Hang The Little Man Read online

  “Meaning he came prepared to kill? With a treacle tin?”

  “You don’t need to carry a weapon,” Roger said. “If you came to kill, you could use your hands or anything handy.”

  “Couldn’t be overdoing this angle, could you?” inquired Appleby mildly.

  “Oh, I could be,” Roger admitted. “As Bellew pointed out, these shop raids often come in waves. But there have been a hell of a lot, and there’s obviously a possibility of big scale organisation.”

  “Could be, I daresay,” conceded Appleby. “So you’re worried about shop crimes in general, and this one is particularly puzzling.”

  “That’s it.”

  Appleby said: “How many robberies are known to have been by the same man?”

  “I talked to several witnesses, and the description in each case was different,” Roger said. “The differences were much more than the usual variation in description because of differing powers of observation. Different men were almost certainly involved.”

  “And when you check in the morning, you may find that this one is different, too,” observed Appleby. “Any common factor at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t h-h-hold out on me.”

  “Whenever violence was done, something found in the raided shop was used as a weapon,” Roger said. “More often than not it was a bottle—such as a bottle of orange squash. A tin or a can was used on two jobs. Twice—” He broke off, for his memory was ticking over very fast, while he was recalling the circumstances of cases which he had not himself handled. “Twice a bacon knife was used. The weapon was always left in the shop, too.”

  “Handsome, I can see you’re worried,” said Appleby, “but who would organise small-time robberies like that?” When Roger made no comment, Appleby went on: “Do you know how much was stolen tonight?”

  “Just under fifty pounds in cash, and about a hundred pounds’ worth of cigarettes and chocolates. Bellew got the figures for me. There’s a girl assistant at the shop, who goes to technical college on Thursday afternoons. She was able to say what the stocks had been this morning, so we know that the total taken was a hundred and fifty poundsworth, at the most.”

  “Do that often enough, and it spells money,” remarked Appleby.

  “But with an organisation there are a lot of people to share it with,” Roger pointed out. He was whirling the whisky and soda round in his glass as he went on: “I know what you mean, though. If these raids are organised by a receiver who pays cash for the stolen goods, say, he would get the goods for next to nothing, and the thief would keep the cash. One receiver could have ten or a dozen or twenty people doing the jobs, too, but—”

  Appleby broke in: “Can anyone employ a dozen or twenty raiders all prepared to kill?”

  Roger didn’t answer, and before Appleby could make any other comment, footsteps sounded at the door, and he stepped across to open it. His wife came in carrying a tray with lettuce, tomato, the pink succulence of a piece of fresh salmon, brown bread, biscuits, butter and cheese.

  “Don’t I get fed too?” demanded Appleby.

  “If you eat anything else tonight, I’ll leave you,” said Dorothy Appleby. “You’re getting disgustingly fat. Now if you had a figure like Mr. West, you could eat as much as you liked. Tea, coffee or beer, Mr. West?”

  V

  BODY

  NEARLY a week later, on the Thursday morning, Roger made a dash for the front of his garage, where his younger son, Richard, was pushing open the door against the whiplike fury of a gale-force wind. Low clouds scudded, sometimes almost as low as the rooftops in this pleasant Chelsea street. Trees which had been fresh looking and picture-pretty a week before were bowed down by a wind which howled and whined and carried bucketsful of rain, splashing and hissing. A corner of Roger’s lawn was under inches of rippling water. Beds of antirrhinums, asters, delphiniums and geraniums were waving about as if in desperate panic.

  “Coo, what a morning,” Richard exclaimed. “Think it’s safe to drive, Dad?”

  “I’ll manage,” Roger said, dryly. “Put that mac over your head and run for it. You’ll have to leave ten minutes earlier for school this morning.”

  “Be a jolly good excuse for being late,” Richard said, and added a little wistfully: “We’re hardly ever late.” He gave a bright grin, hitched the mackintosh up, and said: “ ‘Bye, Dad. Catch lots of crooks!” and made a dive for the open front door. Janet was there, to wave, then to look gloomily on the wreckage of the garden.

