Headline Murder

by Peter Bartram

  M Trumper

  I pushed the remainders of my cheese on toast round the plate and called over to Marcello for a coffee. He nodded and set the espresso machine hissing and bubbling.

  So Trumper had been having an affair before Mildred indulged in her storeroom dalliance with Reggie. And she owned half of the Krazy Kat. I wondered whether the police officers investigating the case in nineteen forty had realised that. Perhaps it was a secret known only to Trumper and Mildred. And Trumper would have a strong motive for keeping the information to himself. If he let it out, the police could well decide he had a motive for killing Mildred. But Wilson had been adamant that the investigating officers were certain Farnsworth had committed the murder.

  Marcello brought over my coffee, then wandered back to his espresso machine.

  I picked up the newspaper. It was dated Thursday the twenty-fifth of April, nineteen forty. A triple deck headline read:

  HEAVY FIGHTING IN NORWAY

  Three armed trawlers sunk

  TWO BRIGHTON MEN MISSING

  I glanced down the story. It was a rewrite of agency copy about the Royal Navy’s campaign in Norway. A Chronicle reporter had added local comment from friends and relatives of the missing men. At the bottom of the story, there was a trailer: Sussex Rifles go to war, page five.

  Sussex Rifles. Mary Farnsworth had told me her father Reggie had served in the Sussex Rifles.

  I turned to page five. The report described how the regiment had marched up Queen’s Road to Brighton station, with cheering crowds lining the pavements. There was a picture of the regiment marching along the road. Another of a soldier leaning out of a train window. He was kissing his wife goodbye.

  I recognised the face immediately. I’d seen it framed at Mary Farnsworth’s house. Besides, the caption writer had spelt it out for me: “We’ll meet again: Corporal Reginald Farnsworth says goodbye to his wife, Abigail.”

  I looked again at the date on the newspaper: Thursday the twenty-fifth of April. I picked up the last of Mildred’s letters: Friday the twenty-sixth of April.

  I checked the dates again.

  That couldn’t be right.

  If Reginald had killed Mildred before he left for France on the twenty-fifth, she couldn’t have written a letter on the twenty-sixth.

  I had to allow for the fact that Mildred might have dated her letter wrongly. But I didn’t think so. She was making arrangements to pick up the cool sum of five hundred pounds. That was important to her future. She wouldn’t get the dates wrong.

  Which had to mean that Farnsworth was innocent.

  Somebody else had killed Mildred.

  And there could only be one culprit. Trumper had killed Mildred because he didn’t want to pay over her share of the money from the Krazy Kat. More likely, he couldn’t afford to pay it without selling the property. Which would be worth a fraction of its value in wartime.

  I sat there feeling sick. And not from the cheese on toast. The full horror of Trumper’s crime had just struck me.

  If he had killed Mildred, could he also have murdered Barnet?

  I picked up the blue Basildon Bond note. It read:

  Robert,

  Don’t come to my sister’s house. I will bring the money to your place in Sokeham Street at nine o’clock. Make sure you have all the letters.

  A Trumper

  I read the note a second time. Then a third.

  It was hot in Marcello’s, but I shivered.

  I let the remains of my cheese on toast congeal on the plate while I thought about what it all meant. Barnet had read about Mildred’s murder and the police investigation in the old copies of the Chronicle I’d seen on the floor of the storeroom at the Krazy Kat. No doubt he’d taken a law student’s forensic interest in the details of the case. Then he’d come across Mildred’s fruity letters while sorting through the other boxes. He’d noticed the disparity in dates between the copy of the Chronicle with the picture of Farnsworth going off to war and Mildred’s last letter. He’d realised that Farnsworth had to be innocent. Like me, he’d guessed that Trumper was guilty of Mildred’s murder. And he’d decided to blackmail Trumper. I remembered that he’d complained several times that he was short of money for his law course. Somehow, he’d found out where Trumper was staying. It was likely that somewhere in the boxes he’d found information about Dorothy Trumper’s address. Perhaps he’d guessed that Trumper would be holed up there. Or perhaps Trumper had inadvertently given himself away. Either way, Trumper would not have been pleased to know that somebody had discovered his hidey hole. The only way to keep his secret was to kill Barnet.

