Death in the City, page 13
*
I didn’t have any ideas. I had a sandwich in a crowded City pub, and then went to the bank to collect Miss Macdonald’s letter. Sir Geoffrey’s intervention worked wonders. I gave my name to a clerk and I was taken to the manager’s room at once. He handed me a big brown envelope, and although he was obviously curious his training kept back any questions. I felt rather mean at not staying to chat with him, but there was nothing I could say and I wanted to get away somewhere by myself to study movements of ships. So I just thanked him and left.
I could have gone to my own office in Whitehall, but I was due to see Sir Edmund Pusey in the evening, and I didn’t want to risk running into him before I’d managed to clear my own mind a bit. I was lucky in meeting a cab as I left the bank, and I went back to my anonymous room in Peel Square.
Miss Macdonald had done me proud. She gave a separate sheet of paper to each ship, and on it, in neat, small writing, she had listed every voyage, with any intermediate ports of call, over the past twelve months. The pattern was much as she had described it. Susan shuttled to and fro between Rotterdam and London, occasionally going to Felixstowe instead of London, and making two voyages during the year between London and Stockholm. Charlotte had a more or less regular trade with Bordeaux, but had been once to Lisbon, and twice to Las Palmas. Josephine, Cynthia, and Agnes had been all over the place. They were fairly frequent visitors to Antwerp, but from there showed no obvious pattern in their voyages. There were passages to Italy and Greece, various trips to Tunis and Algiers, with calls at a number of smaller North African ports, and there were a number of voyages considerably farther afield to West African ports, mostly small, as far South as the Gulf of Guinea. Agnes was the longest away from home. She had left London on June 6, a date that had cropped up twice before, though with no apparent connection with anything else – it was the day after Andrew Stavanger’s last known appearance at the office, and the day on which the body of the still unidentified man had been found by Southwark Bridge. She had cleared for Antwerp, where she spent a couple of days, and had then gone to West Africa, calling at several small ports before returning to Antwerp. From Antwerp she had gone to Santander, where she had been due to return to London, but had been diverted to Bilbao instead.
For all Miss Macdonald’s painstaking work, I could not get really interested in these itineraries. My mind kept going back to the case that was nothing to do with me, the unsolved mystery of the man with a load of live ammunition in his pockets found dead on the Thames mud. I got out the file that Inspector Redpath had given me, and studied it. Hundreds of man-hours had gone into its compilation – all for nothing. I read the reports of interviews the police had had with people who had been near the river at Chiswick, Barnes, and Hammersmith, on the night of June 5 – nobody had seen a drunk being assisted from a car, or a heavy bundle being carried towards a boat. Suddenly it struck me that there was a flaw in the reasoning that had concentrated police inquiries on this upper part of the tidal Thames – or rather, not so much that there was a flaw in what had been worked out, but that the reasoning was incomplete. The man had been found near Southwark Bridge at the turn of the tide: he had grounded at low tide, and it had been assumed that he had been carried down river with the ebb. Starting from the place where he had been found, and working back with calculations on the tidal stream, a probable area of his entry to the water had been deduced. That was all right as far as it went, but it assumed that the body, weighted sufficiently to keep it below the surface, but not enough to take it to the bottom, had been moving the whole time. There didn’t seem to be anything to justify this assumption. It might be probable – a body put into tidal water cannot stay put unless it goes to the bottom, but to go with the tide it has to be free to float. Suppose the Southwark Bridge body had been caught on some underwater obstruction – it might have been held for hours before it was freed, by the wash of a passing vessel, or the slow force of the tide itself. If so, it might have gone in nowhere near the upper reaches of the tide – it might have gone in almost anywhere. There was nothing to suggest that the body had been caught in such a fashion on its journey to its final resting place – equally there was nothing to suggest that it hadn’t.
