Late Delivery, page 20
‘It wouldn’t be big,’ Piet said. ‘Can you take us there?’
To get upstairs meant going back into the shop. Mrs Grimshaw was rather startled when they began going up, but her husband said, ‘It’s all right, Shirley. I’m just taking the gentlemen to have a look at something.’
The bedroom was directly over the shop, although not as big because there was a landing, and at some stage a bathroom and a lavatory had been built into the area. But it was quite a big room, surprisingly big from the cottage-like appearance of the Post Office. The bedroom furniture, like that in the sitting room, belonged to a past generation, and the bed was a heavy brass one, the brass knobs at head and foot lovingly polished. Mr Grimshaw moved the pillows and turned back the sheet under them. At a glance there was nothing to be seen but the grey ticking of an ordinary mattress, but on looking closer there was a sort of envelope in it, a slit in the ticking about two feet long, with one edge skilfully overlaid an inch or so, leaving a practically invisible opening.
‘There’s Aunt Liz’s piggy-bank,’ Mr Grimshaw said. ‘It’s an old horsehair mattress, but horsehair’s good stuff, and it’s still comfortable. If you put your hand in you will find that some of the horsehair’s been scooped out, and the place lined with canvas, making a pocket like a big shopping bag. That’s where the money was. I used to tell Aunt Liz not to keep money there, but she wouldn’t listen. She used the bank, of course, but she didn’t wholly trust banks, and she liked to feel that she had a bit of cash handy. I’d no idea there was so much – that’s partly why I didn’t report it as I should have done.’
‘We’re not discussing that,’ Piet said. He put his hand into the mattress, and found the canvas-lined pocket. It certainly seemed empty. But right at the back, against the top of the bag he felt something paper-like. He pulled it out carefully – it was a sheet of postage stamps, the normal 200-stamp-sized sheet, with one stamp missing. Mr Grimshaw was flabbergasted. ‘What on earth would she want to hide a sheet of stamps for?’ he asked. ‘And why didn’t I find them when I took the money?’
‘Because they seem to have been stuck to the top of the bag,’ Piet said. ‘And have a look at the stamps.’
‘They seem ordinary enough stamps.’ He took a closer look. ‘Good Lord, there’s something wrong with them! The Queen’s head is the wrong way round!’
‘Exactly. And we think it was because of these stamps that your aunt was killed. They could be very valuable, you see.’
‘But how did she get hold of them?’
‘It’s a long story, and it will come out later. We think that they were in her stamp-book in the ordinary way, and just before closing-time on the evening before she was killed she sold one of them to a customer. He posted it, and that’s how we came to know about it. After that, it’s guesswork. Your aunt had exceptionally good eyesight, and I think she probably half noticed something odd about the stamp when she sold it. But she was in a hurry, it was closing time, and she didn’t look at the rest of the sheet closely then. When she was tidying up after shutting the shop I think she did examine the stamps, realised their exceptional importance, and rang you. When you couldn’t come, she felt that there was no urgency about things, and put the stamps in her mattress-safe until she could show them to you.’
Mr Grimshaw was silent for a moment. Then he asked, ‘If I had come over, would she still have been murdered?’ He was clearly very unhappy.
Piet tried to help him. ‘No one can say what might have happened if something else had happened first,’ he said. ‘From what we know of what did happen, I don’t think your knowing about the stamps, even if you had taken them away with you, would have made any difference. Your aunt was murdered in an attempt to recover the stamps. Her killer couldn’t find them. Unless you had taken your aunt home with you, I don’t think it would have made any difference.’
‘She wouldn’t have wanted to come home with us. She wouldn’t have agreed if I’d suggested it.’
‘Then try to stop worrying about it. You have nothing to blame yourself for – except, perhaps, a little concealment from the Inland Revenue. I’ve told you how to deal with that.’
XIV
In the Churchyard
SIR GORDON INVITED Piet and Simon to dinner at the Old Rectory. Everything was over. Eric Marshall was back at home with his mother, and an ex gratia payment from the Crown was enough to buy a piano, and to leave a useful sum invested in a building society. Ian Reece and Rebecca Wells had been tried, pleaded guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Neither had attempted a defence. ‘What do you suppose will happen to them?’ Sir Gordon asked.
‘Reece will probably serve life, or something near it,’ Simon reflected. ‘If she behaves, the girl may be released after ten or twelve years. She didn’t take part in the actual killing.’
‘She was responsible for the accusation against Eric Marshall,’ Piet said. ‘That is the vilest feature of the whole case.’
‘Yes, but she didn’t kill an old woman. And in spite of women’s lib, there’s still an edge of sympathy for women convicts.’
