by Unknown
Quaid and Trave exchanged a look and took out their guns. Fire escape or no fire escape, there was no point taking any chances. The police had been issued firearms in the first year of the war, but neither the inspector nor his assistant had had occasion to use them yet. Quaid went first, with Trave just behind, both of them shining their torches up into the darkness. The stairs creaked under their shoes, but otherwise there was no sound.
Two flights up, the two policemen became more aware of the line of light above their heads, and when they turned the corner, they saw that it was a shaft coming through a half-open door on the other side of the next landing. Moving forward, their hearts hammering against their chests, they felt a current of cold air coming towards them.
Signalling to Trave to get ready, Quaid flattened himself against the wall behind the door and gently pushed it open, and Trave found himself looking down the length of an empty corridor lit by a single overhead light to where a metal curtain rail had been pulled down onto the carpet and a second door stood wide open to the night air. Quickly he ran to the end and then came to an abrupt halt. Outside, snaking down to the ground below his feet, a black iron fire escape clung to the back of the building like some parasitic creature missing its head and tail.
Trave shone his torch down into the shadows but saw nothing except the outline of a row of squat municipal dustbins behind a railing near the bottom of the ladder that looked for a moment like a line of men at a bar. Everything was silent – the killer was long gone. That much was obvious.
‘What can you see?’ asked Quaid, coming up behind Trave as he was examining the outside of the door frame.
‘Whoever it is got out this way—’
‘I know that.’
‘But I don’t think this is how he got in,’ said Trave, finishing his sentence.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘There are no signs of forcible entry, and the key’s in the door,’ said Trave, pointing. ‘And I don’t think the killer put it there.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just don’t see him going round the flat looking for it when he knew someone had seen him. He’d have been too desperate to get away.’
‘Maybe he knew where to look,’ said Quaid. ‘He certainly knew where to find the fire escape.’
‘Yes, but I don’t think that means he’s been here before,’ said Trave. ‘Most of these Victorian apartment blocks have fire escapes like this at the back.’
‘Well, aren’t you the expert?’ said Quaid sarcastically. And then apologized immediately when he saw how Trave recoiled, obviously offended. He hadn’t had Trave working for him that long, but there’d already been several cases where his assistant had noticed something that seemed minor at the time but turned out afterwards to be important. Quaid was an arrogant man, but he was clever enough to realize that two sets of eyes were better than one. After all, what did it matter who saw what, provided Quaid got the credit for solving the case afterwards. ‘Come on, William, have a sense of humour,’ he said, clapping Trave on the back. ‘I expect you’re right. Our dead friend probably had the door locked – unless he was too busy with his books and got absent-minded, which is always a possibility. Have you seen how many he’s got? The flat’s stuffed to the rafters with them. Come and take a look.’
Trave followed Quaid back down the corridor to the living room. The inspector was right. Books were everywhere, lined up horizontal and vertical on overloaded shelves or piled in precarious leaning towers on tables and chairs. From a side table over by the window, Trave picked up a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the original German that had been heavily annotated in blue ink; lying underneath it was a copy of The Communist Manifesto, this time in translation.
There were papers too, all covered with the same distinctive spidery handwriting, and yellowing articles cut out of newspapers. There didn’t seem to be any surface in the flat that wasn’t covered in some way.
‘Christ, he’s got more books than the bloody public library,’ said Quaid, whistling through his teeth. ‘You’d need a compass to find your way round here.’
‘No, I think that he knew where everything was. Or almost everything,’ Trave said meditatively. It was almost as if he were speaking to himself.
‘So you think there’s method in the madness, eh, William?’ Quaid observed, eyeing his assistant with interest and glancing back round the jam-packed room.
‘I had an uncle who lost one of his legs in the last war,’ said Trave. ‘He didn’t do anything except read.’
‘Like you,’ said Quaid with a smile.
‘Worse. His house was just like this, and yet when he wanted to show me something in one of his books, he could lay his hands on it in a minute.’
‘Well, good for him,’ said Quaid. ‘But why did you say “almost everything”? What was that about?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe it’s nothing. It’s just these papers on the floor here, they’re different somehow,’ said Trave, pointing to a small heap of documents near his feet that were lying on the carpet in the space between the desk and the fireplace.
‘In what way different?’
‘They look like they’ve been thrown there, maybe from off the desk. They’re not stacked up like the other papers.’
‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ said Quaid, looking down. ‘Good work, William. You’ll make a decent detective yet. Okay, leave everything where it is for now. We need to get back downstairs. We can bring the daughter up here when she’s back on her feet – see what she says; see if anything’s missing. You can carry her if you like,’ he added with a grin as he went out of the door.
Trave shook his head and gave a weary smile. He’d already picked up on his boss’s irritation at the way he’d helped the bereaved woman downstairs, but what was he supposed to do – leave her to faint on top of her father’s corpse?
Carefully he replaced Mein Kampf on the table where he’d found it and looked curiously around the room one last time before he followed his boss down the stairs. Strange, he thought, how all the books seemed to be about different kinds of politics. Reference books, language primers, treatises – but as far as he could see, there wasn’t one novel in the whole damn place. But then fact, of course, could be a great deal stranger than fiction.
