Death in the City, page 15
*
The police canteen hadn’t done at all badly. There were generous helpings of cold chicken with two cartons of coleslaw, a loaf of crusty bread cut into convenient slices, and some massive pieces of cheese. There was also a flask of hot tomato soup, and, for the small hours, two flasks of hot cocoa. We ate and enjoyed the chicken and some bread and cheese, and decided to keep the soup as well as the cocoa for later in the night.
Inspector Balfour ate his supper perched on the ladder to maintain his lookout. When I’d tidied up things and put the plates back in the toolbox, he came down, and I took his place. Unpromising as conditions seemed, he contrived to make himself quite comfortable at the foot of the hole, arranging the two stools and the cushions so that he could almost lie across them. He couldn’t stretch out fully, but with a cushion to support his shoulders, and a stool and another cushion to take his legs, he folded himself up remarkably neatly. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, ‘but I’ve even managed to get some sleep like this. Learned how to do it in an anti-aircraft dug-out command post during the war.’ He’d had a long day, and soon he actually was asleep, and snoring slightly.
I found my watch extremely tedious. It was impossible to get really comfortable on the ladder and there was nothing to be seen through the spyhole in the canvas cover to provide interest. Apart from the soft red glow of the road lamps it was pitch dark outside. It was too dark to make out even shapes of buildings, but I could see where the camp was by a lighted window in one of the huts. From time to time a shadow passed across it, indicating that a guard or sentry was on duty. No car turned up, and there was no other sign of movement.
I thought I must have been on duty for at least two hours when I glanced at my watch and was horrified to find that I had been at my post for precisely twenty minutes. That wouldn’t do at all – I should be an exhausted wreck by midnight. To make the time pass, I concentrated on thinking hard about the job ahead, trying to visualise every yard of ground I should have to cover to get to the area I proposed to search. The distance, I reckoned, was about a quarter of a mile, maybe a little less. If the sentry stayed fairly near the lighted window, I should not be badly placed, for it was in a hut some fifty yards or so to the right of the road leading to the camp. I didn’t have to go as far as the camp, for the man had been well along the road, or rather the side of it, when he had shot at me. I should conduct my search on hands and knees, presenting only a low silhouette, and I could drop down on hearing the slightest sound. The road lamps by our telephone-hole, and the lighted window in the camp, got over one problem for me – there would be no difficulty in finding my way to the camp, or in getting back.
This mental exercise did help to make time pass, but it still went slowly, and I was thankful when my watch told me that it was five minutes to midnight. I woke Inspector Balfour, and we each had a cup of cocoa. Then, instead of climbing down into the hole, I went up and over the top. The Inspector followed me up the ladder to take post at the spyhole. ‘Good luck,’ he said, and that was that.
*
It was an infinite relief to be out of the telephone-hole. I was on hands and knees as I crawled out of it, and I stayed down until I’d crawled beyond the range of the red road lamp. Then, after listening intently for a moment, and hearing nothing, I stood up, fairly confident that I couldn’t be seen by anybody more than a yard or two away. I walked quickly to the road leading to the camp, my rubber boots making next to no sound.
On the road there was no cover of any sort, but kindly low cloud prevented any hint of moon, and when I reached the area crisscrossed by marsh drains or ditches there was a comforting slight mist. With a dark blue Balaclava to hide the whiteness of my face, dark blue pullover and my sailing trousers in dark Breton red – a good colour for not showing up at night and, being different from the colour of my pullover, helping to break the effect of monochrome mass – I felt that short of having a searchlight turned on me I was as near invisible as could be contrived.
I’d scaled off distances on the Ordnance map and now counted my paces to estimate the two hundred and thirty yards that I reckoned would bring me to my area of search. When I got there, I knelt down, and stayed quite still, for a long minute. I was a good couple of hundred yards from the lighted window, and far beyond the range of the unshaded electric light bulb which I could see inside it. I saw something else, which comforted me greatly – the shadow of a man apparently sitting at a table. I couldn’t see the man himself, because he was to one side of the field of view offered by the window, but I could see his shadow on the wall behind him. Feeling safe for the moment, I began my systematic search.
*
The walk had taken me just over twenty minutes. Allowing half an hour for the return trip, to have something in hand to keep my promise to Inspector Balfour to be back within two hours, I had a good hour for my hunt. I calculated that I was probably within six yards of where the man had been standing when he fired at me. To allow a margin for error I moved back a yard, and then crawled forwards an estimated eight yards, thus putting a yard on at each end of my six yard line of search. Having crawled my eight yards I felt round for a stone or something to mark the end of the line, something that I could feel, because it was too dark to see. In that marshy ground there were no stones, so I uprooted a tuft of grass and turned it earth upwards. Then I crawled back to my starting point and went another eight yards at ninety degrees to my first line, and again turned up a tussock of grass. That gave me two sides of a square, and I began crawling up, and down, moving my line about half a yard each time. Prodding in the grass with my hands as I went forward, and extending the search to my full reach, I was confident that I overlapped each time, so that the whole area of my square would be covered thoroughly.
