No Relaxation At Scotland Yard Page 8

  Oswald opened the letter, which was from the Divisional Superintendent; the gist was that he should report at four o’clock at Headquarters, and if questioned by newspapermen “or any other person” he was to say nothing. He read through the newspaper story again and went to bathe and shave. He was delighted with his recognition, deeply satisfied that he had passed his first real test so well, yet still nagged by the memory of the man on the bicycle. There had been something about the way the man had averted his face, and pedalled so stiffly, almost as if he had a guilty conscience. Oswald heard a ring at the front door and suspected another newspaperman, but Mrs. Stilwell let this caller in and a woman’s voice sounded.

  The woman was still talking, over sizzling bacon and spluttering eggs, when he went downstairs; the little dining room was off the old-fashioned kitchen. Mrs. Stilwell came out with a laden plate, and there was toast, butter, and marmalade already on the table. He sensed something in the air as the caller, a near neighbour, looked over Mrs. Stilwell’s shoulder. Of course it might simply be that she had come to greet the hero. Oswald, who had a natural humility, was already laughing at himself.

  “Well,” the neighbour said. “Go on, tell him.”

  “Elsie, do let him have his breakfast first.”

  “You tell him or I shall,” declared Elsie. “It isn’t often you have a chance to tell a copper anything about crime.”

  Oswald’s heart missed a beat. It was now apparent that she hadn’t come about his previous night’s success. There was something else. Elsie was a short, very tubby woman in her early thirties, with plain features and a spotty skin but quite dazzling pale honey-brown eyes and beautiful silky golden hair. Her lips were red and very moist; whenever he saw her he thought her one of the most sensuous women he had ever met – or was voluptuous the word?

  “What’s been going on?” he inquired, slicing into an egg so that the bright yellow yolk oozed out over one of the three crisp rashers of bacon.

  Elsie breathed: “Murder!”

  Mrs. Stilwell said in a choky voice: “There’s been a murder, in Ealing.”

  “On our doorstep,” Elsie gasped.

  “Near where you were last night,” Mrs. Stilwell told him. “In Caerphilly Road.”

  He thought: Caerphilly Road, off Cardiff Street. For a moment he felt almost too choked to eat, but he knew he must not show too much excitement, so he put bacon and egg into his mouth, ate it, and then said:

  “You’ve been dreaming.”

  “Oh, no, I haven’t,” Elsie insisted, her eyes becoming even brighter. “It was on the radio at half-past one, don’t you make any mistake about that. It said a girl had been suffocated with her own pillow. You can’t even be safe in your own bed at night! They didn’t find her until someone came round from her office – she worked at Hammersmith – to see why she hadn’t turned up, and when there was no answer the landlord opened her door – it’s a house of bed-sitter flatlets, you see, like mine – and they found her, absolutely dead she was, been dead for hours . . .”

  Oswald did not interrupt, nor did he take everything in, except the fact that the woman had been murdered about the time he had caught the two men at the shop.

  Rosamund Lee’s lovely body, stiff now with rigor mortis, was on a mortuary slab, and would soon be under the post mortem examination.

  In the north of England her mother and father had been told of her death, and the mother was in a state of shock.

  In the heart of London, only a few buildings away from Mayhew & Company, Importers and Exporters, David Wells was at his desk. Most of the time he was able to concentrate on the figures and the analyses on which he was working, but every now and again a strange chill took possession of him and the figures and the letters blurred. Whenever this happened he gripped his pen tightly and raised his head and stared at the plain calendar pinned to the wall in front of his desk. After a while he began to realise what caused these spasms, in which he could see Rosamund in his mind’s eye, could almost feel her closeness.

  There was a girl, Lucy Chalmers, at a desk behind him, typing most of the time. But occasionally someone would move across and speak to her, and when she spoke back she sounded like Rosamund.

  It was getting worse.

  Clenching his fists did not drive the chill away any more. Instead it seemed to send it coursing through his whole body. And it took longer to get back to the job again, it was more difficult to concentrate. But he had to, because there was so much to do; and also because there were dozens of others in the office who would notice if he behaved oddly.

  He did not know that Lucy Chalmers was watching him, wondering what was worrying him.

  At his home, in Chiswick, not very far from Ealing, his wife, Ellen, was baking scones, which he liked, and preparing a Lancashire hot pot, which he liked, and wondering which book he would like from the library, just around the corner. All of these things occupied her mind a little, but what most concerned her was how to keep the children quiet when he came home. She had become more and more aware that they got on his nerves with their shouting and squabbling; he hadn’t anything like the patience with them that he’d shown a year ago, although they had been just as noisy then.

  Behind all this preoccupation was another: about their own relationship, David’s and hers.

