by Rhys Bowen
“I think we might know where he is,” Evan said.
“We might?” Watkins turned to him.
“In the police morgue in Bangor,” Evan said.
“Ted Morgan, you mean?” Sergeant Watkins demanded.
Evan nodded. “It all ties in, doesn’t it? Arriving like that out of the blue, bringing nothing with him but clothes. He was hiding out.”
Watkins turned to Jim Dobson. “Any idea whether Taffy Jones could have been an alias?”
“No idea at all. Taffy Jones is the only name we’ve known him by here. You say he’s dead?”
“If it’s the same man, someone put a bullet in his head. Maybe the protection racketeers caught up with him.”
“Is that a fact?” Jim Dobson took out a cigarette. “Smoke?” He offered the packet. “Mind if I do? Filthy habit but I don’t have time to quit.”
He lit the cigarette and drew deeply on it. “Put a bullet in his head, you say? Execution style?”
“Not really. A neat little bullet between the eyes from a small revolver.”
Dobson shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like their style at all. A burst of machine gun fire from a passing car or torching his house would be more like it. Or if they got hold of him, one bullet to the back of the head with his arms bound behind his back. Of course, I’m sure Mr. Jones had many enemies outside of any protection racket. He always liked to sail close to the wind, but he was a sharp one. I have to say that for him. We never managed to shut him down. God knows we tried enough, but he was always one step ahead of us.”
“Somebody has managed to shut him down now,” Evan said, “if he turns out to be the same person.”
“Have you got a photo?”
“Only with a hole in his head,” Watkins said and produced it. “But I think you could still identify him from that.”
Dobson studied it. “Looks pretty much like him,” he said. “So how did you manage to connect him with Taffy’s club?”
“Pure luck,” Evan said. “We were looking into another murder that took place last week. An old colonel on holiday had his head bashed in. It turned out he was a regular visitor to Taffy’s.” He looked up with an excited smile on his face. “And I think we might have found out who killed him!”
“We have? Who?” Watkins asked.
“Look, sarge. How does this sound? The colonel recognized someone in the village and was surprised to see them there. He was telling me about it at the pub and then he suddenly shut up and made up a ridiculous story. Ted Morgan, Taffy Jones, that is, was at the pub that night. If he was hiding out in Llanfair, he wouldn’t want to be recognized, would he? He thought he was safe up there. Everyone knew him as Ted Morgan, and how many outsiders come to a little village like Llanfair? It was just bad luck that the colonel was there. He couldn’t risk the colonel going back to London and blabbing that he’d seen him, so he crept out of the pub behind him, bashed him over the head, and came back to join the group.”
“But wouldn’t you have noticed him going out after the colonel?” Watkins asked.
“It’s possible he could have sneaked out with all the excitement that was going on that night. I never thought of that before. He might have gone to the bathroom, then dashed out through the back entrance, killed the old man, and come back in the same way. It was risky, but there’s a chance that nobody missed him for a short while.”
“You might have something there,” Watkins agreed.
“It has to be right, sarge. He was probably scared silly that the colonel would go back to London and announce to all and sundry that he’d seen Taffy Jones calling himself by another name in Llanfair. He couldn’t take that risk.”
“Okay, but the colonel didn’t get a chance to talk to anybody, did he?” Watkins said. “So who else knew that Ted Morgan was Taffy Jones?”
“Someone else in London must have known where he had gone,” Watkins suggested.
Dobson shook his head. “Nobody we’ve talked to, and I can tell you the underworld types are very anxious to find him. Of course, they’d like to get to him first. Did he have any close friends or relatives in the village who might have known the truth about him?”
Evan shook his head. “Only his sister, and he wasn’t on speaking terms with her. He hadn’t been near the place for twenty years. Everyone thought he was a successful London businessman.”
“He was, in a way,” Dobson commented dryly. “Just not in the way they thought.”
Evan smiled grimly. “The only address we had for him was a posh place in Mayfair that turned out to be a mail drop. That’s where his father had always written to.”
