The C.I.D Room

by Roderic Jeffries

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I just wanted to make certain. It doesn’t matter, of course,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I do understand that you have to go out to work in the evenings.’

  He would have preferred her open resentment to this determined understanding. He wondered if she ever suspected that he was seeing another woman? He immediately answered his own question. She would suspect no such thing because she knew her own vulnerability only too well and was determined not to allow herself to be most terribly hurt emotionally. Her mind was deliberately blanked off from any possibility of his infidelity. Should anything ever knock down that mental wall, the effects of the shock would be tragic. She had only two precious things in life left to her — their children and their marriage. The children were away from home, leading their own lives, and that really left only her marriage.

  ‘Gladys,’ he said suddenly, ‘why don’t you buy a car and get out and about? You could use your money to have a chauffeur and he could take you round the countryside. Even better, find a woman who can help in the house and also drive.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I want to keep my money for an emergency. Something dreadful might happen to you or the children.’

  ‘But why not use some of it to make your life a little easier?’

  ‘You know I don’t want to,’ she answered fretfully.

  He finished his drink. Did she refuse to ease her lot in life because then she would become less of a martyr? He went to the cocktail cabinet and poured himself another drink. If only he didn’t ask himself so many damned questions. At work, he had never questioned his own or other people’s motives. You couldn’t command a ship and keep wondering whether you were doing the right thing.

  ‘George, will you do something for me?’ she suddenly asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he answered automatically.

  ‘Please have dinner here, at home, tomorrow evening. I’ll make something special. D’you remember how before the war I used to make something special on high days and holidays? We were so hard up, but it was fun.’

  It hadn’t been fun, he thought angrily, but in her memory it had become so because in those days she had been able to dance, play tennis, sleep at night, and be free from pain.

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Of course, dear.’ He looked quickly at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  She noticed his glance. ‘Have you got to be off?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Are you going to be late tonight?’

  ‘I may be.’

  Before she could say anything more, he put down his empty glass, kissed her goodbye, and left.

  He drove from Pendleton Bray to Marshborough, a distance of just over fifteen miles. During the drive he thought, with a sick anger, about Gregory Heywood-Smith and he wondered how such a man could be allowed to flourish. Was it true, as some had been saying, that the world had come to honour only the false, the slick, and the successful, no matter how that success was obtained?

  Heywood-Smith said his father had been a Greek, his mother a Levantine, and he had been born in a train as it crossed the border from Montenegro into Bosnia, which surely made him a citizen of the world. He said, with his booming laugh, that his parents had been so honest that it was not until five years after their death that he had at last been able to throw off the final restraining influence of their honesty. But it was just as likely that his father had been a road sweeper in Ankara and his mother a brothel keeper in Cairo.

  Heywood-Smith lived at Heller Towers, in the middle of stockbroker country. The house was an architectural nightmare, a mishmash of a dozen different styles, a place of columns, towers, steeples, oriels, and God knows what else. The owner of such a Gothic barbarism should have resembled a monster, but Heywood-Smith looked like someone’s favourite uncle. Looked like him, that was, unless and until one realised his slate-grey eyes had the bleak, ice-cold regard of an ancient horned lizard.

  Heywood-Smith opened the door and welcomed Leery in. ‘My dear chap, how pleasant to see you again.’

  Leery mumbled something in reply. Whenever he was with Heywood-Smith, he felt he was being laughed at, but he could never be certain. The other man seldom changed from being his ebullient, self-satisfied, bombastic self.

  They went into the larger of the two drawing-rooms. The place was furnished without regard to style or taste, only in a way that would show it had cost a great deal of money.

  ‘Sit down, my dear Captain. A drink? I can offer you anything you like, even absinth. And there aren’t many homes where you can still get absinth, are there?’

  ‘There certainly aren’t,’ replied Leery, pandering to the other’s desire for praise and applause and hating himself for doing so.

  ‘What’s it to be, then?’

