A Glimpse of Death (David Mallin Detective series Book 7)

by Ormerod, Roger

  “All right,” cut in Grace crisply. “Leave it for now, George.”

  So we left it, and it was hours later, at the station, before we got back to it.

  “Now,” she said, leaning forward over her desk, “what wasn’t there that should have been, George?”

  I don’t want to give the impression that I was being treated as a star witness. Far from it. They’d stuck me out in the corridor on a hard bench, where I found that there was no easy position for my leg, and they hadn’t even produced a cup of tea to help me through the hours. But Grace had been working like a beaveress, people galloping in and out of her office with reports, and even so she hadn’t forgotten me. She never forgot details, and I was one of the details.

  “His shoulder harness,” I said.

  “Perhaps he didn’t own one.” She seemed amused.

  “Of course he did. He’d feel naked without…”

  “His gun?” she prompted, when I paused at the thought. “But George, his gun was wrapped and put away. He wasn’t one of your hammer-headed heavies, living next to the boss for protection. He existed for one reason, and one only. To strike off the people Sarturo found annoying. That’s not going to be a nine to five job. It’s a once or twice a year one. So it follows that he wouldn’t need a gun harness.”

  “Then why,” I demanded, “were his hands gripping his lapels?”

  “A habit? Maybe he stood like that, the way some people stand with their hands clasped behind them.”

  “No, Grace. He was holding his jacket open, and in a gesture that had to mean one thing. He was indicating the fact that he was not wearing a gun. He’d opened that door, and found himself facing the bad end of a thirty-two. It was two pros facing each other, so he opened his jacket wide, to indicate he wasn’t armed.”

  “A lot of good it did him.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  She smiled. “Do you?”

  “You’re thinking of the small calibre, and the low muzzle velocity?”

  “You seem convinced it was a pro,” she said. “Convince me.”

  “I’m not interested in convincing you. I’ve convinced myself, and that’s enough. It was a gang killing, so I’m not interested.”

  “Hmm!” She looked down at her blotter. “Because you don’t want to be, I suppose. Does it make a difference?”

  “They wipe each other out — I should worry.”

  When she looked up again I was surprised and shocked by her expression. Her eyes seemed to have become darker and her mouth now was hard and bitter. I could understand, then, how she’d bludgeoned her way to that position, that desk. “It’s still murder,” she said coldly. “Do you expect to be judge and jury, and decide that this crime is bad and that crime is good?”

  Hell, I thought, an idealist. A woman idealist! “Saturn’s no loss.”

  “What were you when you retired, George? A sergeant? I can see why. You always had unconventional views.”

  “Oh, I see. Now we know where we stand.”

  “Do we?” she snapped. “You do. I don’t. You’re a sight too much unconcerned about the whole thing, it seems to me. You haven’t once asked about the robbery.”

  I’d been a bit nervous of enquiring, to tell you the truth. After all, it was my fault, and I felt I now owed the company the value of what had gone. The debt hung heavy on my conscience. I don’t like to be in debt.

  “You’re going to tell me that they got clear away,” I said.

  “With your help.”

  “You could put it more kindly.”

  “I’m not in a forgiving mood.” She rustled about amongst the reports. “Like to see what they took?”

  And she tossed it over at me with a gesture of anger.

  I read slowly down the list.

  1.000 capsules: Pentobarbitone.

  1.000 capsules: Butobarbitone.

  1.000 capsules: Phenobarbitone.

  2.000 tubes (10 per tube): Dextroamphetamine.

  2.000 tubes (10 per tube): Drinamyl.

  20.000 phials (20 mg): Methedrine.

  10.000 phials (50 mg): Methadone.

  10.000 phials (50 mg): Meperedine.

  The first three were barbiturates, the next three amphetamines, and the last two were opiates. At a quick mental calculation, the opiates alone were worth £50,000 on the street.

  “A nice haul,” I said. “No LSD, I see.”

  “Is that all you care?”