Then another thought struck me. The man had been found early in the morning of June 6, and the medical evidence indicated that he had died some time fairly late on the previous night. The police theory required the body to have been put in the water within an hour or so after death – a reasonable, indeed, an imperative assumption if it was to make the journey from Chiswick, Barnes or Hammersmith in time to be found where it was. But the doctors couldn’t estimate how long it had been in the water: long enough to be thoroughly soaked, but that need not have been very long. The only real evidence here was the condition of the cartridges in the pockets, and that suggested that they had not been waterlogged for any considerable length of time.
And what about the cartridges themselves? They seemed to me the most inexplicable feature of the whole affair. They were Belgian cartridges, manufactured for the standard NATO rifle used by the British Army in common with many other armies in the Western world. They had been examined by ballistics experts and were reported to be in good condition – they had not, apparently, suffered from their immersion, which implied that they had not been under water long, and were capable of being fired. The file contained a report on efforts to trace the origin of the cartridges. A statement from the Ministry of Defence said that while precisely similar to the rifle ammunition supplied to the British Army, no cartridges of this particular batch had been bought by the British Government. The Belgian police reported that the manufacturers were an old-established firm of the highest repute, and regular suppliers of small-arms and other military equipment to various governments. The managing director of the firm had been interviewed, and had gone to a lot of trouble to try to discover the destination of all the cartridges in the batch from which those found in the pockets of the dead man came. Unfortunately, this had not proved possible, save in general terms. Small-arms ammunition was made in very large quantities, and a batch number covered many thousands of boxes. All that could be said of the batch in question was that some had gone to various Continental ordnance depots, and some to an ordnance depot in Belgium, from which orders were supplied as they came in. Most of it had gone out, but there were still a few boxes in the store. A large order might be supplied with cartridges all of one batch, but this was not necessarily so, and smaller orders might often have cartridges from different batches. This made no difference to the user, for the ammunition was all manufactured to fine limits and every round gauged and tested in the manufacturing process to ensure that it met all requirements of weight and calibre. The batch records were primarily for the factory’s own use, to assist in quality-control, and to identify cartridges in any case of complaint. The factory was proud of its standards. ‘It is seldom indeed that there is any complaint,’ the manager had said.
It was possible that small quantities of this particular ammunition might have come into the possession of a British unit, on a combined exercise with other forces abroad, but it would be extremely hard to determine if and when this might have happened. Such an inquiry would be a major undertaking, and the outcome in any case was likely to be inconclusive, for even if some British unit had used ammunition obtained from another army, it did not follow that any of this would be brought back to the United Kingdom. And it would not explain how the cartridges had come to be put in the pockets of a dead man in civilian clothes found in the Thames.
*
I put down the file feeling that the police had done a remarkably thorough job – apparently to no purpose. I was sorry for Redpath, whose efforts deserved a better outcome, but it was no business of mine. Apart from a slight coincidence in dates there was nothing whatever to link the Southwark Bridge mystery with the Stavanger case, and my long shot in trying to identify the body as Andrew Stavanger’s had come to nothing, like everything else in the inquiry.
I spent so long on the Southwark Bridge file that I used up the entire afternoon, and when I forced myself to return to thinking about Andrew Stavanger and the Ingard outfit it was time to go to the meeting at Sir Edmund Pusey’s flat. I was the last to get there, and found Sir Edmund, Seddon, and a pleasant, youngish man from the Foreign Office having a drink. I was introduced to the Foreign Office man – Trevor Forrest – and Sir Edmund poured me a glass of his admirable malt whisky. ‘To encourage you, Peter,’ he said, ‘for I am sure you have a lot to tell us.’
‘I can produce a lot of words,’ I said, ‘but none of them make sense.’
‘Well, fire away.’
Sir Edmund already knew of Seddon’s and my adventure in Andrew Stavanger’s flat. I gave a brief account of my call on Miss Macdonald, and of my attempt, with Inspector Redpath’s assistance, to see if the still unidentified body found in the Thames by Southwark Bridge in the summer could be Andrew Stavanger. The dental evidence proved conclusively that it couldn’t. I also reported Henniker’s conviction that the whole Ingard empire was insolvent, and Miss Macdonald’s belief that the shipping company, although apparently trading profitably, could not be making money out of ordinary maritime commerce. I gave Sir Edmund the voyage sheets compiled for me by Miss Macdonald. He glanced at them, and put them on the table. ‘Before we go into these,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to hear from Seddon about the watch on Winter Marsh.’