  But Trumper had had a card up his sleeve to throw police off the scent. Darke’s business card. No doubt he’d been given it at the meeting Barnet overheard in the storeroom. Trumper had used the card to point the police towards Darke.

  So Trumper, the disappeared golf man, was a double murderer.

  I was as sure as I could be that my reasoning was correct. The problem was that although Mildred’s letter proved that Farnsworth had not been her killer, it didn’t prove that Trumper had murdered her. The only way I could prove that would be to find Trumper, confront him with what I knew and force him to confess.

  And there was another question which nagged at my mind. Trumper had tried to throw suspicion for Barnet’s murder on to Darke. Darke already had a strong reason – his casino project – for removing Trumper from the scene. But now that Trumper had tried to frame him for Barnet’s murder, he had an even stronger motive. Darke had carved out his property empire by paying for information. I had little doubt that he had a nark inside Brighton Police – one of Wilson’s less trustworthy colleagues – who would have told him about the business card found in Barnet’s flat. That would have driven a man like Darke to irrational fury. He would use every contact he had – and in Brighton he had plenty – to find Trumper and silence him.

  I thought about how Mary Farnsworth had lived a life of grief because she believed her father was wrongly accused of murder. I thought about the injustice of it all. If Darke silenced Trumper before the truth could be told, that injustice would live on for ever. Certainly as long as Mary lived. She would carry the burden of her sorrow to her grave. I couldn’t let that happen.

  Which meant only one thing.

  I had to find Trumper before Darke got to him.

  But how?

  From his note to Barnet, I now knew that Trumper had been hiding at his sister’s house. But my attempts to track her down had failed. The thought that Harriet Sturgess had said something which could help still nagged at my mind. I pushed the cold cheese on toast round my plate in frustration. I closed my eyes. Let my mind drift back to Harriet’s sitting room. Heard the clackety-clack of her knitting needles. Tried to recall my questions. And her answers.

  What had I asked her?

  “When did you last see Dorothy?”

  Clackety-clack.

  And what had she answered?

  “I’ve not seen her for two years – since her husband died.”

  Of course. Dorothy’s husband had died two years ago. Her husband’s death could be the clue I needed to discover where Dorothy lived. And I’d thought of a way I could do it. I wasn’t convinced it would work, but I had to try. And to do it, I would need more help from Henrietta and the Clipping Cousins.

  I drained my coffee, paid Marcello for my lunch and headed out to the MGB.

  Chapter 18

  On the way back to the office, I double parked the MGB, sprinted into the bakers and bought a bag of Eccles cakes.

  The girl behind the counter was the one with the hazel eyes and mascara.

  She said: “You’re becoming quite a regular. You must like your cakes, but you don’t put on any weight. I like a man who eats hearty but doesn’t let it show. Fancy meeting up for some Bakewell tarts after work.”

  I said: “The cakes are for my housebound wife and the three orphans we’ve adopted.”

  She said: “I didn’t know. You
must be a saint.”

  I said: “The patron saint of pastries, that’s me.”

  As the conversation was getting out of control, I took the bag with the Eccles and sprinted back to the car.

  When I arrived at the Chronicle, I took the Cross folder and the bag of cakes and hurried up to the newsroom. Figgis was cruising round the desks chivvying up people for late copy. He spotted me and came over to my desk.

  “I was beginning to think that you’d left the paper.”

  I looked at him sharply. Did he know about my interview with the Daily Mirror this evening? I’d not told anybody except Shirley. But Figgis was a crafty old operator. He’d had to be to run the newsroom for twenty-six years. He had contacts on other papers, including the nationals, and I worried that he’d picked up a whisper from one of them.

  I said: “Don’t know what you’re worrying about. I’m a Chronicle man to my fingertips.”

