Blood and Judgement

by Michael Gilbert

  “Ricketts?”

  “Intake attendant,” said Petrella. “Lived in that cottage until quite recently. Got fed up and walked out on them.”

  “He couldn’t take the boat with him, hardly,” said the foreman. “If it was there before, it’ll be about somewhere.”

  “How often,” said Dodds, “do you have occasion to search through this little lot?” He indicated the shrubbery.

  “Nothing to do with me,” said the foreman. “My job’s to keep the cut clear. I believe they have it thinned out about once every two years.”

  “And that’s the sort of service we pay our water rates for,” said Dodds. “Come on, Patrick. You go one way and I’ll go the other, and we’ll meet at the far end – if we’re still alive.”

  It was Petrella who found the boat. He had reached a point on the west bank, towards the northern tip of the reservoir, immediately under a path which led up to a high, stockaded fence. Behind the fence, he guessed, must lie the railway workshops; and beyond them again, the main line.

  What he actually saw was a short piece of rusty chain, wound twice round a stake, at the water’s edge. The other end seemed, at first sight, to be made fast under water, but when he bent his back and pulled there was a faint stirring of free movement.

  He shouted to Dodds and between them they hauled from the water, and halfway up on to the concrete apron, the remains of an old pram dinghy.

  “Stove in,” said Dodds. “Stove in and left to rot.” There were two big holes in the bottom. “Probably did it with the butt of an oar. I don’t suppose those are far away either.”

  The prospect of something concrete to look for seemed to have revived his spirits. In ten minutes they had retrieved from the bushes behind the path two oars, three duckboards, a footrest, and two cork fenders.

  “Signs of thought here,” said Dodds. He surveyed the salvage. “Someone takes this boat from the boat shed. Rows across to the north end of the reservoir and sinks the boat. But first he takes out anything that might float and give him away. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then he goes up this path – turns right at the top, because it’s the only way he perishing well can turn – and what next?”

  “He climbs the fence. One foot on that tree stump, another on that bolt head, like so. A bit of a pull – and he’s up.”

  Petrella straddled the fence, puffing slightly.

  “Tarzan of the North London Water Board,” said Dodds, approving. “What’s on the other side?”

  “It’s a yard,” said Petrella. “And a lot of workshops, and a light railway line and – yes – a gate out to the road.”

  “That’s it, then. That’s the way he went.”

  “Quite a few people about.”

  “Not at night.”

  “Not so easy at night. Unless he’d worked it all out beforehand.”

  “Of course he’d worked it out beforehand,” said Dodds. “This is a murderer we’re talking about. A careful chap.”

  Petrella returned to earth, and dusted himself down. “The only thing I don’t see,” he said, “is why he should do it at all. Why didn’t he go out of the main gate. At that time of night, it’d be safe enough. A lot safer than all this caper.”

  “Don’t run before you can walk,” said Dodds. “Everything will be clear as daylight before we’ve finished. Talking of which, we can’t do much more this evening. I spotted a nice little pub on the way in. Got a dartboard too. Let’s go and earn ourselves a pint.”

  “Not more than one, then,” said Petrella weakly. “I’ve got a date with a girl.”

  When he got to Corum Street, he found that life had ebbed back into its derelict creeks and backwaters. Most of the windows had lights in them, and there were two empty prams in the hall.

  When he knocked on the door of Flat D, a voice said, “Come along in, whoever you are.”

  Petrella pushed the door open and looked inside. There was no front hall. Flat D proved to be two intercommunicating rooms. The nearest of them was a living-room, with one of those contraptions which becomes a bed at the whisk of your hostess’ hand: the farther one, as far as he could see through the open door, was a bedroom, which, no doubt, could equally easily become a sitting-room.

  Standing in the communicating doorway was a fluffy-haired, brown-eyed, comfortable-looking woman of thirty – thirty-five – forty? Petrella’s bachelor mind boggled at the problem.

