‘Find the car, find the man,’ said Lowry. The others grunted agreement. That was the common sense of the matter.
‘Before I deal with that,’ said Anderson, ‘I’d like to clear up one point. The scientific evidence has established, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the same man was responsible for the killing of Jackie Fenton in Rewell Wood last September and Barry Lathom, in Winterfold Forest, in April of this year. The similarities in the three cases had already raised a supposition that it was the same man, although there was always the chance that it was imitation killing. What we now know is that in every case, including the present one, the man took a blanket out of the car and spread it on the ground. There were fibres on the boy’s clothing in each case. Coarse grey woollen fibres. I’ve got the laboratory reports here if you want to look at them. They’ve done a lot of work on those fibres. They established, quite early on, that the blanket was army surplus. The sort of thing that was sold off, after the war, by the hundred thousand. At that point one had to accept the further possibility that different men had the same sort of blanket. Not likely, but possible. Now they’ve given us something else. In all three cases they’ve isolated microscopic fragments of–’
Anderson peered at the paper in front of him.
‘Distemonanthus benthemiamus.’
‘Come again,’ said Lowry.
‘It’s a sort of wood. All I can really tell you about it at the moment is that it’s a hard wood, and is Number 64 on the Chatterton Key Card.’
‘Might be used by carpenters or cabinet-makers,’ suggested Colonel Brabazon thoughtfully.
‘It might indeed, sir.’
‘I think that conclusively links the three crimes. You’d agree with that?’
The others nodded.
‘Then from this point the investigation can be considered, officially, as covering all three. There’ll be a number of administrative matters to settle on that. But we needn’t waste time discussing them now. Carry on, Superintendent.’
‘I’d like you to take a look at the map here.’ Sheet 182 of the inch-to-a-mile Ordnance Survey had been pasted to a piece of hardboard, with sections of the surrounding sheets attached to it. It covered a square from a point east of Aldershot to Tonbridge in Kent, then south to Eastbourne and along the coast to Bosham, south of Chichester.
On the map were three red circles. The first was north of Cranleigh and included Winterfold Heath, Winterfold Forest and Hunt Wood. The second, away to the south, enclosed the area bounded by Warburton, Madehurst and Arundel. The third circle was a larger one. It covered Haydock Wood, where Lister had lived, Tolhurst Green where he had been picked up and Brading where he had been killed. The A24, running south from Horsham, cut this area into two almost equal halves.
Anderson said, ‘This man’s followed the same technique in all three cases. He takes his car out around dusk. Not when it’s actually dark, but when it’s beginning to get dark. He must, superficially, be a sympathetic or harmless looking character, because boys are pretty leery nowadays of accepting lifts from strangers. Anyway, he gets a boy into the car, terrorises him, probably by showing a knife or a razor, ties him up, and dumps him in the back of the car on the floor. I’ll tell you how we know that in a moment. Then he drives him somewhere quiet and gets to work on him.
‘In the first two cases he took care to pick a lonely spot. Rewell Wood, north of the Arundel-Chichester road, is overgrown and full of gullies and pits. It was two months before Fenton’s body turned up. Winterfold Forest is a lot more open. We beat through it and found Lathom inside the week. This last time our man seems to have worried even less. He just dragged Lister into the first field that was handy.’
‘And next time,’ said Lowry, ‘he’ll take him to the bottom of his own garden and leave him lying about on the lawn.’
The others nodded agreement. They were all acquainted with the curious mentality of series killers who took diminishing precautions, which could be calculated almost in arithmetical progression. Was there not inscribed in every policeman’s pocket book, “The second murder is three times as easy”?
‘There’ll be no next time,’ said Anderson. He said it with such absolute conviction that the four men looked at him.
‘In the first two cases we got very little out of the scene of the crime. As I said, it took us two months to locate Fenton and exceptionally rainy weather had washed away most of the marks. In Lathom’s case, there were signs that a car had been driven to the spot. Snapped off undergrowth and a bit of oil. The ground was rutted and muddy and we might have got some useful prints. Unfortunately we had that hard frost the day before.’
