‘Very good, sir.’
‘We want a blood typing and a palm print, and you’re to get them without him knowing. Is that too Irish for you?’
‘I don’t think so. I have a certain Celtic strain in my blood.’
CHAPTER 7
Kremayne entered the police station with a swagger of amused tolerance. He asked for Rusk and looked around with an exaggerated curiosity.
Rusk arrived within thirty seconds. ‘’Morning, Jonathan, nice of you to drop in.’
‘Thought I’d give you a hand if I could, old boy, even if the wording of the invitation was slightly peremptory and I damn’ near stayed away on principle. Great man for the liberty of the subject, I am.’ He laughed and his attitude suggested he had issued a challenge he knew no one would dare accept.
‘Shall we go up to my room?’
‘Lead on, MacDuff — or is that wrong?’
‘Only slightly.’
‘Never could stomach Shakespeare, but I’ll guarantee to know a good cow from a bad one … And for my money, that’s a bit more use in this world.’
Rusk wondered whether there was meant to be any special significance in that last sentence. He led the way up the stairs and through to his room which was beyond the DI’s.
‘They don’t go out of their way to make you comfortable, do they?’ said Kremayne. ‘Just like the old dormitory — cracks in the walls and dirt on the ceiling.’
‘And the pervading smell of that hard green soap we had to use which stung like hell and was popularly supposed to have been made from melted-down dead bodies. Grab a seat over there.’
‘Thanks … Damned interesting, this. Justice in the raw, eh? By the way, old man, I’ll have to get away smartly, I’ve bought several Fresians in Essex that are being brought down by road and I must be at the farm when they arrive. Anne told you about them, didn’t she?’
Rusk went round to his seat behind the desk and sat down. ‘She said you were going to the sale and would buy if the price was right.’
‘It wasn’t but I bought. Tell me, Blayne, d’you like Anne?’
‘She seems very charming.’
‘The best that money could buy. If you want to breed well with humans or animals, it pays to get the best.’ He laughed, with a matey all-boys-together laugh.
Rusk said: ‘What would you say to a drink?’
‘Intoxicants in a police station? By God, that’s introducing the civilised world. What’s the offer?’
‘Anything, so long as it’s gin or whisky.’
‘Stop at the whisky. Know something? Ever since my school-time, I’ve had a taste for that stuff. I can remember knocking some back in the privacy of the fives’ court expecting to enjoy it in peace, and then hearing you come along. When you came up and asked me what I was doing, I had to hold my breath in case you smelled the liquor. In the end I had to use a handkerchief in front of my face … There’d have been no mercy if you’d caught me. No room for human frailties in those days.’
‘We all have to learn.’ Rusk picked up the internal telephone and asked for two whiskies.
‘I’ll even go further, old boy, since we’re talking about days long ago. You were an out-and-out prig. You thought anyone who didn’t rush forward to join the fifteen and so willingly and chauvinistically break every bone in his body, was a namby-pamby, and anyone who smoked or drank was no less than a traitor.’
‘Who’s so intolerant as he who’s too young to know the extent of toleration?’
There was a knock on the door and a police cadet came in with a tray on which two tumblers, each containing a measure of whisky, were alongside a chipped glass water jug.
The cadet offered the tray to Kremayne, who picked up one of the glasses but refused water, then carried it across to Rusk.
‘Thanks, Bob,’ said Rusk.
The cadet left. Rusk raised his glass. ‘Here’s the skin off your teeth.’
‘And the best of bloody good luck to you.’ Kremayne drank quickly. When he lowered his arm and rested his hand on his knees, over half the whisky had gone.
‘That was very welcome and no mistake. Keeps the old blood circulating.’
‘Cigarette?’
‘A drink to wet the throat, a smoke to dry it. That’s how the world goes round.’ Rusk pushed a packet of cigarettes across the top of his desk. ‘Drink up and we’ll have the other half.’
