Blood and Judgement

by Michael Gilbert

  Petrella stared at him.

  Haxtell said, “Howton’s case comes up before the Court of Criminal Appeal tomorrow week. I’ve just heard. It’s been expedited.”

  Detective Constable Mote, whose hobby of photography has already been mentioned, was a conscientious young cockney with curly hair, who had come to the police via the lower deck of the Royal Navy. He was a painstaking performer, and this was as well, for there was tribulation in store for him.

  “I can’t tell you anything more about this print than I have done,” said Sergeant Blinder, when appealed to. “It seems to me everyone’s making a lot too much of it. If you’ll look at my report again you’ll see what I said.” He ran a finger down the typescript. “‘Much distorted.’ Well, you couldn’t expect anything else from a fingerprint made in mineral jelly. Mineral jelly’s not plaster of Paris, you know.”

  Mote agreed that mineral jelly wasn’t plaster of Paris.

  “If you ask me, it’s a miracle we picked it up at all. If anyone had told me a fingerprint could go underwater and come up six weeks later almost as good as new, I’d have called him a liar.”

  Mote said that the whole thing reflected the greatest possible credit on the efficiency and technical skill of the Fingerprint Section and on Sergeant Blinder in particular.

  “Mind you,” said Sergeant Blinder. “There’s five points of similarity between this print and the second, and I’d say that was quite enough to work on, particularly when one of them’s a reversed delta with a double inlet. But I couldn’t get up in court and swear to it. You want eight points or more for the court.”

  Mote agreed that eight points were better than five. In common with most policemen, he understood very little about the niceties of fingerprint classification, having found the lectures on it boring. All that he really wanted was the details from the record and these, after ten minutes’ further mollification of Sergeant Blinder, he got.

  In faded ink, on the yellowing form, he read the recorded particulars of Robert Lowry Bancroft who, forty years before, had stumbled into the path of the law. Age eighteen. Height five foot eight inches. Occupation, Armed Forces (Infantry). (They might at least have given his regiment, thought Mote.) Peculiarities and distinguishing marks, Nil. (Naturally!) Previous convictions, Nil. Aliases, Nil. And an address at 14 Culver Street, Battersea.

  “And you can bet your bottom dollar,” said Mote, “that Culver Street’s been pulled down and a ruddy great block of flats put up.” It was one of those days.

  Culver Street was still there. It looked as if it had been there forever. The bricks, red and yellow in their springtime, were now a deep and desperate black. The front gardens had merged into forecourts, and had then been trampled into the street itself. The occupants of No. 14 had been there since 1948. They knew nothing of the people who had had the house before them except that they had been “evacuated”. This was the word which greeted Mote at every turn. Evacuation. There had been a break, a severing of the historic development of the street, sharp and decisive as a landslip. The little families had been bundled out. Few had come back again.

  Mote found one old lady whose memory went back beyond two wars. She remembered the Mafeking Day celebrations. But she remembered no Bancrofts.

  Those tried friends of authority, the Housing Department, the Church, and the Labour Exchange, had nothing to offer. They, too, spoke of the evacuation, and of their records which had been destroyed in the blitz. Mote called it a day and went home.

  The next day he tried the War Office. When they understood what he wanted they packed him off down to Staines where, in a disused motor-car factory, lay stored the documentary records of the British Army’s past.

  “1918,” said the sergeant major clerk. “Why, certainly. We go back a lot further than that. What unit are you looking for?”

  “Not a unit. A man.”

  “And you don’t know what regiment he was in?”

  “I’m afraid not. Just that he was in the infantry.”

  “And all you know about him is his name?’’

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it’s going to be a bit of a job, isn’t it?”

  He led him along corridors, through transepts, down further corridors, all lined, above head height, with slatted racks, and, on the racks, boxes and boxes of paper. There were millions of them. Hundreds of thousands of millions of them.

  “Haven’t you got some sort of index?” he said.

  At this suggestion, the sergeant major clerk laughed, so loud that he roused a family of bats, which swooped across angrily, casting great shadows under the naked overhead lights.

  Petrella, too, was encountering difficulties. He had found Lundgren in an unco-operative mood.

  “I wish I’d never let you into my reservoir,” he said. “It’s been nothing but trouble.”

  “I’m sure they’ve finished now.”

  “I should hope so too. They wouldn’t like me to drain it for them, perhaps?”

  “No. I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

  After a time, he unbent so far as to admit that it probably wasn’t Petrella’s fault personally. But he hoped there wasn’t going to be any further bother. The Board were getting restive.

  “This is nothing to do with the Metropolitan Water Board,” said Petrella. “It’s a bit of ancient history. I want to find out everything I can about Ricketts personally.”

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t been in touch with you. I should have thought he would have been bound to have read it all in the papers.”

  “That’s what we thought too.”

  “And yet I don’t know that I am so surprised. Ricketts was an odd sort of chap. Superficially very friendly, but I doubt if he had any real friends. He was a good deal older than the ordinary run of chaps in the battery. When he went out he usually went alone.”

  “A self-contained sort of person,” suggested Petrella.

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you think he might have had some sort of past?”

