Death in the City, page 16
‘Fine.’
‘As a matter of fact, I’ve already accepted the invitation for you. He is expecting you about twelve fifteen.’
Taking people for granted is one of Sir Edmund’s disconcerting and sometimes less than charming habits. But it does save time – his time, anyway.
I now wanted to use the telephone myself. ‘Has Seddon notified the City of London police that we are officially interested in the Southwark Bridge case?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Can I use your phone? There’s something I want to ask Inspector Redpath.’
‘Of course. Use the phone in my study.’
Redpath was off duty, but I had his home number at Ilford. ‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday morning,’ I said, ‘but I’d be awfully grateful if I could see you some time today.’
‘Any time you want, sir. I’ll come into the City – or shall I come to your office?’
‘No, don’t do that – I’m not going to interfere more than I must with your day off. I was wondering if I could come out to see you? I won’t keep you long.’
‘Well, sir, if you care to come out to Ilford, I’d be delighted to see you. But it’s a long way out for you.’
‘Not a bit. I’m tied up for lunch – could I come around six o’clock?’
‘Of course. And would you stay for some supper?’
Two free meals in one day – I felt as if I were on the make. But I liked Redpath, and there was a lot to be said for developing personal relations with him. So I accepted his offer and was given directions for getting to his house.
*
The Foreign Office man had a charming Regency house near the river at Putney. If he was irritated at giving up a day’s golf he had the diplomatic manners not to show it and introduced me to his wife as if I were a long-awaited guest. ‘You’ve heard so much of Colonel Blair – he was the man who pulled off all those remarkable things in Carminia,’* he said. ‘It’s a great honour that he should actually come to our house.’
Denise – his wife – had obviously had a diplomatic training, too. We discussed the world pleasantly over some excellent sherry, and had a most agreeable lunch, including a bottle of a truly admirable Montrachet. After lunch Mrs Forrest excused herself, and her husband asked if I would care for cognac. I don’t like drinking brandy at midday, so I declined and settled for some more coffee. Over coffee, he said, ‘Sir Edmund told me that you had something you particularly wanted to discuss.’
‘Yes.’ I told him of the discovery of the Belgian cartridge case at Winter Marsh. ‘Now these are not twelve-bore cartridges, or sporting ammunition that could come into the country in some normal commercial way. They are for military weapons, and one would expect them to be used – and properly guarded – only by the army, or conceivably by the Royal Navy or the RAF. Yet, according to the Ministry of Defence, they come from a factory that has never supplied the British Forces. So how do they come to turn up in England twice – and on both occasions in circumstances that suggest some criminal activity? It seems to me imperative to go into the distribution in Belgium – and perhaps elsewhere on the Continent – of cartridges from that particular batch far more thoroughly than has been done so far. And it’s a job that wants doing quickly. Of course, we can act through the Belgian police, and I could go over to Belgium easily enough. But with various military authorities involved it would be far better – and certainly quicker – for inquiries to be made through diplomatic military channels. I know that weekends are bad times for getting things done, but I know enough about the reality of our foreign service to know that the popular view of diplomats as nicely dressed people who spend all their time in country houses is not the whole truth. So I wondered if you could prompt inquiries forthwith – I mean really now, this afternoon if possible.’
‘I’ve already sent the request you made the other night. What more, exactly, do you want done?’
‘Well, I’d like the director of that factory run to earth at his home, and asked for the fullest possible list of ordnance depots, or other military agencies, to which ammunition from that batch may have gone. And I’d like the people in charge of those depots to make an immediate check of their stores, to account for all the rounds that have been issued, and to discover if any can’t be accounted for. It’s a big job – just how big I don’t know, for a lot depends on the fullness and efficiency of records. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and find that records are well kept and reasonably centralised. Maybe we’ll be unlucky, and learn precious little. But however it turns out, I think we ought to have a go, even if it means upsetting the weekend.’
Forrest reflected for a moment. Then he said, ‘What you’re asking involves rather more than an approach to the Military Attaché. I should have to invoke the ambassador, to seek the Belgian Government’s authority for the inquiries you want made. I don’t say it can’t be done – but we’d need some very good reason for making such a request.’
‘You could say that there is prima facie evidence suggesting the diversion of military weapons for some unlawful purpose. Surely that would justify urgent action by the authorities.’
‘Yes, I think it would.’ Once convinced of the need for action, Forrest could make up his mind quickly. ‘Right – I’ll get back to the office at once. Where can I get in touch with you if we need you over the weekend?’
‘I’m not sure of my own movements, but that doesn’t matter. If you want anything more from us, get in touch with Sir Edmund Pusey. And I’d like to say how grateful I am for the way you are rallying round. I really am sorry about the golf.’
‘Get away with you! And – good luck.’
* See Death in the Desert (Gollancz).
