Hardcastle's Secret Agent

by Graham Ison

  ‘I’m absolutely positive, Don.’ Doris rang the bell and the bus finally moved off.

  DCI Hardcastle was not pleased that Craig had lost the suspect, but had to admit that it did sometimes happen, even to the most experienced surveillance officer. Nevertheless, on the plus side, Doris Jackson was adamant that she had recognized the man who she had seen dancing with Joyce Butler the evening before the woman’s murder.

  ‘Working on the basis that villains are creatures of habit, Jack, we’ll mount an operation at the Surbiton Assembly Rooms. We’ll take Doris Jackson there and hope that she spots this man. If she doesn’t, we’ll just keep on until he shows up.’

  ‘Just the two of us, guv’nor?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘Not bloody likely, Jack. He might’ve given Craig the slip, but he’s not going to get away from us. We’ll draft in half a dozen men just to make sure that we get him in the net. And I think we’ll take Ruby Watson, too.’

  The following Friday evening seemed to be the obvious time to mount an observation at the Surbiton Assembly Rooms. Hardcastle held a briefing at the Yard before the selected officers set off.

  ‘Having considered the matter, rather than six men, I have selected three male officers and three female ones. This will enable you to pair up on the dance floor and give the impression of being in a relationship.’ There was an outburst of laughter as the officers deliberately misconstrued what Hardcastle had said. ‘All right, all right. The reason, if you haven’t worked it out already, is that I don’t want any of you dancing with someone else at a time when you’re most needed. To that end, you will keep an eye on either me or DS Bradley and work on our signal if you are needed. Have each of you got your flute?’

  There were a few mumbles of agreement and one or two displayed a police whistle.

  ‘If there is what used to be called a hue and cry, blow your whistle; it will disconcert anyone trying to escape and alert everyone else that there is a fleeing felon.’ Hardcastle paused. ‘I hope.’

  Doris Jackson and Ruby Watson had put on their finery. Ruby had obviously had her hair dyed again that very day – no doubt free of charge if she was paying her rent to ‘Jules’ in kind – and was wearing even more make-up than when they had first seen her. In both cases the girls were attired in what could only be described as posh frocks, designed to show off their figures to advantage.

  PC Don Craig and WPC Eve Sullivan were also among the team of watchers, mainly because Doris and Ruby respectively knew and trusted them, and because Craig had also seen the suspect.

  However, plans rarely worked as anticipated when it came to making an arrest. The suspect inadvertently gave himself up. With all the bravado of a self-perceived ladies’ man, he walked straight up to Ruby Watson and asked her for a dance. But that was as far as he got.

  ‘It’s him!’ shrieked Doris Jackson, who was standing beside Hardcastle, and pointed an accusing finger.

  Unsurprisingly, the man had heard her above the noise of the twenty-two-piece dance band, and the accompanying vocalist who was competing with the tenor saxophonist as she tried to make heard the words of ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Spinning on his heel, the man ran into the centre of the whirlpool of dancers, and made for an emergency exit on the far side of the hall. Furious men and their womenfolk were pushed out of the way. Several lost their balance and hit the floor, and one slipped on a hitherto undisturbed patch of French chalk. One woman tripped and fell headlong, tearing her precious stockings as she did so and uttering a very unladylike oath. Her irate partner gave chase after the fleeing suspect, but Jack Bradley, who had placed himself near the exit some time previously, intercepted the wanted man, neatly tripping him.

  As he fell to the ground, several of Hardcastle’s team descended on him and yanked him to his feet. By this time, Hardcastle had reached them.

  ‘Sergeant Michael Cassidy, I am arresting you on suspicion of murdering Joyce Butler on or about Wednesday the thirty-first of July 1940.’

  ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ demanded Cassidy, but the police put his rhetorical question down to his overweening personality.

  Cassidy was escorted to Cannon Row police station where his fingerprints were taken. On the express orders of Detective Superintendent Fred Cherrill, priority was given to comparing Cassidy’s fingerprints with those found on the broken wine bottle and the wine glass found in Joyce Butler’s flat.

