Crowner and Justice

by Barrie Roberts

  The day had turned cold and grey. When I got home Sheila was already in the kitchen.

  ‘Hi!’ she said, without looking round. ‘It was cold, so I thought you might like something hot.’

  I pinched her backside gently. ‘As soon as I walked into the kitchen I fancied something hot. Why don’t we forget dinner, get swiftly drunk and go to bed?’

  ‘Huh,’ she snorted. ‘What’s wrong with the front room carpet these days?’

  ‘That’s for winter when the curtains are drawn,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to cause heart attacks on the top of a double decker bus.’

  ‘There aren’t any buses along this road,’ she pointed out. ‘Truth is, you’re just a stuffy old pom, afraid of what the neighbours think.’

  ‘Truth is,’ I said, ‘that we have experience of chilly weather hereabouts, and the best place is in bed.’

  She turned from the worktop and kissed me. ‘In South Australia we don’t have cold weather,’ she said. ‘There are parts where it’s 125 degrees in midsummer.’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘The parts where nobody lives. Anyway, why have you taken over my turn to cook?’

  ‘Told you. I thought you’d fancy something warm after a hard day at the office.’

  ‘What you really mean is that either Mac or John Parry has wheedled a free meal out of us and they both prefer your cooking.’

  ‘Well, yair, that as well. John rang and said he’d got some info about the McBride affair.’

  ‘I have been wrestling, for much of this afternoon, with the fact that I’m probably going to lose Con Mulvaney’s case, and you want me to waste my evening talking to John Parry about a case that I can’t do anything about anyway?’

  ‘Hoy!’ she said, ‘Go and pour yourself a drink and keep out from underfoot till John gets here. After which you can be rude to him if you like.’

  So I withdrew.

  Parry turned up with a bottle of Talisker in tow and we settled to eat. Sheila’s work was quite sufficient to stop us talking shop until we got to the coffee and whisky stage.

  ‘I have a few bits of information about Charlie Nesbit,’ the big Welshman said, ‘not to mention a bit about Sean McBride.’

  ‘He thinks it’s none of his business,’ said Sheila. ‘He’s more interested in his old strike case.’

  John looked from one to another of us. ‘Have you kiddies been scrapping again? Shall I go out and come in again, or shall I just kiss the hostess and slink away into the night?’

  ‘If it’ll stop you mauling my fiancée, I’ll listen to what you’ve got to say about Nesbit and McBride.’

  He nodded. ‘Did you know that Kath McBride’s gaff was burgled a few days before Sean died?’

  ‘What?’ I ejaculated. ‘I’ve not heard that!’

  ‘It’s true, though, boyo. She says that they were all out at the pictures one evening and when they got back the glass in the back door had been smashed, the door opened and someone had been in.’

  ‘Was anything taken?’

  ‘Well now, that’s the peculiar bit, isn’t it? Most of the house only showed odd little indications that someone had been there — you know, things out of their usual place, but Sean’s room had been gone over in some detail. Nevertheless, as far as Kath knows, nothing was missing.’

  ‘That’s pretty bloody odd,’ said Sheila. ‘Did she report it?’

  John shook his head. ‘No. Kath took the view that we don’t take any notice of burglaries in general on that estate and we certainly wouldn’t want to be bothered by a burglar who didn’t steal anything, and she’s probably right.’

  ‘What do you think they — he — she — was after? Any idea?’

  ‘Well, they left Sean’s camera and his music gear. They left the telly and the video in the sitting room. It certainly wasn’t your average estate burglar. But what they really wanted, I don’t know. Sean wasn’t into drugs, so far as the Drug Squad knows, he wasn’t into thieving, and he kept his cash in a bank account. That leaves something personal.’

  ‘Something personal?’ Sheila queried.

  ‘Yes. Perhaps something that he’d had from someone else that they wanted to get back.’

  ‘Why not ask?’ I said.

  ‘Because, presumably, he wouldn’t hand it over.’