  “Do I know you,” she said, “or have you come to the wrong flat?” It was a Lowland voice, but it had an inner core of toughness, an acquired metropolitan hardness.

  “Mrs Fraser?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Petrella.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I expect you’re surprised.”

  “Not a bit. Is this going to take long enough for me to ask you to sit down?”

  “I – well – I don’t know.”

  “Sit down, then,” said the lady, relenting a little.

  “You said you weren’t surprised,” said Petrella, settling cautiously into a wicker chair. “Why was that? Most people are surprised when–”

  “The colonel – he lives opposite – told me you’d been asking for me this morning. He said ‘from his face you’d call him a schoolboy, but from his boots he’s a policeman.’”

  “And I thought his mind was miles away.”

  “Don’t let him fool you. That’s how he makes his living. You didn’t come to talk about him?”

  “No,” said Petrella. “I came to talk about Mrs Ritchie. You shared these rooms, didn’t you?”

  ‘They’re my rooms. She had the use of one of them for a while.”

  “Could you tell me about that? When she left, and so on.”

  Jean looked at him speculatively, and Petrella got the impression that she was quite used to dealing with policemen; but policemen, perhaps, of a different sort. Not ones who said “Could you” and “Would you”.

  “If you like,” she said. “Though it’s all ancient history now. She came here in – when would it be – January or February of this year. Some time about then. She left toward the end of September.”

  “Do you remember which day?”

  “How should I remember that?”

  “Were you surprised when she left?”

  “No more surprised than when she came. If you’re a policeman you’ll know that her husband was a criminal.”

  “Yes. I knew that.”

  “Well, I can read, Mr–”

  “Petrella.”

  “That sounds foreign.”

  “It’s Spanish, actually.”

  “Uh, huh. I was saying, I can read. When I saw in the papers that Monk Ritchie was out of prison – and later that he was believed to have escaped abroad – I formed my own conclusions.”

  “Yes,” said Petrella. “I thought that was the way of it. What time of day did she go?”

  “I couldn’t be certain. I left her here when I went to work in the morning. She was gone when I came back.”

  “Without taking any of her things with her?”

  “That’s true. But she hadn’t a lot, poor soul.”

  “Are her things still in the room?”

  “Am I a millionairess? It’s been let twice since then. There’s a Polish lady has it now. Would you like to see it? Madame Jablonski is out. She works in a café. She won’t object, I dare say.”

  “How many times would you say the room has been cleaned since Mrs Ritchie left it?”

  “Every day. And repainted and papered last month. Madame did it herself. She’s very artistic.”

  “Then I don’t think,” said Petrella, “that there’s a great deal of point in my looking at it. What became of Rosa’s things?”

  “I packed them in a bag and put them in the storeroom downstairs. Do you want to see them?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Petrella. “I may do. First, could you tell me–” He was unwrapping the parcel he had brought
with him. Mrs Fraser seemed to sense something either from his tone of voice or from his movements, and she was suddenly still.

  “Do you recognize this dress? Or any of these clothes? Or the shoes?”

  In the silence he heard a door open on the top landing and the voices of people speaking on the stairs.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment,” said Petrella. “First, if you don’t mind – are they Mrs Ritchie’s?”

  “Yes.” She had scarcely looked at them. “They’re hers. In fact, two of them – that and that – are mine. I lent them to her. Where did you find them?”

  “We found a woman,” said Petrella, “on the bank of one of the reservoirs. You might have seen it in the papers – but it didn’t make much of a splash.”

  “And that was Rosa?”

  “From what you tell me, there seems no doubt about it at all.”

  “And how – what had happened? Can you tell me that?”

  “She had been shot. That’s in the papers now.”

  “By her husband?”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “It would be her husband. Who else?”

  “We may have to ask you to identify the body formally. Unless we can find a relative. Would you do that?”