  In the meantime, even though he would rather have awaited the result of the fingerprint examination, Hardcastle decided to question the suspect.

  ‘You were seen dancing with Joyce Butler in the Surbiton Assembly Rooms the night before her murder. When did you first meet her, Cassidy?’

  ‘It wasn’t a meeting, like it was a date. It was when I decided to do a snap inspection of the billets and found her playing strip poker with the gun crew. But I told you that already.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you that several members of the gun crew are prepared to testify that it was you who brought Joyce Butler into the billet and that you were taking an active part in the fun and games?’

  ‘They’re a load of lying bloody toads, that lot. Look, I’m a disciplinarian and if they can say anything to screw me, they’ll bloody well do it. It happens all the time in this man’s army. But that’s all lies.’

  ‘Seven years is the going rate for perjury, Cassidy. D’you think those men are likely to risk that to save your neck?’ suggested Jack Bradley.

  The phrase that Bradley had used reminded Cassidy that if he was convicted of murder, he would face the death penalty. He remained silent, and resolved that he would say as little as possible from then on. He knew about the police and their propensity for ‘stitching you up’ if they couldn’t find anyone else.

  ‘Have you ever been in trouble with the police before, Cassidy?’ asked Hardcastle.

  ‘No,’ said Cassidy, and smirked. ‘But then, you’d know that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And you were in the last lot,’ said Bradley, nodding towards the three Great War medal ribbons on Cassidy’s tunic. Somewhat irreverently, they were referred to as Pip, Squeak and Wilfred after the cartoon characters appearing in the Daily Mirror.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Where did you serve?’

  ‘Wipers.’

  If Cassidy thought Bradley wouldn’t know where that was, he was wrong. Geoffrey Bradley, Jack’s father, had served in the Salient for part of the war and Jack knew that the small city of Ypres was known throughout the army as Wipers.

  ‘What did you do between the wars?’ asked Hardcastle.

  ‘What did I do? I was in the army.’

  ‘So, you’ve been a soldier since 1914.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No.’

  Hardcastle decided to leave it there. There would have to be further enquiries made of the army because he had come to the conclusion that Cassidy was an inveterate liar coupled with the leery attitude of the old soldier. All of which added up to the fact that he was not too intelligent.

  Cassidy was kept in custody at the police station overnight pending further enquiries.

  Detective Sergeant Bradley began making his enquiries the next morning. He walked down Whitehall to the military police office at Great Scotland Yard and sought out Regimental Sergeant Major Richard Purdy.

  ‘Dick, I’m in need of some help.’ Bradley explained about the arrest of Cassidy on suspicion of murdering Joyce Butler. ‘He told us that he had been in the army continuously from 1914. Is there any way of checking that quickly?’

  ‘I should be able to get the answer right now.’ Purdy reached for the telephone and gave the operator an extension number. ‘War Office,’ he mouthed to Bradley, while he was waiting. Once connected, he asked the relevant questions about Sergeant Michael Cassidy of the Royal Artillery. Ten minutes later, Purdy had the answer. ‘No, he wasn’t, Jack,’ he said, and replaced the receiver.

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me, Dick.’
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br />   ‘He was stationed in France for the whole of the last war, and took his discharge there in 1919. My mate at the War Box believes he stayed in France until just before the German invasion in the present war. At which point, he came back to Blighty a bit bloody sharply and joined up again.’

  ‘I wonder why he told us he’d been in the army all the time. Perhaps he’s got something to hide.’

  Bradley, being possessed of what is known as a copper’s nose, intended to pursue Cassidy’s inexplicable lie, and made his way to the office that dealt with matters that had been circulated by the International Criminal Police Commission in the St Cloud area of Paris before the war started.

  The detective sergeant in the ICPC office, who introduced himself as Nick Starkey, sucked through his teeth when Bradley outlined his problem. He started where all policemen start, by asking for Cassidy’s date of birth. Moving across to a filing cabinet, he eventually extracted a docket and returned to his desk. He lit a cigarette and spent a few minutes thumbing through the contents of the file.

