by Roger Bax
The first thing, clearly, was to have a good look at one of the local name-plates. After dinner Cross went off in the car, called in at a pub for a double whisky, and on his way back drew up under a lamp at the corner of a road of semi-detached houses and closely examined the plate.
There was a single post driven deep into the ground, and a flat wooden cross-piece, bolted to it with three iron bolts, the whole forming a T. The metal plate, with the lettering on it, was screwed to the cross-piece with four screws – no doubt well sunk in paint and rust. To remove a plate, let alone exchange it for another, would take a long time. It could only be done in the dark, and still the risk of being spotted would be considerable. If there were ever an investigation, it would be obvious that the thing had been tampered with. To uproot the whole post and carry the sign away bodily would be quite impossible without heavy tools and plenty of time. Cross gazed at the sign despondently. The whole plan had been hare-brained, impracticable.
Then he had a new idea. He got out of the car and quickly examined the cross-piece. The slab of wood was rectangular, about three feet long, nine inches broad and a little over an inch thick. The sides were smooth, and slightly bevelled at the front edge. Might it not be possible to make a dummy plate and hook it on in such a way that it covered up the real one? Or, better still, a canvas dummy – a canvas dummy shaped like a very shallow bag, which could be slipped bodily over the cross-piece in a couple of seconds? In the daytime, of course, such a dummy would be noticed, but if it were a tight fit and carefully painted, who would be likely to detect the difference for a short period on a dark night?
At last Cross felt that the plot was beginning to take shape. The more he thought about the canvas cover, the more he liked the idea. It had one enormous advantage: it could be rolled up and stuffed into a coat pocket. Provided he could make such a cover, skilfully painted on one side in black and white, and work out the necessary movements, he had no doubt that he could deceive his witnesses. He went home feeling quite pleased with himself.
Back in the flat, he went to work on some of the details. The killing would obviously have to take place at Hollison’s house in Welford Avenue. Somehow it would have to be arranged that Uncle Charles should be at home on the night of the murder, and alone. Cross took a sheet of paper and made a note under the heading, ‘Things to see to’.
Suppose the murder were timed for eight o’clock. At that hour, Cross would have to be in Welford Avenue. At approximately the same time he would have to be persuading two witnesses – by means of a dummy name-plate affixed at a suitable moment – that he and they were, in fact, in quite a different street a long way away – a street not yet selected, but which for the time being could be called ‘X Avenue’.
What about these witnesses? One thing was clear – he could not possibly do the murder first and rely on securing his witnesses afterwards. The Avenue might be empty. It wasn’t a main thoroughfare, by any means – it was a rather quiet road of medium-sized detached houses set back behind gardens. Anyone happening to pass at that hour would very probably live near by, and would know that it was Welford Avenue, not X-Avenue, whatever the name-plate might say.
No, the witnesses would have to be complete strangers to the district, and they would have to be ‘in the bag’ – in this case, in the car – before the murder, all ready to do their stuff. But on what pretext could he pick up a couple of total strangers, whose presence in the car must be made to seem both unplanned and explicable? And on what pretext could he leave them in the car while he went inside the house in Welford Avenue and killed his uncle? Dare he take that risk at all – and yet wasn’t it an essential part of the plan? Again, by what stratagem, short of a clumsy and obvious one, could he draw their attention to the faked name-plate and leave on their minds the erroneous impression that they had been in X-Avenue?
The questions were now running far ahead of the answers, and for the moment Cross contented himself with making a note of them. They must be dealt with one at a time, and in due course everything would fall neatly into place. He had still to decide how to get hold of the witnesses – that was the next step.
