Call Back to Crime

by Roderic Jeffries

  *

  Downring arrived home and hurried into the sitting-room where Linda was watching the television.

  Valerie came in. ‘You’re back early. . . . Conrad, you ain’t changed: look at the muck there, on the carpet!’

  He looked down to his left. A lump of filthy grease had fallen from his boot on to the carpet.

  ‘I’ll never get that clean,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you change before coming in here? . . . Be careful or you’ll make more of a mess.’

  ‘Can’t you belt up?’ he demanded crudely. He saw the astonished look Linda gave him.

  ‘Is . . .? Has something terrible gone wrong?’ asked Valerie, worry immediately replacing annoyance.

  ‘Nothing’s gone wrong.’

  ‘But you ain’t ever come straight in here in your dirty clothes before. And you ain’t spoke like . . .’ She became silent.

  The children’s programme came to an end on the television. The news and weather began.

  ‘Has something happened at work?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he muttered.

  Her bewilderment grew as he made no effort to apologise for his unusual behaviour. He stepped forward and increased the volume on the set. The news reader listed trouble in the Middle East, trouble in the Far East, trouble at home in two of the nationalised industries.

  There was a report on the attempted bank robbery in Fortrow where thieves narrowly missed getting away with over a quarter of a million pounds. A still photograph showed the pear-shaped gash which had been blown in the wall of the strong-room. There were interviews with the bank manager, the florist, and a woman who lived close by and who’d been woken in the middle of the night by something, she didn’t know what.

  The moment he saw the shape of the hole, Downring knew what had happened: they’d ignored his careful instructions to make absolutely certain the explosive collar was regular in shape and bearing down perfectly on the surface to be blown.

  ‘Conrad . . . You . . .’ She spoke to Linda. ‘Go upstairs to bed.’

  ‘But it isn’t nearly time, Mum, and you said . . .’

  ‘Hurry up.’ Her voice was strained and harsh.

  Linda left, nearly in tears, frightened by the tone of her mother’s voice and the unmistakable air of tension. They heard her thump her way up the stairs. A door was slammed shut and then something was thrown on to the floor of her bedroom.

  Valerie spoke. ‘You were in on it,’ she said, not bothering to specify what.

  Automatically, he tried to bluster. ‘I was in on what? You ain’t talking about that bank robbery, surely?’

  ‘You’d something to do with it,’ she said, with appalled certainty. ‘That’s why you rushed in here just now without changing. You’d got to hear the news.’

  ‘Sure I wanted to hear the news, but only because someone at the garage said there was something important.’

  Her lips quivered. ‘Why? Conrad, why? . . . I thought you really loved us.’

  ‘I do,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘You can’t, or you wouldn’t’ve had nothing to do with it. Didn’t you swear before we got married you’d never again do anything bad?’

  Her misery forced him to tell the truth. ‘I had to help them . . .’

  ‘Had to?’ she asked contemptuously, fear changing her normal placid nature. ‘They couldn’t’ve forced you unless you really wanted to.’ Her voice changed. ‘Did you do it for the money? Conrad, can’t you see it didn’t matter how much we needed the money? I’d rather live in poverty than make a penny that way.’

  He spoke very slowly as he stared straight at her. ‘They threatened to get you. They blazed the garage to show what they could do. I couldn’t guard you and Linda all the time.’

  She gestured vainly with her hands, then moved and gripped his right arm. ‘You shouldn’t have given in,’ she said, in little more than a whisper.

  ‘I kept thinking of you being burned to death.’ He put his arms round her and held her tight against himself. ‘I refused to go with ’em, but had to get the putty and the detonators and tell ’em how to use ’em.’

  ‘You didn’t take no money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it ain’t the same,’ she said firmly. ‘So you’ve got to tell the police.’