  ‘In the circumstances, Jack, this amounts to so much waste paper, because this guy Cassidy is wanted by the French police on a charge of murder committed in April 1939. Apparently, he fled to the UK immediately afterwards, but there are now hundreds of jack-booted Huns marching all over France. There’s no way the courts are going to consent to extradition just to see him handed over to the Gestapo.’

  ‘We could try him here,’ said Bradley. ‘A British subject can be tried at the Old Bailey for a crime committed anywhere in the world.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But in this case there’s a snag, Jack,’ said Starkey wearily. ‘Cassidy was born in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. Consequently, my old mate, no court in the UK has jurisdiction to try a foreign national for a crime committed in France. Anyway, all the evidence will be in France and can’t be got at. And I very much doubt that the Irish government would be interested enough to seek his extradition from the UK. So, Cassidy will have to wait until the war’s over before we can send him to the guillotine. Assuming we win, that is, which is not looking too hopeful right now.’

  ‘Mind you don’t get snapped up by the Ministry of Propaganda, Nick. You’d be an instant success. By the way, does your file tell you who Cassidy murdered?’

  ‘Yes, a French national, Marianne Cassidy, née Lebreton, his wife.’

  When Bradley reported back to Hardcastle, he was surprised by his response.

  ‘That’s all very interesting, Jack, but it turns out that Cassidy is not our man.’

  ‘Not our man, guv’nor?’ Bradley could not hide his disbelief. That a man wanted for murder in France had not committed another murder in London was beyond his comprehension.

  ‘Cassidy’s fingerprints aren’t a match, Jack. I got the report an hour ago. What’s more, there is no fingerprint evidence that he was ever in Joyce Butler’s flat.’

  ‘So, we start all over again?’

  ‘Unfortunately yes, but it’s in the nature of a policeman’s lot.’

  ‘So, Cassidy’s suspected of murdering his wife and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it.’ Bradley was appalled; to a policeman it didn’t seem right that a murderer was free to walk about the streets of London because the law couldn’t touch him.

  The science of fingerprints is an involved business. The fingerprints in the national collection, which is held at New Scotland Yard, are classified into the four main categories: arches, loops, whorls and composites.

  Once a scene-of-crime fingerprint is classified into one of the groups, an officer begins the torturous task of comparing them with the collection. This physical examination is time-consuming and requires an expertise only achieved after many years. Once an identification is made, the result is taken to a senior officer who examines the prints and, if he is satisfied, confirms that there are sufficient points of similarity to be able to confirm that they are, in fact, identical.

  There were many fingerprints lifted from the scene of Joyce Butler’s murder and priority was given to those on the wine bottle and the wine glass. However, those prints were not in the national collection.

  Furthermore, the International Criminal Police Commission in Paris had been taken over by an odious SS general called Reinhard Heydrich and he had promptly transferred the office to Berlin. Almost overnight, it had become ineffective as one after another of the free nations withdrew its support. Consequently, any hope of identifying a fingerprint taken by a foreign police force was stillborn.

  Hardcastle was becoming frustrated at the lack of progress in the murders of Joyce Butler and Mavis Lavender. Every avenue he pursued seemed to come to a dead end.

  ‘We’ll begin again, Jack, and interview some of the original witnesses a second time. There’s Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s colleague, Sister Audrey Kane, and there’s the leading fireman. What’s his name?’

  ‘Eric Simpson, sir.’

  ‘Of course. While we’re at it, we might as well talk to Simpson’s wife as well. According to her husband, she had several conversations with Joyce Butler and more or less described her as a tart.’

  ‘When d’you want to start, guv’nor?’

  ‘We’ll make Sister Kane this afternoon’s job, Jack. I wonder if she’s on the phone.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Bradley. ‘A senior nurse might be called in at any moment, given the pounding that the Luftwaffe is giving London at the moment. I’ll find out.’ He was back in Hardcastle’s office a few minutes later. ‘She’s at home, guv, and she said she’ll put the kettle on.’

  TWENTY

  It was two o’clock that afternoon when Hardcastle and Bradley arrived at Sister Kane’s Coram Street flat. Since their last visit, a bomb had taken out a building opposite, leaving a gap like a missing tooth. The buildings on either side had been shored up with great timber baulks.

