Death in the City, page 17
‘You watched the lighter as you walked across the bridge. And it was out of sight when you saw the man?’
‘It wouldn’t be out of sight, but I wasn’t looking at it – I’d walked past it, you see, and it had gone behind me. I couldn’t have seen the man if the lighter had been there, because I couldn’t see through the lighter.’
She couldn’t recall anything else, and I thought that she’d done pretty well to think about the lighters. Whether they meant anything was another matter. She was much less worried now. I asked her about her children, and she chatted away about how they were doing at school. I asked if I could say goodbye to them, and she called them back into her flat. I shook hands with each of them, and in doing so gave each of them a five-pound note. It was a private tribute to a gallant little family – I had no intention of trying to recover it from my expenses.
*
Did Mrs Millings’s lighter mean anything? I walked back across Southwark Bridge treading, I suppose, more or less in her footsteps – you can’t deviate much on the pavement of a bridge. It was a greyish autumn day, and the tide was making: otherwise the river scene was not much different. There were still two or three lighters moored to buoys off the Southwark bank, but no sign of life around them. On a Sunday morning there was little traffic on the river. I imagined a lighter being sculled across from the other bank. It would not go straight, the lighterman with his long sweep would skilfully use his tide. On that summer morning it was near the last of the ebb. Odd time for a lighter to be moving? Not necessarily – I didn’t know what he was doing, and a skilled waterman could move a lighter pretty much as he wanted, using an eddy or current here, slack water there. Mrs Millings had said that the lighter appeared to be crossing the river to the Southwark bank. Depending on how near it was to the bridge, and the angle at which it crossed the river, it might have masked her view of the City bank for some time. Impressions of visual experiences months afterwards may not be accurate, but there is usually something in them. ‘I couldn’t see through the lighter,’ she had said. That at least implied that at some point the lighter was between her and the bank where she saw the body. Well, maybe it was. What did it matter?
Then a point struck me so forcibly that I stopped in my tracks. If Mrs Millings had been able to see the body from the bridge, why hadn’t the lighterman seen it? He was much nearer, and watermen have an instinct for noticing anything on the river. I leaned on the parapet and gazed down into the Thames. No magic whirlpool showed me a picture of what had happened. I felt suddenly rather cold, walked on, and was thankful to see a taxi a minute or two later. I took the cab back to my rooms, and stood myself a drink. That evening Seddon rang up to say that a message had come from the Spanish police to say that the MV Agnes had sailed from Bilbao. He’d made a date with the River Police for ten o’clock in the morning.
*
Superintendent Carstairs had a severe but rather beautiful room at the top of the River Police Headquarters, with a magnificent view over the Thames. I’d asked Redpath to come along, and I think he was glad to be asked, though he still seemed a little ill-at-ease. The Superintendent had Detective Sergeant Burgess with him, and two other River Police officers, whom he introduced as ‘probably our best boatmen’.
Seddon, as the senior policeman present, opened our conference. He explained that both the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police were interested in a T and T line coaster, the MV Agnes, believed to be on her way from Northern Spain to the Thames. ‘For a variety of reasons which I needn’t go into, we think that she may not come directly to the Thames, but may make a call first at the old Ministry of Defence training area at Winter Marsh, to the north-west of Foulness Island, on the Crouch. If she does this, she will probably make for Winter Marsh at some time between midnight and the early hours of next Wednesday morning – that’s the day after tomorrow – when the tidal conditions will be about right. We don’t know why she may be making for Winter Marsh – we do suspect that she is concerned in landing some form of illegal cargo, and we want to be sure of having an adequate force on hand to deal with things when she gets there. The Navy is cooperating with us – they hope to pick up the Agnes somewhere off Ushant as she comes into the Channel. They won’t shadow her up-Channel in case she gets suspicious and changes her plans, but they’ll try to pick her up again off Dover, and a frigate will keep an eye on her to find out where she goes. It will be dark by then – or, at least, we hope so, if our timetable is anything like right – and the frigate will be out of sight, and following her by radar.’
