Mistress Murder

by Bernard Knight

  He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. Leaning back in the chair, he addressed a nude mural on the opposite wall.

  ‘I’ll find you, Paul bloody Golding. I’m going to screw a few thousand out of you and then take over your racket.’ His face hardened, even through the euphoric haze of heroin.

  ‘But if I find out that you croaked my bird, sonny, I’ll kill you!’

  Chapter Four

  A stubble-haired man in blue dungarees came into the charge room of Oldfield police station. He was carrying a short piece of twig and had a worried look on his round face.

  ‘Sarge, is the inspector in his office?’

  Burrell looked up from his Occurrences book and nodded.

  ‘What’s up? A sawn-through steering column?’

  His facetiousness was lost on the vehicle examiner, a constable in the Traffic Division. Part of Johnson’s job was to report on the road worthiness of vehicles involved in accidents or on charges of negligent maintenance.

  He held up the dirty bit of stick.

  ‘Look at this … from that Alpine outside.’

  Burrell brushed up his moustache and peered at the thing. It was a fairly straight twig about a foot long.

  ‘What’s so wonderful about it?’

  The mechanic turned the twig in his fingers.

  ‘It .was jammed under the throttle control rod. How the hell did it get there?’

  The sergeant looked at him with new interest.

  ‘Was the throttle stuck open?’

  Johnson shook his head.

  ‘No, but it might have been before the crash. The stick looks as if it was broken off.’

  Burrell came around the desk.

  ‘Let’s ask the guv’nor.’

  He tapped the inspector’s door and a moment later the three men were huddled over the stick in the inner office.

  ‘See, there’s grease on this end,’ Johnson pointed to stains on the bar. ‘But the other end has snapped.’

  ‘Could it have got there at the time of the crash?’ hazarded Burrell.

  ‘How … there was no hedge there? The car came down the road, through a wire fence and over the grass bank – no bushes anywhere near. This is a hazel branch.’

  They adjourned to the station yard and leant over the twisted remains of the red Sunbeam. The engine had been pushed back in the frame by the impact, but the twin carburettors were undamaged.

  ‘The stick was jammed under here,’ explained Johnson, indicating the gap between the butterfly control arm and the venturi tube of the rear carburettor.

  Burrell studied the front of the scuttle which separated the engine compartment from the inside of the car.

  ‘Look, see those scratches … they could have been caused by the other end of the stick.’

  On the flat partition, which was undamaged, there were several wavering lines gouged in the coating of black grease. These were at the same level as the butterfly control.

  Johnson nodded excitedly.

  ‘If the stick was longer, it would reach from there to the carburettor.’

  The inspector, a lifelong sceptic, straightened his back.

  ‘But it isn’t, is it?’ he said.

  Burrell took the stick from Johnson and looked at the broken end again. ‘If we could find the other bit that matched this … and if it was the right length … and if it had grease on the end …’ His voice trailed off.

  The inspector moved. ‘Come on, my car’s over there,’ he said.

  Within five minutes of starting to search the bank of the culvert on Cuckoo Hill, Johnson had found the missing twig. It was directly under the parapet, in the centre of the skid marks. It was half as long as the first piece, it had black grease on one end and the other end had broken in such a way as to make it clear to the most obstinate juror that it had once been continuous with the bigger twig.

  ‘This is it,’ enthused Johnson. ‘Some bloody jiggery-pokery here all right.’

  The inspector took it more soberly.

  ‘You mean our troubles are just beginning. I’m already wishing I’d never heard of you, Johnson.’

  The practical sergeant was studying the two bits, which he held end-to-end. ‘If it’s the right length, that will add a bit more weight to our argument.’

  They drove back to Oldfield and visited the local Rootes agent. The mystified owner led them to a new Alpine in his showroom and watched them while they vanished under the bonnet. To Johnson’s delight, the total length of the two twigs exactly fitted the distance between the scuttle and the throttle control.

  They went back to the police station and held a council of war.

