Night of the Twelfth

by Michael Gilbert

  The Inspector spread his photographs on the desk. Whilst he was talking the Major kept his single eye fixed on him and did not even look down at the photographs.

  He said, ‘Is there a reward for this information?’

  ‘Only the reward of helping to catch this man.’

  ‘If you’re not offering a reward the matter can’t be serious.’

  The Inspector was too old a hand to show his annoyance. He said, smoothly, ‘We didn’t think this was the sort of enquiry which would be helped by payments of money.’

  ‘I see.’ The Major shifted his gaze to the photographs focusing his single spot-light on each in turn. Then he gathered them together and said, ‘I have never seen any of them. And I do not believe that any of them has been to any of my establishments. We examine our patrons very carefully before we admit them.’

  ‘I know you do. Well, thank you for trying.’

  The Major selected one of the photographs he was holding. He said, ‘If you had asked me, from my experience, which of these men was most likely to be the one you are looking for, I should have chosen him.’

  ‘That could be helpful,’ said the Inspector. When he got out into the street he took several deep lungfuls of what passes in Soho for fresh air.

  Other policemen were active, too. Enquiries were being made in the area round Farnham. A doctor at Broadstairs who did a lot of work for the police was asked to turn up some of his old records. A Sergeant of the Scottish Constabulary who had spent most of his working life at Kirkmichael was recalled from his retirement at Kirriemuir and questioned closely.

  Other people who were not, in the strictest sense of the word, policemen were working too. Old school friends were meeting up, seemingly by accident, in the bars and smoking-rooms of London clubs. The talk would turn, as such talk often does, to the heroes of the past. Nigel Ware? Bloody good stand-off half, said number one. Unlucky to have missed his blue. Wondered what had happened to him. You didn’t see him playing for any of the top London clubs. Number two said he thought he heard that he’d taken up school mastering. Number one thought this was a very good joke. When he fagged for Ware, he remembered one of his chores had been to do all his maths prep for him.

  Old naval friends seemed to be encountering each other too, and reliving, over a succession of pink gins, their early days in the Royal Navy.

  A thin trickle of information from all these sources duly reached Superintendent Jock Anderson and Chief Inspector David Rew at their headquarters in the British Legion Hut at Haydock Wood, a headquarters which, after four weeks, was beginning to wear the air of a permanent establishment.

  There were four policemen permanently on duty in front of the bank of telephones and the walls were lined with large scale and small scale maps. One of the largest of the maps had been inset into a table top and was equipped with an electrical device by which, at the pressure of a selector in a row of switches, different lights in the map lit up and winked redly, like the eyes of tiny creatures caught in headlights at night.

  As this information arrived it was sifted, pondered over and fitted into the picture which was slowly emerging.

  On the Sunday night three men sat late in Colonel Brabazon’s study. They had been talking since ten o’clock and it was now nearly two.

  The Colonel seemed unaffected by the responsibilities of his position or the lateness of the hour. The noticeable changes, Manifold thought, were in Jock Anderson. He had the look of a man who had been working at full pitch for too long. The lines of strain were apparent on his thin face, but there was something else there too. Was it the look of a general, at the crisis of a long and hard fought battle, who suddenly sensed that the enemy was weakening and victory might be there for the taking? The pressure must be kept up for a little longer. Then he might relax and go to sleep.

  Manifold hoped that he was wrong about this. It was a state of mind which he mistrusted. It was a moment at which a single mistake could turn victory into disastrous failure, and a tired man might make that mistake.

  ‘So that’s the situation to date,’ said the Colonel. ‘Mr Diplock is definitely excluded. Not only have we had good reports from previous colleagues and found no single trace of previous outbreaks in any of the areas he’s been associated with, but we are as certain as we can be, short of a formal identification parade, where he was from eight o’clock until midnight on the twelfth.’

  Manifold laughed. He said, ‘I hope, for his reputation, that we never have to demonstrate it in court. He once told me that the most fascinating part of his hobby was photographing animals in their natural surroundings. I thought he was referring to his aunts’ goat, not the undraped beauties of the Penny-Come-Quickly.’