  Near the corner of Bell Street some slates had been blown off a roof; at the corner the whiplash fury of the wind caught a struggling cyclist and made him get off his machine. Three cars were crawling along, not daring to pass. Roger fell into line. It was nearly half past eight, and he was due at the Yard at nine o’clock for some special briefing on a jewellery smash-and-grab job which had set the Yard by the ears and the Press by the headline the previous day. This morning’s newspapers hadn’t yet arrived; when they did, the smash-and-grab job would have priority. By bad luck it had taken place within a stone’s throw of Savile Row Police Station; there would be some raucous Press comments about it.

  Roger felt virtually sure of one thing; this would prise him off the investigation into Mabel Stone’s murder, and he didn’t know whether to be pleased or sorry. He had made very little progress, although he had concentrated on the inquiry and touched practically nothing else. He had interviewed hundreds of people who had seen or might have seen the murderer, but there was still no real clue to his identity.

  Almost certainly because Mrs. Stone had been expecting the child, the newspapers had given the murder and the subsequent hunt much more space than most shop robberies—more, in fact, than Roger could remember on any of them; usually there was nothing spectacular or really sensational about that kind of sordid crime. But he could not complain of the support the Press had given him. An Echo artist had drawn a composite picture of the man seen to leave the shop, gleaned from many neighbours’ accounts, and the picture had taken up a lot of the front page not only of the Echo but of theSunday Globe, with its six million circulation.

  Reports, all valueless, had come in from all over London. Bellew as well as a section of the Yard had spent the whole week sifting through these, and while no one had yet said so, Roger expected to be taken off the job this morning. It would become a simple matter of routine, and he would be reassigned later if anything new came in.

  If he had a complaint, it was that none of his superiors had been impressed by his “organised shop robbery” theory. Closer inspection of all the records had shown a lot of differences among the crimes, and the variations in the descriptions of the thieves had been very wide.

  “Shouldn’t waste much time on that angle,” the Commander of the Criminal Investigation Department had said, and that had been tantamount to an order.

  One of the unexpected things to develop had been a growth of liking for Jim Stone. One met murderers, witnesses, victims, and the relatives of victims, and they passed before one rather like pictures on a screen, real and vivid enough at the moment of contact, but soon half forgotten. Stone made a deep impression, partly because of his cold and deliberate persistence in saying that he meant to find the murderer, and kill him; partly because there was something clean cut and likeable about him. In a way, and although he was twice Martin’s age, Stone reminded Roger of his own older son.

  A pleasant but ugly girl named Gwen Fowey was looking after the shop, with temporary help.

  After the day of the funeral, Monday, Stone himself had made the local deliveries, but he had coupled this with questions to neighbours, nearby shop keepers, and others he knew, about the appearance of the killer. He did all this with a single-minded application which suggested that whatever the cost he meant to track down the man. Roger began to wonder whether the highly improbable would happen, whether Stone would find a clue to the killer’s identity. If he did, he certainly wouldn’t come to the police.

  The si
tuation could become delicate and difficult.

  Roger slowed down to turn into the Yard as rain in huge drops scudded across it. He had seldom seen the courtyard so empty, and all the spaces near the doors were filled. He had a struggle to get the car door open, then staggered across to the main entrance, went up the long flight of stone steps, and paused at the top to get his breath back and to shake the rain off his trilby and his raincoat.

  “Talk about flaming June,” complained the sergeant on duty at the top of the steps. “Just about the worst basinful we’ve had for years, sir, ain’t it?”

  “Remember we had summer last week,” Roger said mechanically, and went up with four others in the lift, then along to his office, which was quite small, but had that river view. The Chief Inspector who normally worked with him was on holiday, and he was managing with temporary and spasmodic help. On his desk was the usual pile of reports, a big fat folder of the Stone case, and pinned to it a pencilled note:

  “Please telephone Mr. Bellew.”

