A policewoman eventually came and rescued me. She drove me away from there, fussing over me as though I was a baby, fastening my seat belt for me and driving carefully, as though speed would be too great a shock for my system. At the station there was no suggestion that I should take my car and drive home. At this thought I vaguely wondered whether I should phone Aunt Peg; it was surely getting late. But as we pushed through the growing activity in the outer office, and made our way to the canteen, I forgot about it.
She got me a cup of tea and a sandwich. I hadn’t thought I was hungry. The canteen, open all hours, was nevertheless quiet, lights on only at one end. There was a cosy intimacy about it, a warmth. This I realised when the shaking ceased. I hadn’t noticed the shaking, but she had.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Feeling better now?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, thank you.’
Then she began talking to me, drawing me out, yet not a word related to what was in the forefront of my mind. She had her instructions. I was to be unfrozen.
‘Why are we waiting here?’ I asked at one point.
‘Chief Inspector Caldicott will want to see you.’
‘It’s getting late.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
It was too much effort to look at my watch.
Eventually I was taken up to Caldicott’s office. Probably he’d handled many witnesses in my condition, half in shock. His technique was simple. He ignored my feelings and stuck to the basics.
‘From the beginning,’ he said. ‘What were you doing at Pool Street Motors?’
‘I was trying to dig into my memory and get some idea of what had happened there...’
‘Never mind your memory. You broke in. Why?’
‘Not actually broke in. The main sliding door was open.’
‘Take it from there.’
I did. In detail. He had a tape machine recording our conversation. As long as I went on talking he did not interrupt, simply kept his eyes on me, boring in, unimpressed. He didn’t even say anything when I could not give a coherent account without mentioning my memory loss. When I came to an end he switched off the recorder and sat back.
Not much wrong with your memory, there.’
‘It’s just one specific day, sixteen months ago, and odd bits before then.’
‘What’s a day between friends?’ He smiled thinly. ‘You make a fair statement, by the way. We’ll type it up verbatim.’
‘I had umpteen years of experience in making out statements and reports. I can quote you the Judges Rules by heart, if you like.’
He laughed, rising from his desk and walking round. ‘More than I can. I’ve got the stuff written on a bit of card.’
‘Me too.’ I grinned at him. ‘I was just kidding.’
For a moment or two the misery had drained from me. Caldicott was probably a very good policeman. But outside his office the mood was left behind. She was waiting for me, my policewoman. I saw that she was a good-looking woman in her twenties, not tall, smiling and pleasant but always with her eyes assessing me. She took me down, and into a waiting room with a bit of privacy.
‘I’ve got to leave you now.’ It was an instruction. ‘You’ll be all right.’
‘What am I waiting for?’
‘The typist. Your statement. Then you can go home.’
Home, I thought. Of course. I should have realised. Aunt Peg, I thought, as she smiled and left, I ought to ring her. That was when Nicola put her head round the door.
‘Here you are,’ she said, closing it behind her. ‘You look lousy, Cliff.’
‘What on earth...’ I got to my feet. ‘What’re you doing here? It must be...’
‘It’s three in the morning.’
‘Oh God, poor Aunt Peg, she’ll be worrying herself stiff.’
‘Don’t worry...I called her. She was worrying, but when I told her you’d come across another of those bodies you keep finding, she said that was all right, then, and she could get to bed.’
Nicola’s sense of humour. I tried a weak grin and took her hands, and suddenly I felt weak and ridiculously close to tears.
‘Everything under control,’ I said.
‘You do get yourself into trouble.’
She turned away. We found ourselves chairs. I was able to look at her, feast my eyes on her. Her hair was untidy and there was no trace of make-up. The lack of discipline in her features was obvious, now. Her clothes had been thrown on, a blue jumper with pink joggers.
‘You didn’t say,’ I reminded her, ‘why you’re here.’
‘That sergeant sorted out my address and phoned me.’
‘Oh?’