*
I’d used up half an hour of my time without achieving anything when I had a bad fright – the door of the hut opened, and what seemed a blinding shaft of light came out. I dropped flat on my face, and lay at full length. The grass was long enough to hide me fairly well, and I breathed a bit more freely when I realised that what seemed a blinding light to my dark-adjusted eyes was no more than ordinary room lighting, and could not penetrate the night as far away from the hut as I was. I heard rather than saw, for I kept my face down, someone come out of the hut and walk round the building. Then I heard the door shut, and the light that had momentarily dazzled me disappeared. I waited a couple of minutes in case the door opened again, but it didn’t, and I returned to my search.
I was not doing well – more than half my time gone, and considerably less than half of my area covered. The whole enterprise seemed suddenly ridiculous – looking for a needle in a haystack was likely to be more rewarding than scrabbling in long marsh grass in the dark in the hope of coming on a cartridge case that probably wasn’t there, anyway. The thought of the telephone-hole was like the thought of going home. I pulled myself together – I’d come to hunt in the long grass, and I’d damned well go on hunting.
My hour elapsed, but I’d left myself half an hour for getting back, and I thought I could knock ten minutes off this safely enough. With five minutes to go the fingers of my left hand touched something cold. Another snail? No, it was round and smooth – about the right length, too. Using both hands I disentangled it from the grass. I couldn’t see what it was, but it surely felt like a cartridge case. Yes, I was certain that it was! Well, whatever it was, I had no time for any more looking. I put it in my pocket, and with a sense of infinite thankfulness, I stood up – and at once almost fell down again because I was so cramped from spending over an hour on my knees. Grateful that there was no one to see how ridiculous it must have looked, I bowed ceremoniously from the waist a couple of times, and the stiffness passed off. As quickly as I could I made my way back to the road lamps, and our hole.
*
I tapped lightly on the canvas cover, and whispered, ‘Friend!’
‘Thank God,’ replied an extremely anxious Inspector Balfour. ‘In another two minutes I was going to telephone for a rescue party.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t. I think we may have had a bit of luck. Let me get in, and then we can both have a drink.’
*
The Inspector moved to let me climb down the ladder, but insisted on returning to his post at the lookout slit. Installed on the floor of our home, I got my whisky flask from my duffle bag, opened another flask of cocoa from our food box, and mixed cups of hot cocoa and whisky fifty-fifty for the Inspector and for me. I handed his up to him. The drink relieved tension for both of us. ‘I don’t doubt you know what you’re doing, sir, but I don’t want to go through another two hours like that again,’ the Inspector said.
‘I don’t either. I feel as if I’ve served a sentence of the severest form of pack-drill. I wish we had a better light, but if I get close to this red lamp I daresay it will do. I’ll tell you in a minute if we’ve got anywhere.’
I took the object from my pocket and held it against the glass of the lamp. It was a cartridge case all right, but what mattered were the markings on the rim. The photographs of the Southwark Bridge cartridges in Inspector Redpath’s file were vividly in my mind. It was damnable to have to study my find in dim red light, but it was good enough. There was a bit of mud to be rubbed off, and then I could make out the markings. I’d have to check them against the photographs later, but I was quite sure in my mind that they were the same.
*
‘Do you know anything about the Southwark Bridge case, back in the summer?’ I asked Inspector Balfour.
‘Not much. It didn’t come my way. I do know that it was never solved.’
‘Well, I told you that I wanted to look for a cartridge case that might have come from the bullet fired at me a week ago, in the hope of tracing where the ammunition came from. I’ve found a cartridge case – and it seems to have the same markings as the cartridges that were mysteriously in the pockets of the dead man found by Southwark Bridge.’
The Inspector was interested, but only politely so. ‘Funny, that,’ he said. ‘But there must be millions of those rifle bullets around. This place was a training area not long back, and I expect the army did a lot of practice firing around here.’
‘Yes, but these are Belgian cartridges, and as far as we know the British Army has never used ammunition of this particular make.’
‘That certainly makes it more puzzling. But what on earth can be the connection between a dead man found in the Thames by Southwark Bridge and this God-forsaken place? Must be all of fifty miles from here to Southwark.’
‘The cartridge case is a connection of some sort. But what it means only God knows.’
*
It was past three o’clock, a dismal hour of early morning, a kind of last-of-the-ebb of life, when the human spirit is at its lowest. Even if I possessed Inspector Balfour’s skill in stretching out across two stools, I knew that I could not sleep. Balfour had endured a trying watch, so I suggested that he should turn in again while I kept post at the spyhole. I doubted if there would be anything to see, but I wanted to sort out my thoughts. Balfour protested, but he really was tired, and he was glad enough to go below when I insisted. I stood myself another mug of cocoa and whisky, and resting as comfortably as I could on the parapet to which the ladder was hooked – which was not at all comfortable in fact – I gazed out into the night.