‘Third of April,’ said Brayne. ‘Killed off all my young dahlias.’
‘This time it’s quite different. The ground was reasonably soft and we were there soon enough to prevent it being disturbed. We used about a ton of plaster on that piece of ground, and I reckon there wasn’t a blackbird landed there in the twenty-four hours before the murder that we don’t know all about. If you’d care to look at this plan you’ll be able to follow it better. The car drove up to the gate and stopped. The man got out and opened the gate – marks there, and there – got in again, drove through, turned the nose of the car to the left and then backed for ten yards down the track as far as the corner there. We think he left the gate open, in case he had to make a quick get-away. Then he got out, opened the back door and dragged the boy out, by his shoulders. There was a tiny shred of dark blue leather in the metal eye-hole of one of his gym-shoes and another thing we found, on the shoes and the clothes, were dark grey fibres with fragments of rubber, or rubberoid. They must have come from the mat in the back part of the car. But most useful of all, when the boy was dragged out of the car, his body must have made contact with the edge of the coach-work and we got some paint.’
‘Give the lab boys a flake of paint,’ said Brayne, ‘and you’ll keep them happy for a week.’
‘We didn’t send it to the laboratory, we sent it straight up to Home Office Central Research Establishment at Aldermaston. They’ve put it under the mass spectrometer and this is their report. Three separate layers of paint. Dark green, light grey undercoat, dark grey finish. And a rusty discoloration under the light grey.’
‘That seems clear enough,’ said Colonel Brabazon. ‘A car which was originally dark green, got a bit shabby and rusty, and was resprayed. First with a light grey undercoat, then with a dark grey finish.’
‘It takes us even further than that,’ said Anderson. ‘The boffins broke down the dark green paint into its original constituents, and compared it with the check samples they keep on file there. The car was one of the standard BMC range, probably an Austin or an MG and certainly pre-1967.’
‘Because they stopped using that sort of paint?’
‘No. Because they stopped using that sort of floor carpet.’
‘It’s still a pretty wide field,’ said Lowry.
‘I’ve been keeping the best to the last. We got perfect impressions of all four tyres. They’re cross-ply, which is common enough, but–’ he paused for effect, ‘–the near-side rear tyre has got a plug in it.’
‘A plug,’ said Brayne. ‘That’s illegal.’
‘There are garages who will still do it. They say they’re doing it for the spare tyre. Don’t use it unless you have to. But there are still quite a few plugged tyres in use. However, taken in combination–’
‘You’ve made your point,’ said Colonel Brabazon. ‘If we find the car, we’ll be able to tie it to the crime tight enough. Where are we going to look for it?’
‘We can make a few broad assumptions as a starting point. First, I don’t think a man like this drives hundreds of miles. That would mean a very long absence from his home base and would increase the risk of questions being asked. But he goes a fair way. Far enough to get away from people who might recognize him or his car. The second point is that when he does pick up the boy he’s much more likely to drive away from his base than towards
it.’
‘Sound psychology,’ said Colonel Brabazon.
‘If you take the three points where the bodies were found, join them to the points where the boy was picked up, and extend them inwards for forty or fifty miles’ – he demonstrated on the map, ‘–that brings you into an area roughly here. You can’t do an exact resection, of course. It’s only an indication. If any one of our assumptions is wrong, we could be a hundred miles out either way.’
The four men considered the proposition in silence. Between them they represented more than a hundred years of criminal investigation; of reading the minds of men and women who, from a bewildering variety of motives, mania, passion, vanity, greed or whim, had started to defy the laws of the land.
Lowry said, ‘I think it stands up, but I’d be happier if we had one witness who identified the car positively.’
Anderson said, ‘Yes.’ They were on delicate ground again. With a prompt warning he could have had his own network in operation and they might have known a lot more about the car. They might even have intercepted it on its way home. ‘Apart from old Mr Moritz,’ he said, ‘we’ve got four witnesses. I’d put three of them in the “probable-but-non-proven” category. The fourth one’s different. They all noticed a dark grey oldish saloon car, at about the place we think it should have been, but their versions of who was driving it are – well, you shall hear for yourselves.’
