Late Delivery, page 1
LATE
DELIVERY
J.R.L. ANDERSON
CONTENTS
IDeath in the Post Office
IIThe Seventh Nerve
IIIA Postcard
IVThe Reversed Head
VIt Couldn’t Happen . . .
VIAnother Crime
VIIA Green Fiat
VIIIIn Prison
IXResurrection
XEleven Girls
XIEncounter in a Ditch
XIIBreakdown
XIIIThe Stamps
XIVIn the Churchyard
About the Author
Copyright
THE J.R.L. ANDERSON COLLECTION
The Peter Blair Mysteries
Death on the Rocks
Death in the Thames
Death in the North Sea
Death in the Desert
Death in the Caribbean
Death in the City
Death in the Greenhouse
Death in a High Latitude
The Piet Deventer Investigations
A Sprig of Sea Lavender
Festival
Late Delivery
Other J.R.L. Anderson Mysteries
Reckoning in Ice
The Nine-Spoked Wheel
Redundancy Pay
For Ian Lister Cheese
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a story about people from widely different backgrounds – West Indians, English villagers, professional men and women of one sort and another. To attempt to convey differing accents and intonations presents problems which are more or less insoluble. One can distort words to suggest pronunciation, or use the phonetic alphabet. Both seem to me to be tiresome to the reader. So I have let my characters speak in ordinary English, but in words that I think they would use. Please read with an ear to the text, as well as with the eye, listening to the softenings and elisions of Caribbean speech, the omitted ts, the replacement of th by d, the rather lilting intonation. To distort speech in print seems to me to distort character. With only 26 letters in the Roman alphabet there is not much one can do but to ask for the reader’s generous assistance.
I
Death in the Post Office
WITH THE JUDGE’S commendation of his officers ringing in his ears the Chief Constable should have been a proud, contented man, but he left the court miserable and ill at ease. Yet if ever there were an open and shut case, surely this was it? The jury had been out for only half an hour, and its verdict of guilty was unanimous. The indictment as presented by leading counsel for the Crown was damning. The accused was found with blood on his hands, a blood-stained weapon beside him, and notes stolen from the little country Post Office whose postmistress had been murdered were found at his home. The defence? Well, all the defence amounted to was the accused’s statement, ‘I didn’t do it.’ Clearly the judge had not believed him, nor had the jury – and the judge had complimented the police for having cleared up a brutal crime so quickly. Could there possibly be any doubt?
Piet Deventer was the youngest Chief Constable in Britain, and although he was fairly hardened to crime he was, perhaps, less hardened to it than long-experienced judges and criminal lawyers. His police career had been somewhat out of the ordinary,* and while this gave him certain advantages of insight and imagination, he paid for them in emotional sympathy for other people. Why should he feel sympathy for the accused in this case, an eighteen-year-old West Indian youth, convicted on what seemed overwhelming evidence of a brutal killing that had shocked the country? Partly because the boy was West Indian, a black youth transplanted by world economic forces, that had nothing to do with him, to a community alien to practically everything in his own culture, subject to irrational but nonetheless real hostility because of his colour. Piet did not believe that his own force had been in any way prejudiced against the boy because he was black; he did not assume that policemen are automatically saints, but he knew enough about the realities of policing to refuse to accept that the police as a whole are out to ‘get’ people because their skins are black or brown. His own force in North Wessex was predominantly a country police force, and although it had some industrial areas where competition for jobs and housing generated almost inevitable hostilities between white and black, for the most part his constabulary had no problems with immigrants. This boy and his mother were unusual in living in a village where they were the only coloured inhabitants. They were looked upon as ‘foreign’ in the way that country villages regard everyone not born in their community as a foreigner, but until the Post Office murder shocked everyone they had met neither hostility nor abuse. Even after the murder, some of the village people had gone out of their way to show sympathy for the boy’s mother.
Piet had not himself investigated the crime at Netherwick, a picture-book village lying in a fold of the rolling country between Newbury and Wantage. One of the penalties of being Chief Constable was that he had to spend most of his time administering other people’s work. But he encouraged his men to feel that he was approachable and concerned in everything they did, and naturally he had been kept informed of the work of the chief inspector and the detective-sergeant who had done most of the investigating. For all the judge’s compliments on the efficiency of the North Wessex police, there had not been much real detective work to do. The village Post Office, which was also the village shop, was broken into at some time after six o’clock and before eight on a Wednesday morning in April. The Postmistress, a widow in her seventies who lived over the shop, had apparently heard something and come down to investigate. She had been struck several blows on the head with a heavy instrument, killed almost instantly, and left lying in a pool of blood behind the counter. The shop had an early trade in newspapers, and normally opened at eight o’clock. The murder was discovered by the first customer a few minutes after eight. He had dialled 999 from the phone in the shop and waited for the police to come. It was then found that the safe had been unlocked by a key taken from the dead woman, and apparently nothing but money stolen. The exact sum could only be conjectured because it was not known exactly what had been in the safe, but Post Office accountants reckoned it at around £900.