‘What, exactly, do you want from us?’ the Superintendent asked.
‘Chiefly, your experience. You know the estuary as nobody else does. The Agnes is a biggish vessel to get into the quay at Winter Marsh, though we reckon she’ll be able to do it within two or three hours of high tide. But we don’t know what’s going to happen, and we’d like to have one of your launches standing by with, say, about a dozen men on board. I can provide the men if you can provide and man the boat.’
‘We’ll see about that. Let’s have a look at the chart.’
There were large-scale charts of the estuary on the walls of the Superintendent’s office. ‘She’ll have to approach Winter Marsh from the Crouch,’ he said, ‘but we could have our force in readiness on the River Roach. There’s this inlet here – it’s not more than half a mile from the quay at Winter Marsh, and I doubt if anyone would see us there at night. We’d need some signals, though, to know what to do and when to do it.’
‘Pilotage is compulsory for the Crouch,’ said one of the River Police officers. ‘You pick up a pilot from the cutter cruising off the Sunk Light vessel. Could a couple of our chaps go on board with the pilot?’
‘If our guesses are anything like right, she won’t stop for a pilot.’
‘Then she’s committing an offence, and we could intercept and board her.’
‘Well, the Navy could do that. We’d find out what she was carrying, but we wouldn’t know just what she intended to do with it. No, we want her to dock at Winter Marsh and start unloading before we intervene.’
‘What about the Customs? Isn’t this rather a job for the Waterguard people?’
‘I’ve been in touch with the Customs, of course, and they’ve promised to provide at least two officers for our police party. But – again if our theories are anything like right – this case is a police job. It has far wider ramifications than the smuggling of contraband.’
‘Right. We’ll certainly provide a boat – she’d better be one of our bigger launches, Delphinium, I think. She can take the whole party, she’s got cover, and, if need be, she’s capable of over thirty knots. Where can you join her? Let’s see – we don’t want a police boat to be seen around during the day. What about Burnham? We’ll get her round this evening, and she can lie up there all tomorrow – anyone interested will think that she’s put into one of the yacht yards for repair of something. Time?’
‘We estimate zero hour at around midnight. To be on the safe side we ought to be in the Roach by ten p.m. The Agnes couldn’t get in then, because there wouldn’t be enough water for her. But something else may be happening, and we ought to be on hand.’
‘No problem. It’s not much more than three miles from Burnham to the mouth of the Roach, and at half speed Delphinium can do that comfortably in a quarter of an hour. Allow another quarter of an hour for getting to the inlet just above Winter Marsh – it’s no distance, but it’s tricky navigation, and we’ll be without lights. Say your party joins us at Burnham at 9 p.m. If we’re to be in position by ten, that’ll leave about half an hour in hand for contingencies. Do we carry arms?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Seddon said, ‘and while I hope it won’t come to anything so drastic I feel that we ought to be equipped with firearms. There’s evidence of some sort of armed guard at the camp on Winter Marsh, and while the last thing we want is a shooting match, we’ve got to be ready for anything. The Customs men won’t be armed – I know that preventive men have been in plenty of fights in the past, but it’s scarcely the thing nowadays. I shall issue revolvers to my policemen – and they’ll all be men who’ve been through the police course in handling weapons.’
‘I’ll do that too, then. There’ll be four of us, myself and Sergeant Burgess, and two police boatmen. We don’t have much to do with pirates these days, but you never know. And I’ll have a few rifles on board, too, just in case.’
That settled, I asked the Superintendent if we could go back to the Southwark Bridge case.
‘Rotten case, that,’ he said. ‘God knows how many hours we put in on it, and Inspector Redpath and the Met men, too. But we never got anywhere. How does it crop up now?’
‘I don’t know that it does, but there’s been a funny little coincidence.’ I explained about the cartridge case on Winter Marsh. ‘Inspector Redpath and I discussed it all on Saturday, and we came to the conclusion that it might just be worth having another interview with Mrs Millings – the woman who saw the body.’
Redpath looked at me gratefully. ‘Don’t see what she can add now,’ the Superintendent said.