I listed in my mind what I called ‘points of coincidence’. Top of the list was the Belgian-made cartridge case – not used in the British Army, but now found twice in England. The Inspector’s comment that the cartridges in the dead man’s pockets and my cartridge case from Winter Marsh had turned up fifty miles apart did not much bother me: if there was a link between them, it would not be a direct geographical one. What sort of link could there be? Well, there could be a link of supply – that cartridges of the same brand were supplied for whatever was going on at Winter Marsh and to whoever was concerned in the death of the Southwark Bridge man. Did that link the Southwark Bridge death with Winter Marsh? Not necessarily – there was nothing to indicate any other connection at all. Wasn’t there? Surely there was another ‘point of coincidence’ in death – someone had tried to kill me at Winter Marsh (and thought he had succeeded) and someone had certainly killed the man at Southwark Bridge. Wherever those cartridges turned up there was a link of death. Of course rifle bullets are inherently engines of death, but not this sort of death – there is a world of difference between death in battle and murder or casual killing. The attack on me seemed casual in the extreme. I had no evidence to show whether the death of the Southwark Bridge man was casual or long premeditated, but stuffing his pockets with rifle bullets had a suggestion of improvisation about it: anyone who planned in advance to dispose of a body in the river could reasonably be assumed to arrange for something more practical than live ammunition to weight the body. And he hadn’t weighted it very competently. The Redpath theory of weighting the body sufficiently to float it below the surface without sinking to the bottom was ingenious, but I didn’t believe it – to make it work properly would have called for a degree of cold-blooded weighing and accurate calculation that didn’t go with the other features of the case. The cutting-out of tailor’s labels from the clothes was cold-blooded enough, but that didn’t need any particular calculation: it would take only a few minutes, and needed no advance preparation. Yes, there were elements of similarity in the manner of death for the Southwark Bridge man and the attack that at least two people believed had finished off me.
That didn’t necessarily mean that there was the same mind at work in both cases – indeed, from what I knew of things it probably wasn’t the same mind: the casual way in which I was left either dead or drowning in a ditch did not match with the intelligence that at least tried to do something about weighting the genuinely dead body. But there did seem a similarity of circumstance – a short-notice killing, and the use of whatever happened to be around, ditch, river, rifle ammunition to dispose of the body. That seemed to imply that somebody felt himself threatened unexpectedly by something or other, and threatened sufficiently seriously to decide to kill. In my own case the only thing I could think of was that my mere arrival carrying field-glasses at Winter Marsh constituted some sort of threat. It seemed little enough, and it wasn’t at all clear that the man with the rifle had actually intended to kill me: what was important was that he didn’t baulk at killing, and when he thought he had killed me he shrugged it off as if it didn’t matter, and, from what I overheard of his remarks to his mate, even expected approval of his action. ‘We did all right,’ he said. What, or whom, could the man found dead by Southwark Bridge have threatened? Why should it have the remotest connection with events at Winter Marsh? I didn’t know, but the cartridge case was real evidence of at least the possibility of some connection.
Having something real to think about made the time pass much more quickly than on my earlier watch, and when Inspector Balfour sat up from his ingeniously contrived sleeping position I was delighted to find that it was past six o’clock. We shared the last of the cocoa, and were glad of the hard-boiled eggs thoughtfully provided by the police canteen for breakfast. The telephone van turned up promptly at seven thirty, and our vigil was over. The two officers who had come to relieve us took our place in the hole and we went off in the van to Southend where a couple of police cars were waiting, one to take Inspector Balfour home, the other to take me to my temporary quarters at Peel Square.
A hot bath got rid of most of the night’s stiffness. I thought of turning in for a few hours, but although I’d had no sleep during the night I was too worked up to want to rest and I took a taxi to Sir Edmund Pusey’s flat. He was having breakfast, and invited me to join him. I didn’t feel like eating on top of the hard-boiled eggs, but I was glad of a cup of coffee, and we talked.
‘It’s an extraordinary story,’ he said when I’d finished recounting the night’s adventures. ‘Have you got the cartridge case?’
‘Yes. And I’ve brought the Southwark Bridge file, too, so you can compare it with the photographs of the others. The maker’s marks and the batch marks seem to me identical. Of course my case will have to go for laboratory examination, but I’m satisfied that it belongs to the same lot as the ammunition found in the Southwark Bridge man’s pockets.’
Sir Edmund studied the photographs and the rim of my case with a magnifying glass. ‘There doesn’t seem any doubt about it,’ he said. ‘Where does that get us?’
‘It gets us back to Belgium. The police in the earlier inquiry traced the ammunition to the manufacturer, who explained quite reasonably that it had gone off to various military depots on the Continent. I think we’ve got to try to find out how it was distributed from the depots – that’s where I hope our military diplomat can get to work.’
‘Do you want to go over to Belgium?’
‘I don’t know the ropes in Belgium, and I’m sure that inquiries there are best left to the people at our embassy in Brussels, who can work through the Belgian Army and police. I do want to have another talk with the Foreign Office man who came here, to stress the urgency of things. Presumably he won’t be working on a Saturday – I wondered if you could get hold of him at his home.’
‘I can certainly do that. I’ll get my little book. Yes, he lives at Putney. I’ll ring him now.’
Sir Edmund telephoned from his study, and was back in a few minutes. ‘Just as well you keep these extraordinary hours, Peter,’ he said. ‘He was going off for the day to play golf, but I caught him before he started. So he’s changed his plans, and instead he’s invited you to lunch. Is that all right?’