“Someone recognized him,” Dobson said. “Someone who had a score to settle with him.”
“We should go back and take a look at the club,” Watkins said. “They must keep a list of members. Maybe a name will show up or maybe he’s got some personal correspondence tucked away. Was he married?”
“Divorced,” Dobson said. “And don’t look for the ex wife as a likely suspect. He was paying her off very nicely, so we hear. He had to buy her silence, didn’t he?”
He got to his feet. “Do you want me to come down to the club with you? They know me there and they won’t give me the runaround.”
“This character called Barry said we’d need a search warrant,” Watkins said cautiously.
“Search warrant. Barry Oates knows where I’d shove a search warrant. He knows I’ve got enough on him to put him away for life if he so much as breathes at the wrong time.”
“Thanks,” Watkins said. “We’ll need all the help we can get if we’re going to get to the bottom of this thing.” They followed Jim Dobson through the deserted corridors of New Scotland Yard and down a back elevator to the garage.
* * *
“I told you we’d be back, didn’t I?” Sergeant Watkins gave Barry Oates a triumphant smile as they swept through the swing doors into Taffy’s again. “Brought a friend to see you too.”
“Hello, Barry. Is business booming without the boss around to keep an eye on you?” Dobson asked pleasantly. “Heard from him lately, have you? No postcard from Rio or Buenos Aires?”
“Get stuffed, Dobson,” Barry said. “What do you want, anyway?”
“Just a friendly visit, Barry. I wanted to show these two friends of mine the inner sanctum—the boss’s office. So open up.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find. We’ve got nothing to hide. See for yourself.” He pushed past Jim Dobson, led them down a narrow hallway, and opened a door leading into the room beyond. It was tastefully decorated with a large oak desk, thick pile carpet, and subdued lighting. It could have been the office of any executive.
“Be my guest,” Barry said and sat in the leather armchair in one corner.
A search of the desk produced a revolving file of names, including the colonel’s. But no other name that they recognized.
“There are no account books here,” Watkins commented.
“Yeah, well, this is a classy joint. We ’ave an accountant do the books, don’t we?” Barry said. “I can give you his name. ’E’ll be in on Monday. But you won’t find nothing there you can stick on us.”
“I think we’re wasting our time,” Watkins muttered to Evans. “If there was anything here, it’s been whisked away.”
“I don’t even know what there could have been,” Evan said. “You don’t keep copies of blackmail notes or threatening letters, do you?”
“Who said anything about blackmail?” Barry demanded. “We’re not involved in nothin’ sordid like that. Just good clean fun here. Ask the sergeant.” He grinned at Dobson.
“We’ll get you one day, Barry. No rush,” Dobson said easily. “Now, if you could just help us find your boss, we’d all be a lot happier, wouldn’t we? Any idea if he might have been going to Wales, for example?”
Barry’s look of genuine surprise was apparent for a second before he regained his composure. “You mean he might have gone to visit the o
ld folks back home? Well, isn’t that nice?”
His eyes went to a picture on the wall. It was of Snowdon from Llyn Llydaw. The trees were in full fall colors and the lake reflected the peak above. Evan went over to look at it. A photo album was lying on top of the credenza—an impressive-looking book with a tooled leather cover. Evan wondered if it contained more photos of Wales. Maybe Ted Morgan had secretly longed for his birthplace after all.
He opened the book and almost closed it again. It wasn’t Welsh mountains at all, but scantily clad girls in provocative poses. Watkins came over to join him.
“Samples to show the clients?” he asked Barry.
“Seen one you fancy?” Barry asked insolently. “I could set you up for later today. For a nice supper together, I mean. Or a game of darts?”