  ‘What on earth are we talking about here? Are you saying he was into blackmail?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s just that all the obvious reasons for burglary are out, so it’s got to be something peculiar, and it certainly seems that someone was looking for something they expected to be in Sean’s room. So — he may have had something of somebody else’s. That’s my thinking.’

  ‘Doesn’t take you very far, does it?’ said Sheila.

  ‘Well, no,’ he agreed. ‘But it helps to confirm the impression that there was something going on around young McBride that we haven’t discovered yet.’

  ‘You sure it wasn’t drugs?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘The usual answer that we heavy-footed plods jump to when serious malarkey breaks out amongst youngsters is drugs, but I promise you, no one — absolutely no one — puts Sean down as into drugs — neither using nor selling.’

  ‘What about the girlfriend?’

  ‘Sylvia Wellington? A puff of pot at parties, maybe. Nothing else. Tom Wellington would have killed her if he even dreamed of anything else. Again — nothing from the Drug Squad.’

  ‘Does the Drug Squad know every drug user in town?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but they soon get to know the serious ones and any who deal, and that wasn’t McBride or Sylvia Wellington.’

  ‘So that takes us nowhere,’ remarked Sheila.

  ‘It is,’ said John, ‘more information, and more information is always good news to a policeman.’

  ‘Huh!’ she said, ‘Except when you haven’t got the least idea what it means.’

  ‘I have demonstrated to you,’ he said, ‘that at least we know what it doesn’t mean, which is nearly as good. Kindly remember Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark. Value of negative evidence and all that.’

  ‘Smarmy and cunning but no cigar,’ she announced.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘until I tell you about Nesbit.’

  ‘What about Nesbit?’ I said.

  ‘Doc’s been at him and given me the benefit of his observations. Firstly, I was right about the small abrasion on his knee and the tear in his jeans. Doc says the injury was from hitting the floorboard on the move, and that it happened very shortly before death or it would have bled a lot more. He also says that someone probably gripped Charlie’s neck with a left hand, very forcefully.’

  ‘So, what do you think happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Just as I speculated before,’ he said, smugly. ‘Someone lay in wait in the little hallway by the bathroom. When Nesbit came back from the pub and headed straight for the loo, that someone stepped out behind him, took him by the neck with his left hand, forced him down against the bath and shot him through the right side of his head.’

  ‘Possible,’ I said, ‘but it’s a bit slender. Suppose he got slewed at the pub, came over all drunkenly remorseful about Sean’s death, decided to end it all, went home, took his little pistol, went into the bathroom and slumped drunkenly to his knees by the bath, thereby scraping his knee on the floor, then shot himself?’

  ‘I know,’ John said. ‘I’m not happy with it. I need more. There’s the marks on his neck, but they could have been made anytime really.’

  They weren’t,’ announced Sheila. ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘Says who?’ I demanded.

  ‘Says me, cobber.’ She got up and left the room, returning with a handful of Polaroid photos. ‘You were there,’ she said to John. ‘Remember the guitar and banjo in the front room?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, slowly and perplexed.

  ‘Notice anything about them?’ Sheila asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘There was a six-string acoustic g
uitar and a four-string tenor banjo. That’s all. Nothing surprising, Nesbit had played with Irish groups since he was a kid.’

  ‘And I thought the Welsh were musical,’ she said. She riffled through the Polaroids and dropped one on the table. ‘Look at the strings,’ she commanded.

  John and I both looked. After a moment John said, ‘When was this taken?’

  Ah, yes, well,’ I began, ‘While we were waiting for you to arrive, I took the opportunity to take a few reference shots.’

  He stared at me, blankly. As an all-too-frequent discoverer of dead bodies,’ he said, heavily, ‘you might be expected to know the rules, mightn’t you? You call the police and leave the scene strictly alone.’

  ‘I promise you,’ I said, ‘I never smoked, breathed, spat, sweated or even thought while I was in that room. I just felt that if I had pictures of my own it would save me asking you to wangle me copies of the official ones when it wasn’t even my case.’

  ‘Very thoughtful of you,’ he said. ‘Now then, what’s with these instruments?’

