The Weight of Evidence

by Roger Ormerod

  “Peculiar. Laughs with murder in his eyes.”

  From George, that was almost poetic. “Did he say why he’s in the district?”

  “Says it’s his home town. Apple pie twice, love.”

  “I didn’t order...”

  “For me.” He beamed. “Lubin says he naturally came home, and doesn’t see why he shouldn’t live in comfort now he’s here.”

  “Which I take it you treated with contempt.”

  “There were binoculars on a side table. He said he liked to pick out the places he’d known, which pile of rubble was the Shoemaker’s Arms, which was his junior school where he first assaulted a female.”

  “It sounds almost acceptable. Nostalgia, it’s called.”

  “Baloney! I tried ‘em. They’re good glasses. I could see Ken Duxford waving his arms while they loaded things into an ambulance.”

  I had not told him about our new client. I thought it was best to show interest in his case before I introduced him to mine.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he was watching last night. When somebody lifted that shed and popped Fred Wallach into the cellar.”

  He shook his head like a pelican, helping his pie down. “Says he was in an all-night poker session with somebody called Beefy Walters.”

  “We’re absolutely surrounded by big men.”

  “It takes a big un...”

  “I know George — to throw you out. You called him a liar, you said.”

  “I asked him if he still thought Marty Coleman had had the loot down in that cellar. He said Coleman certainly galloped away from that bank with it. Then I asked him if he was still interested in it, and he said of course not, it was worthless.”

  “So you called him a liar. And that was when he looked at you with murder in his eyes.”

  George decided he’d have a brandy knocking up the expenses after we’d finished with his case. “No,” he said. “The murder was there when he said he wasn’t interested. It was why I called him a liar.”

  “So Greenbaum threw you out.”

  “He’s got this lock... I thought my arm was corning off. But it was the fourth round of drinks. It was his time. I don’t think Lubin had finished, actually. I think he was going to invite me to tonight’s poker session.”

  “You’d cost us a fortune.”

  “On expenses.”

  “We’ve finished with Emmett Cash.”

  He grinned. “You’ve been quiet, Dave. No more protests. So something’s happened. Another client, perhaps?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Somebody killed Wallach. So there’ll be people shouting for help.”

  “You’re a cynic.” And I told him who wanted help this time.

  “Shouts before he’s hurt, that one,” he said.

  And Ginger Dyke was doing some more shouting when we got back to the room. The phone was ringing before I got the door open, and while George was seeing whether my shirts would fit him I answered it.

  “I’m down at the Station,” said Dyke. “They let me have one call.”

  “Then you should’ve called a solicitor. Have they charged you?”

  “It’s not a solicitor I want, it’s you.” He sounded tense.

  “Have they charged you?”

  “It’s your job, ain’t it, to find out who did it? You said you’re on my side.”

  “Oh I am, I am,” I assured him, not too sincerely. “What’s the charge?”

  “It’s just for questioning.”

  Then why the panic? “All you’ve got to do is answer.”

  “You ought to be down here.”

  “Ought I? Whatever for?”

  “To sort out this Superintendent character.”

  I could imagine that. “Just answer their...”

  “He laughed when I told him what you said about the gun.”

  I looked across at George. The one he was trying was tight around the chest. He grinned encouragingly.

  “Laughed?” I said. “I’ll be right down.” It had been logical reasoning. Nothing amusing about it.

  I hung up. George said: “Lucky the neck fits. What now?”

  “One of us ought to get down to the Station. They’re playing tricks with Dyke.”

  “Dave,” he said, “you weren’t keen on the client I took on. I’m not keen on the one you did. So you go. How many shirts did you bring? Any decent-sized pants?”

  I left him to find out and asked the way to the Police Station at the desk. Ten minutes in the Porsche, and I was wasting my time because they’d got Ginger Dyke in an interrogation room, and nobody was interested in me.

  I sat in that dismal office for hours, more and more stubborn as the time went on. I’d been a fool going there at all; I’ll only confirm it by giving up and going away.