“I don’t think the wife would like it, somehow,” Watkins said. He went on turning pages. “Miss Cynthia Cardew. She’ll show you the sportin’ life,” he read, pointing at a photo of an aristocratic-looking young woman wearing a riding cap and not much else and holding a riding crop in her hand. “I must say the Colonel had good taste. I’d still like to talk to her.” He turned the page again. “Phew. It’s warm in here, isn’t it?” He tugged at his collar and nudged Evan good-naturedly. “You shouldn’t be looking at this stuff, young kid of your age.” He went to close the book. Evan stopped him.
“Here, hold on a minute, sarge. Turn back to that last page.”
“See one you like?” Sergeant Watkins chuckled.
The page fell open. The girl had one high heeled foot on a bearskin rug and a big ostrich feather fan covered part of her naked body as she peeked provocatively around it. Evan stared at the picture in disbelief. Even with the tumble of platinum blond curls and the Marilyn Monroe makeup he could recognize her. The caption underneath read, “Anita Dove. She’ll take you to new flights of fancy.”
“Look, sarge.” Evan pointed fiercely at the photo. “It’s Annie Pigeon!”
Chapter 20
“Give me a chance to talk to her first, sarge,” Evan suggested as the train pulled into Bangor station. It was past eight o’clock but still light, although the sun was hidden behind ominous clouds. The ocean was slate gray and flecked with whitecaps.
“Home sweet home,” Watkins said.
They had rushed straight from Taffy’s to take the next train home. A phone call to D.I. Hughes had revealed that he was away fishing for the weekend at an unknown destination and couldn’t be reached until Monday. Now they were both tired and on edge.
“I think we should bring her in for questioning,” Sergeant Watkins said, getting his bag down from the rack as the train came to a halt. “I don’t see any reason for letting you meet with her first. You’d probably be softhearted enough to help her talk her way out of this.”
“Not this time,” Evan said firmly. “I don’t like being made a fool of, sarge, and she made a bloody fool of me. She saw me as a good-natured, helpful chump who also happened to be a policeman, and she used me.” He thumped his fist against his open palm. “She really had me fooled. That act of polite indifference when we met Ted Morgan up on the hill—as if she didn’t know him from Adam. And all that panic about a prowler—it was just a setup so that she could claim her gun had been stolen. She showed up the moment she heard that we had ruled out suicide. She knew that we’d find her prints on it.”
Watkins opened the door and stepped down onto the platform. “But you said she seemed genuinely scared. Do you think she lured you round to her place and kept you there while a boyfriend lurking outside did the actual killing?”
“No.” Evan shook his head angrily. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the train, and I think she lured me to her house so that she’d have the perfect alibi while she did the killing herself.”
They joined a jostling crowd of arriving tourists and dodged past suitcases, strollers, and little kids.
“How did she manage that?” Watkins muttered.
“She got me to read a bedtime story to her child. I wondered at the time why she insisted on this particular story. She said it was the kid’s favorite, but it wasn’t. Now I know why—it was the longest one she could find. It must have taken me fifteen minutes to get through it and then, of course, the little girl wanted another one. All that time Annie was out of the room, supposedly downstairs opening a bottle of wine, leaving the girl and me alone to get to know each other better. That’s what she said. She would have had plenty of time to get to Ted Morgan’s bungalow, shoot him, and come back. No wonder her hand was shaking when she poured that wine!”
“But what about the colonel?” Watkins asked as they reached his car in the parking lot. “She couldn’t have killed him, could she?”
“I’m not so sure about that now,” Evan said. He was remembering the colonel blundering out of the pub in a panic, almost colliding with Annie who had just come in. “She could have been the person he recognized, not Ted Morgan, who was still in the lounge with his old cronies.”
“What motive could she have had?”
“The same as Ted Morgan, I’d imagine. What if she came here deliberately to kill Ted, sure that nobody would know her here or link her to him. Then she sees the colonel, who recognizes her as a girl from Taffy’s club. Now she’ll be tied to Ted’s death if the colonel blabs. He has to go. She left the pub right after him too.”
He climbed into the car beside Watkins, who said. “And you think she’d be more likely to confess to you?”
