“You came close with me. If that arrow had hit a knothole in the wood, at this present moment I’d be doing a fairly lifelike imitation of King Harold on the field at Hastings.”
He turned to Max. “He does go on so, doesn’t he?”
At which point, with a faint “whoosh”, the whole barbecue went up in flames and, what with trying to save the food and stop the overhanging sycamore tree from burning down, the subject wasn’t raised again that evening. As we ate meat that varied from cremated to raw in the space of two mouthfuls, I remember vaguely wondering whether I should try to argue him out of his current obsession but, what with nearly being killed and then having to play at fire brigades all in one evening, I didn’t feel strong enough to ask.
~ * ~
At 7 o’clock on Thursday, 3 June, on a hot and sticky day, I parked my car in Fairlands Avenue, which stretched and curved away behind me, rather upmarket terraced houses staring at each other across the road. The reason I was there was not because of the day job as a general practitioner, but because I had newly become a Police Surgeon. I had not wanted the post but had been badgered into it by Brian, my practice colleague, who had been doing it for ten years and was now about to retire; he had been assisted in this coercion by my father - himself a Police Surgeon in his day - who painted a rosy-hued picture of the life, one that, inevitably, was as true to reality as my father’s recollections of his war exploits. It was not a pleasurable thing to do - although it did supplement my income quite nicely - and it had the amazing knack of doing maximum damage to my social life. I was becoming seriously afraid that Max would soon forget how beautiful I was.
I walked up to the top of the road where Fairlands Avenue met Thornton Road, which was where a lot of coppers were thronging. I had been doing the job long enough to be let in to what I discovered to be a clockmaker’s shop - proprietor Harvey Carlton, Esquire - without hindrance, where I found Inspector Masson. I wish I could say that he and I were buddies of the bosom kind, that we spent many a long night chatting cosily about our mutual hobbies, how we both quite liked ABBA (although all their songs tend to sound the same) and how we were delighted that Southampton had trounced Manchester United in the FA Cup final. In truth, though, I was slightly scared of him, and he was completely contemptuous of me; this was not the basis for a deep, lasting relationship.
There was an even greater concentration of constabulary blue behind him as he turned to face me. “Doctor,” he said, as he usually did, his tone suggesting that he had hoped for better.
“Inspector.”
“We normally wouldn’t have bothered you, but the pathologist’s been taken with diarrhoea and vomiting.”
Maybe he meant this well, but I had the impression he found my presence only slightly more welcome than an attack of either. “What’s happened?”
He turned and gestured me forward. I followed him through the uniforms that parted as we moved amongst them to reveal the body of a man dressed in brown overalls. He was on his back and his left eye was gone, replaced by a bloodied pulp. In falling, he had knocked over a whole shelf full of clocks, watches, barometers and weather stations, many of which appeared to have shattered, so that he was surrounded by an astonishingly intricate array of cogs, wheels, wood splinters, coils and spherules of mercury.
“Ouch.”
“Did that kill him?” asked Masson.
I rather hoped that it had, but I couldn’t say for sure immediately. “Can I move him?”
“SOCO have got all the photos they need for now,” he assured me, so I gently took the head in my hands and lifted it, feeling the scalp with the tips of my fingers. There was a soft boggy patch that would do for an exit wound. Then, having laid it back down, I quickly looked over the rest of the body, enlisting a constable to turn it so that I could look at the back; I tested the limbs for rigor mortis and gross bony injuries, checked for bruising around the neck and ligature marks around the wrists and ankles. Then, telling myself that a corpse has no dignity to lose, I undid his belt, pulled down his trousers and pants, and inserted a thermometer where not only the sun didn’t shine but there was no starlight either. I left it there for five minutes, pulled it out and examined it, noting the temperature before wiping it with a tissue and putting back in its holder. Without completely stripping the body, it was as good an examination as I could make.
“Well?” Masson’s tone suggested that he was fed up with watching me footle around pretending to know what I was doing.
“The body’s only lost two degrees and it’s still limp, so I’d estimate he’s been dead about three to four hours...”
If I thought I was doing well, Masson soon put me right. “I know when he died, Doctor. As he fell he broke at least eight clocks and all of them stopped at the same time - three-fifty-two.”
It appeared that I was not even to get credit for being accurate in my estimate, so I swallowed some bitterness and went on, “I can see no other evidence of serious trauma apart from the injury to the eye for which there is an exit wound. I would say that there’s no doubt it was that injury that resulted in his death.”
“What made it?”
“My first impression is that it’s a relatively small-calibre bullet, but until a full post-mortem can be done, that can only be a guess.”
He nodded but forgot to thank me as he turned back to his troops and barked, “I want the bullet found.”
I appeared to have been dismissed, but I thought I ought to issue some Health and Safety advice. “Be careful of the mercury from the barometers. It’s poisonous.”