He opened a folder and extracted four documents. ‘Mrs Loveday, who lives at Tolhurst Green, and is married to one of the cricketers who was playing there that afternoon, noticed a car of this type when she was coming back towards the ground from her house some time before eight o’clock. She had the impression it had stopped near the ground to pick someone up. She couldn’t swear it was a boy in it, but she thought she caught a glimpse of someone sitting beside the driver. She had the impression that the driver was a woman.’
His audience all looked up. Anderson continued smoothly.
‘A Mr Parsons, who had been drinking at the Three Horseshoes at Brading – that was the pub, you will remember, that young Maybury and his girlfriend were using – came out at about a quarter past ten and had to wait to cross the street because a dark saloon car was coming towards him. Now that timing is very interesting. Old Mr Moritz left the pub at ten o’clock. It was later than usual, and he and the landlord both remembered it.’
‘And Des Maybury,’ said Brayne. ‘It’s in his statement. The boy must have had one eye on the clock by that time.’
‘Why?’ said Colonel Brabazon.
Brayne said, with a chuckle, ‘He wanted the old man out of the way, sir, so that he could get on with certain plans he had for Rosie.’
‘Of course. Then we can accept ten o’clock as a confirmed time. Please go on.’
‘The point is this. We know it took the old man half an hour to make it back to the cottage. The point where Lister’s body was found is roughly halfway there. That puts him there at ten fifteen, when he saw the car coming out. Now it wouldn’t take a car more than a minute to reach the village and cars aren’t common on that stretch of road at night.’
‘Right,’ said Lowry. ‘Ten to one it was the same car. Did Mr Parsons spot the driver?’
‘He did,’ said Anderson. ‘He said it was a man. Beyond the fact that he thought he was wearing glasses, he couldn’t give any real description. But he was quite clear about that. They were steel-rimmed glasses. He caught a reflection of light flashing from them.’
‘Anything on the car?’
‘Nothing that we hadn’t got already. He only got a quick, sideways view of it. The next one is Mr Mason. He, too, was coming home from his local at about half past ten – or maybe a bit before. He had to step aside for a car at the cross-roads – there. After passing him, the car turned to the right. If we’ve read our man’s mind correctly, he turned away from home when he came out on to the road and saw he was spotted, but he’d want to get back on to course as quickly as possible and this cross-roads is exactly where he would turn. He’d make his way south towards the A272, take any of these minor roads – here, and come out near Cowfold.’
‘The timing’s a bit slow,’ said Brayne. ‘That crossroads isn’t more than three miles from Brading. He wouldn’t take fifteen minutes to cover three miles. Not if he was in a hurry.’
‘Agreed,’ said Anderson. ‘But remember that Mr Mason wasn’t too definite about the time. He said it was about half past ten. Probably a little earlier.’
‘And he wouldn’t go blinding along a secondary road,’ said Lowry. ‘The last thing he’d risk was being involved in an accident. I’d mark that one as short of certain, but highly probable.’
‘The fourth,’ said Anderson slowly, ‘is very interesting indeed and it does check out the other three. You see that building, just off the A272, marked as Southerns Farm. The farmer’s wife was expecting a baby, getting close to zero hour, and she was on a regular round which the district nurse, a Miss Colman, was making. Miss Colman struck me as a very sensible and observant witness. And she was particularly good on times, because she had to keep a log of her visits. She came out of that track from Southerns Farm at about ten forty. As she got to the entrance a saloon car, which was passing her, going west, had to pull into the left to avoid one of those monster lorries, which was coming the other way.’
‘And no doubt sailing along on the crown of the road,’ said Colonel Brabazon bitterly.