  ‘The strings,’ Sheila said. ‘Look at them.’

  He looked again. ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘A six-string acoustic guitar and a four-string banjo. So what?’

  She snorted impatiently ‘What a pair of galahs!’ she said and got up again to leave the room.

  She came back with her guitar and sat with it across her knee, as though she was going to play.

  ‘Do you know “Isle of Capri”?’ John asked. ‘My mother was very fond of that.’

  Sheila snorted again. ‘Observe,’ she commanded. ‘Here I have a bog standard six-string guitar. Note that the so-called “top” string — the thinnest, highest-pitched one — is at the bottom of the array when the instrument is in playing position. Conversely, the so-called “bottom” string — the thickest, lowest note — is at the top of the array.’

  “All very simple and lucid,’ John remarked.

  She shot him an eloquent scowl. ‘Now, watch closely, because there’ll be questions,’ she continued, lifting the instrument and holding it upright. ‘See — the bass string is to your left and the treble to your right. Right?’

  We nodded.

  ‘Now look at the piccy, you galahs!’

  We did, and both saw it simultaneously. ‘They’re back to front!’ exclaimed John.

  ‘Back-strung!’ I said.

  ‘Precisely Watson,’ she said. ‘Charlie Nesbit was left-handed. If he’d shot himself, the entry wound would have been on the left side and the pistol would have fallen in the bath.’

  She glared at us both, triumphantly.

  ‘You’re not just a pretty face and a funny accent, are you?’ said John. ‘You’ve solved my problem, you’ve made my case. Let me give you a big sloppy kiss.’

  ‘No, ta. Just fill the whisky glass,’ she said.

  We refilled and John and I toasted her.

  ‘Just one other little thing,’ said John, after a long swallow. ‘You don’t happen to be able to prove who did it and why, do you?’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We laughed — the way you do when you’ve had a drink and you think you’re doing well. The trouble with drink is that it won’t cheer you up — it’ll only make you feel like you do already but more so, if you know what I mean. A few drinks later the delight at Sheila’s observation had dissolved and we were sitting round silently sipping and looking at the photographs and the drink was making us feel more so — more confused and puzzled.

  ‘I suppose,’ John said glumly, ‘that you really don’t have any other amazing insights, Sheila?’ and this time it wasn’t a joke.

  She shook her head. ‘Not a skerrik.’

  ‘I’d even take one of those if I knew what it was,’ he said. ‘All I keep thinking about is the money.’

  ‘What money?’ Sheila and I asked in unison.

  The big Welshman looked surprised. ‘Haven’t I told you about the money? The money in Nesbit’s bank account?’

  ‘I’m surprised he had a bank account,’ remarked Sheila.

  ‘You almost have to have to get paid your dole nowadays,’ I said. ‘Tell us about the money, John.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we always look for accounts as a matter of course. Charlie Nesbit had a building society cash card in his flat, and we checked it out. We thought there’d only be the remains of his dole in the account, but there was just over a thousand.’

  Sheila and I gaped. ‘How was the thousand accumulated?’ I asked.

  ‘One payment of a round grand,’ said John, ‘paid in the Saturday morning after Sean McBride died, in cash. What do you make of that?’

  Sheila frowned. ‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘Sean disappears on a Friday evening — possibly in company with Charlie — and dies sometime that night, by accident or suicide. Then Charlie finds the body, but before Charlie has found the body — when no one knows that Sean is dead — someone plonks a grand into Charlie’s account, right?’

  ‘Right,’ we said.

  ‘Then Charlie killed Sean,’ she announced.

  ‘Thank you, Sherlock,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t work.’

  ‘Oh yair?’ she challenged. ‘Someone breaks into Sean’s pad and doesn’t — apparently — find anything. So he commission’s Charlie to kill Sean. Sean does it, reports to his employer and the money is paid in to his account. Then the employer stiffs Charlie to tie up a loose end.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘but, firstly, if Charlie killed Sean why did he find the body? Secondly, how did Charlie kill Sean? Sean died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Thirdly, if the employer is prepared to put a bullet in Charlie, why didn’t he see to Sean himself, instead of wasting a grand on Charlie?’