  She had known years ago that he had affaires before they were married – she had been one of them. She never knew why he had married her but for several years had been contented. She had always been able to tell when he had been out with another woman; he invariably brought her flowers or chocolates! Or, before the days when baby-sitters were needed, he had taken her to the theatre or the pictures. And all the time he had been gay with her, and ready to help with household chores.

  Two years ago, soon after the birth of their third child, he had begun to change. Everything he did with her was an effort. Often he would be short-tempered. She feared she was going to lose him, and tried desperately to find a way to keep him or at least to hold the house together.

  What would she do if he left her?

  Apart from the agony it would mean to her, how could she manage with the children?

  He had been out last night, she knew, but he had come home eventually; the awful thing would be if, one day, he simply did not return to her.

  On the other side of London, in Tottenham, another woman was thinking about her problems, which could hardly have been more different. She was Netta Jameson, wife of an alcoholic with whom she had not lived for ten years and from whom she had not received a penny in all that time. She had once been desperately in love with him and had lived through the anguish of a dying love; first his, then hers. It had not seriously occurred to her that she would ever fall in love again, and if she had a deep regret it was that she had never had a child. For the past ten years she had first managed and then become part owner of a small but exclusive fur salon in Tottenham, from which she earned a comfortable three thousand pounds a year, after paying tax. She was never at a loss for an escort but only very seldom took a lover, and then invariably out of a kind of compassion, not out of any deep feeling.

  One day, over a year ago, the salon had been burgled, and nearly everything of value had been taken. Although the salon was fully covered by insurance, the raid had made her very angry.

  The local police had not soothed her, although they had used platitude after platitude. There were a lot of fur robberies, it was never possible to be sure whether the stock would be recovered, had she taken the right precautions? There had even seemed a hint that she was partly to blame for not installing the most expensive and up-to-date burglar alarm. She had not hesitated to show her anger, and had demanded to see a senior officer from Scotland Yard. It had seemed unlikely that the police would ever send such a man.

  To this day she could remember when Matt Honiwell had first appeared.

 
She had been alone in the shop, her partner and an assistant being out having coffee, when he had come in. It did not occur to her that he was a policeman, he looked so—well, not untidy, not ruffled or rumpled, just not official-looking. An uncle of a man. He had closed the door carefully behind him, smiled – and, as she had advanced toward him, seemed to freeze.

  And, in a way, she had gone still and cold, too.

  He said afterward that it had not been simply because she was the most attractive woman he had ever seen but that something seemed to have exploded within him. He had been warned to expect a shrew, and found instead a Venus. He had been dumbstruck. At last he had thawed, and soon astonished her by introducing himself as Chief Superintendent Honiwell of the C.I.D.

  “You are a Scotland Yard man?” she had exclaimed.

  “I know I don’t look the part, and that fools a lot of people,” he had replied in a pleasant voice which was not too deep. He had good features, although then – as now – he had been a little too fat. Well, plump. “There has been a series of burglaries from fur salons lately,” he had gone on to say, “and all of them have been from shops fitted with the same make of burglar alarms. May I see yours?”

  It had been one of the kind he had been looking for.

  On it he had found a smear of a fingerprint.

  From this print he had been able to make some arrests, and had recovered most of the goods stolen from her stock. On the day when he had come to tell her so, he had asked, to her great surprise:

  “Will you have dinner with me tonight, to celebrate?”

  And, accepting, she had been amazed by her own eagerness.

  Within two months they had set up house together, with some misgivings but none of them on moral grounds. He was a widower looked after by his married daughter; Netta was married to the alcoholic, who had refused to divorce her. Until meeting Matt Honiwell she had not particularly cared whether she was free or not. Once her husband had discovered that she had a lover, he had reiterated with malice if not malevolence that he would never give her a divorce.

  “Let them live in sin,” he had sneered when with mutual friends or relatives; and no one could shift his resolve.

  They were happy, growing contented as the ecstasies of their early days became less frequent; the companionship and the pride in each other became much greater. After the first few months, however, Netta had been sure that something about their relationship troubled Matt, but it was not until after the ball the previous night that he had told her what.

  “Almost certainly nothing to worry about,” he had said, “but I’d feel happier from the Yard’s point of view if we were married.” He had shot her an amused sideways glance as he drove. “Do you remember that craggy-looking man, Singleton, from the Thames Division?”

  “Yes,” she had said.

  “He reminded me of one of our men whose wife left him and lived with another man. He went on the hard liquor out of jealousy and drank himself so silly that he attempted to murder his wife. The charge was reduced and he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for attempting to cause grievous bodily harm; he’s due out of prison in a few weeks’ time.”