Masson turned to look at me. “Is it?” He sounded suspicious that I might be having him on.
“Everyone should wear gloves.”
He snorted, looked at me for a moment, then said to the room in general, “You heard the man. Get some disposable gloves.”
I asked conversationally, “Is that Harvey Carlton?”
He shrugged. “Who knows?”
I hung around for a bit but no one had anything more to say to me, so eventually I slunk away. No one even seemed to notice. On my way out I noticed the shop on the opposite corner. It was some sort of bespoke furniture shop. The name above the window said that the proprietor was Peter Carlton, Esquire.
~ * ~
Inspector Masson always evinced nothing but impatience and exasperation in his dealings with me, but I like to think that he had a soft spot for me nevertheless because he seemed to gravitate towards me when things were not going well in his capacity as a sleuth. Max and I had followed the case in the Croydon Advertiser, although we were well aware that this fine organ did occasionally get its facts quite startlingly wrong.
Peter and Harvey Carlton were brothers, and they hated each other. Harvey became a master watchmaker, Peter a highly skilled joiner and carpenter making furniture that was snapped up as soon as he finished it. Apparently they had fallen out over twenty years before because of a woman, Mary. They both fell in love with her and only one could win; they matched each other in terms of looks, skills and prospects, but she chose Harvey. Peter tried to commit suicide, failed, and became an eternally angry man. He had a reputation as an unforgiving, hard and unscrupulous businessman. The paper didn’t say so, but it was clear that Peter was the number one suspect, though there were problems.
“Of course he’s guilty,” Max said with complete conviction.
“Is he?”
She nodded. When I enquired how she knew, she said, “He was a nasty man.”
I saw no point in debate.
It appeared that although a bullet had been found, there were no reports of a shot being fired, despite extensive house-to-house enquiries. Peter had been interviewed for several hours, had been cooperative and open, portraying shock but no remorse at the death of his brother. He assured the police that he had not left his shop all day and no witnesses could be found to contradict this. Harvey Carlton’s financial affairs were reported as being sound, and all enquir
ies regarding his private life returned nothing but the utmost propriety. The paper, inevitably, reported - perhaps more appropriately, crowed - that the police were “stumped”.
The case slipped from public - and our - consciousness.
~ * ~
When the doorbell rang on the evening of Sunday, 27 June, Max and I were sitting in the garden partaking of some Pimm’s. I cannot say that the appearance of Masson’s sunny visage as I opened the front door produced anything close to a whoop of delight from my vocal chords. “Doctor Elliot,” he said. “Mind if I come in?”
I showed him through to the garden. He was graciousness itself as he nodded at Max and said, “Miss Christy. Are you well?”
She smiled at him because that was Max; she would probably smile politely at the Grim Reaper when he came to call. “I’m very well indeed, thank you.”
He sat down and, in not asking for a drink, made it plain that he would quite like one. “Pimm’s?” I asked.
A shake of the head. “Can’t stand the stuff. Poncey in the extreme.” Only Masson could have refused the offer so graciously; only Masson could have then said, “I’ll have a bitter, though.”
After I had accommodated him and we were all sitting around the table looking at the midges and mosquitoes dancing over the garden pond, I was afraid the conversation might prove a tad desultory, but I had reckoned without Masson’s forthright character. “I expect you’re wondering why I’m here.”
“Not a social call, then?”
He looked at me and I found myself wondering if he disliked everyone as much as he appeared to dislike me. “I don’t seem to get the time for social calls.” With which, somehow, he seemed to imply a puritanical disapproval of anyone sitting in the garden on a summer’s evening.
Max, bless her, asked, “Would it be to do with the death of Harvey Carlton?”
To which he said curtly, “After we’d got the pathologist out of his bed, he confirmed what you had told us - that Carlton died of a single small-calibre bullet wound that entered through his right eye and exited through the back of his skull.” He didn’t seem inclined to applaud my diagnostic skills so I said nothing. “We eventually found it embedded in the corner of a wooden cabinet. It’s a small-calibre revolver round.”
“That’s good,” I said.
He didn’t snarl because he didn’t make a sound, but it was the look that big hairy men were always giving Charlie Chaplin in the golden age of silent movies. “You think so?”
“Isn’t it?”
Masson said nothing; I looked covertly at Max and she did likewise at me. I think that we were both unsure of what to say, or whether to say anything at all, since it would almost certainly be taken amiss by our guest. Silence therefore ensued between us and there was the faint sound of a cuckoo in the distance. Masson drank more beer and we did similar damage to the Pimm’s.
He said at last, “It has to be Peter Carlton. It just has to be.” He snorted. “We’ve found out that a few weeks before Harvey’s death the two brothers met unexpectedly at Mary’s grave. There was some sort of fracas. It was witnessed by one of the gardeners at the crematorium; he didn’t hear everything that was said, but he swears that he heard Peter threaten to kill his brother.”