“It’s possible,” Evan said. “At least I’d like to find out why she did it.”
“She’s a cool customer and she wanted Ted Morgan out of the way. What’s the betting he’s the father of her kid? Maybe he had life insurance money settled on the child. Who knows?”
“Will you let me talk to her in her own home? Whatever Annie’s really like, Jenny is a sweet little kid and I’d hate her to be scared by having her mother hauled away in the middle of the night.”
Watkins sighed. “Alright. Go ahead and talk to her, but I’m putting a couple of men to watch her house. I don’t want to risk her doing a bunk during the night. And you might want to watch yourself too. If she’s killed twice, there’s nothing to stop her from killing again. We don’t know that was her only gun, do we?”
“I’ll be careful,” Evans said. “I’d like to think that I can persuade her to give herself up.”
“Just make sure she doesn’t persuade you to let her slip out through the back window,” Watkins said dryly. “Whatever happens, I’m bringing her in first thing tomorrow. Make sure she knows that.”
* * *
The cottage door opened a crack in response to the knock. Annie Pigeon’s suspicious face peered around it. A smile of disbelief spread across her face and she threw the door open wide.
“I couldn’t think who it could be, calling so late at night. Excuse the robe. I’ve just had a bath.” She was still smiling up at him, her eyes flirting. “I didn’t expect to see you—I heard you’d gone away for the weekend.”
“That’s right,” Evans said. “I decided to come home early.”
“What was it, business or recreation?”
“A bit of both,” Evan said. “I decided to go for recreation to a place that had been recommended to me.”
“Oh, what was that?” She was still relaxed, smiling up at him with innocent blue eyes. She was dressed in a fluffy white bathrobe and Evan found it hard to believe that he was confronting a killer.
“A place called Taffy’s Club. Only it seemed that the young lady I requested wasn’t available any longer. Pity really, her picture was still in the album.”
“You’d better come in,” she said. She glanced up and down the street. “Here, what’s going on?” she asked, her voice sharp now.
“You tell me,” Evan said. “That’s right. It is a police car parked over there. Your house is being watched, so don’t get any funny ideas.”
She touched his sleeve. “Evan, I can explain everything.”
“It better be good,” Evan said. He shepherded her into the living room and waited until she sat in the vinyl armchair. He perched on a fold-up chair in the corner.
“How did you ever find out?” she asked. Her face, without its usual mask of makeup, matched the whiteness of the fluffy robe.
“You must have thought I was very stupid,” Evan said, trying to control the anger in his voice. “I bet you couldn’t believe your luck when I rescued your daughter and you realized you’d got a tame village bobby who probably wasn’t too bright. You certainly worked hard enough on it, didn’t you—asking me to show you around, feeding me all that rubbish about how fond of me your daughter was so that I’d be fooled into reading her a bedtime story. I can understand now that you were setting me up, but using your daughter—”
“That part was true,” she said. “She thought you were the nicest man she’d ever met. She did talk about you all the time.”
“That was a lucky break for you, wasn’t it then? You had me trapped here—your perfect alibi while you went and killed Ted Morgan.”
“I didn’t kill Ted Morgan!” she exclaimed.
“Oh no? Where did you go then? A late-night stroll around the village with your gun in your hand?”
“You have to believe me, Evan. I swear it.”
“It’s not me you have to convince—it’s the jury. And quite frankly I think you’re going to have a hard time convincing them that you’re innocent when your prints are on the gun, you lured me here to give you an alibi, and you worked for Ted Morgan as a call girl. They’ll probably get you on two counts of murder in fact—”
“Two counts?”
“The colonel. He was a regular customer at the club. You recognized each other, didn’t you? You were scared he’d give you away. He was bound to put two and two together when you killed Ted, so he had to go. You left the pub right after he did. And you knew he was murdered when everyone else still thought it was an accident.”
“I saw Ted slinking back from the direction of the river,” she said flatly. “I thought I recognized the old bloke from the club in London, so I figured it out.”