A Three Pipe Problem

by Julian Symons

  ‘Don’t you see that you’ve let this get out of proportion? You’ll get shoals of letters, people calling here–’

  ‘Of course. There may be clues.’

  ‘They’re going to be total nuts, busybodies, people confessing things, sick people. Don’t you see?’

  He got up, walked across to the mantelpiece, put his arms behind him. ‘Do you mean that only sick people are interested in Sherlock Holmes?’

  ‘I just think this idea’s insane.’ There, the word was out, and she did not care. The drive back from Greenwich had been done in heavy traffic that had reduced her speed to a crawl, and then there had been parking trouble because there was a new assistant at the garage where she put the car, and her usual space was occupied. The habitual composure with which she spoke did not reflect the angry turmoil within her mind. ‘What I mean is that I wish we’d stayed in Weybridge, I wish you’d never started all this TV. I’ve had enough of this Sherlock Holmes game. I can’t put up with it, and I don’t see why I should. If you go on with this I shall leave you.’

  She stopped. He was dialling another number. When she heard him say, ‘The Guardian? This is Sheridan Haynes. I have a message of some importance about the Karate Killings,’ she walked out of the room, packed an overnight bag, and drove to Battersea, where she stayed with an old friend from Weybridge named Marjorie Billings, who had divorced her adman husband and gone off to live with a black actor who called himself Seamus O’Toole. Seamus had recently left her for what he called a mare of another colour, and the two women sat up half the night drinking whisky and talking about men. Val woke in the morning with a bad headache, which was not improved by reading two newspaper stories headed respectively: tv’s sherlock on trail of karate killer and there’s method in these murders, says tv’s sherlock holmes. One story was facetious, the other disapproving. She found it hard to do more than nibble at her toast.

  Chapter Thirteen How and Why

  Devenish also breakfasted badly. Sue, in the pursuit of something more interesting than eggs and bacon, had bought some croissants from a delicatessen, and they proved to be stale. He was ploughing through one when she asked: ‘But can he do that, this Sheridan Haynes? He says he’s going to investigate the case.’

  ‘Publicity gimmick.’

  ‘But I mean, if he came to you for information–’

  ‘He wouldn’t get it. But it’s a free country, people can investigate what they like.’ He masticated the last of the croissant with a gulp. ‘Got to go now. Back about seven with luck. I’ll ring if I’m going to be late.’

  He held her tightly, kissed her, and then he was gone. As she got the children ready for school, she reflected that a policeman’s wife’s lot is not entirely a happy one.

  Three quarters of an hour later Devenish watched while they conducted an experiment. A detective-constable named Stark walked over to a Lamborghini, unlocked it, opened the door, sat in it. Brewster approached, waving to him. Stark wound down his windows, looked inquiring. Brewster, close to the window, made a punching motion at Stark’s gullet. Stark’s head went back, he put hand to throat. Brewster leaned inside, pulled the head forward, made two chopping gestures at the back of the neck. Stark was left slumped over the steering wheel.

  ‘It can be done,’ Brewster said. ‘Gladson was four inches shorter than Stark, which would have made it easier.’

  ‘You couldn’t defend yourself?’ Devenish asked Stark.

  ‘Not really. Inside a car you’re kind of helpless. Confined like, being so low down.’

  ‘I saw.’ Devenish scratched his nose. Stark gazed at one of the great thumbs he had heard about, thumbs that looked as though they could squeeze the life out of anything. ‘But only if you open the window. Why did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know really. The sergeant waved at me.’

  ‘Yes.’ Afterwards he said to Brewster, ‘Two things. Gladson knew whoever it was well enough to wind down the window. And the killer was right-handed. To punch and then chop left-handed with Gladson so low down in the car would be pretty well impossible.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘With a lot of right-handed men.’ Back at the Yard he spent an hour in a time-wasting conference about the case with the top brass. He agreed that a gang war must not be allowed to break out, and said that he was pursuing half-a-dozen promising lines. At the end of the conference the AC’s red-faced deputy made a joke. ‘Don’t want to run any risk of Sherlock Holmes finding the chappie before we do, eh, Thumbs?’