‘Well, as you said a moment ago, you never know. I went to see her yesterday, and she remembered that when she was on the Southwark side of the bridge – before she knew anything about the body – she saw a lighter being sculled across the river.’
‘What of it? There’s still a lot of lighter trade on the Thames.’
‘The lighter was coming from the City bank, just below the bridge. Why didn’t the lighterman see the body?’
‘You’ve got a point there – if her recollection is at all reliable. I remember the case well. She didn’t say anything about a lighter in her statement.’
‘She wasn’t asked. She was shocked at seeing the body, and she was worried about being late for work. She didn’t mention the lighter because she didn’t think of it – it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the body. She only remembered it when I asked her to go back over her whole walk across the bridge, to think back to what the river was like that morning, to describe everything she’d seen from the bridge.’
‘If we’d known about it at the time we might have found the lighterman. It was months ago now. We can certainly make inquiries, but I doubt if we’ll get anything.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of that so much, but rather of the placing of the body. If the lighterman had anything to do with it, you wouldn’t find him. The point that occurs to me is this – could the body have been dumped from the lighter a few minutes before it was seen? All inquiries so far were based on the probability that it had been put in the water somewhere much higher up the river, around Hammersmith or Putney. If it had been dumped from the lighter, the inquiries could scarcely help coming to nothing.’
The Superintendent was keenly interested now. ‘Opens up quite a new line,’ he said. ‘I wonder . . . but could it possibly have been like that? As I recall it, the medical evidence was that the body had been in the water for some hours. It was on the mud, uncovered by the tide. If it had been dumped from a lighter more or less where it was found, it would have been muddy rather than sodden. And why the cartridges? We reckoned that they were there to weight the body so that it would float below the surface.’
‘Yes, it was an ingenious reconstruction, on the evidence you had very well thought out, if I may say so. The lighter is new evidence. I can think of various reasons for keeping the body in the river before it was finally dumped, but they’re all guesswork. Whether we’ll ever get any more facts, God knows. But I’d be grateful if you’d think about the lighter.’
‘I can promise you that all right,’ the Superintendent said.
X
IN DOWNING STREET
AFTER OUR CONFERENCE with the River Police I looked in at Ingard House, mainly to try to keep up Henniker’s morale. He was not happy. ‘I’m just wasting the bank’s money and my time,’ he said. ‘With the possible exception of the ships, which might be viable if they went back to being an independent company, the whole concern is insolvent. There’s really nothing more I can do except advise the bank to put in a liquidator. And you tell me I mustn’t do that yet.’
‘I want you to give us two more days,’ I said. ‘Today’s Monday. On Thursday morning you’re free of all obligation to me. I know it’s been hell for you, but try to bear it. I’m not exactly enjoying myself, either. Can you keep things ticking over, try to look busy, for just two more days?’
He laughed, a little bitterly. ‘I don’t go back on my word, wrong as I feel now that I was to give it,’ he said.
‘Were you brought up on Latin?’ I asked.
‘Well, I struggled with “mensa”, I suppose. But why on earth?’
‘I had a good Latin master, and he made us put Latin verse into English doggerel. It seemed pretty pointless at the time, but looking back, I think I got more from his Latin lessons than anything else in my life. I’m going to offer you a reflection from Horace now:
Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi finem di dederint.
And an English doggerel version:
Don’t try to find out, mate
We’re not meant to know
To what sort of fate
God intends us to go.
‘I often find Horace comforting. He makes one realise that people went through it all a couple of thousand years ago.’
He laughed again, less bitterly. ‘You’re an odd character,’ he said. ‘Well, roll on Thursday.’
*
I felt the same. My plans were all made. One of the ‘Jewel Class’ of frigates, HMS Moonstone, was cruising off Ushant, hoping to pick up the Agnes when she entered the Channel. Assuming that she did pick her up, and that the Agnes went on up-Channel, arrangements had been made for aircraft from Plymouth and Southampton to keep an eye on her. Another frigate, HMS Onyx, would be waiting off South Foreland tomorrow afternoon, ready to take up the trail once the Agnes had come through the Strait of Dover. If things went on as we expected, I was to join Onyx by helicopter from Dover during the afternoon. Seddon would be on board the police launch.
