A Man Condemned

by Roderic Jeffries

  ‘Never. He didn’t like it . . . Why are you asking that? What’s it matter what he drank?’

  ‘There was an opened bottle of whisky in the car.’

  She thought about that for a while, then suddenly realized what the inference was. ‘You think he crashed because he was tight? Haven’t I just told you, he didn’t like whisky?’

  He said quietly: ‘The bottle in the car came from the pub where he’d been called during the night because someone had broken in and stolen a lot of drink and cigarettes.’

  ‘You . . . you’re trying to say . . .’ She closed her eyes. ‘Oh, God!’ she suddenly shouted. ‘You’re calling my Reg a thief. It’s a filthy lie.’

  The door opened and the middle-aged woman hurried in. ‘What’s the matter, love? What’s happened?’

  ‘He says Reg pinched some whisky from a pub. He wouldn’t never do a thing like that,’ Vera answered wildly.

  She faced Fusil. ‘You come here, the day after he’s killed in a crash, and start saying he stole a bottle of whisky . . . I hope to God your wife gets killed and someone starts telling filthy lies about her.’ Then, because she was really a warm-hearted woman, she was immediately ashamed of what she’d just said.

  Fusil spoke sadly. ‘I had to put the facts to Mrs O’Connell. But I don’t believe those facts mean that he stole the whisky.’

  They stared at him, distrusting and hating him.

  He stood. ‘When I arrived, Mrs O’Connell, I told you that your husband was a fine policeman. If it’s humanly possible, I’m going to prove that that’s exactly what he was.’

  They watched him leave.

  *

  Menton was standing by the window in Fusil’s office. ‘I’ve been waiting over half an hour.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ replied Fusil tiredly.

  Menton, who was dressed in a grey suit with a tie whose striping suggested an old boy’s club, crossed round the desk to the chair and sat. It was not in his character to realize that, now he was no longer using this office, manners dictated that he should have chosen one of the other chairs. ‘Have you been checking out Yates?’

  ‘No, sir. I’ve been making preliminary enquiries in the O’Connell case.’

  Menton frowned. ‘What case is that?’

  Briefly Fusil sketched in the details of the car-crash and the evidence which seemed to suggest that O’Connell had stolen the whisky from The Cat And The Fiddle.

  Menton allowed his vexed astonishment to surface. ‘You’ve been concentrating on those enquires at this time. When we’ve a murder case on our hands?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Fusil’s manner was far too direct to be in any sense placatory. Menton’s astonishment turned into sharp annoyance. ‘I didn’t expect to have to remind a man of your experience that one of your duties is to understand the priorities which all cases must carry.’

  ‘I judged it important to discover whether PC O’Connell had, or had not, been guilty of theft.’

  ‘You should have detailed a DC to carry out the enquiries.’

  ‘I was asked to conduct them personally by the divisional superintendent.’

  ‘When it comes to assessing the priorities of CID work, it is the DI who makes the decisions, not the divisional superintendent. Surely to God you know that?’

  ‘I made the decision, sir.’

  Menton stepped aside from an open argument because he was well aware that at this stage some people would have supported Fusil’s actions. He tapped on the desk with his fingers. ‘In the course of the enquiries, did you learn anything to say that the PC didn’t steal the whisky?’

  ‘Nothing definite, no, but there are those odd inconsistencies in the evidence.’

  ‘Inconsistencies, surely, based on a wife’s statement and on your assessment of his character—both of which may obviously be very wrong?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve been trying to find out if they were, but up to date I’ve no answers.’

  The telephone rang and Fusil stood up, leaned across and picked up the receiver. An assistant at the forensic laboratory said that tests showed O’Connell’s blood-alcohol level had been nearing .3 per cent which meant he’d been drunk when he died.

  Menton could not forbear from pointing out the obvious. ‘But the wife insisted that he never drank whisky . . . You know, Fusil, the fact that a man once worked for you doesn’t automatically lift him beyond suspicion.’