  Around one in the morning a young constable ushered in Vera Wallach, and said something to the desk sergeant. If she recognised me, nothing appeared in those flat, empty eyes. Fingal, who was with her, nodded to me, but wasn’t going to leave her side. They had been down to identify her husband, I gathered, and would she just mind waiting a few moments because the super wanted a word, and if she’d go into that little room they’d bring her a cup of tea.

  Fingal wandered over to where I was sitting on a bench. Even his shadow was huge.

  “You disappeared smartlike,” I said, not in my best humour.

  “Mate, I’m on parole. One mention of the police, and I’m off.”

  “But you’re here now.”

  “Being a good citizen. Helping ‘em. What about you?”

  “I don’t seem to be helping anybody,” I admitted.

  “Then I suggest you sod off home,” he said amiably.

  “What?” I looked at him, startled, stared up into his long, lugubrious face, and was surprised to recognise his fury.

  “Vera’s upset,” he said, staring at the door to the little room. “Wouldn’t have had any harm come to him. Not for the world. Doted on the bastard.”

  “Then why did she ask you to sort him out?” I demanded.

  He shrugged. “The odd broken rib, where’s the harm in that? It’d keep him at home, so’s she could look after him. But now she’s real upset. I don’t want anybody diggin’ around. Y’ know.”

  “Something I might uncover?” I asked.

  “Something I might. People could get hurt.”

  “Thanks. I’ll look out.”

  He nodded again, and just then Supt. Meakin showed out Vera, who was in tears, and was very solicitous as he handed her over to her brother. Nearly in tears he was himself. Then, just when I thought he was ignoring me, he turned and was instantly jovial. Even kind, as one might be to a moron.

  “What’s this he says about a gun?”

  “Wallach was shot, wasn’t he?”

  “He was. So somebody had a gun. It could have been him as well as anybody else.”

  I stood up and stretched. We stood eye to eye. He smiled. I smiled.

  “All I told him was that the police wouldn’t be so stupid as to think he’s the sort to own a gun.”

  “Nobody’s saying that,” he said, quietly hurt, playing with me.

  “Then how...”

  “He’s not being charged. We’ll take him back to the George later.”

  “But you’re saying something.”

  “You mustn’t bully me, Mallin. Really you mustn’t. When I’m trying to help.”

  “Help who?”

  “Me, of course. We’ve had a ballistics report. A prelim, of course, but very smart work under the circumstances. We never fully appreciate... well, as I was saying, the first report is that both men in that cellar were shot with the same gun.”

  “But they can’t have been...” I stopped myself. He was watching me with mild interest. “You’re not going to tell me that you’re holding Ginger Dyke for that!”

  “We’re not holding him. You don’t listen, Mallin.”

  “You’re surely not saying that Ginger Dyke c
ould be Dutch Marks, come back after all these years. He’s too young...”

  “Well now.” Meakin scratched his ear and grimaced. “I hadn’t thought of that. He’s really not too young, you know. Thirty-six.”

  “Quite apart from the first being suicide... What had you thought?” I asked suspiciously.

  “You,” he said. “Your remark about Dyke not owning a gun. It’s valid enough in itself, but not relevant. Now I’ve told you this, perhaps you can help. Always open to suggestion, that’s me. You saw the set-up. Two men shot with the same gun. A hand missing, as though something had been snatched from the body. Then Wallach shot. You see the inference. It must have been with the gun in that corpse’s hand. How else could it have happened? You tell me, Mallin. I’d like to know. As a matter of interest, you understand.”

  “But...” I couldn’t think how to go on.

  “Because if that’s the case, then Dyke wouldn’t need to own a gun. It’d be there on the spot. Now wouldn’t it?”

  I suppose it was his way of getting rid of me. He drove me away, flummoxed.

  I went back and told George. I woke him up to tell him. He said: “I’m not having that,” with a quiet and easy confidence, and went back to sleep before I could say angrily that nobody cared whether he had it or not, and more angrily that he was wearing my pyjamas.