  ‘I’m going to speak to Headquarters about this,’ decided the inspector. ‘This is going to be a London job, through and through. If our chaps have got any sense, they’ll give it to the Yard straight away. No point in the County arsing about with it; all the background is going to be up in Town.’

  Johnson looked as if his pension prospects had been snatched away from him, but the inspector’s forecast was quite right. Before lunch, the Divisional Detective Chief Inspector had been down to verify the facts and after speaking to the chief constable on the phone, had rung the Central Office of the Metropolitan Police to ask for assistance.

  At four thirty, the Yard men arrived, a chief inspector and a detective sergeant.

  The senior man was the well-known Archie Benbow, known to the Met as Admiral Benbow. He was a thickset man with bulbous features, bearing a startling resemblance to Mr Khrushchev.

  His assistant, Alan Bray, was a very young sergeant, recently made up from detective constable. He was bursting with enthusiasm and his appearance generally reminded the cynical Sergeant Burrell of a keen country curate.

  The two newcomers went over the car again and studied the pieces of stick, which Johnson was guarding as if they were the Holy Grail. They adjourned into the inspector’s office and sat around the table.

  Benbow removed his Moscow-type fedora and folded his hands on the stained wood before him. He was well aware of the stock joke about his resemblance to the Soviet ex-leader and did all he could to perpetuate the gimmick. His belted raincoats and large hats were all part of the act, but this harmless farce took nothing away from his ability as a first-class detective.

  He started the ball rolling. ‘Now then … what’s been done so far?’

  The Oldfield inspector went on the defensive at once.

  ‘Well, very little so far; we didn’t know there was anything fishy about it until this morning.’

  Benbow puffed out his podgy cheeks. ‘OK … now, do we all agree that the bit of stick jammed under the throttle means a deliberate attempt to crash the car?’

  He glared around as if defying anyone to deny it.

  ‘So who could have done it?’

  No one spoke and he went on. ‘Couldn’t be the deceased … if she wanted to knock herself off, she’d go it a darned sight easier by keeping her foot on the pedal. So that means someone else did it for her – and that means murder!’

  This was the first time that day that the word had actually been used and there was a thoughtful silence. Everyone had been skirting around it for the past few hours, but now the Admiral’s blunt words had broken the ice and there was confused murmuring of suggestions and comments.

  Benbow held up his head in best United Nations manner. ‘All right, all right, let’s get the facts straight.’

  His sergeant, the angelic-looking Bray, cut in with an objection, voiced with a nervous determination.

  ‘But no one would risk murder this way – she might not have been killed – we’ve all seen far worse crashes than this where the driver has got up and walked away.’

  Benbow gave him a sorrowful look.

  ‘And how do you know the crash killed her? She might have been shot, stabbed, strangled, poisoned …’ He left the sentence in mid-air.

  ‘The post-mortem …’ Bray’s voice trailed off weakly. Benbow looked at the inspector a
nd then at the local sergeant. They both shook their heads slowly and sadly the Admiral slapped his hands on the table sharply.

  ‘See, Bray, keep your trap shut then you can’t put your foot in it.’ He smiled suddenly and disarmingly at his sergeant, taking all the sting out of his words. ‘Well, we can soon fix a post-mortem, can’t we?’

  Benbow looked brightly at the local policemen and their sheepish faces made his jaw drop.

  ‘Oh God … no … not that!’

  The Oldfield inspector nodded sheepishly.

  ‘Buried the day before yesterday,’ he admitted. ‘Sorry, but our local coroner’s not too keen on holding post-mortems, especially on what he calls obvious road accidents.’

  Archie Benbow sighed. ‘Still, it could have been worse,’ he said. ‘She could have been cremated.’ He stiffened suddenly. ‘Christ, she wasn’t was she?’

  ‘No, she was buried … here in the local cemetery.’

  The Admiral relaxed.

  ‘Well, we can fix that. As far as I remember, the coroner has power to order an exhumation on one of his own cases, hasn’t he?’

