The Silence of the Night

by Roger Ormerod

  Then Alwright took Uncle Albert through it in detail, and the old idiot recovered his wits enough to realise he’d better not mention anything about pinching the thing. He also said nothing about the strange silence, but by the time he’d finished my nerves were twanging.

  ‘So now,’ said Alwright, ‘we come to the strange part of it, which was why, if Mallin knew this, Mallin’s kept quiet about it.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d believe it,’ I said, not very forcefully.

  ‘But I am believing it. Try again. When did you know?’

  ‘Last night.’ I glanced at Elsa. She’d moved forward, away from Vale, leaning towards me a little, urging me — no, no.

  ‘Last night. Charlie, he knew last night. That’s a long time to withhold evidence.’

  ‘It wasn’t satisfactory,’ I claimed.

  ‘Oh come on. Come on. What’s unsatisfactory about it?’

  I shrugged, avoided his eyes, fumbled for my pipe.

  ‘You wanted time?’ he asked nastily. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘There were things to think about.’

  ‘Such as whether it made him sound guilty? But it does, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t see that,’ I protested desperately. ‘I believed him. He’s not the sort of chap who can lie well.’

  ‘But you think you are? That’s what it is. You had to think of a story for him, one you could present. But you’re not making a very good job of it. Look at him, Charlie. We get better liars once a week at the Station.’

  ‘Oh, he’s lying all right,’ Kenny agreed.

  ‘It’s what happened,’ I said. I looked round as though for help. ‘You ask Elsa. She was there.’

  It wasn’t so much that I’d brought her into it that distressed her, as the fact that I’d had to, having nowhere else to turn. Alwright and Kenny turned slowly, their eyes on her, their expressions disbelieving. ‘Were you, Mrs Forbes?’

  Her chin came up. ‘Yes. I heard what my uncle said.’

  ‘And it’s true? What we’ve heard. That’s the story he told Mallin?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it was.’

  And I blessed her, though her eyes on me were bleak. She had been expecting too much from me.

  ‘There you are then,’ I cried. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Then why,’ demanded Alwright, who’d probably conducted a thousand interrogations, ‘are you still fiddling with that pipe? You’ve filled it, you’ve tried to light it twice. You’re nervous because you’re a copper and you know I’d detect a lie. You’re lying, and you won’t admit how.’

  ‘Go to hell!’

  ‘So if the story’s correct, then what you’ve said about it must be the lie. What did he say, Charlie?’

  I turned away from them in anger, turned back trapped, looked round wildly. ‘There was no reason to disbelieve him.’

  Kenny smiled sourly. ‘He’s just done it again. That’s when he lied, when he said he believed it.’

  ‘Well all right,’ I shouted. ‘So I didn’t believe him. You know yourself — never believe anything.’

  ‘But I believed him,’ Alwright said happily, now he’d got me going. ‘So what did he say to you that he hasn’t said to us, which made you think he was lying?’

  I looked at him sullenly, gave Elsa an apologetic little smile, and admitted: ‘He said he didn’t hear the vase break. And he must have done.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Alwright. ‘So you didn’t tell us. It was too damn incriminating. He didn’t hear it break, because he broke it himself. And he didn’t dare say he’d heard it, because somebody was going to ask why he didn’t go and investigate.’ He smiled like a waiting tiger. ‘But you kept it to yourself.’

  I laughed then, coarsely, brashly. ‘You know how it is. I wanted to prove it myself. Watch him. Talk to him.’

  Elsa turned away.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘Till just before you came in. Then there was just a chance, and you went and broke it up.’

  ‘What chance?’

  ‘I had a phone call a few minutes back. My friend who’s putting the vase together told me there’s a piece missing. You see? Whoever smashed it took the bit away with him. Somehow. And I just thought ...’

  I allowed my eyes to drift around the circle of cuff-less trousers, then back to Uncle Albert’s.

  ‘Hell, if I’d had time!’ I complained bitterly, and Elsa slowly turned to face me again, her eyes wide in comprehension, and, bless her, she solemnly lowered one eyelid a fraction.