  In the morning Ginger Dyke was back in his room, all grumbles and evasion, and I could have kicked him. Elsa wasn’t home when I phoned. It was very strange and disquieting. Over breakfast George kept saying that he could prove the cellar door had been bolted on the inside, so that the gun must have been shut away in there too.

  “George, lay off, will you! That’s what they’re saying.”

  “Then how the hell could it’ve fired both shots?”

  “Don’t ask me. It’s your locked cellar. You explain it.”

  I had an urgent desire to dash off home, if only because George was already straining the seams of one of my shirts. It was an excuse to get away from it for a while.

  Quite frankly, I was deep in a mood that I found distressing. Elsa had not stayed away from home before, not without warning. At any other time I would not have thought twice about it, I’m sure, but I’d had a belly-full of Dyke’s extreme jealousy, and perhaps some of it had rubbed off. One can be too complacent. I cursed Dyke for arousing these ideas, but they were with me, and I took them home because I thought I’d be closer to her there, and be able to recapture my sense of security.

  The phone rang ten minutes after I got there. I snatched at it.

  “What the devil’s happening, Elsa?”

  She seemed to miss the sharpness in my voice. I’ve never heard her so excited. There was a rigmarole about murder and theft at her end, the whole thing sounding very unhealthy. I said she ought to come home. It wasn’t her sort of thing.

  “It’s my investment, David,” she said, which put my nerves on edge again. It’s not all joy and pleasure when your wife has the money. She made it worse by pointing out that my earnings as an enquiry agent had not been fabulous.

  I attempted desperately to capture her interest. “We’ve just landed our first joint assignment.” I tried for a trace of enthusiasm.

  “Is there any money in it?”

  “Well no, I suppose not. But Elsa...”

  “Because I could do with your help here.”

  Now that sounded false. There had been a mention of a name — Ian Carefree. He had been an old mate of mine, a handsome devil then. Did she mean she was staying with him? If so, the request for me to go there could’ve been deliberately intended to keep me away. I played up, bringing out all the reasons why her case had no interest, and therefore why she should come home.

  She wasn’t having any, going on about this interesting facet, and that. I was irritated.

  She paused, detecting it.

  “Leave it, love, and come home,” I said. I was asking more than that, appealing for reassurance that what we had always possessed between us was still there. It went over her head. Blasted phones, they kill emotion.

  “I can’t.”

  I tried desperately for her sympathy. I told her we’d got a locked room thing, a classic. It meant nothing.

  “I’ll keep in touch, David,” she promised. My mind was on fire. I tried to concentrate, to appeal to her to keep out of trouble, and then, in desperation, because I knew that now I couldn’t walk away from Ginger Dyke, I promised to clear up our case quickly. My God, clear it up! I hoped she didn’t detect the despair in that statement, and we hung up.

  Ian Carefree! The last I’d heard, he was a widower. They’re the worst.

  I was in no mood to argue with George when I got back to the hotel and found that he’d spent all morning with Ken Duxford, drinking. On the face of it, a get-together of old friends, but each had been pumping the other. Knowing that George’s head isn’t as strong as he thinks, I reckoned Duxford had probably got a fair bargain for the snippet of information he had traded

  that the police reckoned they had a good case against Dyke. But he hadn’t said why, nor explained Dyke’s release, if it was that good.

  George reckoned that it was this one gun for both deaths that was hanging them up. He was getting involved now, with my client. I wished I could feel something but discomfort whenever I thought about Dyke.

  So we hammered out the bolted trapdoor bit. Up to then, it seemed to me, we had treated it too lightly.

  “It’s like this,” said George, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Here, hand me that book.”

  I did so, and he opened it out at the middle, placing it covers down on the centre of the bed, with its spine pointing straight up the centreline of the counterpane.

  “Right,” he said. “The bed’s the shape of the base they built the shed on. The front half of the book represents the trapdoor and the back half the opening. You with me?”