I hate waiting for something to happen, but now there was nothing for it but to wait. And what made waiting worse was that we still had little more than guesswork to go on, and it was by no means certain that anything would happen at all. Doubtless the Ingard Group would be in liquidation by the end of the week. That would be a City sensation, and it was certainly important, but somehow I couldn’t work up a great deal of interest in the fate of the Ingard group.
As I should soon be giving up the relative luxury of my service flat I felt that I might as well use its facilities for lunch, though I didn’t feel much like eating. However, I had an omelette and a bottle of Piesporter Moselle sent up to my room. Over lunch it occurred to me that the one person at all intimately connected with Andrew Stavanger I had not yet met was his daughter, Mrs Carolan. I didn’t think that she could tell me much, and from what Miss Macdonald had said she wasn’t even greatly interested, but it would be tidier, I thought, if I went through the motions of calling on her. Carolan being a Cabinet minister, his home telephone number was ex-directory, but I had the number from Miss Macdonald – I had asked for it as a matter of routine, with the vague feeling that it might be useful to know it. I lifted the phone to ring her to ask for an appointment, when, for some reason, I decided not to ring beforehand. I decided instead to call, unannounced, at six o’clock, reckoning that she would quite probably be out during the afternoon, and might well be going out to dinner later. Six o’clock seemed a good sort of time to call – if she was in there was no reason why she shouldn’t see me, and if she was out I didn’t think that I’d miss much.
*
The Carolans had an attractive small Georgian house off Millbank, convenient for the House of Commons, and a pleasant place to live. It was not all that far from my apartment block in Chelsea and with nothing better to do I walked there. Mainly to look more official, I took with me my black briefcase which, as it happened, still held the file on the Southwark Bridge case. Mrs Carolan herself came to the door when I rang, which surprised me slightly, though I shouldn’t have been surprised in view of their public commitment to the more aggressive forms of political equality. I gave her a card, which simply said ‘Colonel Peter Blair, Police Liaison Department, Home Office’.
She looked at it, I thought rather distastefully, and I said, ‘I do hope I’m not bothering you at an awkward time, Mrs Carolan, but a possible new factor in your father’s apparent disappearance has just come to light, and I’d be immensely grateful if I could discuss it with you.’
‘My father hasn’t disappeared,’ she said. ‘I suppose that Macdonald woman has been keeping on at you. He has gone abroad somewhere on one of his ships – there’s no earthly reason why he shouldn’t. But you’d better come in. I can’t give you very long, but I must try to put a stop to this tiresome idea of my father’s disappearance.’
She took me into a beautifully furnished drawing room on the first floor, with a superb Cezanne from Carolan’s private collection on the wall facing you as you went in. ‘Would you prefer your husband to be present?’ I asked her. ‘I have some possibly distressing news of your father.’
‘My husband is speaking at Barrow-in-Furness, and he won’t be back in London before Wednesday,’ she said. ‘But what is your news – and who, incidentally, are you? Policeman normally come either from the local police station or from New Scotland Yard. I’ve never heard of your’ – she glanced at my card again – ‘Police Liaison Department. What is it?’
I explained briefly the department’s place in the scheme of things, adding, ‘You’re right in supposing that police inquiries were invoked by a certain Miss Macdonald, though I’m acting quite improperly by mentioning her name. I do so because you yourself mentioned her, and I’m anxious that you should understand precisely our position in the matter. Miss Macdonald’s story was, I’m afraid, so vague that the regular police passed it on to us, in case it might have any bearing on other matters with which we’re concerned. It’s just possible that it has. But before I go any further, would you like to check my identity? You can do so by ringing New Scotland Yard, and asking for Assistant Commissioner Seddon. He himself will probably not be there at this hour, but his office will be manned, and if you care to ask about my credentials I’m sure you will be satisfied.’