‘Are you trying to get me tight so I’ll admit to anything and everything?’ Kremayne roared with laughter. He fingered the tie he was wearing — a vivid mixture of red, blue, and orange. He drained his glass. ‘Lead me to the slaughter,’cause I like it.’
Rusk telephoned for two more drinks. He lifted his own glass and drained it. The liquor bit into his throat.
Kremayne looked at his watch. ‘I hate to rush things, old boy, but tempus fugit, as they always used to say.’
The cadet brought the two fresh drinks, collected and placed on the tray the two empty glasses. He left.
Kremayne stubbed out his cigarette, took a gold case from his pocket and opened it. ‘Have one?’
‘Not just for the moment.’
‘Still looking carefully after your wind, eh?’ Kremayne lit his cigarette. ‘Now — what’s it all about?’
‘The Ellery murder.’
‘Look, old man, I’ll be completely frank with you. I’ve had a word with my solicitor. D’you know what he said?’
‘If you’re innocent, give the police all the help you can, if you’re guilty, stand on your legal rights and refuse to answer everything and anything … Did you kill Brenda Ellery?’
‘No, I bloody well didn’t.’ Kremayne finished the whisky with two large gulps and slammed the tumbler down on the desk. His eyes gave the strange impression of having moved closer together. ‘I told you, I never met the girl. Anyway, I was fast asleep that night, so why keep chasing me?’
‘The DI is a very inquisitive man.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘The detective-inspector, my immediate superior, a man who may have many friends, but if so, they’ve all been abroad during the past year.’
‘He told you to drag me here today?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’
‘To talk about the colour of your car, your Harris tweed suit, and the size of shoe you wear.’
‘I’d be an idiot not to understand he reckons I know something.’
‘It is a bit obvious, isn’t it?’
‘He must be a bloody fool, then. Can’t he see I’m happily married? Why should I go after a girl?’
‘It could be a compulsion quite beyond any possibility of restraint: a part of your mind that has become cancerous in thought. Each time the cancer explodes your mind is flooded and submerged and you enter worlds no sane person knows. When it’s over, the shutters come down, and perhaps you don’t even know what went on.’
‘You make it sound as though that’s your line of thought as well?’
‘I was trying to explain why marriage doesn’t automatically release you from suspicion.’
‘Call me the killer and have done with it.’
‘It could be you. It could be one hell of a lot of people. We just don’t know.’
‘Why pick me out of the bag, then?’
‘You’ve had your woman troubles.’
‘That girl told me she was stung. Can you try and understand that?’
‘And the kitchen-maid at school?’ Kremayne stubbed out the cigarette, pressing so hard that the paper split and the tobacco spilled out. ‘You’ve really been raking the mud.’
‘That’s one of our jobs.’
‘Poking and prying and shoving your nose into every little smell you can find, or imagine you’ve found. That kitchen woman was an honest-to-God slut who ought to have set up shop in Piccadilly. She was always chasing me, and one day I didn’t run hard enough. That’s when they caught us. The slut started to cry and swore by all her saints that I’d threatened her if she did
n’t do what I wanted. Because my school record stank they wouldn’t listen to my side of the story and they kicked me out.’
‘And the maid?’
‘What about her?’
‘What happened to her?’
‘How the hell should I know? … You’ve got the full and unexpurgated story and you’ve discovered all your nasty little suspicions don’t add up to a tinker’s cuss so you can pick up your tracks and leave me alone. I’ll tell you this straight, by God, I’m ready to raise the roof just as high as ever it’ll go, if you don’t.’
‘I’ll pass on the message and no doubt the DI will know what to do with it … What size shoe d’you wear?’
‘What’s it matter whether the answer’s one or twelve?’
‘We found a footprint by the body.’
‘Since I didn’t make it, I’m not interested.’
‘As you didn’t make it, it can’t possibly matter to you whether you tell us the size of your shoe.’
There was a pause. ‘Ten.’
‘D’you normally use rubber soles and heels?’
‘Sometimes. So maybe that makes me guilty of stealing the Crown Jewels?’
‘And you own a dark green three litre Rover?’