  “I’ve got funny views, you said.” I wasn’t going to let her know how sick I felt, not this Grace Sanders, who was looking at me as though I’d crawled out of something. “If the young idiots like to poison themselves with that filth, then let ‘em get on with it. If they like to pour money into Sarturo’s pocket while he plays Bach on his bloody organ, then they’re even more stupid.”

  Her eyes blazed. “By God, you’ve fallen a long way.”

  “You know damn well what I mean,” I snapped back. “If they’re on opiates, they can go to a clinic and get their methadone on prescription. Or heroin, if they want it. And if they’re on goof balls or bennies of French Blues or Meths, they can get the blasted stuff anywhere. So don’t preach at me, Grace Sanders, don’t you…”

  “Shut up!” she barked, and her hand came down like a man-trap on the desk. “Be quiet,” she went on, “and listen to me. I don’t like what you’re saying, and I’m going to pretend you don’t mean it. But there’s things you haven’t considered. No, let me say this, George — You’ve claimed you were watching a window and so you loused-up your job. That may not be true. Quiet!” she snapped as I opened my mouth. “It may not be true because you said nothing of this until we found Saturn dead. You had an envelope addressed to him, but you could have got that…anywhere. Wait! You spoke of your window-watching in his wife’s presence. I’m not a fool, George. I saw your eyes meet over that brandy. I saw something pass between you. She could have picked up on it; she might even have known you before. So maybe you were intended to look the other way while the crime was being carried out. But you looked the other way for a long time, George. And, if that was an alibi you were giving yourself, it was a damn clever one. But you must admit that whoever killed Saturn could use a gun — and you can. I’ve seen you do it.”

  Anger was crawling inside me. I didn’t know why she was doing this to me. Her eyes held cold contempt. Disapproval I could have handled, even criticism. But I wasn’t taking contempt from somebody I’d put my arms around when I showed her the two-handed grip on a gun butt. Oh no.

  “Now you listen here…” The fury caught my voice.

  “I’m listening.”

  I got to my feet. I felt better, towering over her. “I’ll get your bloody drugs back. I’ll get ’em and sling ‘em on that big, fancy desk of yours — ”

  “You do that, George. You’d better start now.”

  I glared at her, could think of nothing more to say, so I headed for the door, actually pleased to be getting out of there.

  As I yanked it open:

  “Even if you laid it on yourself, George,” she said acidly.

  CHAPTER III

  Mind you, we’d both been acting it up a bit. At least, I had. I only hoped I hadn’t got to take Grace too literally, but I tried to persuade myself that she’d felt it necessary to prod me into assisting her, but without making it official. She needn’t have troubled. I was going to recover those drugs, somehow or other, and if she felt I needed a shove, all well and good. But I was under no illusion. She didn’t trust me; she’d give me no assistance. And if I slipped up, all I could expect was a harsh laugh and maybe a dry-eyed farewell as she sprinkled her handful of soil.

  When I got out of that station it was getting along towards dawn. My shift didn’t theoretically finish until eight-thirty, so what I had in mind was to get back to the factory and hand over to Charlie Bates. I mean, round things off neatly, so that they’d have no difficulty with my final pay cheque. But Chief Downes was at gate No. 3, and if he was glad to s
ee me he hid it well.

  It had been too early for the first bus, and my pocket didn’t run to taxis, so I’d walked. Consequently I was tired and my leg ached, so I told Chief Downes I hadn’t been too keen on the job, anyway, and that led to some slight criticism of my eyesight and intelligence and general morality, and you know how it is, you’re not supposed to hit a man in glasses even if it finishes with him tearing them off and tossing them on the ground, and anyway he was even older than me so I simply stalked away with halting dignity.

  But not far. I still wanted to speak to Charlie Bates when the workers came on at eight-thirty. So I hung around and sneaked back when Chief Downes finally found his glasses and fumed away. As I’d deliberately forgotten to hand in my pass keys, I used them to let myself into the office block for the last hour or so, out of sight in case he came back, and I was therefore able to check when Larry got up that morning.