  ‘Whisky, please, Gregory.’

  ‘Scotch, malt or blended, Irish, Bourbon, soda, water, or neat?’

  ‘Ordinary Scotch and soda, please.’

  ‘A man of habit, eh?’

  Leery watched the other cross to a large, very ornate inlaid cocktail cabinet. Heywood-Smith obviously weighed between fifteen and twenty stone, yet he walked lightly, as a cat walked, in perfect balance. He brought the whisky and his own drink over on a silver salver which he said cost him two hundred and fifty pounds. Leery, as he knew he had been expected to, showed amazement at the sum.

  ‘Silver’s the thing,’ boomed Heywood-Smith. ‘Put your money into it, even today, and you can’t go wrong.’ He lifted his glass. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘We’ve got to…’ began Leery urgently.

  ‘A cigarette? What kind d’you like? Virginian, Turkish, Egyptian?’

  ‘I don’t mind, Gregory.’

  ‘Then try one of these.’ Heywood-Smith picked up a silver cigarette-box and opened it. Inside were king-sized cigarettes that bore the gold monogram GHS.

  Leery took a cigarette and accepted a light. ‘The police…’

  ‘The tobacco’s mainly first-quality Virginian, but there’s a trace of Balkan. I order them specially, of course.’

  Leery drank quickly. Heywood-Smith was jeering at his frightened impatience, deliberately cutting short his attempts to speak. He suddenly wished, with a sick, impotent longing, that when he had met Prudence eighteen months ago he had been able to overcome his suddenly aroused desires. But he hadn’t. Later, when his overdraft stood at £800 and the bank manager was getting nasty, he had tried to end the liaison. By then, it was too late. His need for her had become like the need of an alcoholic, whose body and mind demanded the very thing that was poisoning them. He had pleaded with the bank manager, pawned some old silver, even stolen money from his wife, but the money so obtained hadn’t satisfied Prudence. She’d refused him. His mind had tortured him with pictures of her, naked, in the arms of another man, doing the things she had done with him. He’d become frantic. So frantic that when down in a ship’s hold one afternoon he’d suddenly realised the obvious — he was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of goods.

  ‘You’re very serious, my dear chap,’ boomed Heywood-Smith. ‘Nothing serious, I trust. Your wife’s no worse?’

  Leery was shocked by the last question because until now there had never been cause to think the other knew his wife was an invalid. Did he know about Prudence?

  Heywood-Smith drained his glass and stood up. ‘Another? I have a friend whose favourite saying is that there’s only one thing in the world nicer than a whisky and soda, and that’s two. He’s a nice man, but pompous.’

  As Leery handed his empty glass over, he wondered how pompous the man had to be for Heywood-Smith to notice the fact. Yet, was Heywood-Smith really pompous, or was it all a pose? One could never tell. The cold, unblinking, slate-grey eyes defied all attempts to discover what lay behind them. At times, Leery had the fantastic thought that underneath the gross exterior was another and much smaller man who when alone stepped out of the skin of his disguise.

 
Heywood-Smith refilled the glasses, returned to his chair, and sat down. The tapestry-covered chair creaked as it took his weight. Leery remembered how, inwardly, he’d laughed at the other at their first meeting. It had been a very stupid mistake.

  Heywood-Smith stubbed out his cigarette when only half smoked. He lit another. ‘You were saying, my dear chap?’

  ‘Saying?’ repeated Leery.

  ‘Were you not about to discuss something in connexion with the police?’

  Leery jerked his thoughts into some coherence. ‘They’re everywhere, asking everyone questions. It’s not safe to carry on with the second lot.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘I swear it isn’t. Look, if we go on…’

  ‘Leave this end of things to me, my dear Captain. Just remember one thing. Panic is a policeman’s very best friend. If you don’t panic, there’ll be absolutely no need to worry.’

  ‘We shouldn’t —’

  ‘But we’re going to,’ interrupted Heywood-Smith, and for the first time that evening his voice was not jolly: it was cold and harsh.