In what circumstances, he asked himself, did a motorist normally pick up strangers? Usually on quiet roads, where there were no ordinary means of transport, or main roads – arterials and by-passes – where a car was so much faster than a bus. Even then the pedestrian usually had to make the first sign. In the closely-packed suburbs around Twickenham and Richmond it wasn’t likely that motorists would do much casual picking up. Only of young women, of course, and a floozie would hardly make the sort of alibi he was after. He felt certain that he could stooge around in the car all day long – and all night, too, for that matter – without being asked for a lift in this district. It looked as though the initiative would have to be his. He could always stop and ask a pedestrian the way, and then it would be only courteous to suggest a lift. But the pedestrian would probably have local knowledge, and so would be useless. You couldn’t take people far out of their way, even at night, and get away with it. Not even strangers – they would begin to get uneasy after a few minutes. Cross thought and thought, and after a quarter of an hour he had to confess to himself that he hadn’t the foggiest idea how this particular problem could be solved.
The foggiest idea! Fog! Fog! Of course, that was the answer. You could blame fog for anything. People would feel lost in a fog, they would be grateful for a lift. He could get lost, too, and they wouldn’t mind. Of course, it would have to be a fog of just the right kind – thick enough to excuse error and make the detection of a dummy name-plate unlikely – but not too bad to spoil the working out of a precise time-table. There might not be many suitable nights, but there were bound to be one or two, with winter coming on. Yes, fog was undoubtedly the answer. Cross could see now the infinite possibilities of well-engineered confusion.
He went to his writing-desk – a present from his uncle before the war – and took out a road map of the district. To make the alibi safe, X-Avenue must be at such a distance from Welford Avenue that it would take a car not less than half an hour to make the journey on a foggy night. The witnesses must be picked up at a point about mid-way between Welford Avenue and X-Avenue. At the Richmond roundabout, say, where buses would be discharging home-going crowds all through the evening. Many people would live ten or fifteen minutes’ walk from the bus. There should be no difficulty in getting customers. They would sit in the back, not seeing much. He would pretend to drive them home – pretend that was the way he was going – but in fact he would drive them to Welford Avenue. This would be his second visit to Welford Avenue, of course, because he would have already fixed the dummy X-Avenue plate. As he turned the last corner he would slow down, pretend he was lost, and ask them if they could read the name of the street. They would all three peer out, and read X-Avenue.
That would establish the alibi. He could easily check the time with them by apologizing for losing the way and for keeping them so long. But he would still have to do the murder. He would need an excuse for leaving the car and going to his uncle’s house. He could say he was going to call at a house and ask the way. Uncle Charles lived at the second house from the end where the name-plate was; it would be perfectly reasonable to make inquiries there. His uncle, alone in the house, would come to the door. Cross would strike him down, return to the car, say there was nobody in and that they must drive on and hope for the best. He would have to put on a pretty good act, of course. And he would have to make sure that one blow was sufficient – it wouldn’t do to have any calls for help. But Cross had had a lot of practice with blunt instruments, and, anyway, the fog would muffle the sound. Soon afterwards he could pretend to discover where he was, and drive his witnesses home.
The weapon would be a complication. Whatever it was, he could hardly conceal it in the car beside him – that would be too great a risk. He’d have to hide it somewhere handy – perhaps just inside his uncle’s gate – when he paid his first call to fix t
he dummy name-plate. Yes, and as soon as he’d done the murder he’d have to collect the dummy and stuff it into his pocket before he returned to the car. It would all need most careful rehearsing, perfect timing, an ice-cool head. There was a hell of a lot to remember – his list of ‘things to do’ already filled the sheet of paper.
He’d have to establish the time of death with a responsible person in order to perfect the alibi. It wouldn’t be safe to leave that matter to the police surgeon – it was notorious that estimates of the time of death were subject to a wide margin of error. If the alibi was to be good, the time of death must be pin-pointed. That meant he would have to ring someone up from his uncle’s house, with the old man lying in the hall. Dangerous – but a reasonable risk, if it were quickly done. Whom should he ring – the police? No, they might move a little too fast. A near neighbour would be better – in a disguised voice, of course. He made a note to pick a suitable telephone number from the residents in Welford Avenue or nearby.