  He said: “What’s bothering me is that those fingertips don’t seem to have been hitting the keys of your typewriter this morning. When am I going to have some more copy from you?”

  I said: “Can we talk in private?”

  “Follow me.”

  I picked up the Cross folder. We threaded our way back across the newsroom and entered Figgis’s office. He sat down behind his desk and lit a Woodbine.

  I said: “You wanted a front-page splash. I can give you a tidal wave.”

  “Amaze me.”

  I said: “Following the Barnet killing, I’m working on two new leads. I’ll start with the first.”

  I told him about my visit to Cross’s house earlier that morning and how Cross had confessed to accepting bribes from Septimus Darke. I thought it prudent to leave out the bit about the dustbin rummage. I dropped the Cross file on the desk.

  “Cross claims this charts his dealings with Darke. As you can see, there are more than a hundred pages but I haven’t had time to study it in detail yet.”

  Figgis grabbed the file and turned the pages swiftly. “The lawyer will have to look through this before we publish anything. Then we’ll have to hand the file to the police.”

  “That’s what I thought. But I want to write the story when the lawyer’s decided what we can and can’t say.”

  “Where’s Cross now?” Figgis asked.

  I couldn’t tell Figgis that I’d given Cross twenty-four hours to disappear without involving him in a criminal conspiracy. So I stuck to the literal facts.

  “I left him at his home,” I said. “I think his wife was on the point of throwing him out.”

  Figgis said: “You mentioned you had two leads.”

  I said: “I’ve got hold of documentary evidence which suggests that Arnold Trumper murdered Robert Barnet. My evidence also suggests that he killed his wife Mildred back in nineteen forty.”

  I told Figgis about Mildred’s letters, Trumper’s note and the old copy of the Chronicle.

  “The lawyer would advise us to hand these documents straight to the police,” he said.

  “Which would mean that we didn’t have time to stand up the story. So what do we do?”

  Figgis took a long drag on his cigarette. He exhaled slowly so that the smoke spiralled in a single stream towards the ceiling.

  “As it happens, the lawyer isn’t here at the moment, so we can’t ask him,” Figgis said. “But we can’t sit on this for more than a day?”

  I said: “I believe I can trace Trumper in that time. If he’s still alive.”

  “How?”

  I told Figgis about the problems I’d had tracing Trumper’s sister Dorothy through her husband John Smith.

  I said: “But while I was eating my lunch, I remembered something Harriet Sturgess had told me.”

  “Sturgess being?”

  “Trumper’s long-time neighbour. Knew Dorothy before she married. She mentioned that she’d heard Dorothy’s husband had died a couple of years ago. I’m going to look through the Chronicle’s deaths columns for that period and see if I can find a reference to the funeral of a J Smith. If so, I may be able to trace Dorothy through the undertakers who handled the arrangements.”

  “Sounds like a long shot to me,” Figgis said.

  “Not so long as it sounds. Most people announce a loved one’s death in the paper. And undertakers will keep records of the addresses of former clients – especially if there is a widow who may eventually become a client too.”

  “Worth giving it a try,” Figgis said.

  I rushed back to my desk, grabbed the bag of Eccles cakes and hurried towards the morgue.

  As I entered, the Cousins were giggling over some private joke. They looked up expectantly as I marched over and dropped the bag on their table.

  I said: “A little late for lunch and a bit early for tea. But you might like a snack in between.”

  Elsie opened the bag and said: “I can always eat an Eccles cake.”

  Mabel said: “All those currants are good for you.”

  Freda said: “I always used to call them flies’ graveyards. But they’re delicious despite the name.”

  I said: “Where’s Henrietta?”

  She said: “Here I am.”

  I turned as she emerged from the filing-cabinet stacks carrying an armful of buff folders.

  I said: “I’ve got another urgent job. I need to look through all the deaths columns in the bound copies of the paper from nineteen fifty-nine to nineteen sixty-one. I’ll be looking for a J Smith who’s died.”

  Henrietta said: “There’ll be twelve volumes in those three years and there are five of us. We should be able to do that in an hour.”