She puckered her mouth and eyes at my blank expression. ‘You’d been asking for me.’
‘Had I?’
‘So he said. This sergeant. But he could have been telling lies.’
The door opened as though he’d been listening outside and couldn’t stand the insult. Sergeant Porter slid in and closed the door quietly, found himself a chair without a sound.
‘It wasn’t a lie. You asked for her.’
I tried to grin at her. ‘That’s a relief. Proves I wasn’t crazy, and for a while I thought I was.’
‘Tell me,’ she said, nodding, not taking no for an answer, accepting it as humour but not smiling.
I told her, in detail. Porter sat, heels hooked on the cross brace of the chair, chin cupped in his hand. I was well aware that he’d probably heard what I’d told Caldicott; that micro-phone on the desk might have led elsewhere than to the tape recorder. Maybe this was his friendly act, seeing whether my account now corresponded with my previous one. As far as I could make it, it did, though maybe now embroidered with more emotional arabesques.
Porter stirred. ‘You were asked to go to 17C Rock Street? No hint of who’d be there?’
‘Not a thing. I thought she was speaking about George.’
He snorted. ‘We’ve been round to the room, and gone over it in detail. There was nothing, no sign at all that anybody had been there this evening.’
‘There wouldn’t be.’
‘Possibly not,’ he mused. ‘But if there had been, it was this person she was afraid of?’
‘If it wasn’t my imagination.’
‘So you believe that whoever it was got tired of waiting, and went to find her?’
‘It’s not for me to believe anything.’
He smiled thinly, and reached for his pack of cigarettes. ‘Isn’t it, Cliff? We’re not getting that message around here. You’ve done nothing but poke around...’
‘My memory. That’s all I’m digging for.’
‘Yes. This damned memory loss of yours. Don’t you think it’s causing too much trouble all round?’
I looked at Nicola. She was big-eyed and solemn, and she gave me no encouragement. It was my memory, so I could do the talking.
I sighed. ‘Look Bill, it wasn’t just the missing day. I could have lived with that, but there were other things, not so positive. It was like living in a vacuum. Kind of a personality problem. I wanted to bring it back, but didn’t feel like making the effort. But now it’s too late, and I’m right in the middle. I’m remembering parts of things, bits and pieces, and it doesn’t all come together and make sense. I can’t leave it now. It’s my bloody mind we’re talking about. I’ll go crazy if I can’t get the complete picture.’
Nicola was nodding. It made sense to her. She had a proprietorial interest in my mind. If there’d been time, I might have worried about that, but Bill Porter picked me up on what I’d said, and carried it on.
‘So...what have you found out about the day of your assault?’
‘Fact...or guess?’
‘Both. See what we get out of it.’
I felt I’d have liked notice of the question, time to marshal a few thoughts and reject a few. Nicola didn’t give me much chance.
‘He went out on an Industrial Accident claim – George Peters – and got a statement from him...’ She let it hang there, her ey
es on me, eyebrows raised.
‘I’m sure, now, that I got a statement,’ I said. ‘There’s a withdrawal on the file, but I took a statement from him. He’d crushed his right arm, and described how a car had run off its jacks and collapsed on him. This was at Pool Street Motors. I went there. That’s fact. Then my memory’s vague, though there’s something about a barney I had with a chap called Charlie Graham. I can’t understand that. But I do know that at one time I had four statements. There were three men there, in that repair bay, so it seems to confirm that I’d already had a statement from George Peters. I don’t know what sort of statements, though. I mean...I seem to have walked into a situation where George Peters’ accident fitted almost exactly the circumstances of a fatal accident to a chap called Colin Rampton. As described by George Peters, who must have seen it. But in any event, my enquiries that day couldn’t have involved money.’
‘Ah yes.’ Bill nodded, gazing at his toes. ‘I get your point.’
‘If I’d stuck to the accident question, then money wouldn’t have been mentioned.’