  “She’d no relatives down here that I know of. She came from Ayrshire. It’s where I’m from myself, that’s how we came to be friends. Yes, I’ll identify her, if I have to–”

  “We may be able to do it some other way.”

  “I’ll give you the name of the place I’m working.” She scribbled on a piece of paper. “It’s a place that makes sweets. Don’t come after me there. I’ve a reputation to lose.”

  Petrella promised. Out in the street, it had started to rain again. He turned up the collar of his coat against it and stumped off. He was thinking about Mrs Fraser, and how nice she was, and how poor. And that she had become neither hysterical nor self-important about the violent death of her friend. He was thinking too deeply to have an eye out for his surroundings, and he missed a quick movement. Behind him, a man had detached himself from the shadows and moved cautiously out. Slowly though he moved, the dip and roll of his progress was unmistakable. Boot Howton looked first to right and left, then climbed the steps of No. 39 and disappeared into the hall.

  6

  The Outgoing of an Intake Attendant

  Petrella was down at the reservoir by half past eight next morning. It was a calm, bright, cold winter’s day, a day of nipped fingers and steaming breath. He found Sergeant Dodds already at work.

  A lorry and trailer stood in the open space in front of the cottage and Dodds and three men were offloading a flat-bottomed boat. It looked like an infantry-assault craft.

  “Now you have got out of bed,” said Dodds, “you can come and lend a hand. I’m warning you it’s a lot heavier than it looks.”

  Between them they staggered onto the landing stage, lowered one side, lifted the other, and heaved. The boat hit the surface with a solid ker-splash, sending a long ripple out over the surface of the water and fetching a protest from a sleepy swan.

  “She floats,” said Dodds. “What next, George?”

  “The detector gear has to be fixed in,” said the young man who seemed to be in charge of the party. “We can handle that now. Just tell us the line you want to take.”

  “You’re to cover a strip,” said Dodds, “ten or twelve feet wide. Say two yards either side of the boat. Go straight across from this landing stage to the far end. There’s a point you can lay on. It isn’t easy to see from here. Where a path goes up through the bushes.”

  “I’ll walk round in a minute and stick a flag in,” said the young man. “You show me just where you want it. It’s going to take me a bit of time to rig the gear. I’ll tell you when we’re ready.”

  He went into a huddle with his two mechanics, and Petrella heard snatches of conversation about something which sounded like “the fixer magnet”. Then all three men went back to the lorry and started rolling back the tarpaulin.

  “What’s it all about?”

  “Just a bit of Chris Kellaway’s famous drive and efficiency,” said Dodds. “This is an up-to-date salvage unit. Private firm. George, here, does the frog stuff, when it’s called for. The other two operate the box of tricks. It’s a detector. Something the navy dreamed up for dealing with limpet mines. You can drag an electrical gadget across the bottom and if it comes within smelling distance of any metal it goes ‘ping’. In fact, it goes several different sorts of ‘ping’ and the bright boy sitting in the boat can tell how much metal, and what sort, and how far off, and so on.”

  “And then the frogman goes down and has a look at it?”

  “Right. And rather him than me this weather.”

  “I don’t know,” said Petrella. “You can wear warm clothes inside the suit. As a matter of fact, I’ve always wanted–”

  “Not today,” said Dodds. “Have a heart. You get it out of your system some other time. This is strictly a professional job.”

  One of the men in the boat looked up from screwing an instrument panel to the cross-thwart of the boat and said, “How deep’s the water?”

  Dodds consulted his plan. “Twenty feet in the middle,” he said. “Six feet at the sides. Gravel bottom, shelving gently. Piece of cake.”

  The man grunted, picked up a ratchet screwdriver, and screwed in a screw as if he hated it.

  “You’ve got to hand it to Chris,” said Dodds. “He does get ideas – sometimes. You take an ordinary piece of water, a pond or a river or a canal. You put a sensitive bit of machinery like this over it, and what happens? ‘Ping’ – and up comes an old kettle. ‘Ping-ping’ and it’s a washtub with a hole in it. ‘Ping-ping-ping’ and it’s an–”

  “I get your point,” said Petrella.