  She led me into the stacks. It seemed darker than usual. The air was dusty. I sneezed.

  The bound volumes I was looking for were on a low shelf. I heaved them up two at a time and lugged them into the room. Thumped them down on the Clipping Cousins’ table. Each volume created a little cloud of dust as it hit the table. The Cousins fussed around brushing the dust away.

  Then we all set to work.

  Heads bent over thick volumes. Paper rustled as pages turned. Black-tipped fingers ran down columns. Lips pursued in frustration.

  When I’d been sitting in Marcello’s, I’d been sure that I’d find John Smith’s death in the despatches columns. Now I was not so sure. Briefly, I wondered what I would do if we failed. I couldn’t think of another idea.

  I pushed it from my mind, closed the volume I’d just finished and reached for another.

  Elsie said: “Some of the people choose weird memoriam poems. This one says, ‘I wish I could have loved you more/But you went out and shut the door.’”

  Mabel said: “This one says, ‘With your last breath you made a joke/And had a laugh with one last croak.’”

  Freda said: “I’ve just read one about somebody who was cremated. It says, ‘On cigarettes you spent your cash/And now it’s you who’s simply ash.’”

  Henrietta said: “Ladies, this isn’t a poetry reading circle. Let’s concentrate.”

  The Cousins fell silent. More pages rustled. More tuts of annoyance. More sighs of frustration. Through the window came the sound of the clock on the Chapel Royal striking two.

  Then Henrietta said: “I’ve found a dead John Smith from nineteen fifty-nine.”

  I hurried to her side. Looked over her shoulder.

  The announcement read: “Smith, John Tunnicliffe. Peacefully at Royal Sussex County Hospital after a long illness. Funeral at Brighton Crematorium, 2.30pm, 17 November. Flowers to Stodges & Hopkins, funeral directors, Lewes Road, Brighton.”

  I copied down the details.

  “We need to keep looking,” I said. “I have a feeling dead John Smiths are like buses. You wait ages for one, then two come along together.”

  And I was right. I found the second John Smith in August nineteen sixty.

  The announcement read: “Smith, John. Suddenly at home. Funeral at St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, 11.00am, 19 August. No flowers but donations for cancer research to
Arbuckle & Son, funeral directors, Western Road, Brighton.”

  I copied the details. We continued our search. Twenty minutes later we’d looked at every deaths column from the beginning of nineteen fifty-nine until the end of nineteen sixty-one.

  I slammed the heavy board cover of the last volume shut.

  “Are you sure your John Smith died during those years,” Henrietta asked.

  “I’m not sure of anything,” I said. “But this is the best lead I’ve got.”

  “Good luck,” Henrietta said. “You know where we are if you need any more help.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said. “Enjoy the Eccles cakes”

  Elsie said: “They remind me of a man I nearly married.”

  Mable said: “Was it because he came from Eccles?”

  Freda said: “Was it because he liked cakes?”

  Elsie said: “No. It was because he was puffed up and very flaky.”

  I left them laughing and headed back to the newsroom.

  I went into a newsroom telephone booth and dialled the first of the funeral directors.

  A man’s voice answered in sepulchral tones: “Stodges & Hopkins, funeral arrangements with taste and decorum. Mr Hopkins at your personal service.”

  I said: “This is a very distressing call for me.”

  Hopkins said: “Please take your time.”

  “My name is Gareth Llewellyn. I have just returned from Argentina, where I was beef farming in Patagonia, to supervise the funeral arrangements of my great aunt, Lady Arabella Henfield. I am her only surviving relative.”

  “How may we be of assistance, with taste and decorum, for Lady Arabella?”

  I said: “She has a commanding personality, even as she takes those final steps down the lonely corridor that leads to the stairway to heaven. She would like to approve her own funeral arrangements before she reaches the stair and places her foot on the first step. You understand?”

  “I quite understand.”

  “It will be a large funeral. We shall need at least ten cars as well as a horse-drawn hearse and the usual bloke who has a face like a slapped bottom and a top hat.”