Body of a Girl

by Michael Gilbert

  He said, “How’s it going?”

  “We’ve got a confession. Of a sort.”

  “Written?”

  “Written out, but not signed. He says he’ll think about signing it tomorrow. When he’s not so tired.”

  “Which means he’ll repudiate the whole thing.”

  “Very likely. But it was made in the presence of two police officers. It’s enough to hold him. When he comes up tomorrow, we can oppose bail on the grounds that there are more serious charges pending. They’ll give us that, won’t they?”

  “Treat Murray Talbot right,” said Clark, “and he will give you all the help you want. Get that confession signed and we’ll charge him straight away.”

  “I’m not all that happy about the confession. Not as it stands right now.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He’s told us at least six different stories. The one I’ve got down is the last one he told us. That Sweetie came home pretty high herself one evening. They had a real set-to, she fell and hit her head. He found she was dead, and pushed her into the river. When I said, then how did she end up three foot down in a grave on Westhaugh Island, he said he supposed he must have buried her.”

  “Do you believe a word of that?”

  “Frankly,” said Mercer, “no. Whatever happened to her, it wasn’t that. It was something a lot more cold-blooded. And anyway, she wasn’t killed by a blow on the head. She was strangled. But he was involved in her death. I’m sure of it. She’s on his conscience. She’s at the back of his mind. She’s walking in his sleep.”

  “You’ll be walking in your sleep if you don’t get to bed soon,” said Clark.

  Mercer started back to his lodgings in Cray Avenue, but halfway there, changed his mind and turned down to the river. He had an unpleasant taste in his mouth and he thought that a pint of beer might wash it out.

  Mercer took his beer into the back room at The Angler’s Rest and found Jack Bull and Rainey in front of the fire, drinking whisky.

  He said, “Where’s the supporting cast?”

  “Johnno’s just pushed off,” said Bull. “Vikki wouldn’t come out tonight. She’s sulking.”

  “That young madam wants slapping down,” said Rainey.

  “I wouldn’t advise you to try it,” said Bull. “She packs a fast right hook, with a lot of weight behind it.”

  “Speaking from experience?” said Mercer.

  “Am I not.” Bull rubbed the point of his jaw with a big finger.

  “You ought never to have taken her on,” said Rainey. Whisky seemed to have loosened his tongue. “She’s playing hell with my figures.”

  “As long as her own figure’s right, I don’t give a damn what she does.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “My dear old Percival,” said Bull with sudden ferocious good humour, “you must know that I’m far too old and far too evil to be warned. I’m beyond redemption. And you’re tight. Go home to bed.”

  There was no doubting the mood of the last sentence. It was in the imperative affirmative. Rainey finished his drink and shambled to his feet.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. He made for a point to the right of the door, tacked at the last moment, and made contact with the door handle.

  “And whilst you’re passing the bar, see if you can remember to order a couple of whiskies. Doubles.”

  “Is his name really Percival?”

  “Gospel truth. Perce the Purse, the boys call him. He’s a highly qualified accountant and a bloody marvellous mathematician. When he’s sober.”

  “Is he often?”

  Bull laughed, and said, “He’s mostly sober from ten till six. If he wasn’t, he’d be out on his ear.”

  “It’s your business, but I should have thought there might be danger in having a man like that in charge of the cash.”

  “Yes and no. He’d swindle me if he dared. But he knows I know that, and I’m watching for it, so he doesn’t do it. Also he knows, if I caught him fiddling, I wouldn’t only sack him, I’d break his bloody neck.”

  The drinks arrived. Bull paid with a pound note and waved away the change. “Water or soda?”

  “I never touch the stuff,” said Mercer.

  On top of the beer the whisky slid down smoothly. Bull let a companionable minute tick by before he said, “And how are you finding Sinferry?”

  “It’s an interesting sort of place,” said Mercer. “Full of characters.”

  “Like Sowthistle Hedges?”

  “No. Not like Sowthistle. He’s unique, I should say.”