  Lundgren reflected. “It’s easy to imagine things like that, after the event,” he said. “But now that you put it to me, I shouldn’t be entirely surprised. I don’t necessarily mean anything criminal. I mean that one just got the impression that he was a bit of a man of mystery.”

  “Was he married?”

  “I think he drew a marriage allowance. Although that’s not always the same thing. I’d have said, he was the sort of man who was quite attractive to a certain sort of woman. You know how they go for the quiet, grey-haired, fatherly type.”

  “Yes,” said Petrella. He found a very different picture building up in his mind from the rough Water Board labourer he had started by visualizing.

  “Army records should be able to give you some information about that. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help you more.”

  “On the contrary,” said Petrella.

  This time the War Office were able to be more helpful. Their 1939–45 records were in good order and, given proper particulars, they turned up Ricketts’ paybook and identity documents without trouble.

  Petrella ran his eye down the page. There was something there that might be useful. Next of kin. “Wife. Dorothy Mabel Ricketts, Forge Cottage, Bearsted, Kent.”

  “That would only be a wartime address, I expect,” said the officer in charge of records. “She was probably evacuated there.”

  “Never mind,” said Petrella, “it’s a start.”

  He took the afternoon train from Victoria to Maidstone, and a local train brought him to the pleasant Kentish village of Bearsted, which huddles round a green where cricket is still played in the summer and the dogs and children from the nice houses nearby chase each other all the year round. Forge Cottage stood in a side turning, south of the green. It was a quiet, clapboarded affair buried up to the neck in a garden which had spilled over onto the roadway.

  The woman who opened the door to him was, he guessed, about fifty; thickset, grey-haired
, and unsmiling.

  Petrella introduced himself.

  “It’s a long time ago,” he said apologetically. “Someone who may have been evacuated here during the war. A Mrs Ricketts.”

  “You’d better come in,” she said, and called out, “Mother.”

  An old lady in black appeared from an inner room. “It’s a gentleman from the police, Mother. He’s asking for Mrs Ricketts.”

  They both stared at him, and Petrella felt uncomfortable under this convergent gaze.

  “If you have any information–” he said.

  “I’m Mrs Ricketts,” said the grey-haired woman. “I’ll tell you anything I can, but if it’s my husband you’re looking for, I warn you, it won’t be much, for I haven’t set eyes on him for more than twenty years.”

  “Another dead end,” said Petrella. “She was as helpful as she could be but it didn’t amount to much. They got married in 1924. When she was eighteen. They never had any children. He was away from home a lot, and pretty soon she began to think he’d set up a second home of his own somewhere.”

  Haxtell looked up sharply, and Petrella said, “Yes. That’s the type that seems to be emerging. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? By the time war broke out in 1939, she hadn’t seen Sydney – that’s his name, apparently – for two or three years. He’d been sending her a little money from time to time. She was back with her mum. When he joined the army he put her down as his wife and next of kin and the marriage allowance went to her. He had to do that. She’d have gone up to the War Office and raised hell if he hadn’t. She knew her rights.”

  “And when the war was over–?”

  “As soon as he was out of the army, the money stopped.”

  “Didn’t she do anything about that? He was still her husband.”

  “I asked her that,” said Petrella. “And she said, ‘I’d got a job and I didn’t need the money. But to tell you the truth I was glad to see him go. He wasn’t really a good man.’”

  “She said that?”

  “As near as I can remember it.”

  “She might have been right, at that,” said Haxtell. “Where do we look next? Time’s getting short.”

  It was on his way home that night that Petrella saw the card. He had given up visiting Collins’ shop, having drawn a blank there so often. But since he had to go past it he stopped to look.

  “The person,” said the card, “who was asking about a job at the reservoir. Inquire within.”

  14

  Jean Speaks Up

  The little shop was lit by one economical bulb, and smelled like the inside of an empty biscuit tin. Petrella waited, then shuffled his feet, then coughed; none of this having any effect he took a half-crown out of his pocket and rapped it sharply on the wooden counter.

  At this magical sound an inner door flew open and an old woman looked out.

  “We’re shut,” she said. “I ought to have locked the door.”

  “I’m not a cash customer,” said Petrella. “I came about one of your advertisements.”

  “It’s my husband does them. He’s at the doctor’s. The time you have to waste at the doctor’s since they came on the rates, it’s a disgrace. In the old days you had to pay for ’em, but they were there when you wanted ’em.”

  Petrella picked the card out of the window and showed it to the old woman, who read it disinterestedly.

  “I can’t make head or tail of ’em,” she said. “My husband does them.”

  “When’ll he be back?”

  “Might be hours, yet. You’d better come back tomorrow. I’ve known him sit in that waiting-room till eight o’clock. All those people, sitting in a room together, with different illnesses. It’s not right. No wonder people catch things.”

  “I expect that’s why the doctors do it,” said Petrella. “To make more work for themselves.”

  The old woman looked at him suspiciously.

  “But as it happens, this is rather urgent. So I’ll come back in an hour’s time.”

  The old woman had opened her mouth to protest when she was saved the trouble by the return of her husband.