  It was still not properly light. The sky was heavy that morning, the clouds low. I was standing in exactly the same place as the night before, and of course the curtains were still the same, so that I saw the dial light of the radio come on, and then, five seconds later, the main light. Larry was awake. Give him time to get decent, and I’d pay him a visit.

  Then I saw that Charlie Bates had arrived, so I went down and explained why there was that special air of tension around, and handed in my pass keys. I was still explaining to him when the staff — office workers, factory workers, lab men — streamed in. Of course, this was only one of the six gates, but my guess was that it had to be someone working around there.

  The way I saw it, a robbery at a place like Marston’s wasn’t going to be as simple as keeping one of the night guards busy. There’d be alarms on the storage sheds, special locks, and all those drugs I’d seen listed would be only one tiny percentage of the stacked crates and boxes, all code identified. It had gone smoothly, though, and Grace would be working on the possibility of inside assistance. But I was one move ahead of her in that respect. When Saturn had approached me, he’d been certain I was on gate No. 3, and he’d been sitting with a companion. The odds were, therefore, that the companion was an employee at Marston’s, and used gate No. 3 himself.

  And I spotted him. “That chap there,” I said. “The one with the thin face and the round shoulders. Know him?”

  Charlie Bates had been there years. He knew everybody. “Antrim,” he said. “Works in No. 2 lab. On the synthesiser.”

  “Lives close, does he?”

  “No — way out. A bit of a loner, him. Some place — Rose Cottage I think it’s called. Out at Fairleigh.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. See you some day.”

  Then I walked across the road to number 73.

  They were, as I said, terraced houses, one long row of narrow homes, nudging wall to wall, with an arched entrance every half a dozen to enable you to get round the back. The front doors opened directly on to the pavement, and this front door opened at a touch.

  The hall was narrow and so short that you were through it before you were in far enough to close the door after you. I could see by the run-painted numbers on doors that this was converted to four bed-sitters, though why it’d been necessary to pack-in the residents so tightly I don’t know, seeing that most of the rest of the houses were empty. There was some talk of destruction for a motorway.

  I knew where to go. Up the stairs to the creaking landing, and to the front. I knocked.

  “What is it?”

  “Larry?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Open up, will you, I want to speak to you.”

  He turned back the Yale lock and opened the door with the wary anticipation of a man expecting to greet an angry husband. It seemed he had never met the husband, because there was no change in his expression on seeing me. Perhaps the uniform misled him for a moment. Larry was tall for his age — around twenty, I thought — but he’d grown up instead of out because there was not an ounce of spare meat on him. Narrow hips in faded levis, narrow shoulders jutting from an undervest. He had shaved but hadn’t yet combed his hair, which was long and wild and blond. His eyes were grey, deep-set, intelligent, and at the moment he was frowning so fiercely that a sharp ridge ran up from his long nose clear into his forehead.

  “Who the hell’re you?” he said.

  I explained that I was the night guard who’d been right opposite that room the previous night. He didn’t seem to know there’d been a robbery, and I didn’t mention it. We were still on the landing, so I said we ought to discuss the young lady.

  “What young lady?” he asked, but all the same he backed away.

  The hall and stairs had prepared me. The place was coming down, so why trouble with the peeling wallpaper and the flaking plaster, which even exposed an area of laths around the light fixture? There was a narrow, unmade bed against the wall, with pink sheets but with ex-army blankets, and he had an upright chair stuck under a plain table, a battered easy chair, and a scratched sideboard against the wall behind the door, with his radio on it. The sink in the comer was almost too small to perch a tap over, and the cooker on the draining board consisted of one gas jet and a grill.

  By that time he had the curtains drawn and the light off. His radio wasn’t going. The flex to it ran from the central light, which had one of those junction things in the socket, with a push-button switch for the light bulb. I looked at the radio, and lined it up with the window. It was certainly its dial I had seen.