  ‘Tell the splits! And give ’em a chance to wheel me straight off to the nick? You’ve got to be joking, love.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Fusil read through the army captain’s report. The explosive used at the bank was confirmed as TTX plastic, a fairly recent improvement on the previous SX plastic. Its explosive force was roughly equivalent to that of dynamite, it had the property of seeking out the greatest resistance provided it was laid very carefully and evenly, none was legitimately on sale, its smell was characteristic and closely resembled marzipan, and its past presence could be detected for a considerable time by the use of Baroni-sulphate papers.

  What in the hell were Baroni-sulphate papers? wondered Fusil. Whatever they were, he wanted some, since the odds were strongly against the villains knowing that the explosive left detectable traces behind.

  A memory that refused to be identified worried him and he stood up and began to pace the floor along the well-worn carpet. Suddenly he remembered and he crossed to the tall, gun-metal cabinet in which he filed dozens of reports and sheaves of his own notes. He found the report he wanted. Several months previously there had been a raid on army barracks just inside county boundaries and fifty-four rifles, two revolvers, six hand grenades without fuses, and a quantity of plastic explosive had been stolen.

  He resumed his pacing. If the plastic explosive which had been used at the bank had come from that raid it was reasonable to suppose it had been sold locally. All local villains known to deal in explosives must be worked over. He was about to call the C.I.D. general room when the outside telephone rang.

  ‘Coroner’s officer here, sir. The pathologist asked me to tell you that he’s about to start the P.M.’

  Fusil looked at his watch. ‘He’s working late! All right, I’ll be along in ten minutes.’ He replaced the receiver. He’d judged the P.M. wasn’t going to be until tomorrow, after all. He rang his wife. ‘Josey, it’s Bob.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re ringing to say you won’t be back for supper? How many more times do I have to tell you . . .’ He held the receiver away from his ear. Normally good-natured, Josephine really bitched at him whenever she thought he was working too hard.

  When the call was over, he walked along to the general room. Only Kerr was present. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Gone home, I suppose, sir. It’s late and . . .’

  ‘I know damn well what the time is.’

  There was a pause. Kerr, realising the probable futility of what he was doing, yet at the same time optimistic, left his table and went over to the stand on which hung his mackintosh. He unhooked the mackintosh. Nothing was said. He reached for the door handle.

  ‘Find out from the narks who’s been selling plastic explosive,’ said Fusil.

  It had, thought Kerr despondently, once upon a time been his week-end off.

  Fusil rubbed his forehead in a weary gesture. ‘It’s worth a tenner for a good lead.’

  Kerr left, bitterly pondering on the fact that if he’d shown his usual carefree attitude towards work —there was always tomorrow—he’d have been away before Fusil turned up.

  Fusil followed Kerr out and shut the door and it was a measure of his preoccupation that he’d failed to notice the room was even untidier than usual. He went down the back stairs to the courtyard and his car.

  The traffic was still heavy and it took him twice as long as usual to reach the mortuary, so that when he went into the P.M. room he found the pathologist was already taking X-rays of the dead man’s head.

  The pathologist briefly looked up. ‘’Evening, Inspector. We’ll see as soon as the film’s developed, but there’s small doubt the man was shot in the head. We’ve an entry wound which I s
howed you on the site, but I can’t see an exit one so we should find the bullet.’ He tapped the head with his gloved fore-finger. ‘Of course, you can rule out suicide.’

  Fusil stared at the dead man.

  ‘We’re going to have a harder task with prints than I thought,’ said the pathologist, his Irish brogue suddenly marked, ‘but we’ll manage. His clothes are over there—hand-outs, by the look.’

  The clothes, in large plastic bags, were over on one of the working surfaces. What had the man been? wondered Fusil. A tramp? A drop-out? A small-time, unsuccessful criminal? Yet such men were seldom murdered when they got in the way, just beaten up.

