s been to tell me.”
“You weren’t worried that he was out all night?”
She shrugged.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t be, if he often works away from home.”
“Not him. A few miles at most, and he’s got his van.”
“So you’d expect him?”
“Not expect. With Fred, you expect him when he arrives.”
“Often goes missing, then?”
“Not missing.” She was hunting for something in a plastic basket.
“Then what?”
“With his fancy woman,” she said negligently. “One of ‘em.”
“You’d know that? Or just guessing?”
“Oh... I knew. Believe me, I knew. He’d tell me. Afterwards he’d tell me.”
Did he, indeed? Nice chap. I had wandered round until I’d found the inevitable, their wedding photograph. It was the first time I’d seen what he looked like, tarted up here in a dark suit with shoulder pads a foot wide and trousers flopping in folds over his shoes. He was two inches shorter than his wife. His face was nothing to be proud of — lips too thick and eyes too narrow and ears sticking out — but otherwise not too revolting. And he did smoke, or had then (there were no ashtrays visible in the room) because he had his right hand cupped with its back towards the camera, and smoke was still drifting from his nose to glorify the memory.
George kept his tone level. “So you’d expect him to turn up this time, and tell you again?”
“Sure to.” There was just a hint of snap in her voice.
“Including a name?”
“Always a name.”
“And in this case...”
“Unless it’s changed — Clare Moss.”
“You know her?”
“No!” She was suddenly violent. “No. He keeps ‘em far away.”
“How far?”
“This one’s forty miles.”
“Ah yes. You said he’d got a van.”
“A blue Ford.”
“Address? Would he share that with you?”
“Dear God, yes. He never missed a detail. Threw the lot at me. Watching to see...” She caught at herself. “He gave me her address. If you ask me, he’s there now.”
She passed it on, and George made a note. “No doubt he is,” he said evenly. It had all been business-like with him, no emotion, but he couldn’t control his curiosity right at the end. “And you’ve never done anything about it?”
“I said I’d speak to my brother, when he came out.”
“Out?”
“Of prison. He came out last week.”
“So you’ve had time to speak to him.”
“On the phone.” She nodded, complacent, warmed suddenly by the chance of violence. “There’ll be an end to it. Fingal will sort him out.”
George gulped a little and said yes he was sure, and we left, and because I’d noticed his reaction I asked him, when I’d got the car moving.
“Fingal?”
“His name’s Philip Ingle. Fingal for short. If I was ten years younger I wouldn’t care to take him on. He’s got this bear-hug. If he gets you in it, you’re finished. They call it Fingal’s Cave, in the profession, because that’s what happens to your ribs.”
“Profession?”
“He’s a film stunt-man. One of his spare time stunts was diving from windows with a handful of loot into waiting cars. The last time it was a police car waiting.”
“Then maybe,” I suggested, “Fred Wallach’s heard he’s out, and decided it’s safer to go missing.”
He grunted. We continued to cover the forty miles.
Fred Wallach seemed to go for women in flats. But this one was the upper of a series of two-storeyed ones, set in an arc around a pleasant stretch of green with a few trees. It was two-thirty, but the enclosure was quiet. Grey light rested on it, and one or two curtains twitched. We got out of the Porsche.
Clare Moss was a little, dark puss-cat of a woman, all sleek comfort and soft, easy movements, controlled, measured. Not a wasted gesture in her; not a useless, graceful throw. The vase was intended for my head, and would have got it if my reactions had been slow. Two pounds of fake Worcester shattered against the side of the door.
The door had been open an inch, and there’d been no response to my tentative tap, so I’d eased it fully open. Can’t ever resist a temptation. But she had been poised, waiting.
I said: “Excuse me — are you Clare Moss?”
“Damn you,” she said, doubtless for causing her to waste a bit of Worcester.
“Expecting somebody?”
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded. The fur was ruffed behind her neck and the claws unsheathed. Her tail, if she’d had one, would have been fat.
I introduced myself, and introduced George, who was entering tentatively. His leg’s better now, but he’s slowing up, old George is, and he’s not good at dodging flying pottery.
“We were looking for Fred Wallach.”
She did not react. Now I got a better look at her, I could see she’d been in a fight. There was a cut over one eye, which was darkening, and her lips — nice lips normally, I’d say, purring lips — were thicker one side than the other. She was wearing a dark skirt and a loose-sleeved blouse, but it was nearly transparent so that I could see her right arm was bruised. I could see, too, that she wasn’t wearing a bra’. She folded her arms.
“No good coming here.”
“Not at the moment, you mean. Any good coming some other time?”
“It might be.” But she was relaxing. The fury had poured from her. “He’s here at odd times. If you’re the police...” She gave a throaty little laugh. “... I’ll tell him you called.”
“We’re not the police. Was he here last night?”
“No.” Little frown puckers appeared between her large, brown eyes. “I wasn’t expecting him.”
“But perhaps you were, a few minutes ago.”
“No. It’s not that.”
You let them lead you away. It gratifies them. “Then what was it?”
“I was angry.”
“So I gathered. You would be, with those bruises. You assumed he’d come back.”
“I told you Fred wasn’t here.”
“Somebody was.”
“You were asking about Fred,” s
he persisted.
I gently led back to what she’d been avoiding. “I still am. Somebody was here, because those bruises are fresh. You seem so determined that it wasn’t Fred Wallach, that I’m led to believe it was.”
“Nobody’s been here.”
“You walked into a door, perhaps?”
She bristled. “What’s it got to do with you?”
I’d pushed it too far and too quickly. “We’re looking for Fred Wallach. You say he hasn’t been here. Would you care to tell me who has? It’s all I’m asking, to clear the air.”
Her eyes flickered. She half turned away, as though to hide the soft, suggestive smile on her lips. Unfortunately the stiffness turned it into a sneer. But when she turned back her face was open and revealing. It wasn’t an act. She had a face that beamed out her moods. Fun to be with, I’d say, fun at another, gentler time with the lights low — but not too low. You wouldn’t want to miss one flicker of those meaningful eyes.
“Such a fuss,” she said gently. “What can it matter to you who’s been here? As long as it wasn’t Fred.”
“I don’t like to see a young woman treated with violence.”
She opened her mouth to laugh, but no sound came. The joy was in the shape of it; the laughter was in her eyes. “There hasn’t been any violence. You’re a married man, I’m sure, a big handsome creature like you. You know how it is. Even with love there’s... well, aggression.”
I recalled the flying vase. “Which you look back on with fond pleasure,” I agreed. “Well, thank you, Miss Moss. If you do see Fred, just tell him there’re people anxious about him.”
She held the door for us. “And that I can’t believe,” she said.
“So many disbelievers about,” I agreed, crunching pottery in the wake of George.
George stood by the car. “Miss?” he asked. “She was wearing a wedding ring, Dave.”
“I know. I’ll take the car round the corner and walk back.”
“Any point?”
“She was lying. Let’s see what the neighbours know.”
I did a gentle tour on foot around the arc. Oh, but they were reluctant to discuss people’s affairs, and oh, they couldn’t wait to tell me. Had there been a fight? There most certainly had. You could hear it all round the Crescent. But who? That blue van again — and wasn’t it time he washed it. The blue van! Wallach’s Ford, and there it’d been on the site, and we hadn’t looked at it! What time was this, I asked. Would you believe... three in the morning. Disgraceful. Got here at two-ish, he did, took his case in, and at three he was out like a flash. Couldn’t see him for dust.
The Weight of Evidence Page 2