Body of a Girl

by Michael Gilbert

  There were two mats in front of the front door. Mercer wiped his feet on both of them, and was conducted into the front parlour by Mr. Dyson, introduced to Mrs. Dyson, and invited to take a chair.

  “We were warned by the local police that you were coming,” said Mrs. Dyson. “Would your friend like to come in too? It’s a little cold outside.”

  “He’ll be all right,” said Mercer. He could see no sign of an ashtray, and he knew that an hour without a cigarette would be torment for Prothero. “I’m glad they told you what I wanted to talk to you about. It can’t have been pleasant news.”

  “It was a shock,” said Mr. Dyson.

  “A terrible shock,” said Mrs. Dyson.

  You’re either bloody good actors, or you didn’t give a brass button for her, thought Mercer. He said, “Tell me about her—”

  “Well,” said Mr. Dyson, and looked at his wife. She said, “Maureen was a very nice girl. Naturally, you’d expect us to say that, Inspector. Being her parents. But it’s true. She was always top of her class in school. And she got a lot of prizes, for good conduct, and leadership and things like that. And when she left school, she wasn’t like some girls we know, she went straight into a job and earned good money at it.”

  “A job?”

  “With a firm of lawyers in the town. Batchelor, Symonds and Quirk. She was with them for nearly five years. Then she had to go. She couldn’t see eye to eye with Mr. Batchelor.”

  “About anything in particular?”

  “Just generally. He was an untidy, unmethodical sort of man, Inspector, and our Maureen was just the opposite. She was neat, and conscientious too. She never minded going early, or staying late if there was a job to finish. I think she sort of, well—sort of showed him up. That’s why he got rid of her.”

  “That would have been four or five years ago. What did she do next?”

  “She joined another lawyers’ office. In Stoke. I forget the name, but I could find out if you liked. She was there three years. Then she moved south. We didn’t see a lot of her. She came home for Christmas sometimes. Things like that.”

  “I suppose,” said Mr. Dyson, exhibiting the first, very faint, sign of sentiment, “that there’s no doubt—I mean—about it being her.”

  “It’s not certain, by any means. But what you told the Inspector up here, about her shoes, well, it does make it very likely.”

  “It’s true,” said Mrs. Dyson. “And she was sensitive about it. After I’d spoken to the Inspector I had a look round up in her room. She left a lot of things there. I found this pair of shoes. The right hand one’s quite different. You can see. It’s wider.”

  “That’s really most helpful,” said Mercer. “I wonder if I could borrow them.”

  “I’ll give them a clean first.”

  “Don’t bother.” He put them into his brief case. “I don’t imagine I’ll have to trouble you any more. There’s just one thing. Could you give me the name of her dentist?”

  When Mercer came out, he took a deep breath. Porson Street was not an inspiring place, but it had more fresh air in it than the house he had just left.

  “How did they take it?” said Prothero.

  “They didn’t take it at all. They scarcely noticed it. They wrote her off years ago. See if you can find this address. It’s a left turn off the main square, behind the town hall.”

  “It looked a neat little place,” said Prothero.

  Mercer repressed a shudder. He said, “They put little socks on the legs of the chairs. Tell me, Len, what do you suppose a girl would do who was brought up in a house like that?”

  “Get out as quick as she could,” said Prothero.

  “I expect you’re right. What I really meant was, what sort of person would she turn out to be?”

  “Could turn out either way. I remember a boy at school. Parson’s son. He’d been brought up very strict. By the time he was seventeen you couldn’t trust a girl within an arm’s length of him on either side. This the place?”

  “Maurice Fairbrother. Dental Surgeon. That looks like it.”

  Mr. Fairbrother was helpful. He said, “I remember Miss Dyson well. She used to come to me as regular as clockwork. She looked after her teeth as carefully—well, as carefully as she looked after everything else.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It does seem a funny thing to say, doesn’t it? But she left quite an impression on me. She was a hard sort of girl, even when she was young. Self-possessed, you know. Gave nothing away. We dentists see people’s character in undress, as you might say.”