Thinking over the plan as far as it went, Cross was suddenly brought up very unpleasantly by another obstacle – and a major one. The fact that he could have overlooked it at all rather scared him. At eight o’clock – or whatever the time chosen – he would ostensibly be in X-Avenue, calling at a house to ask the way. That would be his story to the police; that would be the story told by the witnesses. The police would undoubtedly go to the real X-Avenue to check the story, to find out if he had, in fact, called at a house there. And they would find that he hadn’t.
For the first time Cross felt a serious pang of doubt. Things were beginning to get rather involved. Was he going to trip up, to forget something vital, as murderers so often did? There were always the unexpected things, the absurd coincidences, to wreck good plans. But the doubt did not last long. This, after all, was only the initial stage; the dress rehearsal was far ahead.
He posed the new problem. How could he knock at the door of a house when he was half an hour away from it? Or how could he appear to do so? Was there any way in which he could get someone else to knock? His thoughts ranged widely – sending a parcel, sending a messenger, ringing someone up and telling him to go urgently to the address – absurd ideas, conceived only to be put aside. He must do this alone, all alone, or not at all. He had long ago learned to trust no one but himself. If the people in the house were out at the time ... But he couldn’t possibly arrange for them to be out. Things must seem to happen naturally. An empty house! that was it. He could tell his witnesses that he had knocked, and that there had been no reply. He had gone round to the back, perhaps to see if there were any lights, but there hadn’t been. Of course, there were always the people next door – they might say they hadn’t heard a knock. But who would regard their evidence as conclusive? It was notoriously difficult to prove a negative. The real trouble was that X-Avenue would have to be a road where the second or third house – occupying a position similar to that of the Hollison house in Welford Avenue – was empty. To find such a road was going to be a pretty formidable task. There weren’t many empty houses in London these days!
All the same, Cross felt that he had made real progress. However incomplete in detail, the plan had one outstanding quality. Practically all the things which might go wrong related to events before the murder. If the fog were too thick or too sparse, if the witnesses proved unsuitable, if they were too interested in the route, if they were suspicious or inquisitive or too helpful, if they were stupid or short-sighted and couldn’t identify the street from the false name-plate, if the time-table broke down, or the car broke down, or his uncle had unexpected visitors – well, he needn’t do the murder that night. He could simply pick up the weapon and the dummy, take the witnesses home, and try again another night. Indeed, he could go on trying until all the circumstances were favourable. Surely there could be no better safeguard than that?
He would not be committed in any way until the moment he struck the blow. All he would have to do then would be to report the murder, drive off and wait for the inquiry to reach inevitable deadlock.
Meanwhile, the two most urgent jobs were to select a suitable X-Avenue, and to see if he could make a dummy name-plate which would pass in a fog.
CHAPTER III
The next day was Sunday. Uncle Charles, who had a small hoard of pre-war golf balls, had suggested a threesome if the weather were fine, but Cross was anxious to get ahead with his plan and excused himself. Soon after breakfast he set off in the Vauxhall to look for his empty house. He had already studied the street guide, and he thought he would start by investigating the Twickenham district. He cruised about for an hour or so without finding what he wanted. It was going to be, he feared, a disappointing as well as a tiring day. As he had expected, there were very few empty houses about. His simplest course would be to go to an agent and get a list of houses for sale with vacant possession, but that would mean starting a trail which later on might lead to trouble. It was important that no one should know he had ever shown an interest in empty houses.
By lunch-time he had covered many miles. Altogether, he had found three ‘empties’. Two had been in roads so different in character from Welford Avenue that Cross had to reject them at once as quite unsuitable. The third was in the right kind of road, but it was just about half-way along and too far away from the name-plates to be of any use.