  “The young lady I mean,” I said, “is the one who spent an hour or so with you in this room last night.”

  “What’s it got to do with you? You her dad or something?”

  “Did you know her husband?”

  “Why’d I know…What is this?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Not to recognise, no.”

  “His name, then?”

  “Henry.”

  “Henry Saturn?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his fingers through his hair and grinned weakly. “Man, a crazy name, that.”

  “But you didn’t care?”

  “Care what? Who the hell are you?”

  “Care about who he might be. You know — trouble.”

  “Heh, you’re wild. You know that? This chick comes up here — we play a few records…”

  “Records?”

  “Tapes, then.” He nodded towards the sideboard. It was a small, battery-powered cassette recorder, standing beside the radio. There were a few cassettes scattered around.

  “Just a casual pick-up?” I asked. He stared. “You hardly knew this Berenice Saturn?”

  “How long does it take? You meet. She looks. Something gives…”

  “Across a crowded room?”

  “Man,” he said with disgust, “you’re square.”

  “And where did this momentous meeting take place?”

  “The Starlight, the Prince of Denmark. Does it matter? You’re beginning to get up my nose, old man.”

  “And so, something having given, she came up here to listen to your tapes?” He didn’t react. “How often?”

  “Who’s counting?”

  “But last night — no tapes. Your batteries flat or something?”

  I pressed the play button, and a solid beat rocked the open shade on the light. I put it off quickly.

  Frankly, I was surprised he hadn’t thrown me out. He was looking at me, hands on his hips and head on one side, with curiosity, and with something more that I couldn’t analyse. But perhaps I was simply too large.

  “Your radio,” I explained, “was on.” I demonstrated by turning its ‘on’ knob, and the dial glowed. It was one of those old-fashioned things like me that take a time to warm up, and, just in case, I put it off again quickly. “All the time,” I said.

  “I left it on. Yes.”

  “And you never expected trouble from the husband?” I asked.

  He sighed heavily. “And now we get to morals.”

  “Now, son, we get to the happy ending.
I can tell you that you’re safe. Your Henry Saturn died last night.”

  “Yeah?” he said, not particularly affected.

  “He was shot.”

  “That’s happy, is it?” But he had difficulty holding the smile.

  “For you, perhaps. This Henry — don’t let the name fool you, lad — this Henry could have been trouble for you. You know. Capital T. Maybe his wife never told you, but this Henry happened to have half a dozen murders to his credit.”

  The hands slid off his hips. He made the movement into a wiping one, his fingers splayed. He shook his head angrily, clearing his eyes.

  “She never said.” His voice grew in power as he captured his anger at the injustice of it. “She never said one blind word.”

  “Would it have made a difference?” I asked.

  “You bet” he shouted. “You bet your damn life it would.”

  “Or yours.”

  “Well, how’d you like that!” he appealed. “She sits there, them great big brown eyes as meek as you like, all lonesome and pathetic…You never know. I tell you, you never know.”

  “Relax, son. It’s over. The nasty man isn’t going to come round and blast you. You could even go round there and comfort her, and quite safely.”

  “You’re crazy, man. You’ve flipped.”

  “A pity.” I shook my head. “Just when you’d got it made.”

  “You’ve got a dirty mind,” he said in disgust, and then he did throw me out, but politely, no more than an urging hand on my shoulder.

  But he hadn’t said he didn’t know the location of “there,” and his language had deteriorated only as he’d worked himself into the characterisation. The impression had been of a casual pick-up and a wild bit of heavy action, but I wasn’t too sure of the casual part of it, not too sure of Larry, and when I arrived at her flat there was always the possibility that he’d phoned ahead to warn her that I’d been to his place.

  But he hadn’t. When she opened the door her eyes flooded with disgust and she said, “Oh, it’s you,” when in fact she’d have been more careful if she’d been warned.

  “I wanted to have a few words.”

  “I’m up to here with words. He’s dead, and that’s that.”