  “But she had good teeth?”

  “Absolutely perfect. And was determined to keep them that way.” He was examining a record card. “She had an occasional scrape and clean. And I see that I put a brace on her front teeth when she was ten. She insisted on having it off. Too soon, I thought, but she said it spoiled her appearance.”

  “Was she attractive?”

  “She didn’t attract me,” said Mr. Fairbrother. “But then I don’t like my eggs hardboiled.”

  Batchelor, Symonds and Quirk occupied premises in the High Street which looked more like a betting shop than the offices of a firm of solicitors. A cheerful girl, in the outer office, who seemed to be going down for the third time in a sea of papers, told them that Mr. Batchelor was out, but should be back shortly.

  Mercer and Prothero took time off for coffee.

  “Doesn’t seem to be much doubt we’re on to the right girl now, does it, Skipper?”

  “No real doubt. There can’t be a lot of people reach twenty-five without a stopping in their head. If those shoes measure up, I think we can call it a certainty.”

  “What I can’t make out,” said Prothero, pouring his coffee into his saucer to cool it, and then blowing on it, “if it is her, why did she come back? She packs up all her traps and pushes off up to London—”

  “According to Sergeant Rollo.”

  Prothero poured his coffee back from the saucer into the cup and drank a good deal of it. Then he said, “Ah! According to Dick Rollo. Yes. I see,” and said no more.

  Mr. Batchelor was still out when they got back to the office. Mercer sat down to wait. Twenty minutes later he arrived in the shape of a small, disorganising cyclone. Enquired of the girl whether a Mrs. Winlaw had rung. Was told she hadn’t. Took Mercer’s card, but didn’t read it. Asked the girl if she was quite sure Mrs. Winlaw hadn’t rung. She was quite sure. Picked up a pile of unopened letters. Tried to look at Mercer’s card with the letters in his hand. Dropped the card. Mercer picked it up. Dropped most of the letters. The girl picked them up. Succeeded in reading the card, and said, “Good God. Police. Is one of my clients in trouble? Come inside, Inspector.”

  In his own office, once he understood what Mercer wanted, Mr. Batchelor became a little more composed. He said, “Yes, of course I remember Miss Dyson. She started here as my secretary. Then when old Mr. Quirk retired she took on a number of jobs herself. I suppose you’d have called her a managing clerk by that time. She worked under my general supervision of course.”

  “She must have been very useful.”

  “Oh, very,” said Mr. Batchelor. He said it without much enthusiasm.

  “Then why did she leave?”

  “You’re a policeman,” said Mr. Batchelor, “and the police don’t come into things until they’ve gone bad. Has Maureen—I mean, is she in trouble?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Mr. Batchelor said, “Good God,” jumped up, knocked a pile of deeds onto the floor and picked them up again. The exercise seemed to calm him. He said, “You mean she’s been murdered.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. But why should you suppose I meant that?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I assumed that someone—you’re not having me on are you?”

  “I’ll give you the whole strength of it,” said Mercer. He spoke for ten minutes. Mr. Batchelor listened with remarkable patience, only jumping up twice. The first time, he scuttle
d across to the door and put up the ‘engaged’ sign. The second time, as Mercer was drawing to a close, he went over to a filing cabinet, unlocked a drawer marked ‘Personal’, and took out a cardboard folder, which he brought back and placed on his desk.

  Then he said, quite simply, “I got rid of Miss Dyson because she was blackmailing my clients.”

  “Ah,” said Mercer softly. “So that’s it.”

  It was as though a window had been opened, as though curtains had been drawn back, throwing a strong shaft of light and understanding into a dark corner.

  He sat very still, watching Mr. Batchelor’s hands as he untied the tapes of the folder and took out a document. The little solicitor said, “I trust I shan’t have to go into any details about this, because it affects other people, and I hoped that it was all dead and buried.”

  “We’ll keep names out of it if we can,” said Mercer.

