Dead Man Walking

by J F Straker

“Nor murder,” added the chief constable.

  “Murder?” A bejewelled forefinger stroked her lower lip. “Ah, yes. You mean the poor man who was found in that wrecked car. It’s true, then? He was murdered? I’ve heard talk of it, but it seemed highly improbable.” Her hand moved to her glass. “Is it also true that the two crimes are connected, Superintendent? There’s talk of that too.”

  From the guilty look on the chief constable’s face Sherrey thought he knew how that item of news had reached her.

  “There’s always talk,” he said curtly. “Sometimes by those who should know better.”

  The chief constable flushed.

  “Mrs Bollender had heard that your Sergeant Inch wished to question her agent. I thought she had a right to know why.” Guilt struggled with anger for expression in the chief constable’s voice. “I told her that the sergeant believed Wheeler’s death to be connected with the robbery at the bank, and that one of her canvassers had been witness to an incident which could help to confirm or deny this. And that is all.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence before Sherrey decided to apologize. It was a politic rather than an honest decision, and the chief constable’s gruff acknowledgment showed that he recognized it as such.

  For the first time that evening Mrs Bollender allowed curiosity its way.

  “Do you know the canvasser’s name, Superintendent?” she asked.

  “We do not. But we have his description.”

  “Tell me. Perhaps I can help.”

  He told her. She shook her head, diamond earrings flashing. “I’m afraid I don’t recognize him. But then I’ve only met one or two.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not important.”

  “No? You don’t share your sergeant’s opinion?”

  “Opinions don’t bring criminals to justice, madam. For that we need facts.”

  They did not stay long after dinner. The drive back to town started in an uneasy silence, but finished in a semblance of amity. Both were reasonable men, and both had a sense of guilt; both in their way had talked out of turn, and both knew it. But neither would openly acknowledge indiscretion. Instead, they drifted into a casual conversation which ended in a formal handshake at the entrance to the hotel.

  Johnny had yet to report on his visit to Mrs Wheeler, and to Sherrey no time was as good as the present. But Johnny’s door was locked. There was no answer to his knock, and he went to his own room, where he sat for a while making notes before picking up the daily papers. He liked to read before bed. It relaxed the tension built up by the day’s events.

  He was in his pyjamas when he realized he had not yet heard Johnny return. Donning dressing-gown and slippers, he padded down the passage to Johnny’s room. As he reached for the door handle there came the sound of laughter from within, followed by a girl’s voice. Briefly he stood irresolute, bushy eyebrows bunching in a frown. Then he shrugged, and his hand dropped to his side. Johnny too was entitled to his relaxation, even though its form did not meet with his superior’s unqualified approval.

  6

  Fully clothed, Karen Moore lay stretched out on Johnny’s bed and watched him pour the beer. There was an intent expression on his freckled face as the liquid slid smoothly down the side of the tilted glass, ensuring just the right amount of ‘head’. Concentration on such minor tasks was characteristic of Johnny.

  He brought the full glasses to the bedside. “Sit up, woman,” he said. “You can do several things lying on your back — I won’t itemize — but drinking beer isn’t one of them.”

  She sat up, tucking her legs under her, and reached for the glass. She wasn’t thirsty and she had no great liking for beer, but the gleam in Johnny’s eyes told her it might be wiser to obey.

  “Don’t you drink anything but beer?” she asked.

  “Not if I can help it. Tea and coffee, yes. But not spirits. Beer is body-building.”

  “I don’t know that I want to build mine any more.” She sipped, then placed the glass on the bedside table. “I’m happy the way it is.”

  “So am I.” He surveyed her admiringly, half emptied his glass, and put it down. Then he reached for her and pulled her to her feet. “You’re long, though, aren’t you?”

  She kicked off her shoes. Even without them she was nearly an inch the taller.

  “That better?”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her. Her lips were moist, her body responsive. But her height still troubled him. When he had kissed her that afternoon he had not noticed it. Now it stifled his ardour, and he drew away and picked up his glass.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Have I got B.O,, or something?”