  Roger picked up a telephone at once, for the Stone case was still on top of his mind. Two Chief Inspectors looked in, but didn’t stay. Roger nodded to them, then saw another note on his desk:

  “Commander’s Conference postponed to 10.30.”

  “Get me Clapham—Mr. Bellew,” Roger said, and held on. Bellew was an early bird, and his day seldom started later than eight o’clock. Roger sat on the corner of his brown pedestal desk, swinging one leg, looking out of the window and just able to see the wind whipping the Thames into foot high waves. Clouds actually misted the top of the County Hall.

  Bellew said: “That you, Handsome?”

  “What’s on, Jack?”

  “We’ve got a body I want you and young Stone to see. Can you come right over?”

  The obvious answer was “No” in view of the morning’s conference. Roger hesitated.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “If you swear that it’s vitally urgent.”

  “It’s vitally urgent,” Bellew declared. “Come straight to my office, will you? The body’s in our morgue.”

  Roger watched the morgue attendant as he switched on the light over the top of a stone slab where a body lay covered by a sheet of green canvas. The man, elderly and plump and rubicund, seemed to take a delight in what he was doing, pulling down a corner of the sheet with almost loving care. As Roger watched, he realised that this was deliberate; Bellew had laid it on. Bellew was standing by his, Roger’s side, with an unmistakable air of expectancy. At first this was puzzling, for the corpse’s short hair was between colours, the forehead smoothed in death to an alabaster-like pallor, and all seemed ordinary enough. Then the face took on a different meaning—it was virtually the face of the Echoartist’s drawing. When the sheet was down and folded beneath the chin, the chin itself showed sharper and more pointed, but that was the main difference.

  “How did he die?” asked Roger.

  Bellew said: “Turn him over, Sergeant.”

  “Take it easy,” Roger said. “Appleby ought to have a look at him.”

  “Don’t want Appleby for this,” said Bellew. He helped the attendant to turn the body over, and to show the half-dozen or more stab wounds in the back. Roger, used to such sights, frowned at this one.

  “Now I’ve got a bit of news for you,” went on Bellew. “There were some tacky spots on the coat, trousers and on one shoe. I did a quick test. It was syrup.”

  Roger said: “Well, well.”

  “And if you doubt who this chap is, look,” said Bellew, and lifted a flaccid hand. “See the torn nail of the right forefinger? He killed Mabel Stone all right. The picture was so good that this chap was bound to be found sooner or later. Think he was killed to stop him from talking?”

  “Could be,” Roger said, cautiously. He was wondering what his superiors would say if he worried them on that theory again. “Do you know who he is?”

  “Nothing in his pockets, but there was a find in his trousers pocket, a cleaning mark they overlooked,” answered Bellew. “We’ll trace him all right, and you’ve got another murder investigation on your hands. The big boys can’t take you off it now, even if they are annoyed by the smash-and-grab job.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Roger.

  Later that day however, he was told to concentrate on the stabbing murder.

  By the evening all newspapers carried a photograph of the dead man, and copies of the photograph were at all London and Home Counties Police Stations. A team of Yard and Divisional men worked through the dry cleaners of the East End of London, and in the middle of the following afternoon, just a week after the murder of Mrs. Stone, the manager of a small firm with five branches identified not only the tag, but also the dead man. He was Lionel Endicott, he lived at Brasher’s Row, Whitechapel, he was married to a girl much younger than himself—a girl in her early twenties, whereas Endicott, according to the information, was in his middle forties. That squared with the medical estimate.

  Just before five o’clock on that same afternoon, Roger turned into Brasher’s Row’s narrow gloom, saw the terraces of little houses on either side, the unending drabness, and the children playing in the wet streets, for the storm had died down during the night although it had only just stopped raining.