  “Got away quicker this time,” he said. “Nothing but wind, Dr Maddison said. I wonder. It didn’t feel like wind to me. What can I do for you, sir? We’re shut.”

  “I came about this.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, here I am,” said Petrella patiently. “It says ‘Inquire within’. I’m inquiring.”

  “The party that left this card,” said the man, “was most particular that her message should only be given to a – dang it, but I’ve gone and forgotten it – a foreign name.”

  “Petrella.”

  “Right. A Detective Sergeant Petrella.”

  Petrella produced his warrant card, which the man examined carefully.

  “All right,” he said. “That looks all right. You’re to go to Flat 5, Number 74 Parsons Road – that’s off Westbourne Grove. You know it?”

  “I can find it. When do I go?”

  “Any evening this week between six and seven, the lady said. She’d be there, if you wanted to talk to her. Come to think of it, that was Monday, and it’s Thursday now, and nearly ten to seven, so it looks as if you’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

  “I told him he’d better wait till tomorrow,” said the old lady.

  Next morning there was an unexpected message for Petrella. It was from Messrs Carver, Harrowing and Livermore of Lincoln’s Inn.

  “Solicitors,” said Gwilliam, who had taken the message. “An old aunt’s died, I wooden be surprised, and left you a packet.”

  “The only old aunt I’ve got’s ten years younger than I am,” said Petrella, and dialled the number he had been given.

  He was put through to Mr Harrowing, who introduced himself.

  “I saw you in the Magistrate’s Court,” he said. “I don’t think you were at the Old Bailey, were you? We’re instructed on behalf of the prisoner.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Petrella cautiously. He remembered, now, where he had seen the name.

  “We wondered if you could come down and have a word with us. Or we’ll come up and see you, if that’s more convenient. There’s a certain amount of urgency. The appeal in this matter comes on next Thursday.”

  “Well,” said Petrella, “I’ll have to find out if it’s all right.”

  “I don’t see why your bosses should make any difficulty about it,” said Mr Harrowing. “After all, presumably we’re both interested in the same thing, and that’s to get at the truth.”

  “That’s right,” said Petrella. “All the same, I think I’d better check up. I’ll ring you back.”

  “I can’t say I like the idea,” said Haxtell, when it was put to him, “but if you’re going at all you’d better go willingly. They could subpoena you if they really wanted to.”

  “But why me? All they can know about me is that I gave evidence on one or two fairly unimportant points in the Magistrate’s Court.”

  “And didn’t give evidence at the Old Bailey.”

  “Yes. He mentioned that. You don’t suppose–”

  “I don’t know,” said Haxtell. “The thing to do is to go and find out what they’re after. You needn’t commit yourself. You can always pass the buck by saying that you have to refer to higher authority.”

  “What I really don’t want is for anyone to think that I’ve been running off on my own bat, proffering information to the defence. I wouldn’t–”

  “No,” said Haxtell, looking at him curiously. “No. That’s all right. I don’t think anyone thinks that. And by the way, I didn’t tell you. Mote found Bancroft.”

  “He what?”

  “I don’t mean he found him in person. I mean he traced his 1914–18 record, or what was still left of it. Here’s a copy.”

  He pushed a typewritten flimsy across the table and Petrella read:

  “Robert Lowry Bancroft. Enlisted, January 1918. Age at enlistment, 18. Passed fit for General Service. France, May 19
18. Posted 9th Royal South London Regiment. Acting Lance Corporal, July 1918. Rank confirmed August 1918. Mentioned in Dispatches, August 1918. (London Gazette, September 8th, 1918.) Next of kin, Sister. Eileen Joyce Harman, 14 Countess Road, Upminster, Essex.”

  “It’s a good record for a youngster,” said Petrella. “They put them into the thick of it pretty young in those days, didn’t they?”

  “I should think that by the spring of 1918 the army were glad to take anyone with two arms and two legs. The point is, is it Ricketts?”

  “It easily could be,” said Petrella slowly. “It fits in most of the essential points. Ricketts was in his late fifties, and was known to have a good First War record. The only thing is, that I’m pretty certain Lundgren said he had the MM. Wouldn’t that be in his papers? I mean, wouldn’t it be in Bancroft’s papers if Bancroft later changed his name to Ricketts?”

  “It ought to be. But if Ricketts was a crook, he could easily have put up a medal ribbon he wasn’t entitled to. But we’re getting somewhere, now. If this next-of-kin ‘sister’ was already married, she must have been a few years older than Robert. So a search among the Bancrofts at Somerset House for a few years back may turn her up. Then perhaps we can get her marriage certificate. If she was married in church we can get the names of the witnesses and parents-in-law and so on. Plenty of possibilities there.”

  Petrella said, “Suppose we do find Bancroft and he isn’t Ricketts?”

  “I refuse to think about it,” said Haxtell. “You get on down to Lincoln’s Inn and remember that all lawyers are the natural enemies of the police.”

  “Well now, Sergeant Petrella,” said Mr Harrowing. “I asked you to come down and have a chat, because I understand that you were not entirely satisfied with the police case.”

  Mr Harrowing had served for several years, during the war, in the Royal Navy, and was aware of the value of the attack direct.