  Bray shook his head sadly at Benbow.

  ‘No, sir, sorry. If he’s held an inquest – even opened one as in this instance – only the Home Secretary can give permission.’

  Archie Benbow scowled at his erudite assistant.

  ‘Proper bloody genius, aren’t you? Do you read a chapter from Jarvis’s text book every night before you go to sleep?’

  Bray grinned good-humouredly. ‘Do you want me to get it organised, sir?’

  Benbow grunted his assent. ‘And get hold of one of the forensic chaps from Town to come out and do a post-mortem.’

  I think Eustace Soames usually does this part of the Home Counties. And tell the Yard Laboratory to join the party as well.’

  Bray went out with Burrell to the charge room to use the telephone while his boss got on with the talking. Archie tapped the pathetically thin folder which contained the few documents so far collected about the Laskey case.

  ‘All we’ve got here is the fact that this woman lived in an expensive flat in the West End and was kept by some man, so far quite unknown to us.’

  The Oldfield inspector nodded. ‘That’s all we could ruddy-well find out. I’m afraid, apart from the fact that she was separated from her husband, who lives in Luton. Can’t see him as a suspect; he didn’t want to know about her when we had him here for the inquest.’

  Benbow looked thoughtful.

  ‘Better get hold of him again I think, and give him a working over; he may know something that he didn’t think he knew at first.’

  ‘He was a full-blown nobody,’ commented the inspector. Said he hadn’t seen her for nine years and wasn’t madly keen to see her for another nine … he moaned like hell when old Smythe swung the cost of the funeral on him.’

  ‘Well, he won’t have to pay for the exhumation, if that’s any comfort to him,’ grinned Benbow. ‘If Bray does his stuff out there, we should have her up by first light in the morning.

  Chapter Five

  ‘It’s nice to have you at home at the weekend, Paul.’

  The Jacobs family were at home, enjoying tea at the fireside of their Cardiff home. A wicked east wind howled outside and the shaking trees in the garden added to the comfort of being inside.

  ‘Old Ben can look after the shop till Monday,’ he drawled in reply. ‘We never do much on a Friday afternoon.’

  Paul’s legitimate business was in a lock-up shop near the docks, where an aged, but experienced, assistant ran the sales during Paul’s frequent trips to London to ‘buy stock.’

  He leant back comfortably against the arm of the settee and looked across at his wife.

  She was a calm woman of his own age, by no means glamorous but with considerable character. He had met her in London six years before, when he ran a similar business in Finsbury as a cover for the same smuggling racket. She was a schoolteacher and, by some magic of compatibility, he soon found that he wanted to marry her.

  He had a mistress at that time, but his knack of running a double life was already well developed and he found this no bar to a rapid courtship.

  His wife wanted to go back to her home in Wales and, as this suited his Jekyll and Hyde existence very well, he sold up and started a shop in Cardiff. At first heavily subsidised from his smuggling, he found to his surprise that after a year or two it began to break even and now was actually paying its way.

  His wife had no idea of his other life or of his true identity. She was not over-inquisitive, one of the factors that attracted him to her. She realised that he was of foreign origin, but his carefully prepared story of being an Austrian who had fled the country in 1938 and spent the war in the British Merchant Navy satisfied her completely.

  He stretched his feet to the fire and prodded the dog with a toe.

  ‘Better off here than Glasgow, this time last week,’ he lied easily.

  His wife looked up, her grey eyes looking steadily from a long face free of any make-up.

  ‘Why Glasgow all of a sudden? I thought you did all your buying in London.’

  Paul nodded lazily.

  ‘Until now … a new firm has opened up there, a few points lower in price, so it’s worth my while going up to get the edge on the London values.’

  He was building up a cover for the future. Now that his usual routine was threatened by the unknown man on the tape, he might need more time away. It was better to prepare the ground beforehand than to make lame excuses later.