Max asked, “Does Peter Carlton own a gun?”
Masson shook his head. “No, but that means nothing. Fifty pounds is all you need, if you know the right people.”
Max enquired, “And does he know the right people?”
He snorted. “Not as far as we can tell.”
“So maybe he didn’t do it.”
He shook his head immediately. “He did it. I know he did.”
We waited a while as Masson stared at a dragonfly as if he would quite like to give it what for with a truncheon. It was starting to turn to dusk, the light becoming golden and soft as opposed to harsh; the very first stirrings of a breeze played about the tops of the trees. Eventually, Max pointed out gently, “That doesn’t seem very logical to me. Are you sure you’re not just being a bit headstrong?”
Coming from me, he would probably have got out his rubber cosh at this and given me a good talking-to, but Max had this way with people and he merely glanced briefly up at her and then said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Peter Carlton employs a young man called Colin Bell as general assistant and runaround. Bell says that he was in the shop with Carlton almost all of the day that Harvey died, except for a thirty-minute period when Carlton asked him to make a delivery of a footstool to a house in Gonville Road. That was between three-thirty and four.”
I said softly, “Blimey.”
He smiled. “Sounds significant, doesn’t it?”
“I’d have thought so.”
“So would I,” he agreed, but then stopped. It was as though a fuse had blown and he was no longer functioning.
“And we’ve found the gun. It had been thrown into the grounds of St Jude’s Church about two hundred yards down the road.”
All of this seemed like good news and we waited patiently until he said suddenly, “One problem is that ballistic analysis of the bullet’s trajectory places the point of origin as the opposite side of Thornton Road, at ninety degrees to the position of Peter Carlton’s shop. To be precise, from a rather neat and tidy end-of-terrace house called Dunhiking. A newly married couple live there, Mr and Mrs Homan. She’s pregnant and he’s a plasterer; we’ve searched the house and investigated them thoroughly - and, in the process, scared the bejeesus out of them. And found nothing.”
“Ah...”
“As you’ve probably read in the papers, Carlton claims not to have left his shop all afternoon, and all the witnesses we’ve talked to support that; we have no positive sightings of Carlton outside his shop during the critical time. Certainly no one saw him with a gun.”
“Did anyone hear the shot? Surely someone did.”
He shook his head. “A silencer was used.”
“Well, that’s something...”
He pointed out sourly, “A silencer doesn’t make the marksman invisible.”
“Perhaps he was in a soundproofed van or something, parked in the road in front of Dunhiking.”
Masson was becoming impatient. “He didn’t leave the shop all day, remember?”
“An accomplice?” Max suggested, but it was with such timidity that she was almost cowering as the words came out. Masson didn’t even seem to hear, though. He merely repeated, “He did it. I know that, I just don’t know how.”
“Why are you so sure?”
He drained his beer, then put the glass down hard. “I’ve been staring at him across an interview table for the past nine days and he radiates smugness because he knows he did it, and I know he did it, but I can’t show how.”
Max, as usual, came to the point. “Why are you here, Inspector?”
It took him a while to answer that one, and when it came it did so with a degree of reluctance that was quite entertaining to behold. While we waited, I poured more Pimm’s for Max and myself and asked him, “Another beer?”
He shook his head. More silence. He seemed to have forgotten the pleasurable prospect of delivering a beating to the dragonfly and was contenting himself with staring at the bird table. Max and I drank some more Pimm’s.
Then, “You’re his GP, right?”
Pennies - several of them - dropped. “Yes,” I replied warily.
He glared at me. “I know all the crap about patient confidentiality, Doctor, I’ve been there before. You silly sods have no idea how difficult you make my life, but I’m not talking about that.”
“No?”
“I don’t want to know about Peter Carlton’s medical conditions - I want you to tell me if he ever mentioned anything that might be relevant to the death of his brother.”
Which was different. The doctor’s waiting room is not a priest’s confessional; I only have to remain schtum about me
dical things. “I can’t recall anything,” I said.
He was suspicious. “Really?”
“Yes, absolutely. He’s never mentioned his brother, or the history between them.”
He breathed heavily for a bit, possibly angry at me, possibly at the fates that he felt goaded him, then nodded. “It was worth a try.” More silence and more Pimm’s.
He began to speak again after a while. “In pursuit of this case, I seem to have uncovered a secret coven of loonies in the area. I’ve been told about midnight prowlers, UFOs, ghosts and goblins. One old woman saw a man indecently exposing himself, although she only told anyone when we came to call, and another was visited by her ex-husband, except that he was lost at sea in 1948.”
As crusty and irritable as Masson was, Max managed to find empathy within herself. “Surely you’ve been in situations like this before? Cases that seemed insoluble, I mean.”
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