  Chapter Ten

  Yates had the antagonistic manner of someone who would always defy authority without thought to the consequences. He said, with open contempt: ‘I’ve told all there’s to say to some other bastard.’

  ‘Then now you can have the pleasure of repeating it to this bastard,’ said Fusil. ‘And, for starters, let’s have the telly off so we can hear ourselves think.’

  Kerr switched off the large colour television set.

  Yates shrugged his shoulders, walked across to the cluttered mantelpiece and picked up a can of beer. He pulled off the tab, dropped the tab on to the floor and drank.

  ‘Where were you Friday morning, the twenty-first of last month?’ asked Fusil.

  Yates emptied the can and dropped it on to the mantelpiece. He bent over and switched up the fan heater to its maximum setting. ‘Playing poker.’

  ‘With Dusty Walker and a couple of out-of-town blokes. And the first thing you knew of the wages-snatch and the killing was when you saw it on the telly.’

  ‘If you know it all, why waste my time?’

  ‘Because we had a chat with Dusty.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You paid him a century for the alibi.’

  ‘Give over.’

  Kerr said: ‘Shall I tell him about Peg-leg?’

  ‘I suppose you’d better,’ replied Fusil.

  ‘You know old Peg-leg Jordan, don’t you?—bloke lost a leg climbing over a spiked wall when he was a nipper. He was in Mick’s that Friday and he saw Dusty making himself a fortune out of some suckers. Funny thing is, there wasn’t any sign of you.’

  ‘Peg-leg’s asking to get his other leg broken off,’ said Yates viciously.

  ‘Why try to buy yourself an alibi? At the bank, were you, but a bit bashful about admitting it?’

  I wasn’t nowhere near there and you can’t prove nothing.’

  ‘An overabundance of negatives,’ mocked Fusil.

  Yates swore.

  ‘Any objection to us having a look round the house?’

  ‘Yeah, I bleeding well . . .’ Yates stopped and looked at Fusil and his expression became scornful. ‘Look all you like.’

  They were not surprised when they found nothing to suggest that he had been one of the three men who had snatched the wages and murdered the guard.

  *

  Happy, and certain her family were equally happy, Josephine Fusil was approaching middle-age with a reasonable degree of equanimity. By nature she was reserved and it was this reserve which some of the wives of other policemen mistook for snobbery; in truth, she was the least snobby of people.

  She looked across the sitting-room at her husband and asked: ‘Bob, what’s wrong?’

  He picked up his pipe and began to scrape out the bowl with the small blade of his penknife. ‘Nothing’s actually wrong, but neither is anything actually right . . . I had Menton in the office this afternoon. He blasted me with the big guns.’

  ‘There’s surely nothing unusual about that?’ She spoke lightly, but secretly she wished he had learned at some stage of his career that compromise need not be a dirty word.

  ‘No. But the infuriating thing is, I’m quite certain I’m right.’

  ‘Can you remember when you were last wrong?’

  He smiled. ‘All right, so sometimes I sound big-headed enough for two. But one of our PCs has been killed in a car-crash and the circumstances of the crash make it seem that he stole a bottle of whisky and drank half of it, became tight and went off the road in consequence. He was CID aide last year and I got to know him
quite well: he’s no thief. Brian Passmore asked me personally to check up on the facts. I’d have been justified in telling him that with a murder case in hand I couldn’t cope, but since O’Connell had worked for CID . . .’

  Loyalty, she thought, had always been one of his strengths and yet, ironically, also one of his weaknesses. For him, proving the innocence of the PC was as important as identifying the men who had murdered the security guard and he could not—or was it, would not?—see that logically and from Menton’s viewpoint this could not be.

  ‘Common sense says he didn’t take that whisky since his wife swears he didn’t like it.’

  ‘But maybe he really did.’

  He stood and began to pace the floor, threading a way round the furniture. ‘Surely you could say what drinks I don’t like?’