  “He’s a free-wheeler,” said Bull. “Do you know, when he first came here, must have been more than thirty years ago, before he sank up to his neck into the shit, he was quite a boy. When the local council tried to make him pay rates he fought them through the Rating Tribunal and the High Court. Conducted his own case and won it. I believe it’s still the leading case on the difference between a house and a houseboat.”

  Mercer tried to visualise Sowthistle addressing the High Court and failed. He said, “Talking of characters, I met a real one today. Mr. Brattle.”

  “Charlie Brattle. One of the best. A warm man, too. That boathouse and the land round it has been in the Brattle family for a hundred years. I’m told that a firm of property developers offered him twenty thousand for it. They wanted to put up a river club complete with chalets. When he said ‘no’ they upped the offer to thirty thousand. He told them to go and jump in the river.”

  The landlord put his head round the door to say, “Any more orders?”

  “Two more large whiskies,” said Mercer.

  “Make it four,” said Bull. “Save your legs. What were you talking to Brattle about? Don’t tell me he’d broken the law.”

  “Certainly not. I was looking for Prior’s place. He took me across in the punt.”

  “Henry Prior?”

  “That’s right. Used to keep the Stoneferry Garage. Before he ran into that bit of trouble.”

  “Henry was all right,” said Bull. “We may have been cutting each other’s throats in business, but that didn’t stop me liking him personally.”

  “So he told me.”

  “Oh?”

  “About you buying his fixed equipment.”

  “It was good stuff. More useful to me than the scrap dealers. If I’m just being bloody inquisitive, tell me to keep my trap shut, but why would old Henry Prior interest the police?”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s something you might be able to help me on. Being in the same line of business. You remember the mechanic who caused all the trouble.”

  “Taylor.”

  “That’s what he called himself. Did you, or any of your chaps, ever talk to him?”

  “I didn’t. They might have done. Why?”

  “I’d be very interested to know where he came from. In fact, I’d be interested in anything about his past at all. He’s such a shadowy figure. Comes from nowhere, wrecks the Stoneferry Central Garage, departs to nowhere.”

  “I could ask my boys. They’re bound to ask me why I want to know.”

  “Tell them I’m a nosy bastard,” said Mercer. He sank back still more comfortably into the padded armchair.

  “I’d be telling ’em nothing but the truth at that,” said Bull with a grin which showed a set of sharp white teeth. “You are a nosy bastard.”

  “I’m interested in people,” said Mercer. The second whisky had followed the first, and his voice had a very slight slur to it. “In where they come from, and where they’re going to, and what makes them tick. And I’m interested in things that happen. When a lot of different things seem to be happening at the same place and the same time, I want to know whether it’s blind chance, or whether it’s cause and effect. Once, in London, I wanted to find out why a boy was late for school some mornings and not on others. He always set out from home at the same time. It was worrying his mother.”

  The outer bar was very quiet now. The landlord had g
ot rid of the other customers and must have departed to organise his own supper.

  “Go on,” said Bull sleepily. “Tell me.”

  “He’d been put on by his older brother to watch the bank manager and report what time he arrived at the bank. Sometimes the manager was punctual. Then the boy got to school in time. Sometimes he wasn’t. Then the boy was late. It was as simple as that.”

  “Let’s have the punch line,” said Bull. “The older brother was a bank robber and you caught him.”

  “He was working for a crowd who organised wage snatches. I stopped that particular snatch, and I caught this.” His finger caressed the scar on the left side of his face. “It’s a memento from a very undesirable character called Fenton.”

  There was a long silence after this. A casual observer might have supposed that the two big men stretched out in chairs in front of the fire were asleep.

  Chapter Eight

  “Who was Mrs. Tyler?” said Mercer.

  “Never heard of her,” said Tom Rye.

  “Mrs. Agatha Mainwaring Tyler of the Thatched Cottage, Stoneferry Common. Where’s Stoneferry Common?”