Downstairs, Trave went to check on the dead man’s daughter and was pleased to see that she’d recovered her senses while he’d been away. She was sitting up on the sofa where he had laid her before he went upstairs, sipping from a glass of brandy that the old lady must have given her. There was even some colour in her pale cheeks.
Reassured, Trave returned to the hall, where Quaid was standing by the remains of the woman’s father.
‘There’s no point waiting for a doctor,’ said Quaid, sounding typically decisive. ‘We know he’s dead and we know what killed him, so we’d better get on with finding out who did it.’
Trave knew in the immediate sense that ‘we’ meant him. It was his job, not Quaid’s, to handle the dead and go through their possessions. So he took out his evidence gloves, pulled them carefully over his hands, and began methodically to go through the dead man’s pockets, doing his best to keep his eyes averted from the mess of shattered bone and blood that had once been a human face.
‘What’ve you got there?’ asked Quaid, watching at the side.
‘A wallet,’ said Trave, holding up a battered leather notecase that he’d extracted from inside the dead man’s jacket. He took out his torch to shine a brighter light on the contents. ‘There’s an ID card in the name of Albert Morrison, aged sixty-eight; address 7 Gloucester Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, SW11,’ he went on. ‘Plus three pounds ten shillings in banknotes, a ration card, and two ticket stubs. Oh, and a piece of paper – same inside pocket, but not in the wallet, folded into four. There’s a bit of blood on it, but you can read what it says: “Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C.” And there’s a name written underneath with a question mark – Hayrich
or Hayrick, maybe.’
‘Never heard of him,’ said Quaid.
‘I think it’s all the same handwriting – same as on the papers upstairs,’ said Trave, peering closely, ‘but the name’s a bit of a scrawl, like it’s been written in a hurry, sometime after the sentence, I’d say.’
‘All right, bag it. Is there anything else?’
‘A few coins in the right trouser pocket; a couple of keys on a ring. That’s it.’
‘Okay. Let’s go talk to the daughter, see if she knows something. There’s no point standing around doing nothing, waiting for the death wagon to get here.’
‘Are we still taking her upstairs?’ asked Trave.
‘Yes, why not?’
‘I just don’t want her to see her father again, that’s all. I don’t think she can take much more.’
‘Fine,’ said Quaid impatiently. ‘Get a sheet or something. The old woman must have one spare.’
Left on his own in the hall, Quaid scratched his head absent-mindedly as he looked down at the smashed-up corpse that had less than an hour before been a sixty-year-old man called Albert Morrison. The sight didn’t upset him. In the last three months he’d seen far worse – soldiers at bomb sites picking up bits of arms and legs and putting them in potato sacks as if they were working in a harvest field; blast victims fused into the walls of their homes; even once a severed head staring down at him from an oak tree that had been stripped of all its leaves by a land mine explosion.
No, the dead man was a puzzle. That was all. And solving the puzzle shouldn’t be too difficult once all the clues were assembled. For now, Quaid had to be content with speculation. What had happened upstairs? he wondered. Had the old man come home and surprised a burglar, who’d pushed him down the stairs? The answer to that was almost certainly no – Quaid thought Trave was most likely right that the killer hadn’t come in through the fire escape door, and from what he’d been able to see when he was upstairs, there were no signs of forced entry on the entrance door to the flat. And given that the front door of the building appeared unscathed as well, the likely explanation was that someone had let the killer in. All the tenants in the building would have to be questioned, obviously, but Quaid’s intuition told him that it was Morrison who had opened the door. Perhaps the killer had followed Morrison home or perhaps he had been waiting at the door. Either way, he had targeted the old man. Why? To steal from him? The daughter would be able to tell them if anything significant was missing, but as far as Quaid had been able to see from a cursory inspection, there hadn’t been any items of obvious great value in the flat – a lorryload of boring academic books, certainly, but in Quaid’s experience people didn’t get killed for their books. So if it wasn’t to steal, why had the killer come? Perhaps to talk about some matter of mutual interest. According to statistics, most murderers knew their victims, and Quaid had a great deal of faith in statistics. Perhaps the professor and his guest had got into an argument and the argument had got out of hand. Throwing your victim over the banister was certainly an unlikely method for premeditated murder. So much could go wrong in a struggle even with a weak opponent – one false move and the would-be murderer could easily end up falling down the stairs himself.
The professor! Quaid realized that he’d already unconsciously given the victim a nickname. It was a habit he’d developed with all his cases, and then afterwards when they were solved, the names became a filing system in his mind – useful in its way. The sailor for the man who’d drowned under Lambeth Bridge, held down under the water by his brother’s boat hook; the nun for the pious lady in Clerkenwell murdered for her savings by the drug-addicted lodger who lived in her attic; the prime minister for the man who looked like an oversize version of Churchill, dispatched by his wife with a bread knife one evening because she couldn’t stand to listen to him barking orders at her any more. And now the professor – killed by one of his students, perhaps, or an academic rival.