‘Yes.’
Rusk smiled. He stretched out in his chair. ‘Sorry to have had to take you through the catechism, Jonathan.’
Kremayne lit another cigarette. ‘Is that the end of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten my Harris tweed suit?’
‘There’s no need to worry about that now.’
Kremayne stood up. ‘You’re a queer bastard.’
‘Aren’t we all? Did you know that Nature has never produced two of anything exactly alike?’
‘I didn’t, and I don’t damn’ well care. That’s the kind of off-beat thing that’s always interested you, though. Now I must be shoving. Sorry if I got a bit heated, but I’m touchy when those two cases come up.’
‘Anyone’s entitled to be touchy when he’s suffered two injustices.’
Kremayne shook hands and once again apologised for any rudeness on his part. Rusk preceded him downstairs and along the corridor, past the magistrates’ court to the outside door.
‘Anne likes you a lot,’ said Kremayne, ‘so come on out and have another meal with us.’
‘I’d like to.’
‘Good, that’s a date. Be seeing you.’
Rusk watched Kremayne walk over to the large green Rover that was parked near the wall which marked the boundary of the council car-park. Kremayne’s body was slack, despite the exercise he must take on the farm. Too much drink.
Rusk went back to his room. He picked up the ash-tray in which Kremayne had stubbed out the cigarettes and carried it through to the DI’s office. The DI was reading some papers, trying to catch up with all the routine work that existed outside the Ellery case.
‘We’ve two cigarette stubs we can send off for blood grouping.’
‘Wrap ’em up and send them off.’
‘Has Plane got the glasses?’
‘You arranged it, didn’t you?’
Rusk left and went through to the general office in which Vernon and McBade worked. Detective-Sergeant Plane was treating one of two glasses with aluminium powder.
‘He had a solid grip on the first of the glasses,’ said Rusk.
‘That’s this one. Coming up a treat.’ Rusk walked across to one of the cupboards that lined the walls. From it, he took two plastic bags into each of which, he placed a cigarette stub. They would be taken to the Yard and there examined to see if the smoker had been a secretor, group B.
Seated round the table were Detective-Superintendent Ampforth, Superintendent Fearson, Assistant Chief Constable Quinn, Detective-Inspector Carren, and Detective-Sergeant Rusk.
At first, Ampforth did most of the talking.
‘If I may cut across all that’s been said: Kremayne has an alibi, provided only by his wife, nevertheless he has an alibi.
‘No direct evidence connects him with the murder. Indirectly, we have the following. The pattern has emerged, after hundreds of interviews, of a man in a car who has recently regularly been accosting women in an area that spreads at least as far as forty miles north of here. The description of the man suffers from the usual eye-witness discrepancies. He has been pictured as ugly, handsome, scarred, smooth-shaven, moustached, American, Scandinavian, and North Country. The car has been black, green, red, yellow, a Mini-Minor and a Rolls-Royce. The most significant factor here is that one combination is quoted twice as often as any other. A green Rover.
‘The murderer is a secretor, group B. Cigarette stubs showed Kremayne to be a secretor, group B.
‘The murderer left part of a palm print on the dead girl’s handbag. A comparison palm print was obtained. The experts say they are probably the same but that they cannot match a sufficient number of characteristics to swear they’re from the same palm.
‘The murderer left a shoe print, size ten or ten and a half. Kremayne wears size ten.
‘The murderer was wearing a pair of trousers made from Harris tweed, red-brown with yellow flecks in colour. Kremayne has such a suit.
‘Dust in the dead girl’s clothing provided traces of dung and clay. Kremayne farms and keeps a large head of milking cows and another of fattening bullocks.
‘The psychiatrist’s report says that having regard to the manner of the killing, the rape, the repeated stabbing, the removal of the body from the spot where the killing took place, and the probability that the murderer prayed, we are dealing with a sex maniac who will have a history of sexual crime. Kremayne is known to have been expelled from his school because of a girl, and in later years to have been convicted of an indecent assault.