  She frowned again. John sprawled back in his chair and looked at her, watching her grapple with my questions. ‘He’s right,’ he said, after a while. ‘It won’t work that way. You can make Sean’s death an accident, not a suicide, but you can’t make it a murder — by Charlie or anyone else. Like Chris says, he died of monoxide poisoning. You can’t murder someone that way unless they’re already unconscious. There’s nothing to suggest that Sean was artificially unconscious. It looks like he had his wicked will of Sylvia, she went off and left him and he sat in the car and was silly enough to leave the engine running.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done that,’ Sheila said. ‘He was a mechanic.’

  ‘That’s what happened,’ John said.

  ‘So you think Charlie’s death is a coincidence?’ she demanded.

  ‘Charlie’s death, as you have brilliantly pointed out,’ he said, ‘was a murder, not an accident or a suicide.’

  ‘And you think it’s pure coincidence that Charlie takes Sean away from home on the night Sean died, that he gets paid a load of money by persons unknown for reasons unknown, that he finds Sean’s body, that he haunts Kath with his tape on the phone, and then he just happens to get murdered himself? Come on, John Parry, there’s coincidences enough there to choke a stockman’s dog, and I thought you didn’t like coincidences!’

  ‘I don’t,’ he agreed. ‘I thought that Sean and Charlie both committing suicide was a bit iffy, though people do top themselves because someone else has, but you got rid of that coincidence for me, didn’t you? Now I’ve got a murder to solve — the murder of Charlie Nesbit. In the course of looking into that, I shall have to consider whether he took Sean away from home, why he was paid a grand on the following morning, and why he found the body and made those creepy phone calls, but that doesn’t mean I think Sean was murdered. At present I think that Sean died by accident and that Charlie was up to something that had nothing to do with Sean and has ended up killed because of it.’

  Sheila merely snorted and topped up her drink. I sat and pondered, to no point at all. John was right — the connection between the two deaths was that Charlie apparently took Sean away from his home on the night that he died and that he found the body, but that might be innocent and might simply arise out of them being pals.
Sean might well have died by accident, but murder seemed impossible.

  We chewed it round some more, but we got no further. Sheila wanted to believe in two murders, I sympathised with her and half-believed her and John wasn’t having any. Dead end.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Dennis Maiden came back fighting in the next morning’s mail, or at least his solicitor did. A letter from an expensive Birmingham firm announced that:

  ‘Mr Maiden is amused by your attempt to use the Distress Act against him, the more so since we have advised him that the Act is several centuries old and has not been used since 1910. In the circumstances he instructs us that he is still awaiting payment of his account in this matter and that, if the bill is not paid very shortly, he will feel obliged to dispose of the animals.’

  After the previous day’s problems and frustrations I was in an aggressive mood. I rang up the writer of the letter and introduced myself.

  ‘A nice try,’ he complimented me, ‘but you didn’t really think it would work, did you. The Act’s dead. It doesn’t appear in the literature since 1910.’

  ‘True,’ I agreed, ‘but have you, by any chance, read the 1910 case?’

  Of course he hadn’t. Lawyers have almost never read the cases they quote glibly.

  ‘As a matter of fact, no,’ he admitted. ‘Is it relevant?’

  ‘Very much so,’ I said. ‘As far back as 1910, someone tried to get out of a Distress Act action by claiming that the Act was so old it was no longer law. It didn’t work. The Court reminded them that an Act of Parliament has to be specifically repealed before it ceases to be law. I’m sure you remember Ashcroft — v — Thornton — after all, it was a Midlands case — when that principal was established.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said, slowly, and I could almost hear the cogs of his brain racing, ‘but it really doesn’t work, does it?’

  ‘Why not?’ I demanded.

  ‘Because if your client had put a car into my client’s garage and refused to pay for the repairs, my client could seize the car against the debt, and if the debt wasn’t paid he could dispose of it. That’s the law as it is today, isn’t it?’