  It was sticky and warm, many front doors and windows were open, but the door and the window of Number 37, where Endicott had lived, was tightly closed. Roger pulled up just opposite this door, and a dozen kids ran towards him. Almost as soon as he stopped several more windows went up, and more women and men appeared at doorways. Roger was quite sure that word of his progress had preceded him in every street in this neighbourhood, and the people had simply wondered where he was going to call. He got out, and the Divisional Detective Sergeant with him followed, from the other side of the car.

  Roger glanced up, saw a curtain move, and saw a woman’s face at the window. He could not mistake the fear in her eyes.

  VI

  FEAR

  RUTH ENDICOTT had been frightened since half past eight that morning, although at first the fear had been vague and shadowy. During the day, it had grown to gigantic proportions, to a state of terror, and although this had subsided, it flared up again when she saw the black car slide to a standstill outside her tiny house.

  The first realisation that something was wrong had come on waking. She had been alone in bed. At night, she often was. She had learned to expect Lionel to come in late, often in the early hours of the morning, just as she had learned to expect a lot of other things: Lionel’s violent outbursts of temper, his cruelty whenever she annoyed him, cruelty so different from his demanding amiability when he was in a good mood. Looking back, she still couldn’t understand why she had married him, except for his money. It had really been a combination of circumstances, including being sick to death of living in a small back room, all that she could afford, and sick to death of being pestered by men because she lived alone. She had been overjoyed that one of them thought enough of her to offer marriage.

  The odd thing was that Lionel had given her everything he had promised. The little house was well-furnished and newly decorated, they had a 21-inch television set, a record player, a washing-machine, a fridge—everything a housewife could want—and in that way at least she was the envy of her neighbours.

  But on the whole, apart from those occasions when he lost his temper and seemed to go crazy, life wasn’t so bad. She could never understand his wild outbursts, but had a vague kind of impression that he was taking something out on her—that someone else was kicking him, and he had a temperament which made him want to hurt someone in return. Only twice had he marked her permanently: once when he had struck her on the ear with a heavy mug, so that the ear lobe had split; and once when he had smashed a dinner plate on her hand. She still had a scar on the back of that hand, red and unsightly.

  She did not know for certain what Lionel did for a living, and he never talked about it. Once, when she had asked him, he had flown into one of those w
ild rages; that had taught her that it was useless, even dangerous, to probe. Nowadays she never asked questions, no matter how late he got home. She always felt certain that he would be by her side in the mornings; he could be so considerate that he often got into bed without waking her, certainly without disturbing her.

  When she first woke that morning she couldn’t understand the coolness at her back. She turned her head, and saw his empty pillow. It was so smooth that she knew he hadn’t been to bed at all, although it was broad daylight. She stretched out a bare arm for the bedside clock, to turn it round so that she could see it more clearly; it was nearly a quarter to eight. She took a few minutes to wake up properly, and then hitched herself up in bed. It was still strange not to look down and see Lionel, grubby and dirty because he always needed a shave so badly in the mornings—he used an electric razor and had never really learned how to shave properly with it.

  Ruth Endicott pushed back the sheet and got out of bed, catching a glimpse of herself in the tall wall mirror which Lionel had placed there when getting the house ready. He insisted on her wearing only one of the new fashioned, very short pyjama suits, without the pants; and if he was awake when she got up, he liked to lie there and look at her and also her reflection when she first got out of bed. She did not realise that it was simply by habit that she now sat on the side of the bed and unfastened the ribbon-tapes of the jacket at the neck, where they were loosely tied, and slipped the jacket off her shoulders. She always had a moment’s sensuous pleasure when she saw herself like that, knowing that her body was seductively beautiful. Sometimes she even got a thrill out of the way Lionel edged towards her, and from the expression on his face. At those moments his lips were always moist; he drooled.

  She stretched, yawned, tapped her mouth, and then stretched out for her panties, bra and slip. She went along to the bathroom, which had been installed before they had moved in. Very few houses in Brasher’s Row boasted a bathroom. She had acquired another habit, of a quick morning bath while the kettle came to the boil on a low gas.