During lunch at a pub down by the river, Cross considered the problem again. Was it really necessary that he should find this empty house? Could he ‘get away’ with less? Could he, perhaps, just pretend that he was going to make inquiries at a house and then come back to his witnesses after a few minutes and say that it was so foggy and there were so few lights about that he’d changed his mind and decided it was better to go on? Cross let his mind dwell on such a hypothetical scene. He decided that the story would sound awfully lame – he would have to be away at least five minutes to do the murder, and the police would expect those five minutes to be adequately accounted for. With an empty house he could say that he had walked up the path, knocked, waited, knocked again, walked round the back – he could easily explain five minutes’ absence. But he could hardly expect the police to believe that he had ‘dithered’ in the fog for five minutes. They would want to know where he walked to, whether he actually opened a gate, why he didn’t, what exactly he thought he was doing. Cross could vividly imagine that uncomfortable conversation with a sceptical inspector. No, his explanation of his absence had got to be convincing. That meant he must have a particular empty house in mind, a house which to some extent he could describe. He must know whether the gate was of wood or metal, whether the path was of concrete or gravel – even in a fog, it would be expected that some small detail would stay in his mind. There was, it seemed, no alternative to the empty house.
After lunch, therefore, he resumed the search. He had combed the Twickenham district pretty thoroughly in the morning, so he decided to go back to the Richmond roundabout and try the Kingston side during the afternoon. He drove up Kingston Hill and investigated several turnings which were ideal in the sense that they would have been just the kind of places he would have found himself in if, intending to go to Welford Avenue, he had accidentally taken the wrong turning out of the roundabout. But all the houses were occupied. Later on he found two more ‘empties’, one in the middle of a row and one at the bottom of a cul-de-sac. An elderly couple were looking over this last one, and Cross did not linger. He was feeling very despondent when he suddenly had a stroke of real good fortune.
He had turned into a fairly wide and pleasant road named Hamley Avenue. An estate agent would no doubt have described it as ‘select’. The name-plate was of a type similar to that in Welford Avenue, though a shade shorter. As Cross eagerly looked across at the house which, by its position, corresponded with his uncle’s in Welford Avenue, his pulse leaped. It was a bombed house!
Cross stopped the car. He could hardly have regarded the place with a warmer sense of ownership if he had been a young husband taking his f
irst look at the new homestead. This house had everything that he could have desired. It was detached, and stood well away from its neighbours. It had just about the same amount of garden in front as his uncle’s house. It had a path to the front door of well-laid crazy-paving, which would not show footmarks. And it was well and truly blitzed. Part of the roof was open to the sky, a gable was almost torn away, all the windows were smashed, and the front door appeared to be jammed half open. Broken tiles lay all around.
Cross took a quick glance up and down the road and decided to risk a closer look. He turned his coat collar up and pulled his soft-brimmed hat well down over his face. It would only take a moment. He walked quickly up the path. The garden was still in fairly good shape – the house must have been hit by one of the last of the fly-bombs. He slipped through the opening of the front door, broken glass crackling under his feet. He saw at once that the whole place was quite beyond repair – and that was all to the good, for it meant that the shell would stand untouched throughout the winter. It was the right-hand side of the house that had been most damaged. There was a lot of debris lying about – remnants of smashed furniture, torn books, some old sacks. In the first room on the left, which looked as though it had been a rather nice lounge, there was a settee with one foot off and most of the stuffing ripped out. Everything worth taking had, of course, been salvaged.
Cross was delighted. From now on X-Avenue was Hamley Avenue. The place was perfect for his needs. Looking for a house at which to inquire the way in a fog, he would be just as likely to pick a blitzed house as an occupied one. He could imagine himself telling the story – how he had groped about in the dark and found the front door open and tried to knock, and then realized it was a bombed house and damned nearly broken his neck getting away. He could be in an infernally bad temper. That would cover up any natural agitation he might feel after killing his uncle, and would help to make his story sound convincing. He went home with a comfortable sense of solid achievement.