  “You’ve certainly got something. Equally certainly, it isn’t repulsive.” He finished the beer. Flogging desire, he said, “A pity to hide it under all that clobber. If you feel the urge to disrobe I shan’t object.”

  “Bra, panties, frock.” Her hands smoothed her flanks. “That isn’t much.” She sat down on the bed. “Besides, I don’t strip on Tuesdays.”

  “No? Hooray for Wednesdays.”

  There were full bottles on the dressing-table. He snapped the top off one and refilled his glass. Then he turned to look at her. Now she was lying down, raised knees emphasizing the straightness of her long legs, grey eyes provocative as they watched him. There was a faint smile on her lips.

  “You’re nervous,” she taunted. “You are, aren’t you, Johnny?”

  He walked across to the bed. Horizontal, her height was nullified. Desire rose in him again, and he took a long gulp at the beer, nearly choking himself.

  “I’ll show you who’s nervous,” he spluttered. “Move over, woman.”

  They lay in each other’s arms, talking little and kissing much, enjoying the periphery of sex. Her body was supple and expressive in its movements, her small, pointed breasts taut under his hand. But when, inevitably, he attempted further intimacies, she pushed him away.

  “No, Johnny,” she said. “Please!”

  Reluctantly he released her. She swung herself off the bed, smoothed her frock, and walked flat-footed to the dressing-table. Johnny lay on his side and watched as she tidied her hair and made up her face. Desire faded slowly, and he felt hot and uncomfortable and empty.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Sex glands not functioning smoothly?”

  “A damned sight too smoothly. That’s why, Johnny.” She replaced the top of her lipstick, dropped it into her bag. “Besides, it must be getting late. What’s the time?”

  “Ten minutes to midnight. You couldn’t wait that long? Then it’ll be Wednesday.” He sighed noisily. “I’d like it to be Wednesday.”

  She laughed, wiggling her feet into her shoes.

  “You have a one-track mind, Johnny. Go to sleep. Even detective sergeants need sleep, don’t they?”

  “This one does. But not tonight.”

  “Really? I’ve roused you that much?”

  “You could put it that way.” He reached for his glass. “But it wouldn’t be strictly true. It may sound corny, but I have to see a man about a dog.”

  WEDNESDAY

  1

  NICODEMUS was inclined to scoff at most of Johnny’s suggestions — on principle, Johnny suspected — and, when Johnny had suggested that they take it in turns to join the local police detailed to watch Wheeler’s house that night, he had scoffed at this one. But he had not knocked it completely. “Why waste a good night’s sleep? If anyone comes the local boys can handle him. You want to pace yourself in this job, my lad,” he had said, with the slow pomposity that always maddened Johnny. “Still, it’ll be a change from door-bells. I never want to push another bloody doorbell in my life.”

  He had taken the first watch, Johnny the second. But the night had passed uneventfully, with scarcely a sound from the dogs to excite their expectation. When they joined Sherrey at breakfast, all they had to show for their vigil were tired eyes and a certain lack of zest for the day ahead.

  “Dog watching, e
h?” Sherrey neatly sliced the top from a boiled egg, spooned out the white. From beneath heavy brows he looked at Johnny. “From what I heard when I passed your door last night I fancied you had other plans.”

  “Just passing the time, sir, until I relieved Knickers.” Johnny spoke lightly. There had been indulgence rather than reproof in the Boozer’s tone.

  “H’m! Well, it’s no skin off my nose how you two choose to spend your nights. Only don’t expect time off to compensate.”

  They had not expected it. Johnny said pointedly, “Have a good dinner last night, sir?”

  Sherrey grunted and finished his mouthful. The dinner, he said, had been excellent, the company less so. “Incidentally, the Bollender woman didn’t recognize your canvasser from his description. Try the agent again. He was due back last night.”

  He seemed unimpressed when Johnny spoke of his visit to Aysford Common. But then you could never tell with the Boozer. He was not lavish in his praise.

  “So you think you know where Wheeler was killed, eh?” he said. “Well, I suppose that’s something. But it would be nice to know who killed him.”