  “Here you’ve got a nice clear bottom. Shouldn’t be anything there except water. So every time she sounds off, it’s worth going down to have a look.”

  “And you’re starting on this particular line because you think that whoever it was took the boat rowed her straight across and may have dropped – something or other – overboard. What are we hoping to find?”

  “Like all good policemen,” said Dodds, “we’re keeping strictly open minds.”

  The frogman now appeared, carrying a red-and-white survey flag on a stick, and he and Dodds wandered off together to mark the aiming point.

  Petrella looked at his watch and remembered that the reason he was there was that he had a date with Mr Lundgren at nine o’clock.

  Punctual to the minute, a smart little car drew up on the gravel sweep and the resident supply engineer jumped out.

  “Good morning, Sergeant,” he said. “How are things progressing – what on earth’s going on?”

  “It’s a treasure hunt – modern style,” said Petrella, and explained.

  “I hope they don’t disturb a pair of little crested grebes,” said Lundgren. “This is the first year they’ve wintered here. Their nest’s over there, near where those two men are standing. What the devil are they waving that flag for?”

  Petrella explained this too.

  “Let’s stick flags up all round and have a regatta. Why not!” said Mr Lundgren sourly, and Petrella registered the thought that if Superintendent Kellaway had been just that little bit more tactful he would have told the supply engineer what he planned to do and got him on his side first.

  “Do you mean to say,” went on Lundgren, “that you’re working on the assumption that the murderer shot this woman – she was shot, wasn’t she? – I thought it said so in the papers – and then took the boat, and rowed it across, and sunk it, and went up the path and climbed over a ten-foot fence. Why didn’t he walk out of the front gate? It’s locked, but it isn’t all that difficult to climb over. I’ve done it myself before now, and I’m no gymnast.”

  This was precisely the point that was worrying Petrella, so instead of answering the question he
asked one himself. “In fact,” he said, “had you noticed that the boat was missing?”

  “No,” said Lundgren. He sounded a bit upset about this. “I expect we should have spotted it when we made a proper check. That would be when the next man came in.”

  “And the house.”

  “We’ll look at that now. I brought the keys with me.”

  “Are we the first people to go in since Ricketts left?”

  “Bless you, no. We may be a bit unbusinesslike, but we’re not as bad as that. One of our property managers went over it as soon as we heard Ricketts had gone. Turned off the gas and electricity, and checked that Ricketts hadn’t walked off with any of the Board’s property.”

  “And had he?”

  “On the contrary – now which of these two is the front-door key? – I seem to remember that he’d left quite a lot of his own stuff behind. We had it inventoried and stored away–”

  (Petrella thought, Where did I hear that before? Of course, Rosa’s friend Jean. “I packed them in a bag and put them in the storeroom downstairs.” Two lots of belongings, waiting for two people to come back and claim them.)

  “What sort of things?” he said.

  “Bed linen and curtains and things like that. All these doors are apt to stick. Give it a push.”

  Cold and dark and silent, the house awaited them, an old woman, her hands folded, expectant of indignities.

  “Smells damp to me,” said Mr Lundgren. “We’ll have to get it thoroughly aired before the next man comes in. I’ll go and open the shutters. Then we shall have a bit more light.”

  One door on the right of the tiny hallway opened into the living-room; another, at the end, into the kitchen. The stairs rose straight out of the hall.

  “It’s a simple sort of but and ben,” said Lundgren, “but it’s handy. There’s a nice bedroom, and a modern bathroom and lavatory upstairs. Main drainage, of course. And electricity, only it’s turned off just now.”

  “I expect it’s very nice,” said Petrella, repressing a shudder. “When it’s warm and cheerful. Just at the moment–”