  The domestic bliss went on undisturbed. With his knack of being able to produce a voluntary schizophrenia, Paul was able to shut his mind at will to the sordid other half of his life. When he was in Cardiff, he really was a respectable antique dealer with a nice respectable house in a select district, a cultured and utterly respectable wife, and a few respectable friends in the local golf club.

  The only contact that Jacobs allowed between his two lives were the dates of his next visits to London and the judicious transfusion of his local bank account with illegal money.

  Since coming back to Cardiff on the Tuesday, he had spent every day at the shop. He had not bothered to look in his newspaper, rightly presuming that no national daily would bother to report a solitary fatal road accident.

  He was confident that no suspicion of foul play would arise and that he could safely reappear in the West End without feeling the heavy hand of the law to fall on his shoulder.

  The tremendous crunch he had heard when the speeding Sunbeam had hit the parapet of the bridge on Cuckoo Hill told him that it must certainly be a complete wreck, and that Rita’s body had shared in the destruction.

  He had rather hoped that the car would have caught fire, but even so, he expected that the injuries to the body would be so severe as to completely confuse the issue, if it was ever raised. Perhaps he would have been less complacent at his fireside if he had known that the police were at that very moment arranging with the Home Office for the exhumation of his late mistress.

  Conrad Draper sat at his tycoon-size desk and scanned through the lists of accounts from his betting shops. Saturday morning was a time of reckoning, when he could assess his takings for the week. This was when he kicked out his branch managers who were falling by the wayside and when the ‘black spot’ was put on clients who were winning too much or too often. Occasionally, he used Saturday morning to pick out the customers who needed his strong-arm boys to call on them to encourage them to hurry up with their debts.

  The importance of this routine had driven even the matter of Paul Golding from his head for an hour or two. All the week, Draper had harried Irish O’Keefe for more information on the mysterious drug merchant of Newman Street, but so far, he had turned nothing up of any use.

  Plenty of people, especially around Gerrard Street, knew Golding by sight, but very few had any idea that he was a drug runner. No one knew where he went when he left Soho, in spite of all Irish’s efforts to wheedle inform
ation from the junkies and pushers of the district.

  They did no direct business with Golding; he was strictly a wholesaler and never risked the dangers of dealing with a host of small-time traders, who were notorious for their unreliability.

  It was on this Saturday morning, when the boss was absorbed in his gambling statistics, that Irish had his first break. O’Keefe tapped on the door of the inner sanctum and slid in like a wraith. He was standing in front of the desk before Conrad realised that he was there. The pouch-eyed bookie jerked his head up in surprise.

  ‘Don’t you ever bloody-well knock, Irish,’ he rasped. ‘What d’you want?’

  The little man’s mouth cracked open into a grin, exposing a ragged line of yellow teeth.

  ‘I did it, boss, I got a bloke outside. I think he knows something about Golding.’

  Draper slammed his accounts folder shut and stood up quickly.

  ‘Does he know who he is? Show him in – fast.’

  Irish shook his head sorrowfully.

  ‘He don’t know who he is, nor where he goes, but he may know something that might tell you that you’re in a bit of a spot.’

  Conrad reddened. His coarsely handsome face, thickened by fighting and whisky, scowled down at his sidekick.

  ‘Cut the innuendo, Irish.’ He was proud of this word, gleaned from an old movie the week before.

  O’Keefe sidetracked into his favourite topic: money.

  ‘It’ll cost a few nicker to get him squealing. I had to slip him a fiver to get him as far as this.’

  Draper slammed the desk and made the telephones tinkle.

  ‘All right, all right, you flaming Dublin crook, you’ll get it back. Now wheel him in before I flatten your earholes.’

  Irish slithered through the door and reappeared with a skinny young man in a bright blue suit. He had long sideburns and a weak receding chin.

  ‘This is Alfie Day,’ announced Irish proudly, as if he was presenting a child prodigy. ‘He keeps that radio shop in Piper’s Court.’