  ‘He was never very high on my list,’ said Anderson. ‘The man we’re after is younger and stronger.’

  Manifold said, ‘I thought that one of the most curious results of the investigation in Soho was that a man they call the Major, who’s an unquestioned expert in the byways of perversion, should have put a finger on Mr Fairfax as the most likely candidate. I don’t mean that he identified him. It was a spot selection made on the basis of the photographs alone.’

  ‘But he’s definitely out of it,’ said the Colonel. He sounded distressed.

  ‘No question of that. Half a dozen people saw him and talked to him at the critical time. They’re not so sure about Lucy Fairfax, though.’

  ‘I refuse to believe that the driver of that car was a woman,’ said Anderson. ‘Four witnesses said, without any qualification, that it was a man.’

  ‘I agree,’ said the Colonel. ‘A man can dress up as a woman, on the stage, and get away with it. In real life you can always tell the difference, somehow. Incidentally I gather we’ve eliminated Mr Bishop, too.’

  ‘Yes. And he was a distinct possibility. I told you that the Laboratory had identified fragments of hard wood on the blanket which the man was using. It was almost the only material clue we had, and it pointed to a carpenter or joiner. But unless six or seven of the Boxwood villagers are lying – and I see no reason why they should, they aren’t all Bishop’s friends by any means – it’s certain that he was drinking in the bar of the Lion from seven to eight, and back there from nine o’clock until closing time.’

  ‘I’m glad about that,’ said Colonel Brabazon. ‘I’ve always liked Stan Bishop. He did a lot of work for me on this house when I moved in. Have you got any more for us?’

  ‘The rest of it is less definite. We’ve traced Mr and Mrs Fairfax back to the two schools they were at before they took over at Trenchard House. Both were well liked by the boys. He certainly wasn’t a bully. Miss Shaw was a nurse at the Quaker Hospital at Caversham for two years. She only left because her stepfather had his stroke. The matron was very sorry to lose her. Ware gets a comparatively clean sheet from his contemporaries at Chelborough. Gaze isn’t quite so good. Two senior naval officers independently described him as a “bit of a brute”. And if you can say that about someone forty years after the event, he must have left a sting behind.’

  ‘It’s not very conclusive.’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ agreed Anderson. ‘It just adds a little to the picture. In my book there are just two people left. And if I’m right about either, I know where the car will be. If Gaze is our man, he must keep it at Huntsman’s Castle. That’s the place on the north edge of the Common. I expect you know it, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Colonel Brabazon drily. ‘And I know Mrs Herbert who runs the riding establishment there. Actually, she only uses part of it. It’s a rambling old place, with fifty acres of paddock and woodland, and dozens of outhouses and sheds. You could hide half a dozen cars there. I take it the other man in your book is Latrobe? Where would he keep a second car?’

  Anderson said to Manifold, ‘You mentioned in one of your reports that you had both the Warlock boys at the school.’

  ‘Roger and Billy? What about them?’

  ‘You know their father’s acting at Chichest
er this summer?’

  ‘Yes. They told me. He’s taken a house, a couple of miles out of town on the Bosham side.’

  ‘Lytham Hall,’ said Anderson. ‘And that’s a big place, too. Parts of it are said to be Roman. Lots of chances to hide a car. And I’m told that Latrobe’s been down there a number of times.’

  ‘Likely enough,’ said Manifold. ‘Roger told me that Latrobe knew his father. Probably met him when he was acting up in London.’ He stopped to think about it, and then said, ‘It’s plausible. Because I gather that their father is more or less camping out at Lytham Hall. His wife’s keeping their other house going, and only comes down there for weekends. He sleeps in the house and someone comes in to cook his breakfast and clean up, but most of the time I should think the house and grounds are deserted. It was empty for more than a year before he took it.’

  The Colonel said, ‘Another peg, gentlemen?’