  ‘Come in, my dears,’ she said warmly. ‘I’ll just make the tea and I’ve got some cake, too. Then we can get down to business. Excuse the state of the windows, but last night’s bomb took out all the glass. For once, the council came round promptly and boarded them up.’

  Audrey Kane disappeared into the kitchen and they could hear her singing one of the popular wartime songs – ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ – as she bustled about. Minutes later she was back in the sitting room with a tray of tea.

  ‘Now, my dears, how can I help you?’ She poured out the tea and handed it round, followed by a large wedge of home-made jam sponge.

  ‘I wondered if you had thought of anything else that might help us, Mrs Kane,’ Hardcastle began. ‘To be perfectly honest, we seem to have reached a dead end.’

  ‘I can’t really think of anything, my dear. Like I said, I noticed that Mrs Butler’s door was slightly ajar, so I went in to see what had happened. And that, as you know, is when I found the poor girl.’

  ‘After we’d talked to you,’ said Bradley, ‘we spoke to Mr Simpson.’

  ‘Oh, the fireman downstairs.’ There was a slight edge of disdain to Audrey Kane’s voice.

  ‘I get the impression that you don’t like him very much, Mrs Kane,’ Bradley continued. ‘He told us that his wife had spoken to Joyce Butler and she’d formed the opinion that the woman was a tart.’

  ‘He told you his wife said that?’ A look of amazement crossed Audrey Kane’s face. ‘He hasn’t got a wife, my dear, he’s a widower. He told me that the only time I spoke to him. Oh! And he kept going on about his time in America and how it was bigger and better than anything in this country.’

  ‘Is there anything else that you can think of, Mrs Kane?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘Not at the moment, my dear.’ Audrey Kane’s face took on a thoughtful expression. ‘If anything comes to mind, I’ll give you or Mr Hardcastle a ring, Mr Bradley.’

  ‘Thanks for your help, Mrs Kane, and the tea,’ said Hardcastle as he and Bradley took their leave. ‘The cake was beautiful.’

  ‘Are you going speak to Simpson n
ow, guv’nor?’ asked Bradley, as they passed the door to the fireman’s flat.

  ‘No, I think we’ll make some enquiries of the United States Embassy first. For all we know, Mrs Kane might have misunderstood what Simpson said to her, or he may just have been boasting. Or even making it all up just to shut up someone he saw as a nosey woman.’

  The United States Embassy was in Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair district. America was a neutral country, although they helped the United Kingdom surreptitiously with materiel of various kinds.

  Because of this neutrality, and the fact that their diplomatic mission was in the centre of a warring nation, extra precautions had been taken and it was some time before Hardcastle and Bradley were admitted to the office of the legal attaché.

  Despite his diplomatic cover title of legal attaché, Willis Lamenski was an FBI agent and had been stationed at the embassy since 1937.

  ‘I suppose you just stopped by because you want something, Walter.’ Lamenski grinned as he shook hands with Hardcastle and then Bradley. ‘Howdy, Jack.’

  Hardcastle outlined what little the police had learned about Leading Fireman Eric Simpson. ‘It’s a bit of a long shot, Willis, but we’re hoping that he’s got a record of some sort in the States. Is there any way you can find out?’

  Lamenski’s secretary appeared silently with a tray of coffee which she placed on a table before leaving just as quietly as she had entered.

  ‘I’ll do what I can, Walter,’ said Lamenski, a little uncertainly, ‘although records Stateside tend to be spread out. But if it was something serious and was investigated by the Bureau, or if we were asked for assistance, it might turn up. Leave it with me.’

  ‘Thanks, Willis.’ Hardcastle knew that was the best he could hope for, but he also knew that Lamenski would do his very best to assist his ‘limey’ friends.

  It took twenty-four hours.

  ‘Walter, I have something for you about Simpson,’ said Willis Lamenski. ‘If you dropped by it would save me from trying to explain over the phone.’

  ‘I don’t know how you did it, Willis, but Jack and I will be round to the embassy straight away.’