‘And so the money in the envelope could well have been intended for George Peters,’ put in Nicola with triumph.
Porter raised his head and looked from one to the other of us. ‘So what d’you think was going on, Cliff?’
‘I think George Peters had some sort of accident, about ten days before my visit there, and got himself a crushed arm. On the same evening, I believe Colin Rampton died when a car fell on his chest, at the garage.’
He held up his hand. ‘November the 6th,’ he said. ‘That was the evening Colin Rampton died. I’ve been checking records. On that same evening a police patrol car was chasing a Maestro, twenty miles from here, which turned out to be stolen, and which’d run through some traffic lights. They lost it, but it crashed and turned over. Before they could reach it, the driver managed to get out and did a bunk over the fields. Inside the car there was a package containing heroin. Take it from there.’
I felt an upsurge of excitement. This was what I’d wanted. ‘I see what you mean. Tessa Clayton spoke about George having lost a consignment, and that was probably it. I suppose he’d have to pay for it, and she got the money together. Then, on the day I went there...’
‘Hold it,’ said Nicola. ‘You’re jumping the gun. That evening, the evening of the accident...I can see what happened, if you can’t.’
‘Oh, I see, I see,’ I calmed her. ‘Poor George, arm in a mess and knowing the police would be looking for hospital reports...managed to get back to town, here. He was in trouble, so he’d head for his friend Charlie Graham, who was working at the garage. About five-thirty to six, that’d be.’
‘We can tie it down,’ said Bill Porter placidly. ‘Colin Rampton died at five-twenty.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Where was I? Oh yes. Five o’clockish, George Peters got to the garage. He’d got to be careful because he wasn’t too well-in with Tony Clayton. So he crept round the back, and it was there he saw the car fall on Colin Rampton. Then there’d be a lot of fuss and bother, and he’d have to make himself scarce, with ambulances and policemen on their way. So now he simply had to go to a hospital, but at least he’d got an acceptable story to tell about how his arm had been crushed. And once having told it there, I suppose he reckoned he’d better tell it to me, too. An exact description of the death of Colin Rampton.’
‘Hmm!’ said Bill. ‘You’ve given this some thought.’
‘Yes. I had to try to make logic out of it.’
He smiled thinly, robbing his words of intended insult. ‘As you seem to have done with Tessa Clayton tonight. Made logic of it.’
I felt the warmth flooding into my face. ‘It was the phone number. I couldn’t remember the phone number.’
Nicola silenced me with a frown. She turned to Porter and tapped him on the knee reprovingly. ‘That wasn’t fair. Cliff’s making sense.’
‘Of a kind. All right, Cliff, so you went along there ten days later and started asking questions...’
‘About the accident. But of course, it didn’t fit. Arm for a chest, and the wrong person. And maybe Charlie Graham didn’t like the questions I was asking, because I was talking about his friend...’
Bill Porter was shaking his head. ‘Not a friend. We don’t think so. George Peters was a heroin user himself, but he must have been a pusher, too. Or maybe a courier. It’s how they finance their own habits. Peters had probably picked up a consignment of heroin, and was taking it to his supplier, and lost it. There’s a point, there, by the way. Six hundred quid in that envelope, that’s not much for what you’d call a consignment. The stuff they found in the car would have fetched forty to fifty thousand on the streets. Think of it in those terms, and George would’ve been in deep trouble that end, and Graham would also have been in trouble, not being able to get his supply. So, by the time you went there he could’ve been half crazy with withdrawal symptoms.’
‘How the hell you can talk about it so calmly...’
‘Or I go insane,’ he said. ‘As simple as that.’