A loud knocking at the front door recalled the inspector from his reverie. Trave had still not returned, so Quaid walked over to the door and opened it, and then had to step back quickly as an overweight man in a green tweed suit almost fell past him into the hall, coming to a halt in front of the still-uncovered dead man on the floor. The newcomer was red in the face and breathing heavily, but it was hard to say whether that was from the shock of what he was now seeing or from the haste of his arrival.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, stepping back. ‘That’s Albert.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Quaid, sounding surprised. ‘His face is smashed beyond recognition.’
‘Because of his clothes. What the hell has happened here?’
‘And who might you be, if you don’t mind me asking?’ asked Quaid, ignoring the newcomer’s question.
‘Dr Brive, Bertram Brive – I’m his son-in-law.’
‘And what brings you here, Doctor? Nobody’s called for medical assistance as far as I know.’
‘I was worried about my wife. I called home when I heard the siren and she didn’t answer, so naturally I assumed she was over here.’
‘Where were you?’
‘At work. My surgery’s near here – in Battersea High Street. Why are you asking me all these questions?’
‘Because I’m a police officer investigating a murder. It’s my job to ask them.’
‘A murder! Why do you say that?’ asked Brive. He sounded panicked suddenly, and his hands had begun to shake.
‘Your father-in-law was pushed. It was your wife who saw it happen, as a matter of fact.’
‘Did she see who did it?’
‘No, more’s the pity. It was too dark, apparently, but we’ll find the person responsible. You can count on that.’ The urgency with which Brive had asked his last question hadn’t escaped Quaid’s attention.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Brive, sounding anything but glad. ‘Where’s my wife? Is she still here?’
‘Yes, in there,’ said Quaid, pointing to the open door of the ground-floor flat through which Trave was just now emerging with a sheet to cover up the corpse. ‘We were just going to ask her to go upstairs and see if anything’s missing. Perhaps you’d like to come too.’ It was framed as an invitation, but Quaid made it sound more like an order.
But it evidently wasn’t one that the doctor was reluctant to obey. Instead of going to find his wife, he started up the stairs until Quaid barked at him to stop. Trave went back to fetch the dead man’s daughter.
Brive took a step towards his wife when she came out into the hall, then stopped abruptly, reacting to the way she seemed instinctively to draw back away from him.
‘Ava,’ he said, clasping his hands in front of his chest as if he were about to make a speech. ‘I’m very sorry about what’s happened here. Do you have any idea who might have done this terrible thing?’
Ava shook her head, staring mutely at her husband with a half-sullen, half-defiant expression that Quaid couldn’t quite decipher, but he was even more struck by the stilted, almost formal way the doctor spoke to his wife. He would have liked to see more of the interaction or lack of it between them, but Brive turned away and began to go up the stairs.
CHAPTER 3
Quaid followed the doctor up the stairs, with Trave and Ava bringing up the rear. Brive climbed quickly, taking the stairs two at a time, and when the two policemen arrived in Albert Morrison’s book-lined sitting room a minute later, they found the doctor on his hands and knees, picking up the papers that were strewn across the floor – the same heap of documents that Trave had drawn Quaid’s attention to earlier.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Quaid demanded, taking hold of Brive’s arm with one hand and removing the papers that the doctor was holding with the other.
‘What do you think? I’m clearing up the mess,’ said Brive, pulling away.
‘No, you’re bloody well not. You’re interfering with the evidence. That’s what you’re doing. And if you carry on, I’ll put you in handcu
ffs. Do you hear me?’
Brive didn’t answer but instead turned away with a surly expression on his face, nursing his arm as his wife came past him into the room. Quaid kept his eyes on Brive, noting how he kept shifting from one foot to the other, unable to keep still, and how he couldn’t stop nervously rubbing his hands together all the time, as if he were unconsciously trying to wash away the evidence of some recent transgression, while his eyes kept darting back towards the documents on the floor as if he were considering another move in their direction.
Quaid prided himself on being able to tell if a man was lying or hiding something from him, and this medicine man with the funny foreign-sounding name was doing both. Quaid was sure of it. From the moment he’d clapped eyes on him, the inspector had taken an instant dislike to the victim’s son-in-law. He distrusted the fussy triple knot in Brive’s navy-blue bow tie, and it worried him that half of what the doctor said just didn’t add up. Brive said he’d come over because he was concerned about his wife’s safety during the air raid, but then he’d shown no interest in going to her side when he’d discovered that she’d been a witness to her father’s murder. Instead his priority had been to get up the stairs and start interfering with the evidence. And then there was the way that Brive had shown up at the crime scene minutes after the police, even though by his own admission no one had telephoned him or asked for his assistance. He said he was looking for his wife, but why had he been so certain that she was going to be at her father’s?
It was a damned shame that the dead man’s daughter hadn’t got a look at the man who’d pushed her father – too dark, apparently, like everything else in the damned blackout.
‘You say your father was saying “no”. Is that all? Did you hear anything else?’ Quaid asked, turning to the dead man’s daughter. Ava, she was called – a pretty woman with a pretty name. God knows how she’d ended up married to this creepy doctor, Quaid thought, shaking his head.