  “I’ll tell you about the last case. The one I found out about, and that was the reason I got rid of her. She handled a lot of litigation. You know what is meant by a discretion statement, Inspector?”

  “Roughly.”

  “Say a wife is divorcing her husband on the grounds that he has committed adultery. She has clear proof of it. Probably he hasn’t troubled to deny it. But she may have gone off the rails herself. It often happens, you know. A woman sees her husband fooling around with another woman. She thinks, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, if you follow my meaning.”

  “I follow you exactly,” said Mercer. Only half of his mind was attending. The other half was working out the implications of what he had heard.

  “That’s where a discretion statement comes in. A plaintiff who comes into court asking for divorce must come with clean hands herself. So the wife writes it all down. It’s handed to the judge. He’s the only person who sees it. After the case is over, it’s destroyed.”

  “And Miss Dyson got hold of it. And blackmailed the wife?”

  “Not the wife. The man she’d been involved with. He was happily married. It was a simple indiscretion. He paid the best part of five hundred pounds to keep it quiet.”

  “And you say that was one of a number of cases.”

  “It was the only one I knew about when I sacked her, naturally. The facts about the others trickled in later.”

  “How did she get her hands on this – what did you call it – discretion statement?”

  “She stayed working late. She was keen, you see. She’d have the run of the office. She could look at any paper she wanted. Or listen to phone calls. All the rooms are on one line. You’ve only got to lift the receiver.”

  “What beats me,” said Mercer, “is how she ever got another job in a lawyer’s office.”

  “Not difficult when it’s a woman. She says that up to then she’s been living at home looking after her parents. Every job she takes is her first job. The family and the school will give her a reference.”

  Mercer said, “I suppose that’s right,” but he said it absent-mindedly. He was thinking about Mr. Weatherman. That office would be a good deal better organised and more strictly controlled than the cheerful shambles of Batchelor, Symonds and Quirk. But all the same, an unscrupulous girl, with her wits about her, would have plenty of opportunities.

  “The fact is,” said Mr. Batchelor, “that solicitors do learn a lot of secrets. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it’s all right, but if you get a bad’un—”

  They had an unsatisfactory lunch in a pub outside Heckmonwith and took the road for the south. It was nearly five o’clock by the time they reached Maidenhead. As they stopped for a cup of tea, Mercer spotted the placard, and bought an evening paper.

  The headline said wage clerk dies and the sub-heading, ‘Massive Murder Hunt’.

  Charles Watson, the wage clerk of Messrs. Arkinwrights the Stepney engineering firm, died early this morning in Guy’s Hospital. He and his fellow employee George Radici were the two men who put up such a gallant fight against the six men who attacked them when they were carrying the week’s wages to a car. Both men received gun-shot wounds, Watson in the head and Radici in both legs. It is feared that he may lose one of them. The Arkinwright factory employs over a thousand men and the weekly wage roll is believed to be between twenty and twenty-five thousand pounds. The Board of Arkinwrights had already announced a reward of £1,000 for information leading to the conviction of the men concerned. When they learned that Watson had died, they immediately raised this to £5,000. Watson leaves a wife and two children. Last night a massive force of police and detectives started to comb out cafés, clubs and garages in the South London area. Chief Superintendent Morrissey, head of the C.I.D. in No. 1 District is in charge of the operation.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Our keen young detective,” said Sergeant Gwilliam, “hot on the trail of the miscreant, was baffled by a cunning manoeuvre—”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said Mercer. It was seven o’clock that same evening. He had come straight to the station. Ten hours of driving, coupled with two snatched meals, had not improved his temper.

  “The boy shall tell you himself,” said Gwilliam.

  Detective Massey looked up from the blue report form he was filling up and said, “Last night, at approximately eight o’clock, I was keeping observation—”

  “This isn’t a police court. Let’s have it without the icing. Who were you watching?”

  “I was watching Johnno.”

  “And who the hell told you to do that?”