  Devenish looked at him with a straight face. ‘The day a TV Sherlock beats the Yard I’ll write out my resignation.’

  Back in his office again he learned the result of two hunches. It turned out that thirty-seven police officers admitted taking courses in karate. Half of them could be ruled out at once, because they had been on duty in the vicinity of their stations a long way from where the murders took place, on the relevant dates. Fourteen men were left, and he told Brewster to put somebody on to checking them out. Brewster looked as though he regarded this as a total waste of time, and Devenish knew he was probably right.

  The other hunch related to the Poles’ Ford Escort car. It had been sold to a dealer, and had not yet been resprayed. The car had suffered damage to the front offside wing. The damage was slight, the wing had been dented and scratched, but it was fairly recent. He read this with interest, and went to see Mrs Pole.

  Devenish did not gamble, but he believed that if a hunch looked like working you should go on playing it. He sat opposite Mrs Pole in the living-room watched over by the TV’s blank but somehow seeing eye, and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me your husband had been in a car accident?’

  Her expression did not change but she gave a single gasp, like somebody doused with cold water. ‘It couldn’t have had anything to do with what happened. And besides–’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nobody was there. I don’t see how you can know. Afterwards I was so ashamed. It was the worst thing we ever did in our lives.’ She dabbed angrily at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  He waited, and she told him. It had happened two months ago, in early November. They had been to dinner with her brother and his wife, out at West Hampstead in North London. Charles had had some beer at dinner and then a small glass of port, but she was insistent that he had not been in the least drunk. When they set out to go home it was misty, so that the street lights were shrouded in it. They were driving up a side street named Purefoy Road, which led to the Finchley Road, when she saw something shadowy ahead, and then was aware of a bump rather as though they had gone over a ramp in the road. She asked her husband what it was, but he did not reply. Mrs Pole, looking back, saw that they had passed a zebra crossing, its flashing beacon only faintly visible. She also thought she saw, lying on the crossing, a small figure that might have been a child. She had asked her husband to stop, but he took no notice. They drove home.

  Afterwards he said to her that he had seen absolutely nothing, although he had felt the bump. There was nothing he could have done. She did not feel at all sure that he was telling the truth. When she said again that he should have stopped, he asked whether she understood what she was asking. It was a zebra crossing, and if he had hit somebody he would certainly have lost his licence and been fined, perhaps even gone to prison.

  ‘We did try afterwards,’ she said. ‘I made Charles buy the local paper for two weeks, but there was no report in it. But it was an awful thing to have done. I should have made Charles stop. I’ve never forgiven myself. He said it must have been a mistake, and that the damage to the wing had happened before, but I knew that wasn’t true. But it’s strange that there was nothing in the paper. It can’t have been serious, can it?’

  ‘I’ve heard worse.’ He was not given to judging other people. He knew that there are a lot of hit-and-run drivers, and that there would be more if they thought they could escape detection. ‘But you think you did hit somebody?’

  ‘Of cou
rse it was misty and we couldn’t see but I’m afraid we must have done. I don’t see why–’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why you want to know this. Has somebody come forward and complained? There couldn’t be a charge now, could there? I don’t think I could stand that.’

  It was typical of somebody like Mrs Pole, he thought, that she stoically accepted the death of a husband, but could not endure the thought of being brought into court on a motoring charge. ‘Nobody’s complained. And there’ll be no charge.’

  Later he talked about it with Brewster, whose philistine common sense remained unmoved. ‘It’s very far-fetched, Chief, isn’t it? She says herself nobody saw the accident. So all right, maybe she was wrong, but it has to be somebody who spotted the car number and was prepared to kill as a punishment. Then in the Gladson case, the Pages are out as suspects. And in this Halliwell business, too–’

  ‘I know all that. But the fact remains, three people have been killed, and every one has been involved in a car accident. And in each case the driver was at fault and got away with it. You’re telling me that’s coincidence?’