‘The psychiatrist has also stated that the kind of sexual gratification the murderer has to seek cannot be met by normal sexual relations and that therefore the fact that a suspect is married is no bar to his being a suspect.
‘The weapon, and it is long, thin, round — an old-fashioned ice-pick would suit the bill admirably — has not been found. If the murderer had the presence of mind to get rid of it some way away from the place where the body was found, I’m afraid it’ll be only luck that brings it to light.’
Ampforth stared round the table. ‘Let’s be quite frank and call it a bloody cow.’
‘Explicit, if a little stark,’ murmured Quinn, in his dried-up voice.
‘There are the facts. As to theories — Sergeant Rusk has no doubt that Kremayne is the killer.’
Rusk tried to make out if there were any hidden meanings behind Ampforth’s words. He failed. He knew that, stupidly, he was never content to take people, or words, at their face value.
‘I don’t like it,’ said the DI, after a short silence.
‘Why not?’ queried Quinn.
‘Because, sir, although we call things facts, in nearly every case when we come to apply them to Kremayne they become coincidences. What I mean is …’ Carren came to a halt as he failed to find the words to explain precisely what he was trying to say.
Quinn tapped the table with his long, thin fingers that had the appearance of being half-mummified. ‘The evidence fits Kremayne but it only fits him because we name him. It could equally well fit an unknown number of other people who are unnamed.’
‘Precisely, sir,’ said the DI loudly.
‘Very well. Do we believe Kremayne to be our man, and if so, could we prove it in court? … Dealing with the last question first, as at the moment the answer is quite definitely no. Some of our “facts” couldn’t be called in evidence, and any reasonably efficient defence counsel would rip into shreds those that could be.
‘To answer the first question. I’m of the opinion we cannot yet close our minds to someone other than Kremayne being the killer. I intend no disparagement at all to Sergeant Rusk’s work — I merely mean that taking the detached point of view, the probability cannot be called a certainty.’
The DI spoke loudly. ‘Kremayne isn’t the kind of person who’s a sex maniac.’ Quinn lowered his head until his chin nearly rested on his chest, then he looked upwards until he could stare at Carren. ‘I understood you were of the same broad opinion as Sergeant Rusk?’
‘His investigations were only a small part of the whole field, sir.’
‘Of course.’
The DI appeared to be insensible to mild sarcasm. ‘When a man’s nose is pressed down on one track, he’s inclined to judge the smell as being stronger than it really is.’
‘Depending, perhaps, on whether the trail is frankincense or skunk?’
The DI barely hid his annoyance at the remark and the mild laughter that followed. ‘I say this killing was more likely to have been done by someone not in Kremayne’s class.’
‘So the old school tie plus money still carries a banner,’ murmured Rusk, a trifle too loud for his words to go unremarked.
The DI swung round. ‘That’s impertinent.’
Rusk was silent. It amused him to find that the DI was impressed by Kremayne. The DI professed a loathing for class and wealth, and glossy magazines always threatened him with blood pressure. But then it so often seemed that the more people disliked something because they hadn’t got it, the more they respected those who had it.
‘I say,’ continued the DI, ‘that we’re going to find the killer amongst the criminal classes.’
‘Of which Kremayne is, of course, one,’ said Quinn quietly.
‘He claims it was all a mistake, sir.’
‘I’ve yet to meet the criminal who doesn’t.’
‘What I’m getting at, sir, is … well, the habitual criminal.’ The DI struggled to retain the thread of his argument.
Ampforth cut in. ‘I think we can say that we cannot yet be certain we have our man?’
‘If we were, he’d be on charge,’ said Quinn.
Ampforth knew his assistant chief constable sufficiently well not to be distracted by him. ‘That being so, we cannot permit our investigations to be limited to matters that concern him and we must continue on a broad front.’ Ampforth looked round the table. ‘We cannot, therefore, spare sufficient men to keep watch on Kremayne as has been suggested.’
Exhibit No. Thirteen Page 7