  ‘Up to a point, of course I could. But, even though I know you don’t particularly like rum, I couldn’t say for certain you’d never touch it. Maybe whisky was the only thing he could steal easily?’

  ‘He had the full choice. He was on his own, with bottles of almost every drink under the sun.’

  ‘But since that whisky did come from the pub, how did it get in his car if he didn’t pinch it?’

  ‘There’s only one alternative. The bottle was planted on him and whoever did this fixed the break-in of the pub solely in order to be able to plant it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I haven’t an idea.’

  ‘Then you’re resting a lot of weight on what his wife told you.’

  ‘Not that alone. He was the kind of man who would never steal anything, no matter what the temptations.’

  ‘It’s no wonder Menton couldn’t understand you.’

  ‘But you do?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she answered.

  *

  Miss Wagner came into Fusil’s office early Thursday morning. ‘Crabtree and Gosforth have been on the phone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Manufacturers and installers of security systems,’ she answered briskly. ‘They’ve finished their work at Windleton Manor and they want to arrange a meeting as soon as possible for us to check over their work.’

  ‘Fix up an appointment for tomorrow or the next day. And liaise with whoever’s security officer and if it’s still Alf tell him I won’t have the time to inspect every last nut and bolt. If it takes us a couple of hours, that’ll be one hour more than I can afford.’

  He’d be lucky to get away in under three hours, he thought, already resenting the waste of time. But the rich bought other people’s time as easily as they bought everything else. What must it be like to be so wealthy that one could spend a million pounds on somewhere to live and then perhaps as much again to alter and finish it? It was, he was able to reassure himself, a question which would never concern him.

  *

  ‘Chuck Templeton?’ said the man behind the bar of the drinking-club. ‘You’ll not find Chuck around here.’ He wore a wig of long blonde curly hair and used considerable makeup on his face, yet his clothes were conservative, a blue jacket and grey flannel trousers: he looked rather as if he had been interrupted halfway through changing into drag.

  ‘Where does he usually hang out?’ asked Yarrow impatiently.

  ‘It’s a case of not knowing, can’t say.’

  Yarrow left and climbed the steep stairs up to the street. From the doorway he looked straight across the road at the high, blackened brick wall which surrounded the old docks and above them he could see the foremast and crow’s-nest of a large ship. Kerr would have stared at the crow’s-nest and envisaged tropical seas beneath the burning sun, but Yarrow was uninterested and walked on. Only fools daydreamed.

  It took him over three-quarters of an hour to find Templeton in one of the dockside pubs which, by tradition, were granted special opening hours despite annual objections from the police. Templeton was in a party of half a dozen men and women, all of whom had been drinking heavily. He was short and thin and had very dark black hair kept slicked back: he had a wide, toothy smile, a beaky nose and pale blue eyes. A lot of people made the mistake of thinking he was just the amiable, generous, hail-fellow-well-met man he appeared to be.

  The others with him were not so tight that they didn’t recognize trouble. The jokes stopped, glasses were emptied and people suddenly remembered pressing engagements . . .

  Templeton, showing no resentment at having his party broken up, said: ‘What’s it going to be, then? How about a malt whisky? They do one here as smooth as a young lady’s you-know-what . . .

  Yarrow interrupted and said he wanted a word about Friday, the twenty-first of September. It was impossible to have one word with Templeton: he used words as prodigally as a bureaucrat used other people’s money. But even after a few thousand words and a couple more drinks Yarrow learned nothing of any importance.

  Chapter Eleven

  At divisional HQ, the vehicle testing building was on the far side of the courtyard. Fusil passed a van, on the bonnet of which was a notice to say it was awaiting testing for fingerprints, and eased his way past a Rover 3500 which was over the inspection-pit. He entered the small, cramped office beyond.

  A uniformed sergeant, looking almost as harassed as he felt, said: ‘Whatever it is, we almost certainly haven’t been able to get it done yet, sir.’

  ‘You blokes don’t know what being busy means! How far have you got with O’Connell’s car?’