IX
THE LIGHTER
I HAD A couple of hours in hand before setting off across London for my date with Inspector Redpath at Ilford. Half of me would have liked to go to sleep, but the other half was still too much worked up, and by the time I’d got back to my flat it would scarcely have been worth turning in, anyway. So I walked across Putney Bridge and went into the Bishop’s Park by Fulham Palace. It was a still, autumn afternoon, and I wandered upstream along the stretch of river known as Barn Elm Reach. According to the theory in the police file on the Southwark Bridge mystery it was somewhere about here that the body of the dead man had been put in the Thames. Well, it would have been possible enough. Assuming that the body had been supported by at least two men, so that it could have been taken for a drunk, there were plenty of places where it could have been got to a waiting boat. More probably, I thought, it would have been on the other bank of the river – the Surrey side – where there were a number of yacht moorings. But it didn’t seem to matter much – a dinghy from any of the moorings could have been rowed across the river easily enough.
I tried to visualise the scene. It had to be around midnight, to allow time for the tidal stream to get the body to Southwark. What was the moon doing then? My diary had a table of the moon’s phrases, and I looked it up – the moon would have been in the last quarter, so there wouldn’t have been much moonlight to worry about. There must have been at least two men to support the corpse – one of them could, perhaps, have been a woman, but she would have had to be a particularly strong woman, for it is no light job to support a corpse by an arm round its shoulders, and to walk with it. At least two people, then, possibly a man and a woman, but probably two men, with the corpse, and at least one other person with the boat – that meant a minimum of three people directly engaged in the crime. And if the use of cartridges to weight the body suggested something extempore about the action, the three – and the boat – would have had to be assembled at short notice. I didn’t believe it: of course it was possible, and it would account for the downstream journey with the tide, but other facts about the body didn’t seem to fit elaborate planning. Nor could I believe that a weighted body, floating underwater, would have kept to a tidal timetable so meticulously. Again, it was possible, but there are many snags and hazards in the river, and to reach Southwark Bridge by the time it did a body put into the Thames around here would have needed phenomenal luck – or deliberate navigation. And I didn’t see how a dead body could navigate itself, or, in any practical way, be navigated.
So what? The body had unquestionably got to Southwark Bridge because it was found there, and it had apparently been in the water for about the right length of time. If it hadn’t floated down with the tide it must have started from somewhere else, but, in a tidal river, it was hard to see how it could have got where it did without moving with the tide. Arithmetic was on the side of the theory in the police file. Yes, but the equation might involve algebra rather than arithmetic, and I didn’t feel that the police theory solved the equation: there were still a great many factors unknown.
I did not find these reflections particularly comforting, and I set off for Inspector Redpath’s house wondering whether I wasn’t wasting his time as well as my own. On my way to the underground station I passed a telephone box and I felt half inclined to ring up and cancel my appointment, and go home to sleep instead. But Redpath was expecting me; whatever plans he might have had for the evening had already been upset, and it wasn’t fair to him – or to his long-suffering wife who had doubtless prepared a meal for me – to cry off now.
Redpath seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and the simple warmth of his welcome made me feel better. Meeting his wife and two nice kids – a girl of ten and a boy of eight – also made me conscious of what I’d missed in the breakup of my own marriage, and the strange life that circumstances had pushed me into since. But that was neither here nor there – my immediate concern was to see if we could discover any link between the dead man at Southwark Bridge, the dubious affairs of the Ingard empire, and whatever was going on at Winter Marsh.
‘Would you like to talk business before or after supper?’ Redpath asked.
‘If it doesn’t upset the cooking, let’s get business over first,’ I said. ‘I won’t keep you long. There’s been a development in that case I’ve been handling which may have some bearing on your case at Southwark Bridge. I want to talk it over with you as soon as possible.’
Redpath, of course, knew nothing of the empty cartridge case I’d found last night at Winter Marsh. When I told him about it, he whistled slightly. ‘It’s certainly a link with the Southwark Bridge case – your case as much as mine now, from what the Assistant Commissioner told me. But it’s a damned queer link. It isn’t as if the man was shot – a gun with particular ammunition in it might be used anywhere. He wasn’t shot, he was knocked on the head, and the medical evidence, and the timing, make it hard to see how he could possibly have been killed somewhere way out at the far end of the estuary. And if he was killed anywhere near Winter Marsh, why not dump his body there? It’s a desolate enough part of the world.’
‘I don’t want to pour cold water on your tidal theory,’ I said. ‘It’s a damned ingenious piece of arithmetic, and it meets the facts as you knew them. But you didn’t know anything of a possible connection with Winter Marsh, and there’s a hell of a lot more that we haven’t any idea about at all. If you’ve done a lot of hard thinking about something, it’s horribly easy to start – quite unconsciously – trying to fit facts to your own theories. If the case came to you as a new case now, would you still think it probable that the body was put in the river somewhere as far upstream as Hammersmith or Putney?’
‘God knows. It must have been upstream from Southwark Bridge or the tide would have carried it somewhere else.’
‘If it was carried by the tide at all. Suppose it was dumped almost where it was, from a boat?’
Redpath considered. ‘It was broad daylight when the woman on the bridge saw the body – it was not far off midsummer, remember. She would have seen a boat.’