  When both men shook their heads, he got up, poured himself out a small one, and stood with it in his hand. He said, ‘It’s your show, Superintendent. But if I was in your shoes, I know what I’d do. I’d take twenty men and search both those places at first light tomorrow. If there’s a car there, you’ll find it.’

  ‘There’s one thing that’s stopping me doing just that,’ said Anderson. ‘Suppose it’s a stolen car he’s using. We know how careful he is. And one witness at least told us he was wearing gloves. Suppose he wore gloves all the time he was using the car. So, no finger prints. We find the car, at one of these places hidden in a shed some way from the house, perhaps. We can prove, without any difficulty, that it’s the murder car. But how do we prove it’s got anything to do with our man? And I mean prove it so that it’ll stand up in a court of law.’

  Manifold and the Colonel thought about this. The Colonel said, ‘I see your point. What’s your plan?’

  ‘I’m going to have both those places watched, quietly. And I’m going to try to bolt our man. The first BBC announcement goes out tomorrow evening, on the nine o’clock news. We’re stepping it up, adding a little more detail each night. That way, I think we can break his nerve.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  ‘Then we shall have to try more direct action.’

  The Colonel swallowed down his drink, looked at his watch, and said to Manifold, ‘Can I offer you a bed for the night?’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, sir,’ said Manifold. ‘But if you did, I should almost certainly be late for prayers tomorrow morning. Bad for discipline.’

  As he walked home, across the common, under the stars, he was thinking about Jock Anderson. There was, of course, a lot of sense in what he had said. It would be much more conclusive if he could catch his man actually driving the car away in a panicky effort to dispose of it. But was that his only motive? Was there something else, a suggestion of exactly that sort of sadism which Dr Sampson had been describing to him?

  Manifold knew that it was possible for a hunter to become obsessed by his quarry. He remembered meeting a man in Kenya who had started life as a game warden in India and had told him of an experience he had had when he was new at his job. A man-eating tiger had been reported in his district and he had made up his mind to kill it. It had not proved easy. Conflicting reports had been received. A number of traps had been set and he had spent long nights perched on a machan in different parts of the jungle. As failure followed he had found himself beginning to credit the beast with diabolical powers and attributes. It had become a super-tiger. In the end, the man said, it had fallen into a pit which some villagers had dug, and had turned out to be a mangy old tigress with very few teeth in her head; the reason no doubt that she had turned to man-hunting.

  Wasn’t that what Anderson was proposing to do? He was staking out two places and sitting over them with a gun waiting for his quarry to turn up. And suppose, like that hunter, he was setting his traps in the wrong places.

  Manifold usually slept very well. On this occasion he had a dream. He dreamed that he knew, with complete certainty and beyond any argument, who the killer was. He said to himself, I must write the name down. Otherwise, when I wake up in the morning, I shall have forgotten it. Unfortunately, being at that time perched on a platform on top of a tree in the middle of the Indian jungle, he found he had neither pen nor pencil to write with.

  19

  Monday had not started well.

  The fine weather, which had lasted almost continuously since half-term, had broken. A steady, unhurried rain was coming down, with the promise of more in reserve. Gardeners and farmers might be grateful for it. Mr Fairfax was not. A wet day meant fifty high-spirited boys confined to classrooms. The last few days of the summer term were always difficult. A number of boys were leaving, all were looking forward to the two months break of the summer holidays. The bonds of discipline slackened.

  Then the Commander had formed up after prayers and asked for the afternoon off. He said that he had toothache, and had to visit his dentist in Guildford. Mr Fairfax did not, precisely, disbelieve that the Commander had toothache, but felt that it was thoughtless of him to have it at that particular moment. A well organized member of the staff would arrange to have toothache during the holidays.

  Then the telephone had started to ring.