‘I think it must have been. Because Miss Colman said that the saloon car had almost to stop and to get right into the verge. She was one of our first informants, bless her. She saw one of our notices, telephoned us at once, and we were down there by midday on Sunday. We got some tracks from the gravel along the verge. They’re not very clear, but if you look at these photographs–’
‘That’s the brute,’ said the Colonel. ‘Not a shadow of doubt. You can see his paw marks. That’s the cross-ply tyre and that’s the plug in the near-side wheel.’
‘And the driver?’ said Lowry.
‘Definitely a man. He was wearing light wash-leather gloves. She saw his hands on the steering wheel. She, too, noticed that he was wearing steel-rimmed glasses. And she says that his hair was whitish and fluffed out. Almost as if he was wearing some sort of wig. She got much the best view of him, because she was sideways on to him, and her own headlights were directed towards the car.’
‘Good enough to recognize him again?’
‘I’m afraid not. She was quite firm about that. All she got was a quick impression. Hands, glasses, hair.’
‘A pity,’ said the Colonel.
‘There’s another thing,’ said Brayne. ‘Isn’t it possible that he’d disguise himself a bit. You remember that chap in the Isle of Wight who went after boys. He used to dress up in the most fantastic way.’
‘It certainly sounds as if he might be wearing a wig,’ said Lowry. ‘And you can get plain-glass spectacles from any theatrical costumier.’
‘I’m afraid it’s very likely he was disguised,’ said the Colonel. ‘Now let’s see what we have got. A man, age uncertain, shoe size–’
‘Between nine and ten. And judging from the depth of the impressions, between ten and twelve stone in weight, although it’s dangerous to try to be too accurate about that.’
‘Might wear glasses. Might have white hair. Or might not. Could be a carpenter or cabinet-maker. It’s not much to go on, is it?’
‘We’ve picked up some fibres from a tweed jacket which could be matched up.’
‘They can be matched up when we find him,’ said the Colonel grimly. ‘Now what’s your plan?’
‘I think the car is our best chance, sir. And the way to find it is to comb the likely area. I don’t think it can be east of Billingshurst or west of Chichester. And I’d take a line through Petworth as the southem boundary and through Cranleigh as the northem one.’
As he spoke he was pencilling in the lines on the map.
‘It’s a big area, I agree. And full of priva
te houses. And there are other possibilities too. Garages, car dumps or simply a lonely shed or barn. I’ll need all the men you can let me have. If we don’t strike oil soon, we’ll have to consider broadcasting a description. But it’s a two-edged weapon. It might bring in the information we want, or it might frighten the man so much that he takes the car, strips it, and dumps it in some gully where we won’t find it for years.’
At this point, Chief Superintendent Woolmer cleared his throat. Everyone looked at him. The Colonel said, ‘You’ve been very quiet, Les.’
Woolmer said, ‘I’ve been quiet, because I’ve been thinking.’
The other three grinned. Leslie Woolmer was a personality. He played chess at international level and had tied for fifth place that year in the Hastings congress. He was also a scientist of more than average ability. He was one of the men who had perfected the technique of using laser beams to produce holograms, or three dimensional pictures. A month before, he had used his holograms to demonstrate to a jury that a husband must have walked across the carpet in a bedroom he swore he had never entered, and strangled his wife as she lay in bed.
‘Let’s have it,’ said the Colonel.
‘It was this idea of the man dressing up. Were you thinking that if he wore a white wig and a pair of glasses it might make him look a sympathetic old buffer? The sort that a boy wouldn’t be afraid to take a lift with.’
‘I was thinking of it mainly as a disguise. Something to hide his identity. But I suppose it might work that way too.’
‘If he was a bit of an actor, and used to dressing up, mightn’t he have gone further than that?’
‘Meaning what, Les?’
‘I mean,’ said Woolmer, ‘that he might have had two disguises. He might have started out dressed up as a woman. A boy would have even less hesitation in accepting a lift.’
There was a moment’s silence. Then Anderson said, softly, ‘It’s an idea. And it would mean that we could accept the first identification along with the others. I’ve always been puzzled about that one. Mrs Loveday struck me as a good witness, and the timing was right.’
Night of the Twelfth Page 7