  Leery argued no further.

  He left a quarter of an hour later. He had come determined to bring an end to the gold thefts because it was too dangerous to continue, he had achieved nothing other than to make himself look a craven in his own eyes. He drove too fast, venting some of his self-hatred by doing so.

  Back in the drawing-room, Gregory Heywood-Smith poured himself out his third drink. He lit another cigarette. He thought that Leery was one of the fools of the world. To lose his respectability, which to a man of his upbringing was of all importance, on account of a tart was a ludicrous act of folly.

  Heywood-Smith thought with deep satisfaction that in direct contrast, he was far, far from being a fool. He had learned something important and this discovery had made him a very rich man and was going to make him even richer. He had learned it from America where people were so much less bound by tradition. It was a simple fact — those who used up all their energies in trying to stop the police discovering the facts were fools, whilst those who concentrated on making certain the police could never legally prove what they knew to be true were the men who were going to grow old gracefully and rich. The criminal law had originally come into existence in order to protect the innocent from the guilty: by a strange evolution it had now reached a stage where the guilty man who was clever could use it to protect himself from the innocent.

  There were laws enough to fill a dozen libraries, procedural rules as prolix as any encyclopaedia, judges’ rules to govern arrests and interrogations, the immaculate conception of the burden of proof, the jury, twelve simple and bewildered people…all supposedly dedicated to making certain no innocent man was ever found guilty, yet all capable of being used to make certain the guilty were never legally proved guilty. So why worry about whether or not the police knew one had sold a little marijuana here, a little heroin there, had imported a few women from France and Italy and kept a fatherly eye on them, had formed a working arrangement with the betting shops, the one-armed bandit operators, the gambling clubs… Before the police could do anything, they had to be able to prove what they knew in a court of law. In any case, proof needed witnesses and witnesses often forgot what they’d seen or heard, especially if little accidents happened to remind them big accidents also happened in an imperfect world.

  He stubbed out one cigarette when half smoked and lit another. He’d read that by smoking only half a cigarette the chances of lung cancer were greatly lessened. The thought of suffering cancer of the lungs turned his bowels to water.

  He was a rich man and America had taught him something else. When you’d some money, put it into legitimate business and let it work legitimately. Soon it multiplied and the more it multiplied the more respectable you became: the more respectable you were, the more the laws of any land became tailored for your very own special needs. The only thing he hadn’t got was the chance to plead the Fifth Amendment, but perhaps that would one day be imported.

  Leery was a weak fool to think that the next consignment of gold would be left alone. He was terrified the police would discover some of the facts. Of course they would, sooner or later. They would discover Leery’s part in the gold thefts, probably try him and send him off to prison. But although they might know who’d planned everything, they would never be able to prove anything: not prove it to the satisfaction of a court of law.

  He thought about the gold and his mouth began to salivate, just as if someone had put some Malasol caviar before him. Gold was so beautiful it almost hurt him to think about it, let alone touch it. He hated having to sell it, but there was one consolation. Money was nearly as beautiful.

  *

  Judy Anderson was, incredible fact, almost as Kerr had imagined her. She was a striking brunette with a face that could have launched ten thousand ships: she was so svelte that each footstep of hers seemed to be accompanied by the muted sounds of popping champagne corks: she had a husky, intimately toned voice that suggested so many things his brain almost became scrambled: she was uniquely, completely, and one hundred and one per cent exciting. On the other hand, she was also undeniably expensive.

  As they left the restaurant, Kerr tried to work out how much money he had left. The meal had cost three pounds fifteen, even though the moment he had seen the prices on the menu he had claimed not to be in the least hungry: he had given a three-shilling tip, much to the waiter’s open contempt: the taxi to the restaurant had come to six shillings… Still, he told himself, perhaps a trifle mournfully, none of the good things in life came cheaply, no matter what the song said. In any case, there was just enough left to pay for the taxi back to her digs.