The police were on the scene within three minutes, and detection could scarcely have been simpler. There was a lot of blood, and drips of blood led from the shop to a cottage about a hundred yards away where the boy, Eric Marshall, and his mother lived. The police followed the trail of blood and found the boy in the kitchen, washing blood from his hands, with a heavy knife on the floor beside him. The knife was what is often called a bush knife, about two feet long, with blade and handle forged in one piece. It was of a type used under different names all over the world – in East Africa called a panga, in the English speaking Caribbean a cutlass, in Spanish speaking South America a machete.
The boy was arrested at once, and enough blood remained on his hands and arms for samples to be taken for analysis. His story was as simple as his arrest. He worked, he said, as a garden boy, and he used his cutlass for weeding. He kept it very sharp, and he had just given it a particularly good edge because he had to cut down a straggly old laburnum in the garden where he worked one day a week – on Wednesdays. He had been swinging the cutlass on his way to work and cut his left wrist. He was then just outside the Post Office, noticed that the door was open, and went in because he knew that the shop sold little tins of plaster for putting on cuts. He had seen the Postmistress lying in a pool of blood, forgot his own injury and tried to pick her up. When he saw that she was dead he panicked and ran home, where he was trying to wash the blood off his hands and arms when the police came for him.
His story was borne out to the extent that he did have a recent cut on his left wrist, and analysis of the blood still left on his hands showed traces of his own blood as well as blood from the Postmistress. It was the same with his cutlass, which had both blood groups on it. Asked how the Postmistress’s blood could have got on the cutlass he said that he had put it on the floor when he tried to help the woman, and he must have put it in a pool of blood from her. Asked why he had gone into the Post Office instead of going home to the cottage just across the village green where he lived with his mother he said he didn’t think there was any sticking plaster at home, and he knew he could get some at the shop. His story about the laburnum tree he intended to cut down was confirmed by Major Hicks, the owner of the garden where the boy worked on Wednesdays. Major Hicks, who had about a quarter of an acre of garden attached to his house, Orchard Villa, said that he had employed the boy on one day a week for about a year. He and his wife were getting on, and finding the garden a bit too much for them. Eric was a good garden boy, worked well without having to be supervised all the time, and had never given any sort of trouble. Major Hicks himself had decided that the old laburnum ought to come down, and he had told the boy last Wednesday to see to it next time he came.
None of this counted for much beside the damning evidence against the boy. Not only was there the blood on his hands and cutlass to be accounted for, but when his home was searched £870 in £10, £5 and £1 notes was found in a drawer in his bedroom. Some of the money was in used notes that might have been taken in the shop or in payment for stamps, but £600 was in new notes, delivered by the head Post Office for the area in readiness for payment of that week’s pensions at the Netherwick sub-office. These notes were in sequence, and their numbers were recorded, so there could be no doubt that they came from the Netherwick Post Office. It was slightly puzzling that there was no blood on the notes, but the prosecution argued that they coul
Piet’s officers had done what they could to be fair to the boy, and if there had been any positive evidence in his favour they would have presented it. But there was nothing to suggest that the obvious hadn’t happened, that the boy had not broken into the Post Office, killed the Postmistress and made off with the money. His story of finding the Post Office open around half past seven in the morning was just not believed. There was indeed some real evidence against it, for a constable from a patrol car that passed through the village shortly before six o’clock had tried the door of the Post Office to see that it was secure. This was routine police practice on night and early morning patrols, because of the number of robberies at small Post Offices. At six o’clock, therefore, the door of the shop was untampered with, and the possibility of a break-in other than by the boy seemed remote. When the police were called to the shop they found that the lock on the door had been forced and broken away from the wood; what better implement than a strong cutlass?
*
As he came out of the court Piet was slightly sickened by a bunch of a couple of dozen protesters in the cause of Racial Equality. They were well-behaved under the guardianship of a police constable, but carried banners proclaiming HE’S ONLY GUILTY BECAUSE HE’S BLACK, and EQUAL JUSTICE FOR BLACK AND WHITE. Most of the protesters were white, and Piet thought that some of them were probably moved by genuine idealism. But mixed up with the idealism, indeed, battening on it, was a hard core of those who seem to be against all authority, out to stir up trouble between the police and the community for purely political reasons. It didn’t matter to the protesters whether or not the boy was guilty of the crime for which he had just been sentenced – an eighteen-year-old sent to life imprisonment evokes some sympathy in most people, and here was a chance to use decent human feelings to try to blacken the police. Piet wondered what the protesters would say if they knew of his own feelings. Probably they would dismiss them on the ground that a policeman couldn’t possibly have such feelings.