  “South of the river between Chertsey and Laleham. High-class district. The Thatched Cottage is probably a little place with twenty bedrooms standing in its own park.”

  “No,” said Mercer. He was turning over the pages of a dusty office docket, one of a dozen he had unearthed from a cupboard and spread over his table. “Judging from the evidence available, Mrs. Tyler may have been a gentlewoman—but she was a depressed gentlewoman. Depressed, and oppressed.”

  “Who by?”

  “According to her, by Bull’s Garage.”

  “What would they do that for?”

  “It’s an interesting story. Like all these dockets. All interesting stories. Some with beginnings and some with middles, but very few with endings.”

  “The ones in that cabinet were all Dick Rollo’s cases. I don’t think I’ve looked at them since he—”

  “Since he went.”

  “That’s right,” said Rye. “Since he went.” Mercer had noticed that talking about Sergeant Rollo always made him edgy. “What’s so interesting about Mrs. Tyler?”

  “It’s a very human story. Mrs. Tyler was seventy-seven years old. She had long outlasted Mr. Tyler and she lived, in modest but declining widowhood, in the Thatched Cottage which stands—” Mercer consulted the docket—“three miles from the nearest railway station and half a mile from the nearest bus stop.”

  “She can’t have got about much.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. The old duck possessed a motor car. And a driving licence.”

  “At seventy-seven.”

  “Old ladies of seventy-seven cause less trouble on the road than kids of seventeen.”

  “True,” said Rye. “So what happened?”

  “Her car went in to Bull’s Garage for its three-year road test. Since it had been driven by Mrs. Tyler alone, and maintained with scrupulous care, she had no reason to anticipate trouble and was therefore horrified when she was told that the differential was in such a bad state that it would have to be removed and replaced. At a cost of eighty-five pounds.”

  “Lousy workmanship. I’m told one car in ten that comes out of the factory has something radically wrong with it.”

  “You may be right. But that’s not the point. The point is, there was nothing wrong with the differential at all.”

  Rye stared at him.

  “Mrs. Tyler had a grandson, who was a friend of Sergeant Rollo. They’d been at school together. They were both mad about cars. Not just mad about driving them. They loved taking them to pieces to see what made them tick.”

  “That’s right,” said Rye. “Dick Rollo was never happier than when he was lying under some piece of machinery up to his elbows in black grease.”

  “The two of them spent a whole weekend dismantling granny’s differential. They couldn’t find a blind thing wrong with it, and what’s more, they came to the conclusion that it hadn’t even been looked at. Some of the bolts on the casing were rusted in so tight it was clear they hadn’t been shifted for years.”

  “Well?” said Rye. “What happened?”

  Mercer was silent. He seemed to have lost the train of his thoughts. Possibly he was seeing Sergeant Rollo, crouched behind his own car wiring a piece of rubber tubing to the exhaust pipe. Finally he said, “Nothing happened. Bull apologised. He said that two reports had got switched. Mrs. Tyler’s car had a clean bill of health.” He had started leafing through the other dockets. He said, “All the same, I don’t think Sergeant Rollo was quite happy about it. He seems to have started an unofficial enquiry, all on his own. Finding out the names of other people—particularly people who lived outside the town, elderly people who depended absolutely on their cars but knew damn-all about them. I think he was looking for a few other cases where the same sort of ‘mistake’ might have been made.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “If he had said something to you – before he’d collected some other evidence – would you have believed him?”

  “Believed that Bull was on the crook? No, I don’t think I should have done. I should have thought he could make all the money he wanted honestly.”

  “It depends how much he wants,” said Mercer. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me about him?”

  “About Jack Bull?”

  “No, no,” said Mercer gently. “About Rollo. I’ll have to know some time.”

  “I suppose so,” said Rye. He didn’t sound happy. “We’d been having a run of cases of thefts of portable typewriters and tape-recorders. Wireless sets, television sets, hi-fi gear, that sort of stuff. Not one big bust, but a steady trickle. Rollo was put on to it.”

  “Who did Rollo think was doing it?”