  The house in which she had a room proved to be not quite as he would have expected: it was almost dingy. Judy told him, after he’d paid for the taxi and it had driven away, that the landlady was a bit of a tartar who forbade men visitors late in the evening, but if he kept quiet until they were in the bedroom which was downstairs, the old dragon would never know.

  He followed her along the narrow hall… He became ten feet tall and six feet broad and Superman wasn’t in the same league. He would kiss her lightly, she would tremble. She would protest, but a protest of form, not substance. The touch of his hand, and she would arch her back. A slightly rougher kiss and her lips would be scalded, her resistance driven to flight. Tormented into slavish subservience, she would…

  He kissed her. He made some slight further progress, but then she said, quite kindly, that that was that. And so it proved to be.

  8

  Fusil sat down at the breakfast table on Sunday morning. He buttered a piece of toast and stared into the far distance as he slowly ate.

  ‘A penny for them, Bob,’ said Josephine, his wife.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A penny for your thoughts.’

  ‘Oh! Sorry, was I away?’

  ‘Miles and miles and miles.’

  ‘I was thinking of one of the jobs on hand.’

  ‘I thought our marriage was founded on the fact that when you’re at home, you’re not working?’

  He sighed. ‘I know, but it’s a real twister. A load of gold’s missing and so far there’s not a sniff of what’s happened. The papers are on to it, the chief constable’s on to the D.C.I., the D.C.I.’s on to me, and I’m the meat in the sandwich.’

  ‘You can’t work miracles.’

  ‘Kywood says I’ve got to.’

  ‘He’s completely unreasonable.’

  ‘His rank gives him that privilege.’

  She dished the two eggs and three rashers of bacon she had been frying and put the plate in front of him. Their son, aged eleven, came into the kitchen, letting the door shut crash behind him.

  ‘How many more times have I got to tell you about that door?’ she demanded.

  ‘Sorry, Mum. I slipped. Is there any cornflakes?’

  ‘Are there, not is there.’

  Fusil slowly ate the first egg. The gold cas
e was sticking, which meant it was becoming poison. There didn’t seem to be much room for doubt that the gold was stolen in Fortrow. The bricks were locally made: the brown paper had been identified and the manufacturing firm was near Fortrow and only distributed its products in the south of England: the Cumberland police now ruled out the slightest possibility of the theft’s having been up there.

  Who had stolen the gold — a ship’s officer, a stevedore, a member of the shore staff, an outsider, or a combination of these? Probably not an outsider on his own. Because of the time factor, it didn’t seem possible it could have been a stevedore: tests had shown that without the right tool it took a man over an hour to break open the crate and any such tool was far too large to be openly carried around. On top of that, the lock on the inner steel box was a strong one, calling for a first-class locksmith and the available time to force it. No, all the evidence said it was a member of the shore staff or a ship’s officer. Two names immediately sprang to mind. Leery and Wilson. Leery always knew about intended shipments, where they’d be loaded, and so on. He had an absolute right to be aboard any ship and down the holds at any time. His background had been examined, amongst other things for signs that he needed, or spent, larger sums of money than could normally come his way and two items of interest had come to light.

  Not so long ago, his bank overdraft had stood at eight hundred pounds, but this had been paid off quite suddenly — it was necessary to remember that his wife had a large capital and the eight hundred might easily have come from her. Secondly, his wife was a cripple. That was a cynical reason, but good policemen very soon became cynics. She was so badly crippled that maybe she was unable to sleep with him and he needed a woman so had gone out and found himself an expensive one. He was over fifty. Men over fifty so often found themselves women of twenty and then had to buy their faithfulness, or the illusion of it. This could cost a fortune and might well have been what drove Leery to stealing. But who and where was this woman? All enquiries so far had failed to find any trace of her. Leery frequently drove away from home in the evenings, but then it was fact that he quite often had to work at night. If only there were detectives to spare, he could have been watched, but there weren’t ever any men to spare.