  “Ahead of you.”

  “We’ll take it in stages. Now, this is how the hinges were, before they were torn out of the wood. Open and shut the book, and those are the hinges, down the middle. Shut the book, and the trapdoor’s shut. So that if the bolt’d been on the outside, where it’d normally be, it would’ve been where the cover of the book is. Agreed?”

  I hesitated. “I’m trying to find an objection.”

  “It’s too obvious for objections,” he said, opening and closing the book. “If the bolt was on the outside when the trapdoor was shut, it would’ve been underneath when the flap was thrown open. But in fact, it was on top. We saw it on top. So... bolted inside.”

  “But George, the hinges were broken away.”

  “As they would be — rusted to death — if he threw it open violently enough.”

  “What if he broke the hinges levering it open? What if he didn’t throw it over, but simply picked it up? Then, George... then the bolt would stay on the top if it was bolted outside.”

  He looked at me. “Try it then. Here, I will. The spine’s the hinge. We tear it down the middle...”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “You’re too fussy, Dave. Assume it’s torn, then. You lift one half from the other. Go on, try it. Lift one half up, keeping the book cover on top, and straightaway you separate the two torn halves of the spine. You do, Dave. No getting round it. The hinge edges of the trapdoor and its frame were together.”

  “Theories,” I grumbled. “There could be some reason — some sequence of natural action — that’d do it, and still keeping the hinge edges together, and the bolt on top.”

  “That’s all you think about — motivations.”

  “I’ll work something out.” But I was eyeing the book doubtfully.

  Then he had the cheek to laugh, when he was giving us something that could hold us there forever. His blasted locked room!

  “Well you can’t have it both ways,” I said angrily. “Assume it was bolted inside, then Marty Coleman must have bolted it himself, and therefore was holding the gun when he died.”


  “Or at least, it’d be beside him,” he said with insufferable complacency.

  “So, if they were both shot with the same gun, then it’d been lying there for thirteen years. Would you accept that anybody could simply pick the thing up, and that it’d fire?”

  “No. So they’re wrong. If that’s all they’ve got against Dyke...”

  It wasn’t. There was his uncontrollable, murderous jealousy.

  “And if they’re not wrong?”

  He was amused. “If it was the same gun, then the first would’ve ejected a shell case, just as the second did. But there wasn’t one. I looked for it. Are you going to tell me that whoever killed Wallach hunted for that first one — and it wouldn’t be bright and shiny — and found it, and took it away! And left the second shell case there. Never. That illogical behaviour. How much twisted motivation do you want, Dave?”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “Well, he’s your client, and it’s all on his side.”

  “Get something straight, George,” I said. “Once and for all. We’re partners now. There’s no more your client and my client. He’s ours. And it seems to me you’re more keen on him than I am. So you do something for him, George. Something more than theories.”

  It was a bit unfair, I admit, but I was rattled. He stared at me. George seems to look straight through you. Perhaps he understood; I hadn’t mentioned Elsa. He slapped his palms on his great thighs and stood up.

  “All right, Dave. We go at it from both sides. Me, I’ll dive right in. You do your little character-researching and understanding act. OK?”

  He nodded, smiled, and went out, but I could see he was hurt, George is so big that you feel his pain would be vast, too. And it was my attitude breaking us up, not his.

  But to tell the truth, way down inside me there was more understanding of Dyke than I wished. Now I was beginning to feel what he’d felt for Wallach, and even sympathise with his driving urge to kill him.

  I sat there after George left, with a sickening feeling that our client was guilty.

  Six

  George is a wide-pen character, and there’s nothing complicated about his thinking or actions. So I could guess where he had gone, and why. The suggestion that both corpses were the result of the same gun was a definite link between Wallach’s death and that thirteen year-old crime. And so, as Lubin was so conveniently in the area, and as he’d blandly trotted out an alibi, the thing to do was try to break it. That, I was willing to bet, was George’s objective.