‘You may be right, but the whole chain of events was promoted by her scheme for getting rich quick by forging stamps. Without her, Ian Reece would probably soon be coming up for Sergeant.’
‘We can’t apportion guilt,’ Sir Gordon said. ‘The miracle to me is that you were able to get at the truth.’
‘That was straightforward police work. We slipped up badly at the beginning, but thanks to you we were able to make a fresh start.’
‘It was a brilliant forgery.’
‘Rebecca Wells is an extremely able woman, and Ian Reece is very competent, too. They developed a system of photo-lithography that seems almost their own, and practised reversing the head hundreds of times until they got it to perfection. The studio at Miss Wells’s home is full of their experiments. They needed to get hold of the right paper in sufficient quantity to print a sheet. Miss Wells’s first effort was to write to the suppliers on the firm’s paper, forging her boss’s signature, asking for samples of stamp-paper in various different weights. These were duly sent, and, of course, as she opened her employer’s mail, she had no difficulty in getting them without his knowing. They were no good to her, because they were sample widths of paper, not big enough for a sheet. To make sure that there would be no suspicion she duly wrote to the papermakers saying that they’d decided to carry on with the paper they were using. She and Reece thought of breaking into the printing works to get the paper they wanted, but it was too difficult. The place is well guarded at night and at weekends, and inside the works the paper-store is kept securely locked. The opportunity to obtain exactly what she needed by supervising the destruction of the damaged piece of reel was unexpected, and she seized it cleverly. She cut off just what she wanted, and did burn the rest – she made sure that a foreman in the printing works saw her using the incinerator.
‘The next problem was ink. She used her earlier technique of writing to the suppliers for samples of ink in different colours, including the colour in use for these particular stamps. This time her scheme worked. The samples, in tubes rather like toothpaste tubes, gave her just what she needed. She carried on – in her employer’s name – a considerable correspondence with the suppliers, asking about discounts, and tidied up that with a final letter agreeing to accept the price the firm was already paying. She kept no copy of her own letters, but they are all filed by the firms she wrote to, so there is no doubt about what she did. She made a good job of her boss’s signature, and I almost think that he might have accepted the letters as his to try to help her, only by that time we knew too much. He is shattered by the case. He was very fond of her.’
‘How did she get time off to go over to Netherwick on the afternoon before the murder? The managing director was in London, and she was supposed to be looking after his telephone.’
‘She was supposed to be, but the senior secretaries practise a sort of mutual aid scheme when they want to get their hair done, or to do some shopping. Calls can be directed to any extension in the office, and they simply ask one another to take calls for them. Miss Wells got the sales’ manager’s secretary to take her calls that afternoon, and simply went to Netherwick. On the morning of the murder everything happened so early that she was able to get to work at her normal time of 9.30.’
‘Do you think the forgery could have worked?’ Sir Gordon asked.
‘You know more about stamps than I do, but I don’t see why not. It was defeated partly by inadequate reconnaissance, partly by chance. They chose Netherwick Post Office because Ian Reece knew that the Postmistress was an old woman. What he did not know was that she had exceptionally good eyesight. In spite of that, the scheme might still have worked if your friend had not bought a stamp just before closing time. If the sheet had remained untouched Miss Wells might have succeeded in buying all 200 stamps when the Post Office opened in the morning. She had everything prepared – she had a bundle of 200 addressed envelopes to explain her need for so many stamps, and an ingenious little story that the envelopes contained wedding invitations that she had promised to send off for a friend, but had forgotten to buy stamps. It also explained why she was calling at Netherwick. She was on the way to an interview in Oxford, and intended to post the letters there. Seeing the Post Office open as she drove past she realised that it would save time if she bought stamps now instead of having to find a Post Office in Oxford. All this was defeated by the chance arrival of your friend. Knowing that one stamp had gone, they felt they had to get back the others.
‘But chance worked in another way, too, in delaying the delivery of the postcard to you because it was posted in a box that a man tried to set on fire.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He is mad, and very dangerous. After his arrest he deteriorated mentally, and by the time of his trial he was practically a raving lunatic. He was found unfit to plead, and sentenced to be detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure, which means in his case a secure mental hospital. I doubt if he will ever be released.’
‘There’s another thing,’ Simon said. ‘If the postcard had been delivered to you the day after the murder, would you have brought it to the Chief?’
Sir Gordon considered this. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The murder had taken place, the stamp was bought on the evening before it, and I might have felt that the police should know about it. Certainly I ought to have told you about it, but the Marshall boy had only just been arrested, I didn’t know enough about things for the doubts that arose when I heard the evidence at the trial about the flat of the cutlass having been used. I might simply have kept the stamp, puzzled over it, and later taken it to an expert for his opinion on it as a stamp.’
