Late Delivery, page 8
‘Has her successor settled in?’
‘Mr Grimshaw. He is Mrs Denny’s nephew, the son of her late sister Violet. Mrs Denny had no children and she had always planned to leave Mr Grimshaw the shop. He is no stranger to the village, for in the past few years, as Mrs Denny got older, he used to come quite often to help her.’
‘Did he work locally before he took on the Post Office?’
‘No. He was a self-employed plasterer, working for contractors in the Reading area. Between jobs he would come over to help his aunt. He is well liked, I think. He runs the Post Office and the shop efficiently, and although I wouldn’t hear a word against Mrs Denny, I think it must be admitted that in some ways he has improved the shop. Mrs Denny was growing old and she didn’t always know what younger people want to buy nowadays. Mr Grimshaw carries a larger and more varied stock.’
‘Well, I must be getting on,’ Piet said. ‘Thank you for your sherry, and for sparing the time to talk to me.’
‘My dear sir, we are in your debt for a most beautiful and, I am sure, valuable picture! I wish I could offer you lunch, but Marjorie and I have been invited to a luncheon by the Rural Dean, and you will understand that we must go. Do, please, give us notice next time you come to Netherwick, and we shall be delighted if you could stay for a meal.’
Piet said that of course he understood. He was back in his office by five minutes to two.
*
At half-past two his secretary came in to say that a Mr Samuel Evans wished to see him urgently. ‘You have a Traffic Committee at three thirty,’ she added.
‘I shall have time for Mr Evans. Bring him in,’ Piet said.
‘I’ve been working most of the night and all this morning on your problem,’ Mr Evans said. ‘I thought that you would like such facts as I have gathered forthwith, so I came down at once.’
‘It is more than good of you.’
‘Well, I don’t know that you will like what I have learned – everything suggests that the stamp on that postcard cannot exist.’
‘It is there to be seen.’
‘I know. We were able to identify the printers quickly, and I thought it sufficiently important to call on the managing director at his home last night. He lives just outside Oxford – his firm is one of the most distinguished in the business. He accepted that the stamp is printed on his paper and appears to have his ink, but he assures me that it couldn’t possibly happen. The stamps are printed from metal plates, electronically scanned, and on the slightest sign of wear or imperfection a plate is replaced. He does not see how a reversed head could conceivably occur during the printing process.’
‘Yet it did.’
‘He is going to talk to his technical experts today, and has promised to come to London to see me tomorrow. But he is convinced that such a stamp could not have been produced at his plant, let alone have left his premises.’
‘The plant is not in the area of my Force. I can, of course, get police inquiries made there, but in the circumstances I’d rather leave things to you. When you see him tomorrow, can you find out if any abnormal incident, however apparently trivial, occurred at his works within the past year or so? We know that the stamp existed on April 7 so it must have been before that, but it may have been some time before.’
‘I can try. He is as anxious as we are to get to the bottom of it, but if anything unusual can now be recalled is another matter. Now let me tell you of the Post Office end. There is a secret batch-mark invisible to the eye and identifiable only by electronic means, on all consignments of stamps delivered to us; it is in the paper. It would appear that this stamp came from a batch delivered in September last year. No stamps from this particular batch went to Hungerford, or anywhere near it – all were dispatched to Head Post Offices in the North of England. No abnormality in any of them has been reported. Our stamp purchasing division says it is impossible that a sheet of reversed-head stamps would not be noticed.’
‘At least we have a date. When you see your managing director you might ask him to think back particularly to the period around August and September last year. How long is it before newly printed stamps are normally distributed to the Post Office?’
‘Not long – a matter of days in most cases. Stocks of stamps are held by the Post Office, not at the printing firms.’
‘So much the better. That narrows the period over which something may have happened to this batch of stamps. How are they delivered? Can you trace their journey?’
‘They are delivered by security van, loaded at the printers, and unloaded at Post Office headquarters. This consignment has already been gone into. There was nothing in the least abnormal about it. The stamps, several hundred thousand of them, were checked and signed for by a Post Office official.’
‘Well, we must see what more you can discover from the printers. How about local deliveries from Hungerford to Netherwick?’
‘The last relevant delivery was on Thursday, April 2. There were no first class stamps of that denomination supplied on that day. A sheet had been sent out the previous week, and Mrs Denny had not asked for any more. You will recall that ordinary stamps for first class mail were sent to her every other week, unless she specifically ordered some.’
‘So this extraordinary stamp could scarcely have come from a new sheet on April 7.’
‘It would seem unlikely, though of course I don’t know what stock she had.’
‘Is there any way of finding out?’
‘She kept her ledger written up weekly. The ledger is in the hands of the Post Office, for an incoming sub-Postmaster is supplied with a new ledger. The ledger can easily be examined, but it will not be conclusive evidence of her stock on any one day, for she entered daily stamp sales in her rough account book. I don’t know where her rough notebooks are. Possibly the present sub-Postmaster still has them.’
‘That can be gone into. Have you had any lunch?’
‘Actually no. I drove here to see you without bothering about lunch.’