  “The tread casts may help us there, sir.”

  “Not until you find the tyres that made them.”

  Mrs Bollender’s agent proved to be more helpful than his candidate. “We’ve almost as many canvassers as we have probable voters,” he told Johnny. “That may not be many voters, but it’s quite a lot of canvassers. However, your informant must have been mistaken. Melling Drive is off George Street. That’s Mrs Crossman’s area.”

  Mrs Bute indignantly resented the implication that she was unable to distinguish between male and female. “It isn’t as though he were one of these modern long-haired creatures,” she said. “Very respectable, he was. And why’s he so important? He can’t tell you any more than me. He had his back to the road when they left.”

  “He didn’t turn to watch them?” Johnny asked.

  “No more than a quick glance. All that concerned him was that he’d missed her, that he’d have to call back.”

  “Did he call back?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve more to do than sit and watch the street.”

  Maybe she’s right, thought Johnny. Maybe I’ve blown this one up out of proportion. Yet the mystery of the unidentified canvasser intrigued him, and he decided to pursue the inquiry a little further before finally abandoning it. Surely someone in the street could put a name to the man.

  Half an hour and ten houses later he was even more mystified. At two of the houses he had received no answer to his ring. At the remaining eight he had been assured, with unshakable conviction, that no canvasser for any party had visited there on the Monday evening.

  “So he’s bogus,” Nicodemus said. “Some sneak thief looking for easy pickings. You get too involved in trifles, Johnny. I’ve said so before.”

  “You’ve said a lot of things,” Johnny retorted. “And most of them sound like wind. All right, so he’s bogus. But if he were a tea-leaf he wouldn’t have begun and ended with Mrs Bute. He’d have gone on, hoping to strike a dead job. Which he didn’t.”

  “Stop bickering, you two,” Sherrey said. They were having a pre-lunch drink in the lounge. Sherrey preferred it to the bar. “If you slept in your beds at night you wouldn’t be so damned edgy.” He sipped his Martini. “But Inch is right. This was no sneak-thief trying out his luck. He was at Mrs Bute’s for a purpose. So — what purpose?”

  “To have her at the door as a witness to Mrs Sinclair’s departure,” Johnny suggested.

  “That possibility had already occurred to me, Inch. I’m not completely gormless. But why was a witness necessary? And to whom?”

  “To arouse Sinclair’s jealousy?” Nicodemus suggested.

  The superintendent shrugged, pursing his lips. It was the wrong answer, he knew. Unfortunately the right one eluded him.

  It eluded them all for a while. It nagged at them throughout lunch, and it was not until they were drinking their coffee that Johnny said slowly, “I believe I’ve got it, sir.”

  “Got what?” Nicodemus asked. “The pox? I’m not surprised, the way you carry on.”

  Johnny ignored the jibe.

  “I’ve been thinking about Mrs Wheeler’s visitor of Monday afternoon,” he said. “The mysterious Hugh Charlton. If Wheeler didn’t lie when he said he’d never heard of him, then all that business about Wheeler having promised to take Beryl to a party and stay the night was just a load of bull to arouse his wife’s jealousy.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” Nicodemus asked.

  “To stop her reporting her husband’s disappearance to the police. Sooner or later she was going to start worrying, and this new evidence of his interest in the blonde Beryl might induce her to inquire at the Sinclairs’ before going to the nick. Anyway, that was what ‘Charlton’ and his pals, whoever they may be, were hoping. And the observant Mrs Bute was to supply the answer. Mrs Sinclair, she would say, had left in a red Cooper with a man in a yellow jersey, and had not come back. We know the man couldn’t have been Wheeler, since by then he was already dead. But Mrs W didn’t know it. She would believe what she was meant to believe: that her old man had decamped with Mrs S.”

  “And that was important?”

  “Of course it was important. You don’t alert the police simply because your husband has run off with another woman. They knew that.”

  The superintendent’s nod was an acceptance of the logic of Johnny’s argument rather than of the argument itself.