  ‘Of course it is. Why you worry with it, when the Clabers had the best of reasons for knocking off that little queer, I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t like coincidences.’ Roger Devenish sat for a moment or two at his desk, his face heavy and brooding. ‘I want a man to go round Purefoy Road and the streets around. He’ll be looking for an accident, perhaps involving a child, last November. Needn’t be serious, any sort of accident. I’ll want all the details, family and so on.’ Brewster made a note. ‘And we’ll have the Clabers in. Both of them. Though we shan’t get anything out of them.’

  He was right, of course. They came and sat in his office, Harry with his comical look, and Jack with his air of finding it hard to follow what was going on, and said they didn’t know what he was talking about. Harry was voluble, almost eloquent.

  ‘Now look, Thumbs, don’t mind my calling you that, do you? You must know it’s what all the boys call you when your back’s turned.’ Devenish nodded. Harry spread out his hands. ‘You’re brainy, you must know if we were going to do somebody over it wouldn’t be like that. That’s even if I’d got a boy who could do it, which I haven’t. Right Jack?’

  ‘Right.’

  It was true that a good deal of asking around among people who knew the Claber gang had not turned up a whisper about a karate expert inside it. You can’t prove a negative, but still this was the kind of news that never remains secret for long. Harry went on about running a straight business in spite of a lot of police interference and suspicion. Jack looked worshipfully at his brother. Devenish felt it was time to say something.

  ‘You’re up to your neck in this, Harry, and you know it. Gladson gets it after he’s had a row with your bird, and Sonny Halliwell is knocked off to show Freddy Williams he can’t muscle in on your territory.’

  ‘I tell you there isn’t a boy of mine–’

  The Chief Superintendent raised his voice, and slapped the table in front of him. An inkstand rattled. ‘I don’t care what you tell me, or where your boy’s stowed away. You’ve got a reason for having these two jobs done, and I want the right story.’

  ‘Thumbs, Thumbs,’ Harry said, with the smile made more comic by his crooked nose.

  ‘And you can stop calling me that. I want the right story, and I want it quick. If I don’t get it I’ll slap those clubs of yours down so hard there won’t be one left open inside a week. Don’t tell me I can’t do it because I will.’

  That’s the way to talk to them, Brewster thought. Jack Claber’s mouth fell open, and he looked at his brother in alarm. Even Harry’s cultivated ease was ruffled. He uncrossed his legs, put his hands on his knees. ‘You’ve no cause to talk to me like that.’

  ‘Harry, if this job belongs to you I’ll stick it on you, however hard I have to work to do it. Now, you just give me the story, and tell your idiot brother there to shut his mouth.’

  How much his anger was real and how much simulated, Devenish could not have said himself. He might prefer the Clabers to Freddy Williams, but really he hated all professional crooks. Their existence represented a threat to all he valued most, the house in Wimbledon and its small green lawns front and rear, the peaceful life there with Sue and the children. He did not often think about such contrasts, he was on the genial terms with most villains that a detective had to be, but there were times when he would have liked to see the Clabers and their hangers-on put inside for ever, and this was one of them. Or at least, that was part of what he felt. Another part of himself noted Harry’s uneasiness with detached interest.

  ‘There’s nothing to say. Honest. I don’t know what you want.’ Brewster spoke. ‘Williams is moving in on you, and you’re doing nothing about it, is that what you want us to believe?’

  There was a quick exchange of glances between the brothers, expressing perhaps amusement, perhaps a shared secret. Then Harry said solemnly, ‘On my word of honour as a Catholic, and I wouldn’t go against it, you know that, Chief Inspector, I don’t know a thing about what happened to Sonny Halliwell. And that goes for Jack too, isn’t that so?’

  Jack raised one hand as though he were in a witness box. ‘Word of honour,’ he said, with his mouth open.

  When they had gone Devenish said, ‘Do you know, I’m inclined to believe them?’