  Even Sergeant Gwilliam was startled by the viciousness in Mercer’s voice. Massey was as scarlet as if his face had been slapped. He said, “It’s one of my jobs. I was given it before you came here.”

  “My arrival cancelled all standing orders. All right. Tell me about it.”

  “We’ve had more than one tip-off that Johnno was doing these transistor and radio jobs. He was seen hanging round the shops just about the time they got bust, and one of Taffy’s fingers said one of his friends had seen Johnno offering new stuff for sale in the private bar of The Swan—”

  “Third-hand. Someone knows someone who says he saw Johnno. What were you supposed to do about it?”

  Massey told him what he had done about it. His voice said that he thought he was being unfairly criticised, and if Mercer had had a long day, all right. Understood. But that was no reason to take it out on him.

  When he had finished Mercer went over to one of the wall cupboards and got out the set of six-inch and twenty-four-inch Ordnance Survey Sheets. He spread out the large-scale map of Slough.

  “Show me just where you lost him?”

  “I think it must have been that one.”

  “I didn’t ask you to think. I asked you to be sure.”

  “It was that crossroads.”

  “And when you came out—here—he’d gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “He couldn’t have got past you?”

  “Not at the speed I was going.”

  “So he must have been calling somewhere in this area.” Mercer drew a pencil line round the half-dozen streets on the left of the High Street. “And what’s more he can’t have stopped long. Not if he was already halfway home when you overtook him. Do you know this part of the town, Taffy?”

  “I’ve been there once or twice,” said Gwilliam. “I don’t know it all that well.” He looked at Massey who shook his head. Mercer rolled the pencil slowly across the map. He seemed to be thinking. Then he said, “Have you got your notes?” Massey stared at him. “The notes you made when you were watching Johnno.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  Mercer studied them. The other two men watched him in silence. “You were there from half-past seven until about half-past nine, when Johnno shut up shop?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And in that time about twenty cars called for petrol or whatever?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did the drivers do whilst Johnno was serving them?�
��

  “Most of them sat tight. Some got out and walked about. Two or three went into the kiosk to talk to Johnno, whilst he was getting their change.”

  “Could you see into it from where you were?”

  “No. The glass side is blocked up with advertisements and things.”

  “Were any of the drivers carrying anything when they went in?” Massey thought hard about this one. He said, “Do you mean, did anyone leave anything behind with Johnno? I’m sure I should have noticed if they had.”

  “I meant what I said. Was anyone actually carrying anything in his hand when he went in?”

  “I’ve got an idea that the last driver might have been holding something—it looked like a small suitcase. But he didn’t leave it behind. And he wasn’t in the kiosk more than ten seconds.”

  The pencil stopped rolling. Mercer’s fingers closed on it. His knuckles showed white for a moment. When he spoke his voice was studiedly normal. He said to Gwilliam, “First thing tomorrow, I want you to take this plan. Get over to Slough, and mark on it any place of business inside this area. Particularly any place that might conceivably stay open until nine or ten at night.” To Massey, he said, “And a word in your pearl-like ear, my boy. Leave Johnno alone. Understand? Stop watching him. Don’t go near him. Leave him alone.” Before Massey could say anything he had turned back to Gwilliam. “One other thing. Could you find out who owns the block of flats overlooking the recreation ground?”

  “The recreation ground?” Gwilliam was still staring at the map.

  “Keep alert, Sergeant. We’re no longer in Slough. We’re back in Stoneferry. The block of flats overlooking the recreation ground, and backing on Westhaugh Road. Can you locate the owner?”

  “Now?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If there’s a porter I could ring him up and ask him.”

  “Do that. And when you find him tell him to be at the flats in half an hour. That’ll give me time to get a bite to eat.”

  There was a brief silence after he had gone. Then Gwilliam said, “Tom was saying, the other day, he couldn’t make the new skipper out at all. When you thought he was thinking about one thing, Tom said, you found he was really thinking about something quite different. I think Tom’s wrong. I don’t think he really thinks about anything at all. I think he just says the first thing that comes into his head.”