  You focus the attention on one detail that may prove guilt. It’s easy to check, and if it doesn’t work out the inference is that your man is innocent. It’s safe enough when you’ve had time to check it out yourself first, especially if you can make it seem you didn’t have time. So I looked angry and disappointed, so that they’d think I’d been after a success that might save my job in the Force, and Alwright fell for it. He glanced at Kenny, and Kenny approached Uncle Albert.

  There was no necessity for Uncle Albert to dance round again. Kenny obligingly went down on his knees and groped. He looked up, shaking his head.

  ‘Mr Keane,’ said Alwright, ‘will you show me his room.’

  ‘I most certainly will not. He’s a guest in my house.’

  Alwright smiled. ‘He’s a paid guest. You’re paying him for cataloguing your library. That makes him an employee.’

  ‘A labour of love,’ murmured Uncle Albert in protest.

  ‘He’s a personal friend,’ Hillary claimed.

  ‘But there’s no need for anyone to be upset,’ Uncle Albert said. ‘Let him go up there, Hillary. There’s nothing to find.’

  And Hillary, after a little more hesitation, agreed. ‘Rupert will show you.’

  Rupert Allington pressed forward, eager to get in with authority, and took Kenny away. Alwright stayed with us, and we all sat down on those little benches Hillary had so that his visitors could contemplate his paintings in comfort. Alwright sat beside me, slapped his knees.

  ‘Sorry about that. You were on your way to a little triumph.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘No harm done.’

  He nodded, pleased. ‘The only one who didn’t go out on Friday. The one who needs money most. I wonder how he got the vase out of the house. It’s quite a size.’

  ‘The same way he got it in, I suppose.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘A vase was smashed. A fake, maybe, but it’d have to be brought here. And as you say, it’s bulky. Perhaps that’s what you should be thinking about.’

  He glanced at me suspiciously. ‘What about the chap who knocked you out?’

  ‘I think not. I believe he was only here to make it look like an outside job. No, he wouldn’t be trusted with even a fake vase.’

  ‘We’ll ask the old chap,’ decided Alwright. ‘That’s what we’ll do. Look at him. You can’t imagine he’ll hold out long. He’ll tell us.’

  I did look at him. Uncle Albert, relieved now that everything had been revealed and he was safe, secure in the knowledge that nobody was going to find any bits of T’ang in his turn-ups, was contentedly discussing Gainsborough’s brushwork with Fisch. Uncle Albert did not seem to be the type who’d present much trouble to Alwright and Kenny.

  ‘If you take him in, he’ll talk,’ I agreed.

  ‘If?’

  ‘You haven’t found the bit. It was only an idea.’

  He laughed easily, then cut it off abruptly when Kenny entered with one hand firmly grasping Allington’s arm. Kenny was shaking his head dolefully.

  ‘Did you try the jacket pocket of his pyjamas?’ I asked helpfully.

  ‘Pyjamas?’ said Alwright.

  ‘He told me he was in his pyjamas. I suppose a bit could have jumped. You know, in the air. And into his pocket.’

  I knew at once I’d made a mistake, not being able to resist it. But Alwright would know at once that I’d been leading him on. He did. He smiled at me so coldly that
I felt it all down my spine.

  ‘But it’s not all,’ said Kenny. ‘I’ve been talking to the young fellow here.’ Allington looked scared. ‘Do you remember, Super? Mallin said he’d heard about the missing bit just before we got here. Said he’d received a phone call.’

  I hadn’t said received. I’d been most careful not to. But it wasn’t the time to argue.

  ‘And didn’t he?’ said Alwright gently.

  ‘This young man says this is an extension of the phone in the hall.’ Kenny’s eyes went from one end of the Grand Hall to the other. ‘Whichever he used.’

  ‘The far one,’ I said.

  ‘So if a call had come in,’ said Kenny, ‘the one in the hall out there would’ve rung. Mallin could have taken it in here, but he didn’t. Because the phone didn’t ring.’ He drew Allington forward. ‘He knows it didn’t ring, don’t you?’