  He managed to deal, more or less rationally, with the first four mothers and two fathers who had been disturbed by their son’s Sunday letters and he was beginning to get his second wind when the telephone rang for the seventh time. It was Mrs Busbridge. When he heard her voice, Mr Fairfax’s heart sank. Most of the parents with whom he had to deal were rational and sensible people. Where her child, Stephen, was concerned Mrs Busbridge was neither rational nor sensible. She had evidently concluded from his letter that further kidnapping attempts were to be anticipated, and that Stephen might be the object of one of them.

  Her plan was to remove him at once, by car. She asked that his clothes should be packed and that Stephen should be closely guarded until she arrived.

  Mr Fairfax thought quickly. He knew that it was no good arguing with Mrs Busbridge. He also knew that if one boy was allowed to go it might well start a panic exodus, bad in the short term and possibly even worse in the long. But he also knew that Mrs Busbridge was in some awe of Stephen, a solemn round spectacled boy who exercised over her the benevolent despotism of an only child.

  He said, ‘I think I’ll get Stephen to have a word with you himself, Mrs Busbridge. Hold the line for a moment.’ He then got hold of the boy and explained to him what his mother wanted. Stephen said, ‘It’s quite all right, sir. I’ll have a word with her,’ and advanced to the telephone. Mr Fairfax listened unashamedly.

  Stephen allowed his mother to talk for nearly a minute. Then he said, ‘Listen, Mum. If you take me away now, I’ll never speak to you again.’ The telephone gave a faint squeak. Stephen repeated, ‘Never, do you understand? I mean it. This has been an absolutely super term. The Sergeant’s a policeman and another policeman arrived at half-term. He’s got a gun. Lots of boys have seen it. And then we had people trying to kidnap Sacher – well, I told you all about that in my letter. Some of the boys think this master shot the kidnappers. If you think I’m going to miss any of it, you can jolly well think again.’

  The telephone managed to get a word in. Stephen said, ‘Of course I shall be all right, don’t be daft.’ At this point the telephone evidently capitulated. Stephen, having got his way, became more affable. He said, ‘I expect you’ll be coming down to the school play. I’ll see you then. Give Topaz a big kiss from me. Goodbye.’ And to Mr Fairfax, ‘Topaz is my dog, sir. Rather a nice setter. Mummy’s quite all right if you’re firm with her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Fairfax. ‘Yes. So I see.’ He went into first class feeling refreshed. The feeling lasted for ten minutes, at which point his wife put her head round the door and said, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. But some reporters have arrived. I said you were busy, but they insisted on having a word with you.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Fa
irfax. ‘All right. Write me out a translation of the rest of the exercise. You can look up any words you don’t know.’

  He found two young men and one middle-aged woman standing about in his drawing-room. Mr Fairfax gathered that one of them represented the Chichester Times & Journal whilst the other two were the South Coast representatives of London papers. He said, ‘There’s really very little I can tell you.’

  ‘It is true that an attempt was made to kidnap Ben Sacher’s son?’

  ‘And that one of your staff was shot whilst defending him?’

  ‘Not shot. No. One of them got a knock on the head.’

  ‘Could you tell us something about that?’

  Mr Fairfax gave them a brief outline of what had happened. He was conscious, as he told it, that it was a good story with a poor ending. The press evidently thought so too.

  ‘Can you account for these men letting the boy go?’ said the lady. ‘It hardly seems in character.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got no idea.’

  ‘They just drove off?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Do you think we could have a word with the boy?’

  ‘Certainly not. He had a considerable shock and is still under medical care.’

  There was an element of truth in this. Dr Baines had prescribed a tonic for Sacher, one measured tablespoonful of which he poured down the lavatory morning and evening.

  ‘Did his father come down to see the boy?’

  ‘No. He spoke to him on the telephone.’

  When it became clear, after twenty minutes of verbal fencing that either there was no more to the story or, if there was, that they weren’t going to get it from Mr Fairfax, the three reporters departed with insincere expressions of gratitude and Mr Fairfax thought that he had got away comparatively lightly. He was not aware that the local representative of the Daily Record was, at that moment, watching the first full dress rehearsal of Twelfth Night.