‘I think if you had brought it to us straightaway I should have begun making the sort of inquiries we made later,’ Piet said. ‘But that is one of the “ifs” of history – you didn’t have the postcard, nobody knew anything about the stamp. It’s just a merciful thing that the Post Office did deliver the postcard in the end, late as the delivery was.’
‘What happens to the stamps now?’ Sir Gordon asked.
‘The 199 unused ones found in Mrs Denny’s mattress presumably belong to the Post Office. Anyway, the Post Office has them, and it will either destroy them, or keep them securely locked up as examples of skilful forgery. The used stamp that was delivered to you came back from the Post Office to us for use as evidence at the trial. As there was a plea of guilty such evidence was not required. Our legal department still has it. Probably it belongs to you. Is it of any value now?’
‘As an exposed forgery, not much. It may have a curiosity value of some sort, but I certainly don’t intend to try to sell it. In fact, I don’t want it back. You can either destroy it, or put it in some police museum.’
‘Or frame it, and hang it on the wall of my room as a perpetual reminder not to take evidence at its face value. We have no police museum of our own. The Metropolitan Police have a crime museum – it’s rather a ghoulish place. I can ask them if they’d like the stamp. It has a sort of historical interest, I suppose.’
‘It has a great historical interest, as a scrap of paper that led to justice. I think it should go into a museum, if you can find one.’
‘I can try.’
‘Are you any the worse for your own adventures?’ Simon asked. ‘You played an enormous part in unravelling the case.’
‘I disliked the publicity. I can’t say that I suffered anything worse than the manhandling you gave me in the mud.’
‘I’m afraid your case is going to remain unsolved,’ Piet said.
‘The classical tramp, no doubt. Does he exist any longer?’
‘Oh yes, here and there, but we need not bring him into it. We just couldn’t find your assailant – another police failure.’
‘It led to a much greater triumph.’
*
The three men had much to reflect on. Sir Gordon provided an admirable vintage port, and for a few minutes they savoured this without talking. Then Piet asked, ‘How has the village taken Eric Marshall’s return?’
‘With wholehearted pleasure,’ Sir Gordon said. ‘These villages are less inbred than they used to be, but they are still fairly suspicious in their approach to the outside world. For all their suspicions, though, they are kindly to human suffering – that’s one of the best things about village communities. They may resist new ideas, but if you break your leg someone will offer to go shopping for you. The Marshalls, both Bella and Eric, are such genuinely good people that although they will always remain strangers in a sense, they’re accepted as part of Netherwick. If we could break up our ethnic ghettoes and get the people in them out into the landscape, as it were, there’d be far less bitterness and trouble. That’s what my small fund is trying to do, but, alas, the scale of our work is tiny. I think Netherwick is rather proud of Bella Marshall, and Eric is such a useful lad that they are glad to have him back. The Rector is especially delighted. Have you had a chance to look at the churchyard? The grass is cut again.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.R.L. Anderson was an author of fourteen mystery stories and numerous works of non-fiction. He was a journalist at the Guardian for many years, before retiring to pursue his career as an author. He had a life-long interest in sailing and adventure, which results in many of his novels (as his original author biography from the 1970s puts it) ending ‘with an exciting sea chase in a small boat’.
If you enjoyed Late Delivery, why not try one of our other J.R.L. Anderson titles . . .
Reckoning in Ice
When accountant Richard Garston is summoned to Scotland to meet with the chairman of a multi-million pound company that he is auditing, he has no idea of the danger that lies ahead.
Paul Villeneuve, the scientist and chairman at International Metals, believes somebody is out to steal his latest discovery. And he wants Richard to prove it.
Enlisting the help of Villeneuve’s beautiful daughter, Paula, they set sail for Greenland to follow up on a lead. But with danger lurking round every corner, Richard must keep all of his wits about him and track down the culprit, before the culprit tracks him down.
Brimming with greed, murder and a hair-raising showdown, J.R.L. Anderson’s, Reckoning in Ice, is a crime-lover’s must-read.
The Nine-Spoked Wheel
A family holiday takes a dreadful turn when the Boyce family stumble upon the body of a young archaeologist crushed underneath a fallen rock.
Detective Inspector Revers declares it was murder. Dr Arbolent, the head of the excavation team that the victim worked for, says otherwise.
Then another body is found.
Another deeply suspenseful and shocking mystery by master-of-crime J.R.L. Anderson, The Nine-Spoked Wheel will keep you guessing until the very end.
First published in Great Britain in 1982 by Victor Gollancz Ltd
This ebook edition published in 2015 by
Zaffre Publishing
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Copyright © J.R.L. Anderson, 1982
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-7857-6016-7
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Zaffre Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing Fiction, a Bonnier Publishing company
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JRL Anderson, Late Delivery