  Allington nodded. ‘I was just going to use it myself, and it went “ting”, so I knew somebody had beaten me to it.’

  ‘So?’ said Alwright, turning to me. ‘What was that in aid of? You’ve got some explaining to do.’

  Kenny lifted his chin in triumph, and nearly smiled. ‘But he did get a call this lunch time. And it was a man.’

  It was sheer cussed bad luck. I tried to smile, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  ‘Mallin,’ said Alwright, his voice rising, ‘you’ve had all bloody afternoon to look for that piece. And you’ve covered for him. Did you find it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you didn’t, there was no point in covering. And you have covered.’

  ‘The man’s obviously innocent.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ he snapped. ‘And I can tell you this, Mallin,’ he went on, working up to it, throwing it at me, ‘if we get an admission from him I’ll be charging you as an accessory after the fact. Get it? And if that doesn’t stick, by God I’ll break you somehow or other. If it’s the last thing I do.’ He turned to Uncle Albert. ‘Now, sir, if you’ll kindly accompany me to the Station, perhaps we can get at some truth in this. Where we can be on our own,’ he said heavily, ‘and with no interruptions.’

  ‘Now?’ protested Uncle Albert.

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Oh dear. Hillary, I do apologise ...’

  ‘No need, my dear fellow. But do hurry back, there’s so much to be done.’

  So I’d blued it. If it had come off it would have been fine. But it didn’t. After they’d gone off with Uncle Albert I was left with a lot of disapproving faces. It would have been too complicated to explain, but the fact remained that without my assistance Uncle Albert might still have been under slight suspicion, but he’d have been free. With my help, he was now on his way to a most uncomfortable session with the law.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It’s on Sundays you really know you’re in the country. In the city everything dies on Sundays, shops present an unwelcome face and the traffic goes somewhere else. But in the country the rooks still caw and swoop around the stables and the bees continue to hum contentedly, and everything’s the same as Saturday. That’s how the country makes itself felt.

  But for me it wasn’t the same as Saturday, and I couldn’t even expect French and Greene’s van. Nobody actually shunned me, though they must have thought that confiding their troubles to Dave Mallin was apt to get them a stay in a cell. Probably they recalled that they’d already confided too much. But certainly there seemed to be a lot of open space around me that morning, and Elsa, without obviously ignoring me, seemed to arrange matters so that there was no opportunity for explanations.

  Which was unfair, I thought. She must have realised what I’d been trying to do, otherwise why the conspiratorial wink? But come to think of it, she did seem to admire success more than the method by which it was achieved. In any event, it wasn’t me she asked to run her in to Police HQ so that she could go and see what was happening with Uncle Albert, and the first thing I knew about it was when I heard the Porsche revving out of the garage, and realised Vale was taking her.

  One thing about it though, I did get the Grand Hall to myself, and I could really get down to some concentrated thought on it.

  The really worrying point was that Uncle Albert had said he had not heard the vase break. It would have made quite a crash, a thing like that on a hard floor, and the only reason the others hadn’t heard it was that their rooms were so remote. But Uncle Albert had said he’d not heard a crash.

  I wandered the empty Grand Hall with the windows wide open to the June morning. The place was a vast, echoing sound chamber. Blast it, it would have made the most of a crashing vase.

  Right. So was there any reason Uncle Albert should lie about it? He’d made the statement without emphasis, giving no particular significance to it. But you could just imagine he’d lie about it if he hadn’t first admitted he’d come down there. Once he’d said that — what harm was there in admitting he’d heard it? Nobody would have demanded to know why he hadn’t gone running and tackled the thief, because Uncle Albert wasn’t a thief-tackler. If he’d heard it, there was just no point in his not saying so.

  I was therefore forced to the conclusion that he had not heard it, because I wasn’t going to accept that he’d smashed the thing himself.

  And that brought me back to my own position in it. How long had I been unconscious? I’d said a minute or two to Uncle Albert, but it could have been longer. Yet not much longer, surely. The bruise behind my ear hadn’t been too serious, so I had to reckon that the most I’d been under was say five minutes.