  The pathologist completed taking the X-rays. While they were being developed, he examined the fingers of the corpse. He called for a small knife and very carefully cut away the skin from the finger-tips of the right hand. Each piece of skin was placed in a small, labelled test tube filled with formaldehyde solution. He spoke again as he stopped up the last of the test tubes and handed it over to the exhibits officer. ‘The papillary ridges have gone on the outer surfaces so I’ll have to peg the skin out afterwards to get photographs of the inside surfaces.’

  Fusil went across to where Detective Sergeant Walsh stood, wrapped in deep gloom. ‘Get the plates to H.Q. tonight.’

  ‘Can’t be done, sir, not now,’ replied Walsh.

  ‘I said, get ’em there—if you have to crawl all the way on your belly. And get Dabs to see if the prints are on the books.’

  Walsh looked even gloomier, until then a seeming impossibility.

  *

  Kerr’s optimistic nature enabled him to look on the bright side of most occasions. His evening with Helen might have been ruined, but when detailed to question informers—as opposed to doing it on his own initiative—he was allowed to charge full expenses.

  At the first pub he visited, on the boundaries of South Flecton and Bratby Cross, he saw no one he knew. Two half-pints of bitter, he noted down.

  At the second pub, favoured by homosexuals, he saw Redpath. A short time after joining the division he’d broken up a fight in which Redpath had received a six-inch-long slash on his face from a razor blade set in a potato, and ever since then Redpath, showing an untypical gratitude, had given him information and, even more untypically, had always refused payment.

  The barman recognised Kerr and asked him what he’d have and it was on the house. Better and better, thought Kerr. Two more half-pints for the book and this time all profit. He drank the beer slowly and was just putting down the glass when Redpath looked his way. He nodded. Redpath, face puckered along the line of the razor slash, turned away. Kerr smoked a cigarette and finished his drink.

  ‘D’you feel like the other half?’ asked the bartender, as he picked up the empty glass.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no,’ replied Kerr.

  The bartender refilled the glass. ‘There’s no trouble, is there?’ he asked.

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘The guv’nor’ll be glad to know that.’

  Kerr lit another cigarette. There were few perks to the job, but the occasional free drink was one of them. Yet neither he nor any other honest policeman had the slightest doubt about where the line was drawn between a free drink to help good relations and a free drink that was intended as a small bribe.

  He noticed Redpath leave, limping slightly as he went through the doorway, and he suddenly wondered what kind of life the man led. Had he a home, a family? One of the really frightening facts of life was that there were a surprising number of people who had no home and no family and whose disappearance would and often did go unremarked. No one cared whether they lived or died. How could life be so cruel?

  He finished his drink and left. He walked along the road, partially in darkness because vandals had smashed two of the street lights. Redpath came out of a small side turning, passed him, and turned right at the T-junction. He followed, coming to a halt in a small alley that gave access to the back lane between two rows of terraced houses.

  ‘We’re interested in plastic explosives,’ said Kerr. ‘Like who’s selling, who’s buying.’

  Redpath took a stick of chewing-gum from his pocket, unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth. ‘’Airy Al does a trade,’ he finally said.

  ‘Al Cade?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The chewing continued. ‘Saw ’im talking the other night in the Oak to Banger Downring. Been out of the nick somethin’ over a year.’

  ‘Can you go on?’

  ‘Ain’t anything more’n that.’

  Coincidences happened, thought Kerr, but not like this: there had to be significance in the fact that Downring’s name had twice come to the attention of the police in only a few days.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As Valerie climbed out of bed on Saturday morning, she hesitated for a second and shut her eyes.

  ‘What’s up?’ Downring asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she answered dully. She drew the curtains and the sun came streaming in, cutting across her body and making the nylon nightdress virtually transparent.

  She was becoming lumpy: her breasts were pendulous, her stomach slack, her buttocks folding, yet he loved her body as he would never have done that of a seventeen-year-old girl in ripe perfection. ‘Have you got a headache?’ he asked.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘A bit of a thumper,’ she admitted. ‘It’s only because I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you?’

  She turned and looked at him in amazement. ‘Why not? Conrad, can’t you understand anything? I’m worried sick for you.’