  As the sergeant stretched across his desk to a pile of reports, the phone rang. With one hand he leafed through the reports, with the other he lifted the receiver and answered the call. He found the paper he wanted and pushed it across.

  Fusil read. The Ford Escort had done a very considerable mileage but in so far as it was now possible to judge it had been in a roadworthy condition. At the time of the crash the headlights had been switched on and the car had been in second gear. The tyres showed no signs of emergency braking. All the damage sustained was consistent with falling from a height on to a rock face and then bouncing off to a further fall. On the off-side front wing there was a small area of impact paint, coloured blue. Beyond these facts, there was nothing to report.

  Fusil waited until the telephone call was over, then he said to the sergeant: ‘Can you give me a bit more gen on this impact paint?’

  ‘As you know, sir, we list all signs of damage, whether they’re of consequence or not. All that means really is that at some time recently the Escort was brushed by a blue car. The kind of thing that happens every day in car-parks.’

  ‘Was the metal dented?’

  ‘Can I have the report a moment?’ The sergeant read, then left the office and spoke to one of the PCs who was working on the Rover. He returned. ‘The whole wing got so chewed up in the smash it’s impossible to give any indication of how dented it was beforehand.’

  Fusil returned to the courtyard and Bressett came up. ‘Excuse me, sir, Miss Wagner has been looking for you. She says not to forget your meeting at three this afternoon with Mr Goatman and the representative of Crabtree and Gosforth.’

  ‘You can tell her that if I can, I will.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Skip it.’

  ‘One more thing, sir, she’s made out an amended night crime list.’

  Fusil read the typed list. Breaking and entering, two cars stolen, a man in hospital with serious abdominal wounds which he refused to account for, and a fire which might be arson. By the side of the breaking and entering was an asterisk: below was a note to say that the house in question was owned by Mr Apse, who was a councillor. ‘Interview the wounded man again and see if he’s fit enough now for you to put a bit of pressure on him, get on to the fire investigation officer and ask for more definite opinion on whether or not it was arson, and go to Apse’s house and make enquiries, but don’t spend much time on that unless there’s a hell of a lot of stuff been nicked.’ He knew—and resented the knowledge—that probably he should go himself to Apse’s house and certainly Miss Wagner
had made that note because she expected him to, since a successful police force had to have an eye to public relations. But he did not believe in privilege. In any case, he found it difficult to concentrate on anyone except a young woman whose grief had been made doubly bitter because in dying her husband had been branded thief.

  He drove to Dritlington. Mrs O’Connell was still dressed in the shapeless black frock and because the inital numbness had worn off her grief was now the more intense. She recognized him with an immediate dislike.

  ‘Mrs O’Connell, I hate having to worry you again, but I’m trying very, very hard to prove that Reg didn’t take that bottle of whisky.’

  Her hostility waned slightly. ‘You’d best come into the front room.’

  They went into the sitting-room. A studio photograph of O’Connell now stood in the centre of the mantelpiece: it looked as if it had been taken on the day he had been sworn in as a PC.

  ‘I want to know one or two things about your car. For instance, did you help Reg with the washing and polishing?’

  A faraway look came into her eyes. ‘He bought it down at the garage by the shops and they cut the price a little, seeing he was a policeman. It was on the HP, of course.’ Her voice dropped. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to keep up the instalments.’

  ‘The insurance money should take care of all that, but if you need help, any help at all, contact WPC Brown at the station and ask her to give a hand. Tell her I told you to get in touch with her.’

  She nodded, but he wasn’t certain whether she had really understood what he’d said.

  ‘Reg was ever so proud of it and was forever polishing. I told him once—only as a laugh, of course—that he thought more of that car than he did of me.’ She drifted off into her memories.

  ‘And did you help him to look after it?’ prompted Fusil.

  ‘He’d never let me do the actual polishing. Said a woman never got that right.’

  ‘When did you last help him with the car?’

  She looked at him and began to swallow quickly: tears filled her eyes.

  ‘It could be very important,’ he said softly.