‘There’s not a lot, but what there is, like everything else in this damned case, is like a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit,’ Seddon said. ‘Inspector Balfour and a rota of CID men have kept a day and night watch on the place since the telephone hole was dug. The Post Office engineers have cooperated splendidly. Balfour thought that there had got to be signs of telephone activity, so they’ve dug a series of holes along the road, moving their tent-top from hole to hole, and telephone vans have come and gone at intervals – they’ve been useful, incidentally, in bringing the reliefs for Balfour’s team of watchers. As the telephone-holes move along the road, though, they get farther away from the buildings of the old Winter Marsh depot, which makes it harder to see what goes on there.’
‘What does go on?’ I asked.
‘Well, the place continues as a sort of run-down military camp. There seems to be a guard on duty – Balfour and his team have identified at least six different men, who seem to go on duty in four-hour shifts, two at a time. They patrol the perimeter of the camp, armed with pick-handles. Like the men you met, they wear army surplus clothing, so that they give an impression of being in the army, though of course they can’t be. Unlike the men you met, none of them so far has been seen carrying a rifle.
‘There are a few visitors, all in cars or lorries, once a party of a dozen or so in a minibus. Every vehicle is stopped in the road, there’s a brief period of what seems to be questioning, and then the car, or whatever it is, is let through, and driven on into the camp. So far no vehicle has been turned away. From the telephone-hole you can’t see beyond the outer huts, so we don’t know what may go on in the middle of the camp.’
‘Could they be collecting, or grading, or doing anything with oysters?’
‘They could, I suppose, but I don’t know where the oysters would come from. There’s been no sign whatever of oyster-dredging, or, indeed, of any work along the foreshore.’
‘What about the lorries? What sort of size are they?’
‘There’s a complete record here. There have been five altogether, two of them biggish, about three-tonners, the others fifteen-hundredweight trucks. No evidence of what they carry, for they’ve all been covered with dark green tarpaulins – like the guards’ clothing, a bit of an army look about them. But none of them has had War Department markings. There’s something funny about the lorries, all the same. Our chaps have tried hard to get the registrations, but it’s not been easy, partly because most of the number plates have been rather dirty, partly because of the angle of observation from the telephone-hole. But they’re fairly certain of the registrations of two of them – one of the big ones, and one of the trucks. We’ve checked on these, and they are remarkably odd. The registration on the three-tonner belongs to a haulier on Tyneside. We got the local police to ask him tactfully what his lorry was delivering to Winter Marsh, and he said he hadn’t sent a vehicle south of Durham for months. His work is almost all local, supplying materials to building sites. The police on Tyneside say he has a good reputation, and there’s no reason to disbelieve him. The truck registration belongs to a greengrocer in Hereford. We haven’t interviewed him yet, but it looks as though it might be much the same story.’
‘False number plates, picked at random – or at least selected from places a long way from Winter Marsh.’
‘Yes. And once away from the place they can be changed easily enough, so we’ve no idea what to look for. The evidence isn’t all that good, though. Our chaps are sure enough in their own minds about the registrations, but they were reading them through glasses at some distance, and they could have made mistakes.’
While Seddon and I were talking, the Foreign Office man had been looking at Miss Macdonald’s shipping lists. ‘These West African voyages are to some very out-of-the-way places,’ he said. ‘They seem to have one thing in common, though – they are all to countries with extremely unstable governments.’
‘You have a specialised interest in these things, Trevor,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Let me have a look.’ He studied the list. ‘Well, perhaps,’ he went on, ‘that may explain why the apparently unprofitable voyages continue to make money – high freight-rates for going into high-risk areas.’
‘It’s possible, of course.’ The Foreign Office man didn’t look convinced. ‘But I shouldn’t have said there was any trade at all in some of these places. The local economies have more or less collapsed – that’s the big political problem in those parts.’