  “He didn’t seem to get very far with that job. I didn’t bother him. It was just one of a lot of jobs. If a lead turned up, he’d follow it. You know how it is. The next thing was we got a note.”

  “Anonymous, naturally.”

  “Naturally. Written in block capitals on a piece of lavatory paper. It just said that Rollo had taken one of the stolen colour T.V. sets as a pay-off. We’d find it at his house. If the note had come to me, I’d have put it where it belonged and pulled the plug.”

  “Who did get it?”

  “The old man. I don’t think he liked it much, but orders are orders. Any complaint, however trivial—you know the form. As a first step we got a man from the next division to drop in on Mrs. Rollo. The set was there. In the lounge, as large as life. When she was out of the room, he got a sight of the serial number. It was one of the stolen sets. No question.”

  “Out in the open? In the middle of the room?”

  “That’s right. When Rollo was asked about it later he told us how he got it. Apparently a man had called at the house one morning about three weeks before, when Mrs. Rollo was alone, produced his card, and said he was area representative of the Starlight Supermarket Chain, and wasn’t Mrs. Rollo a lucky girl! She was the millionth customer to make a purchase at one of their shops since the chain had started operating, and she was going to be presented with a handsome new television set. There’d be a proper presentation later, with the Press in attendance, and all that jazz. But they didn’t see why she shouldn’t use it meanwhile.”

  “Did she tell anyone about this at the time?”

  “No. The man said to keep quiet about it until the presentation or it’d spoil the surprise.”

  “Clever,” said Mercer. “Plausible, too. What happened next?”

  “The old man asked Rollo about the set as soon as he came off duty. He told us what I’ve just told you. And we believed him. It was an obvious fix. We told him we didn’t intend to take any further step in the matter. Only the man who’d been put on the job was a stickler. We didn’t know it, but for the next few evenings he kept up a watch on Rollo’s house, from a car parked over the way. On the third evening
he saw Rollo come out, quite late, and drive off. He followed him. Rollo drove out of town, up-river, towards Westhaugh Island, stopped on a lonely stretch, got something out of the boot – it was pretty heavy by the way he handled it – heaved it into the bushes and drove off.”

  “Let me guess,” said Mercer. “It was an unopened sale carton with a brand new record-player in it.”

  “A typewriter actually.”

  “And what did he say about that one? That he’d won it in a raffle.”

  “He said he’d found it in the boot of his car when he got home that evening. He wanted to tell us. His wife talked him out of it. She said no one would believe it. She said just go and dump it. So he did.”

  “He must have been worried stupid,” said Mercer. “I don’t mean pulling a silly stunt like that, I mean doing it so bloody inefficiently. He was a trained detective, and he allowed himself to be followed, at night, on a little used road, and didn’t spot the tail.”

  “He was worried all right,” said Rye. “He took it very hard. After what had happened we had to go on with the investigation. This time they sent two senior men down from Central. They started asking a lot of questions. Then Rollo took the short way out.”

  “Which everyone assumed to be an admission of guilt.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Did you?”

  Rye took time out to answer this. Then he said, “It’s hard to say. His wife didn’t help. She was a bit of a bitch and apt to get hysterical. All the same, taken by itself, it didn’t seem to me to be enough. All he had to do was to say that the whole thing was a plant, and stick to it. Agreed he behaved stupidly. Agreed it would have left a black mark. He might have got booted out. If he’d been near the end of the line, with his pension gone and nothing much to live for—but hell! He was twenty-four.”

  Mercer said, “Before I went to Southwark, when I was attached to West End Central, I learned a lot about framing. The villains round those parts made quite a speciality of it, and the police had studied it too. One thing I found was they very rarely tried to frame an absolutely straight man. There had to be a crack in the fabric first. Just wide enough to get the point of a knife into. And the person most likely to be framed was one who’d done them a few favours in the past, and then had stopped. Maybe he saw the light, or maybe he didn’t think the game was worth the candle. Those were the ones they’d really put the hook on.”