‘We must feed our vital witnesses.’ Piet glanced at his watch. ‘I have to attend a wretched meeting in a few minutes’ time, but my secretary will look after you. The police can always produce food of some sort, and usually it is quite good. You have done wonders in getting on with things so quickly. I’m afraid I shall go on needing your help. Now I must go to my meeting, and you must eat.’
*
It wasn’t until he took the chair at the Traffic Committee that Piet realised that he hadn’t had any lunch either. Oh, well, nothing could be done about that now. Doubtless there would be some tea and biscuits at the ratepayers’ expense.
There were, and they were needed, for the meeting dragged on inexorably. It was an assembly of representatives of all the local authorities in Piet’s constabulary, each determined to press the needs, or imagined needs, of his or her particular locality, each, as is the way of local politicians, eager to show how zealously he or she was promoting the interests of the voters. Piet was an impartial chairman, doing his best to ensure that resources for providing school crossing patrols were shared fairly, and that demands for new traffic lights or roundabouts would be presented effectively to the Ministry of Transport. But only half his mind was concerned with traffic lights and roundabouts. The rest was thinking urgently about impossible postage stamps, and their possible bearing on the Netherwick murder. When a formidable woman was demanding (what was beyond the power of the committee) that more Government money should be provided for moving bus shelters to more convenient stopping places in her town, Piet made up his mind. He would have to disclose the new evidence in the Netherwick case.
How, and to whom, was less easy to decide. At six thirty, when the meeting finally broke up, his faithful secretary was still waiting for him. He asked her to get hold of his Assistant Chief Constable and the Chief Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department to invite them to a meeting at his home at eight thirty that evening to discuss a most urgent matter that had arisen suddenly. Knowing that whatever else they had planned for the evening they would come, Piet went home for the meal he was now rather badly in need of.
*
Grahame Stevenson, the Assistant Chief Constable, was considerably older than Piet, and within a couple of years of retirement. He had been with the North Wessex Force for twenty-five years, and promotion had come to him for stolid rather than spectacular achievement. He knew that he himself would never have made a Chief Constable, and he was genuinely grateful for his promotion, which he felt he owed largely to Piet. In spite of his limitations, he was an invaluable deputy, with vast experience of police work, and a native shrewdness that enabled him to put two and two together consistently, and with results that were often psychologically as well as arithmetically accurate. Simon Begbroke, the Chief Superintendent of Piet’s CID, was younger and, with reason, more ambitious. He had joined the police through the graduate entry scheme and had won quick promotion by hard work allied to keen intelligence and a remarkably disciplined mind. Piet thought that he would go far, deservedly.
The two arrived together, within a minute of eight thirty. Piet took them into his study. ‘It’s thundering good of you to come at such short notice,’ he said. ‘I feel mean about not inviting you to a meal, but I’d had no food since breakfast, and after that dreary meeting of the Traffic Committee I was feeling a bit sick. I wouldn’t have been much of a host. Let me get you a drink, anyway. You’ll need it. I’ve got myself involved in a situation that, at the moment, frankly is beyond me.’
‘If it’s beyond you, Chief, it will probably be beyond the lot of us,’ Simon Begbroke observed loyally.
‘It can’t be. It’s got to be sorted out. I’ll begin at the beginning, but I must warn you that it’s a long story.’
Piet told it well, starting with Sir Gordon Gregory’s visit to him after the trial. He spoke like a good judge summing up, omitting nothing, but trying not to over-emphasise anything. He concluded, ‘The main problems now seem to me to be these:
1.Where did the stamp come from?
2.How did it get into Netherwick Post Office?
3.Did the shop doorbell ring, or not, when Eric Marshall entered the place?
4.Why were there no blood stains on the notes found in his room?
5.Why was the flat of his bush knife used, apparently against all West Indian custom?
6.What has happened to the poker in Mrs Denny’s grate? Tongs and shovel are there, but no poker.’
Grahame Stevenson broke the tension here by laughing. ‘I could give you a hundred answers to your last question, Piet,’ he said. ‘Maybe there wasn’t one, and Mrs Denny brought one in from her kitchen when she needed it. Maybe the new owner didn’t like it. Maybe he has a boat on the Thames and uses the poker as a stake for driving into the bank when tying up. The simplest thing is to ask him.’
‘Yes, but how? I don’t want him to know that anybody is in the least interested in his poker. That’s my trouble with all the rest of it. It’s not that I don’t know what to do – I don’t know how to do it.’
Begbroke had been following Piet’s every word. ‘You’ve been very fair, you haven’t mentioned any of the assumptions you have made from these events,’ he said. ‘But you don’t need to – the assumptions make themselves. Everything suggests that nothing like the full facts of the case were brought out, either by our own inquiries, or at the trial. It doesn’t follow that there has been a miscarriage of justice – the boy may have been an accomplice in some plot to deal with the stamps. But that means there are other people involved, who have yet to be caught. Whatever way you look at it, the case will have to be reopened.’