‘Can we be absolutely sure that she didn’t?’
*
Redpath was getting more and more unhappy. ‘It looks as if I may have slipped up badly,’ he said. ‘I did interview her myself, but I must confess I looked upon it more or less as a routine job. She’d made a statement to the constables, and she just repeated it to me. She just happened to be walking across the bridge on her way to work, as she did every morning. I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me to ask her about anything else. It didn’t seem possible that she could be mixed up in the matter.’
‘I don’t for a moment suppose that she is. Look, Ian, if you don’t mind my calling you by your Christian name – I’m much older than you are, anyway – you haven’t slipped up in any way at all. You did what looked like a straightforward job in a straightforward way – having the woman’s statement to the constables, a lot of people wouldn’t have bothered to go to see her at all. It’s easy for me, coming on the scene months later, to think up questions that might have been asked at the time. I’m not here to queer your pitch – if ever we get to the bottom of things much of the credit will be due to you. As things have turned out, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to have a word with the woman – Mrs Millings, isn’t it? – myself. But that’s no reflection on you.’
‘Well, sir, it’s good of you to say so. But I still think I slipped up.’
‘Come off it, and cut out the “sir”. I’m a guest in your house. This is a team effort. You helped me a lot over the dentist and the teeth, and maybe I can help you over Mrs Millings. What sort of a woman is she?’
‘It was some time ago . . . a good sort, I’d say. Precious little schooling, but that’s not her fault, and a hard life, which wouldn’t be her fault, either. Nicely dressed kids, and she keeps her council flat spotless. That’s about all one can say.’
‘It gives a sharp little picture, though, and a useful one. Now, Ian, let’s forget about Southwark Bridge and join your wife.’
*
I think I comforted Redpath. One of the most difficult aspects of my job is having to butt in – and from the top – on the work of real professionals. My own oblique way of looking at things does, sometimes, have advantages, but police work would get nowhere if it were left to people like me.
*
Mrs Millings’s address was in the file, and I felt fairly confident that she would be at home on Sunday morning. She was and, unhappily, she was obviously frightened by my call. Bustling the children across the passage to her neighbour, she faced me defensively in her spotless little living room, looking wretchedly worried.
One of the rotten aspects of the class structure of our society is that the propertyless classes tend to be afraid of the police. ‘Working class’ is a silly term, begging far more questions than it offers in the way of description. The real divide that came with the industrial revolution was between the propertyless and the propertied – a few pounds in a building society counting, at least in nineteenth century terms, as property. The police were the guardians of property, and the propertyless, instinctively, feared them. We who had fathers and grandfathers with some reserves in their lives, and money if need be to pay lawyers, too often scarcely comprehend the instincts of those whose forbears often had nothing but a day’s wages between themselves and disaster. My unannounced appearance on her doorstep – as she had no telephone I could not let her know beforehand – terrified Mrs Millings. My first job was to try to make her less worried. ‘I wonder if you could be very kind and let me have a cup of tea?’
Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn’t this, and the familiar domestic task of getting out the tea things comforted her a bit. ‘No milk or sugar, please,’ I said. ‘Got to watch my figure, you know.’
She gave a thin little smile, but still, it was a smile. She poured a cup for herself as well as for me, and over the tea I said, ‘You have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. You did a good job in spotting that dead man in the river by Southwark Bridge in the summer – if there’d been any life left in him, he could have been revived, and he would have owed his life to you. But he was dead, and so far we’ve got nowhere in trying to find out how he got there. I’ve come along to see you because there’s just a chance that you may remember seeing something that you weren’t asked about before.’
‘I didn’t see nothing, mister. Only the man lying there on the mud. And the birds, of course – it was the birds flocking round that made me look.’
‘I don’t suppose there was anything else to see, then. But that was on the City side of the bridge. You’d walked across from the Southwark bank. Can you remember what the river looked like as you crossed the bridge?’
‘Tide was out – but it must have been, or he wouldn’t have been on the mud. And it was some time back. No, mister, there wasn’t nothing else.’
‘You must know the river pretty well. Were there any ships about that morning?’
‘No, mister, you don’t see many ships above Tower Bridge nowadays, not like you used to. It’s all changing, you know.’
‘Boats then? There’s generally something moving on the river.’
She puckered her face in thought. ‘Not what you’d call boats,’ she said. ‘But there’d be a few of them lighter things tied up, and waiting for some tug to come along and take them off somewhere. Come to think of it, perhaps there was a lighter being moved.’
‘With a tug?’
‘No – yes, that’s why I remember it. Just one man, with a big oar. Don’t see it so often nowadays, and I’ve always puzzled how they do it. Yes, I’m fairly sure there was a lighter moving that morning. I saw it when I got on the bridge at the Southwark end.’
‘Can you remember what it was doing?’
‘Well, it wasn’t doing nothing, except coming across the river, slow like.’
‘Was it going towards the City bank?’
‘No, it was coming this way. There was two or three other lighters tied up off the warehouses, and I suppose it was just coming to join up with them and wait for a tug.’