*
What were his feelings? It was impossible to dismiss the evidence assembled for the trial, and the jury had no doubts. And yet . . . Piet had not investigated the murder at the Post Office, but he had talked to the boy while he was in police custody, and in spite of the evidence he had liked him. He could not say that he actually believed the boy’s improbable story against all the evidence, but he felt that something was wrong somewhere. He was too experienced a policeman to believe that a likeable youth could not be guilty of a savage crime, but this boy had a sort of openness about him that encouraged one to believe him, and left a niggle of doubt. What could be done about it was another matter. The boy had been given as fair a trial as anyone could have, and now had been convicted and sentenced. He could appeal, of course, but unless the defence could uncover some technical flaw in the conviction that had so far escaped counsel, judge, and everyone else concerned in the case, Piet did not see how the Appeal Court could possibly upset the jury’s verdict. He must try to put the thing out of his mind.
There was plenty of work waiting for him when he got back to his office, and a particularly urgent job to decide what more could be done than was already being done to catch an arsonist who was going round setting fire to hay barns. There had also been half a dozen cases of matches being dropped into pillar-boxes to set fire to letters. Whether this was the work of one fire raiser or not it was impossible to tell, but the pillar-boxes were within a few miles of the burned out barns, and it was reasonable to assume that the fires were connected. Unless there is suspicion of fraud in making insurance claims or some other direct possibility of gain, arson is among the most difficult of crimes to clear up, because the fire raiser may be an otherwise normal citizen with a spasmodic lunatic urge to set fire to things. Between the bouts of lunacy he may be the meekest and most law abiding of people. This man – or woman, though arson is more commonly a male crime – had already caused tens of thousands of pounds damage to property, and, worse, his latest burning had brought dreadful suffering to six racehorses, four of which had been burned to death, the remaining two having to be put down. The pillar-box fires were less dangerous to life, but a grave menace to the mail and capable of causing infinite distress. The fire raiser had just got to be found. With the cooperation of a farmer Piet’s officers had arranged a decoy-barn, inviting fire with a lot of loose, badly stacked hay, in the hope that a constant watch on the place might catch the person at work. A twenty-four-hour watch had been kept on the barn for a week, with no result other than heavy demands on police manpower, already stretched to undesirable limits. Should the effort be abandoned? The decision had to be Piet’s, and frankly he did not know what to do. He was discussing things with the superintendent in charge of the case when his secretary came in, to hand him a visiting card. Irritated, he was about to give it back to her to ask the Duty Officer to deal with whoever it was, when the lettering on the card caught his eye –Sir Gordon Gregory, KCMG, The Old Rectory, Netherwick. The Netherwick address gave him second thoughts.
‘What does he want?’ he asked.
‘He wouldn’t say,’ the girl replied. ‘He just said it was private, and he wanted to see the Chief Constable personally. He was very polite.’
‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better see him.’ To the superintendent he said, ‘Sorry, John. Hard as it is, I think we’d better keep on a full watch for another forty-eight hours. If we’ve got nowhere by then, we’ll have to reconsider things.’ At least that was decision of a sort.
*
The superintendent went out with the secretary, who brought in an elderly man, tall and very thin, with a full head of nearly white hair. Piet pointed to a chair in front of his desk and the man sat down. ‘It is good of you to see me without an appointment,’ he said. ‘I felt I couldn’t let things rest as they are without at least trying to do something.’
‘You haven’t yet said about what,’ Piet remarked gently.
‘I am so sorry – I’ve been living with things so much that I expect everybody else to know about them. I’ve come about the Eric Marshall case, the boy who was sentenced this morning. I’m not very up to date about how legal aid works in such cases, and I wanted to tell you that I should like to meet all the costs of an appeal.’
‘If there are grounds for an appeal I don’t think you need worry about the legal costs,’ Piet said gently. ‘But I am bound to say that unless some substantial new evidence comes to light I can’t see any hope of the Appeal Court’s reversing today’s judgment.’
‘Then we must obtain fresh evidence. Again I am at a loss on how to set about things. Can you recommend a good private detective? I should be responsible for all the costs, of course.’
‘There is nothing to stop you or anybody else from employing a private detective as you wish, though I’m afraid the police cannot recommend such agencies. But I don’t understand. What is your interest in the case?’
The man did not reply at once. Then he said, ‘I was responsible for bringing Eric and Isabel, his mother, to Netherwick. Does that give me any standing in the matter?’
‘I still don’t understand. If you have, or even think you have, any material evidence you should have gone to the police in the first instance. Did either Inspector Gray or Sergeant Clifford interview you when they were making inquiries at Netherwick?’
‘Oh, yes. The sergeant came to see me because Isabel asked him to. I said that I had known the accused boy and his mother for nearly two years, and I could give both an excellent character. I explained that they had come to Netherwick through Commonwealth Self-Help, a small independent body, independent in the sense that it has no Government finance, of which I am chairman. It is a charity set up some years ago to help find work for Commonwealth citizens established in this country. We are a registered charity, but are severely limited by lack of means. Still, we have been able to do something. Our members keep their eyes open for jobs that immigrants can do, preferably in places away from the big towns. That is what happened in this case.