  He slid across the bed and put his arm round her waist. ‘There ain’t nothing to be worried about.’

  ‘But if the police learn . . .?’

  ‘The splits won’t get a start. It was a pro job and not even a whisper in it for them.’

  She put her right hand on his and pressed his more tightly against herself. ‘I couldn’t bear you to be in any sort of trouble, Conrad.’ She kissed him with the sharpness of fear.

  *

  When Fusil arrived at the station on Saturday morning there was a message on his desk to ask him to ring the bank manager at Ribstone. The manager, rather diffidently, said that during the night he’d been awake and had suddenly thought of something that could just be important. Because it would be so much easier to demonstrate than explain over the phone, was there any chance Fusil could go to the bank? Reluctantly, in view of the pressure of work, Fusil agreed to drive over almost immediately.

  At the bank the separate door leading up to the manager’s flat was open, and Fusil, after ringing the bell, went upstairs. The manager met him at the top and his wife came out on to the landing to offer coffee, but Fusil pleaded pressure of work and refused.

  ‘I do hope it’s of real importance,’ said the manager, as he unlocked a door and then led the way down into the deserted bank. ‘You know what it’s like, though: a flash of genius at midnight which looks a bit different in the morning . . . But I still think there could be something in it.’

  ‘I’m sure there will be,’ said Fusil, showing a rare sense of tact.

  ‘We need to go down into the vault.’ The manager took another key from his pocket and unlocked the door next to his own office door. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Inspector, since the attempted robbery I’ve been wondering whether it isn’t just a waste of time to keep all these doors locked—after all, they seemed to be able to open them as easily as shelling peas.’

  ‘They were a slick mob,’ replied Fusil.

  They went down the stairs. Since Fusil had last been there, the dust and debris had been cleared up, the files and ledgers had all been stacked in the near right-hand corner, and a thick metal plate had been fixed over the hole in the wall and secured on the inside.

  The manager stood in front of the metal plate that covered the hole. ‘Because of the way in which the strong-room was built there’s one point where the concrete is thinner than elsewhere. That’s here, to the left o
f the door, where the hole was blown. I noticed that fact yesterday afternoon, but it wasn’t until the middle of the night when I began to wonder if there was something more than a coincidence here.’

  ‘Is the hole exactly at this weakest point?’

  ‘As far as I can judge, yes.’

  It was dangerous to think this could not be a coincidence: the spot chosen had been roughly the centre of the left-hand and longer wall and . . .

  ‘There’s something more,’ said the manager, breaking into Fusil’s thoughts. ‘Some time ago a survey was ordered to be made of all the strong-rooms in our branches and the results had to go to head office in London—it was to check on security, of course. Our report along with several others went by registered post but there was a postal theft and it was in the stolen mail. I believe almost everything was recovered soon afterwards and I know our report certainly was, but d’you suppose the thief could have got hold of the information which told him where the weakest point in the wall was?’

  ‘That’s more than possible.’ Fusil faced the manager. ‘D’you know, it’s not everyone who’d have been so observant or so intelligent as to work that out.’

  The manager could not quite hide his pleasure at such praise.

  *

  Yarrow had been telling them how much better things were in the county force.

  ‘It beats me,’ said Rowan, ‘why you came here, amongst all of us hicks.’

  Yarrow was proof against such crude sarcasm. ‘In one word, experience. An efficient officer needs to have experience of the bad as well of the good.’

  ‘Is this division bad enough for you?’

  Yarrow smiled.

  ‘I’ll tell you something, mate. There isn’t a better D.I. around than Bob Fusil.’

  ‘Your mistake is in trying to compare work done in this force . . .’

  ‘Which has the best bloody clear-up rate in the county,’ broke in Welland pugnaciously.

  Yarrow spoke with some perplexity. ‘But can’t you really see it’s impossible to compare a tiny borough with a county division? As my uncle says . . .’