Sir Edmund looked at the lists again. ‘These lists give an indication of the trade, though not in much detail,’ he said. ‘Here we have “For cocoa”, here “For vegetable oils”. You haven’t got the actual manifests, Peter?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘And it would take a lot of digging to get hold of them. That was one of Miss Macdonald’s complaints – that the voyage-accounting had got very slipshod. Henniker is looking into the shipping accounts for us. Whether he can get much detailed information, I don’t know.’
‘We can but wait, then. And apart from possible action by the Fraud Squad when the accountants deliver their report, there’s no obvious line of attack by anybody.’
‘We know that a ship is going to turn up somewhere on Wednesday, and that she should have come a week ago, but has been deliberately delayed because of something that happened,’ I said. ‘There seems to be a slight connection with the attack on me on Winter Marsh.’
‘There’s not much of a connection,’ Sir Edmund said.
‘Not much, I agree, but it’s the only link we have that seems to join on to anything else. The conversation that Seddon and I overheard was in Stavanger’s flat, which at least suggests that it was related to the Ingard outfit. There was a reference to a ship being held in Bilbao, and Miss Macdonald was able to tell me that the Ingard vessel, Agnes T, has been diverted to Bilbao. So let’s assume that the Agnes T is the ship concerned. We don’t know where she’s coming – all Miss Macdonald knows is that she’s due back in the UK. Whatever her official port of arrival, it seems just possible that she’s going to make an unofficial call at Winter Marsh.’
‘Could she get in there?’
‘I think so – within a couple of hours each side of flood water.’
‘What sort of time would that be?’
‘I did a rough calculation on the way here. She’d probably be all right in the early hours of Wednesday morning – say from around midnight to 4 a.m. That’s the early tide on Wednesday, of course. She could get in again in the afternoon, but if the call is somewhat clandestine, one would expect it in the early hours rather than in daylight.’
‘Tonight is Thursday. If she’s due next Wednesday, when would she have to leave Bilbao?’
‘Obviously that depends on how she comes, and if she calls anywhere on the way. There’s no evidence one way or another, but my sense of the conversation we overheard in Stavanger’s flat is that she’s gone to Bilbao to kill time, and will sail from Bilbao to the UK direct. Depending on what course she makes across the Bay of Biscay to clear Ushant and get into the Channel, she’ll have between eight hundred and nine hundred miles to go. I don’t know her cruising speed, but she’s a newish ship, and it won’t be less than fifteen knots – say about two and a half days’ steaming. To get to Winter Marsh by early Wednesday morning, I’d expect her to leave some time on Sunday afternoon.’
‘We could get the Navy to shadow her.’
‘We could, but it might be unwise. If she’s doing anything illegal – it’s got to be “if”, because we don’t know what she’s doing – her master would get a bit suspicious if a frigate was on his tail all the way home from Bilbao. She’s got to clear Ushant, and she’s got to go through the Straits of Dover – unless she goes round Britain north-about, which would be far longer, and I should say unlikely. The best thing, I think, would be to get the Navy to pick her up off Ushant, then leave her to come up-Channel on her own, and pick her up again off Dover. It might be as well to have something of a reception committee – a force of River Police, perhaps – waiting off Foulness.’
Sir Edmund said nothing for some time. Then he asked, ‘What, exactly, do you think they’re up to, Peter?’
‘I don’t know. I have a sort of half-idea of what they might be up to, but it involves so many assumptions that I’d rather not risk making a fool of myself by putting forward any particular theory now. And I don’t think it matters much at the moment. We have evidence that the Ingard outfit is rocky and probably corrupt, there is the still unexplained and, I think, sinister disappearance of Andrew Stavanger, and there is direct evidence of decidedly odd goings-on at Winter Marsh. The link between Winter Marsh and whatever the Ingard ships, or some of them, may be doing is not very clear, but I’m sure there is a link, and I’m equally sure that it justifies keeping an eye on the Agnes T once she leaves Bilbao, and in taking precautions to be on hand at Winter Marsh against her possible arrival there. Nothing may come of any of this, of course. As I see it, that’s a risk we have to take.’