  “And who are ‘they’?” he wanted to know. “We have the firm who did the bank, the man calling himself Charlton, whoever phoned Wheeler that evening, the poor chap’s killers, the bogus canvasser, the man in the yellow jersey. Double, even treble them up, and it’s still quite a lot of villains.”

  “It’s a lot of hooey, sir, if you ask me,” Nicodemus said, encouraged by a hint of scepticism in the Boozer’s voice. “All right. So they fool a few people into believing Wheeler is alive when in fact he’s dead. And where does that leave them when the corpse is discovered? Up the bloody creek!”

  Johnny’s look was intended to convey astonishment that anyone could be so dense.

  “You’ve missed the whole point, you big nit! It wasn’t meant to be discovered. If the woman hadn’t crashed the Morris while transporting the corpse it probably never would have been discovered. The accident was just their bad luck. Something they couldn’t foresee.”

  “The tally grows,” Sherrey said. “I’d forgotten the woman. And talking of women — where do you suppose Mrs Sinclair fits into all this?”

  “She could be part of the act, sir. Or maybe she was expecting Wheeler, and the disguise fooled her too. According to Mrs Bute the man didn’t leave the car, and was off like a rocket as soon as Mrs S jumped in.”

  “Got it all taped, haven’t you?” Sherrey peered into his cup, saw that it was empty, and stood up. “But let me remind you that it’s still only fiction. Until we can turn it into fact, how about some honest police work? Those garages, for instance, Nicodemus. Any luck there?”

  “I’m not sure, sir.” Nicodemus sounded subdued. “A mechanic at the Corner Garage — that’s the one past the bank — told me that a Morris van which had been there Monday evening was missing the next morning. It hadn’t been entered in the book, so he queried it with the boss. The boss said he’d lent it to a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “The man didn’t know. And so far I haven’t been able to contact the boss. He’s been out each time I’ve called.”

  “Well, keep trying. Probably all quite innocent, but we can’t afford to miss a trick.”

  “The Corner Garage,” Johnny said. “That’s Goodwin’s place, isn’t it? You know — the fellow who was in the bar yesterday with Mrs Bollender.”

  “That’s him.”

  For the Boozer’s benefit Johnny repeated what the girl had told them of Mrs Bollender’s interest in Charlie Goodwin.

&n
bsp; Sherrey dismissed it as bar-room gossip, and no concern of theirs. “I don’t like the woman,” he said, “but she’s a damned sight too proud to throw herself at the proprietor of a tuppenny-halfpenny garage.”

  Johnny smiled. The Boozer was married, with two grownup daughters, but it seemed to Johnny that he was singularly innocent where women were concerned.

  He walked to the garage with Nicodemus. Despite their bickering, the irritation which each aroused in the other, they made a good team: Johnny with his intuitive nose for anything amiss, Nicodemus with his patient perseverance in dull routine. Both were zealous policemen, and, despite constant grumbling, neither would have wished himself in any other profession. Perhaps subconsciously they recognized this bond. To both the job was more important than the individual, and neither allowed the friction that existed between them to interfere with it.

  This time their luck was in. They met Charlie Goodwin in the forecourt, a briefcase in his hand and obviously impatient to be gone. At first he was churlish; he had an appointment, if they wanted a chat they must call back later. But Nicodemus was politely insistent. Realizing that the quickest way to be rid of them was to answer their questions, he said curtly, he had loaned the van to a man named Sinclair.

  “He knocked me up late Monday night, which was why I forgot to enter it in the book. Said his wife had gone off in his car, and he needed one in a hurry. Just for the night.” It was not a hot day, but his pink face was wet with perspiration. “Anything else?”

  “Is Sinclair a friend of yours?”

  “Not exactly. He’s a customer, and occasionally we have a drink together.”

  “Did he say why he wanted the van?”

  “No, he didn’t. And I didn’t ask. It was none of my business.”

  “And the car hasn’t yet been returned?”

  “No. But it will be. I’m not worried.”

  They let him go then, and he hurried away. Johnny said, “He’ll have wanted that van to chase after his wife and the bogus Wheeler. I wonder if he found them.”