  Five minutes? In that time Cameron Frazer had been killed, though possibly by accident, the vase smashed, and Uncle Albert had been down, seen Frazer dead, and gone up again. However I considered it — Frazer killed before the vase was smashed, or Frazer killed after — the fact remained that the vase hadn’t been smashed before I was knocked out, and it had been after. Sometime in the compass of five minutes Uncle Albert had been down, found Frazer, and gone up again. It was just not feasible that he could have been far enough from the Grand Hall, either coming or going, and in a state of wakefulness, not to have heard something.

  Though there was of course the fact that Uncle Albert had only seen Frazer dead. He’d not seen whether the vase was or was not on the pedestal at the time. I felt a quickening of interest, went out on to the terrace, and looked back towards the library door. I could not see it clearly from where I was. I’d been still, hadn’t I, leaning against a pedestal? I found the same one — it had a huge stone vase, full of flowers, on it — and leaned against it. I could not see the library door at all, would not have noticed if it had been opened, and shut again.

  Was I, in fact, wrong in assuming that the three incidents — my unconsciousness, the vase-breaking, and Frazer’s killing — were bracketed in the same few minutes? I’d been a long time out there on the terrace. It was conceivable that someone had come down, killed Frazer, and gone back again without my knowledge, that Uncle Albert had then discovered him, again without my knowledge, and that later, enough later for Uncle Albert to have returned to his room and perhaps fallen asleep, I’d been knocked out and the vase smashed.

  But that assumed two separate incidents. There seemed to be no conceivable reason that Frazer should have been eliminated as a preliminary to a later theft. There’d just be no point in it, as in his deaf withdrawal he’d be no danger. He’d have been no danger if he’d been able to hear. So that would have to mean that the killing of Frazer was one thing, the theft another. Unrelated. It wouldn’t, then, be a murder committed during the course of a robbery. They’d have had to be two unconnected incidents.

  And that brought up a purely unacceptable coincidence. I’d have to believe that on that particular Thursday evening both a murder and a robbery had been committed. By separate people. It was even worse than that. I’d have to accept that three people wandered the house that night. One killed Frazer, one found him, and one broke the vase! And none of the three in any way impinged on the other; none
of the three had been noticed by Dave Mallin, on guard and expecting something, unless you could say I’d noticed the one who’d knocked me out. Who, I was convinced, had been Sloan. Hell, that made it even worse, because Beanie, I was certain, had been there only to fake the whole thing as an outside job. So that’d be four who’d been wandering around, not three, and all on the same night, all concentrating on their own specific purposes.

  It was simply not acceptable, especially when such a set-up assumed that Uncle Albert had found Frazer and had retired from the scene without raising any alarm. That he’d have left hurriedly in a panic was acceptable, but he’d surely have recovered in a short while, and the fact that he had not raised any alarm must mean that I’d simply forestalled him. There was only one reading of the situation that was reasonable, that the person who’d stolen the T’ang was the one who’d killed Frazer. I couldn’t think why he’d killed Frazer, but that was what it had to be. Or that Uncle Albert had killed him, on his quest for the First Folio. But that was out of the running, because Uncle Albert, even if he could be accepted as belting anybody with a poker, wouldn’t have let him bleed on the First Folio.

  So I was back where I’d started, and Uncle Albert must have been within hearing of a crash he had not heard.

  There was only one conclusion to be drawn from it: there had not been a crash to be heard.

  It wasn’t until after lunch that I realised why.

  The first thing to do seemed to be to tell Elsa about it. That’s an indication of how far my self-confidence had been shaken, that even before presenting it to the police I’d have to get her approval. The trouble was, she and Vale hadn’t been back for lunch, and I gradually became more and more tense as the afternoon drew on and they still hadn’t arrived.

  It was nearly five when the Porsche nosed into the courtyard, and they got out, laughing about something. I retreated into the dim interior of the house, waiting for them to separate, because if there was anything I didn’t want just then it was to get into an argument with Vale and have to waste time punching him on the nose. Then, at last, she was free, and I caught her at the foot of the stairway.