‘All right. I guess you know your own position. In any event, I took statements, and it seems nothing would fit right. So the obvious thing would’ve been to get back to George Peters and check with him. No great problem there. But somewhere along the line...have you thought of this, Bill? George owed around six hundred quid. His adoring mother had got it together for him. But I’d been there all afternoon, and delayed things. She had been intending to make the phone call, but because of me she wasn’t able to. So she got me alone. Somehow, she persuaded me to phone that call box and hand over the money to George, wherever he wanted us to meet. At that time the money was in an envelope in a drawer in the main office. She arranged...and like an utter fool I must’ve agreed...that we’d go up there and I’d say I had to take the books away with me, and she’d put the envelope in the wages book. You see...I can remember seeing her do that, but somehow Clayton realised, and went after me...’
‘And there you’re stuck,’ said Bill, with apparent satisfaction.
‘No he’s not,’ said Nicola, looking at me in expectation.
‘Yes I am,’ I told her.
Bill laughed. ‘You see, he knows. It doesn’t fall together. Assuming he went back to the office...’
‘I did that sure enough.’
‘...with the intention of phoning the number, which turns out to be a phone box convenient for George Peters, then how was George Peters at the office when Cliff arrived?’
‘I’ve worried about that.’
‘And why should violence be necessary, if Cliff intended to hand it over peacefully?’
‘I did. I would have done, I suppose.’
‘And if Tony Clayton followed you to your office, just to get the money back, why should he resort to violence? You’d have handed it over as meek as a lamb.’
‘As a lamb,’ I agreed.
‘And what happened to the statements you say you took?’
‘Ah!’
‘If you took them.’
‘I seem to remember...’
‘Seem to? Did you? Can you actually say you did?’
‘I got a flash of memory – four statements.’
‘And yet you can’t even prove you took one from Peters...’ He held up his hand. ‘Listen, damn you. All right, you can say there was no reason to have gone to the garage if you hadn’t had a statement from Peters in the first place. That may or may not be true. But what there was – is– on the file is a withdrawal of his claim. In other words, a withdrawal of any story Peters might have told you.’
‘I remember a statement, damn it.’
‘Your memory! And how reliable is that, Cliff?’
‘In this instance, totally.’
‘That’s a confident claim. Right. Accept you had a statement. No sign of it, mind you. But accept it. Accept you took it round to the garage. Accept you left there with that statement, plus three others, an envelope of money, and something or other wi
th a phone number written on it.’
‘You’re accepting all that?’
‘Please listen, Cliff. No point in being sarcastic.’
‘What d’you expect?’ Nicola demanded. ‘Accept this, accept that. What the hell’re you getting at, Sergeant?’
‘It’s all right, Nicola,’ I said, trying to cool the atmosphere.
‘It’s not all right. You just won’t...’ She stopped. Her hand fluttered to her lips, and she shook her head. ‘Sorry.’
‘Let’s hear what he’s got to say. Huh?’
Porter grimaced. ‘It’s not a question of theories, you see, fancy stuff based on flashes of memory. It’s what we’ve got. And that is that you were found unconscious, Clayton standing over you with the money in his pocket, and no statements, no phone number, but a withdrawal was in the file for George Peters. Clayton wouldn’t have had time to get rid of those statements...so what’s the answer?’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is what I’d like to know.’
‘But would you, Cliff? What if you don’t like the answer?’
‘There’s already plenty I don’t like.’
He was silent, watching me, waiting for it to penetrate. ‘What d’you mean, Bill?’
He looked unhappy. ‘It’s a question of timing, you see. Clayton found out his wife had handed money to you, but we don’t know when he found out. It might’ve taken some time. So how did he manage to reach your office just after you? You must have lost a lot of time.’
‘My car broke down. I had to...’
‘Did it?’
‘What?’
‘Your car was found outside the garage later that evening. Nobody remembers seeing it there before then. You could have driven away from there in it. Wouldn’t it be reasonable that you’d have decided there and then to go back to George Peters and challenge him about the statement? Wouldn’t it?’
I could do nothing but stare at him. My heart was pounding, seeming to choke me. Porter turned to Nicola, raising his eyebrows.
‘I think I would have done that,’ she said quietly, but her eyes smouldered.
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