  ‘Not a bit of it, Chief. Did you see the way they looked at each other? They’re up to something.’

  Whatever they were up to, however, it seemed that Devenish’s warnings might have had some effect. The Clabers opened up no more shops, Freddy Williams attempted no reprisals. On the other hand, the trail leading to the policemen who had learned karate seemed to be petering out. Only two of them, DC Graham and Detective-Sergeant Edwards, seemed to be possibilities. They would both have had opportunity in all three cases, and they were known to have talked about the ease with which a karate chop could kill a man. It was all pretty thin, but Devenish ordered a further check run on them to find out if either man had connections with the Clabers, and whether they hated cars.

  Chapter Fourteen The Carrousel

  In the street it was trying to snow, but getting no further than a thin hard rain. The Wardens’ Centre was hot and steamy. A smell of well-brewed tea blended with a smell of drying overcoats. Wardens sat at plastic-topped tables drinking mugs of tea, eating buns and talking. From the general concerto, single threads of sound came through to Sher as he moved among the tables, looking for Johnson.

  ‘–said to me, I should think you could find something better to do–’

  ‘–meter’s out of order. I said, it’s not, you know–’

  ‘–smashing film at the Odeon–’

  ‘–tragic really, I mean since it happened he just isn’t the same–’

  ‘–what did you say after that?’

  ‘–wouldn’t demean myself to speak, just gave him the ticket.’

  ‘–you’ve stuck a dud coin in the meter, I said, that’s what you’ve done–’

  ‘–Jack Nicholson turns me on in anything, I mean he could–’

  ‘–face up to things, it was an accident after all, not as if it was his wife, no use being morbid–’

  ‘–quite agree, got to keep a sense of proportion–’

  ‘–just what I say, I mean an animal after all, got to keep a sense–’

  ‘–he could recite the alphabet and it would turn me on.’

  At the other end of the room there was a raised platform with a big map on the wall showing the Baker Street and Oxford Street area, through to Hyde Park on one side, Regent’s Park on another. Coloured pins were stuck in at traffic junctions, like acupuncture needles in vital spots. A woman in uniform sat on the platform, listening to a radio receiver and then taking earnestly into a microphone. In a cubbyhole beyond this platform he found Johnson. He was on the telephone.

  ‘I’m sorry, madame, I really am, but there’s nothing I can do. Yes, I a
m the controller, but I don’t have the authority to cancel a notice. I appreciate that you’d only stopped for a few minutes, but it was on a yellow line, and that’s a traffic offence. If–’

  He put the receiver down, grinned at Sher. ‘She hung up. They often do. Now, come along and let me introduce you to Betty.’ Here in the Centre Johnson was more assured, less deferential. He steered the way to a table occupied by a large woman who was drinking tea. ‘This is Betty Brade. Betty, you’ll remember I was talking about Mr Sheridan Haynes.’

  ‘TV’s Sherlock on trail of Karate Killer,’ Betty Brade said. The bulk of her trunk strained against the confines of the uniform, the hand in which she held the teacup made it look like a toy. Pig eyes were merry in the unleavened dough of her face. When she smiled her wide mouth showed gold teeth. ‘Joe says you want help. I’m not surprised.’

  ‘She’s a tough nut,’ Johnson said with a kind of rueful admiration. ‘I’ve tried to convince her that it’s a serious idea, but she’s a tough nut.’

  It was a situation of a kind that Holmes had never been obliged to face, one in which he had to persuade somebody by sheer eloquence, but Sher felt himself equal to it. He fixed Betty Brade with what he knew from many TV appearances to be a compelling gaze, and gave his voice a level of deep seriousness that he felt to be convincing.

  ‘I can only tell you that the programme company producing my series have told me that my investigation will be counterproductive unless I solve the case, and they are opposed to it because they don’t think I shall solve it. Personally, I believe in the genius of Sherlock Holmes, and I hope I can reflect some of that genius in myself. But I shall need helpers to act as my eyes and ears. The question is, are you prepared to help me?’