‘Yes, but again, how?’ Piet said. ‘As things are, somebody – it may be person or persons – thinks that the case is over and done with, and that whatever plan there may have been has succeeded. We haven’t the slightest idea who may be involved. The present Postmaster, Mrs Denny’s nephew, seems a good sort and well-liked in the village, but for all we know he may be a villain. That is why I don’t want him to know that the police may be interested in his aunt’s poker. If we do nothing, the next thing will be the appearance on the market of one or more of these extraordinary stamps. That might give us a lead to the identity of whoever is behind the stamps. But it may mean waiting quite a long time. Meanwhile that West Indian boy, who, for all Simon says may equally be innocent, remains a convicted murderer serving a life sentence.’
‘How much are these stamps worth?’ Stevenson asked.
‘Nobody is prepared to give even an estimate. If they are genuine, that is, if they actually came from a Post Office printer and were duly issued to the Post Office, a great deal of money. Even if they are only believed to be genuine, there would be substantial sums to be made while the belief lasts. I’ve been doing a bit of research in stamp dealers’ catalogues. The most valuable stamp in the world is a locally printed British Guiana one, from the days when what was British Guiana was a crown colony. Only one of these stamps is known to exist and it is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, perhaps millions. Other rare stamps can be worth tens of thousands. A defect in a standard British issue is so rare that the stamp on that postcard would be bid for all over the world. I can’t guess a price, and if we are right there are 199 more of them remaining on the sheet. That would reduce the value, but 199 stamps is not much for the world market. Pull a figure out of the air and say ten thousand pounds apiece. That would make the remainder of the sheet worth the best part of two million pounds.’
‘Big money,’ Stevenson said.
‘Yes, but it can be realised only by high-grade intelligence in marketing. I think it would need at least two or three people working together. I don’t see how one eighteen-year-old West Indian youth could possibly have had the resources for such planning.’
‘Then you’re inclined to accept the boy’s story, improbable as it sounds,’ Begbroke said.
‘I don’t know. In the light of later events, it seems much less improbable than it did. I wish the defence had been better briefed at the trial. They didn’t really make much of a fight.’
‘It’s hard to see how they could.’ Stevenson was speaking from a lifetime of experience. ‘It was an open and shut case – even defence counsel didn’t really think there could be any defence. And don’t forget there was direct evidence of the best sort – impartial police evidence – that the shop door was secure only a short time before it was broken into.’
‘I’m not forgetting it – it bothers me more than almost anything else. I’ve lived with the papers, and I can repeat PC Ian Reece’s evidence by heart.
At 05.30 on the morning of Wednesday, April 8, I drove through Netherwick on a normal police patrol. In accordance with routine instructions I stopped outside the Post Office, got out of the car, and tried the door of the Post Office shop. It was securely fastened – bolted, I presumed, although I could not see the bolts from outside. I drove away to continue my patrol at approximately 05.32.
‘Unhappily, he wasn’t really cross-examined. He tells us merely that he tried the door. We don’t know if the door opened easily, or stiffly – I think we slipped up there in our own inquiries later. It is just possible that PC Reece gave the door only a rather gentle push. He would be expecting it to be locked. He was simply carrying out a routine check, which, on his own evidence took about two minutes, including getting out of the car and getting back in again.’
‘PC Reece has been in the Force for six or seven years,’ Stevenson said. ‘He was commended for the arrest of that hit-and-run driver last year, who killed two people and tried to get away by driving a big Mercedes at speeds of over 100 mph. Reece did a brave and thoroughly efficient job there. I see no reason to doubt his evidence.’
‘I didn’t say that there was. All I feel is that in the light of what we know now his evidence may be less conclusive than it seemed at the trial. If by any chance the boy’s story is true, then I think the door must have been unlocked at 05.30. If the boy is telling the truth and the door was open when he got there around 06.30, and PC Reece’s evidence is also accurate, then it must have been broken into in early daylight between 05.30 and 06.30 – possible, of course, but it would seem unlikely.’
‘PC Reece can easily be questioned again,’ Stevenson said. ‘I’d imagine he’d stand by what he said before. But if he knows about the new evidence he might admit to not trying the door very hard. Come to think of it, it’s reasonable that he shouldn’t. He wouldn’t want to wake the Postmistress, and perhaps frighten her, by rattling at the door.’
‘That’s just it. If he knows about the new evidence and simply repeats the evidence he gave at the trial we’re stuck where we are. I’d like to know a lot more about things before we go back to PC Reece.’
‘You can scarcely reopen the case without sending men to go over the old ground. And I don’t see how you can start without bringing in PC Reece.’
Simon Begbroke had been leaving things to the Assistant Chief Constable. He came in now, observing ‘I think I agree with the Chief. If we use the same men to go over the old ground in such an open-and-shut case, however honestly they try, they are not likely to feel things differently. And with Gray and Clifford commended by the judge at the trial, it would be difficult not to put them on the job again.’
‘Sergeant Clifford is no problem, because he’s left the Force.’ Piet explained about the sergeant’s sudden retirement, and his taking over of the inn at Netherwick. ‘Inspector Gray is a problem. What do you know of him, Simon?’
‘Nothing except to his good. He has an excellent record. I’ve worked with him on various cases. If he has a fault I’d say he was a bit unimaginative, but then most of us are.’