  “I remember reading about the case,” she said. “But, darling, I can’t see you losing your head and going to see Rupert with the intention of killing him.”

  “No,” he had said, “nor can I. It—oh, well, I’d much rather marry you than not!”

  They had left it there, but she had wondered several times whether there had been anything else in his mind. She would have to ask him soon. If it did prey on him then it might spoil his pride in and efficiency at police work, the last thing he must allow to happen.

  A customer came in, and she pushed the reverie to the back of her mind.

  In another part of London, the three children of the convicted Entwhistle, sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of their mother, were playing together – the elder children, Clive, now thirteen, and Jennifer, now eleven, quite happily. But the younger daughter, Carol, just ten, soon went up to the room she shared with her sister. She often appeared to prefer to be on her own; was quiet and secretive. Although she had been too young at the time of the murder to know the full implications, both then and now she seemed more affected than the others by the fact that her father was in prison. This afternoon she went to a shelf of books beside her bed, pulled out several, and then took one which was lodged at the back, out of sight unless the shelves were thoroughly dusted, a task which her aunt left to her.

  This was a beautifully illustrated book on the county of Devon. There were the coves and inlets, the rocks and the sea, there were the small towns and the villages, the forests and trees. She opened the book immediately to a page near the end; a natural opening, because inside was a photograph of her mother and father, taken just before he had left for Africa. She could remember, tiny though she had been, that her father had hoisted her high, and laughed, and promised:

  “I’m going to build a bridge across a big river, and when it’s done I’ll be back to carry you across it.”

  He had come back; and her mother had been killed; and he had been taken away by the police, and put on trial at a place called the Old Bailey, somewhere in London, and soon afterward sent to Dartmoor; to the prison.

  There it was, grey and ugly and forbidding, with tiny barred windows and huge spike-topped walls, set amid a bright pasture with a background of trees clad in the soft light green of spring.

  He was there.

  He wrote to them regularly, on buff-coloured paper, often by hand, sometimes on a typewriter. Whenever it was by hand, he wrote at the top: The Library. Perhaps they both realised that their closest contact was through books.

  She studied every window, every bar, every wall, and every door, wondering where exactly her father was . . .

  At that moment he was in the library at the prison, writing; not to her but to one of the Prison Visitors, with his never-ending plea for help in getting a retrial. There was one sentence which appeared in every letter he wrote (except to the children): “I did not kill my wife.” He was sitting at a bare table, writing a sentence at a time, and looking up every now and again as if seeking words from the books on the shelves and the newspapers and magazines neat in their racks. A warder in the library kept glancing at him covertly; at the sunken cheeks and the sunken but fever-bright eyes. Although he worked outside a great deal, his skin was like wax and he looked unhealthy.

  He was tormented, and the years brought no solace; only greater torment, greater bitterness, burning hatred for the man who had killed his wife and allowed him to pay the penalty.

  10

  Murderer . . .

  The man who had murdered Entwhistle’s wife was in his office, a tiny one with a window which overlooked the Thames just below Tower Bridge and a corner of Billingsgate Market. On hot days, when he opened the window, a strong odour of fish would sweep in, and he never really became used to it. Yet if one could forget the stench there was such beauty on the river, with its changing colours and changing surface: the pale blue and dark blue, the nearby green; the mirror calmness, silvered; golden tints, with morning and evening sun; the rippling in wind or when barges passed, or small tugs or pleasure boats or police launches; the roughness, when the wind blew furiously; or the pocked marks, when heavy rain fell straight down, like bullets.

  He sat at a desk pushed against the wall beneath the window, so that whenever he looked up he had a panoramic view. In the smaller office behind his own his secretary typed with a compulsive vigour. She was nearing fifty but seemed neither younger nor older than when she had first worked for him upon his becoming manager of the department, which dealt mostly in carpets, tapestries, silks, and cottons from India and the Far East. She was plump, and squeezed her breasts into a brassiere that was not quite large enough. She had a tightly confined waist and spreading hips. Her h
air was cut all around her head at a level with her only attractive feature, her little pink ears, and she had taken to wearing angel’s wing glasses with a frame of mother-of-pearl. Perhaps to compensate for her physical drawbacks, she was almost incredibly swift and efficient, doing the work of at least two able secretaries, and having been in this department for over thirty years, she had an accumulated knowledge and experience which increased her value tenfold. Her name was Bessie Smith.

  Greenwood was very thoughtful that afternoon, and Bessie was aware of it. Every few months her employer had an affaire. The girl or woman concerned never came to the office, and always telephoned the private number which Greenwood had on his desk. All three department managers had a direct line – not only Greenwood, the man who dealt mostly in spices, teas, cocoa, and other foodstuffs, and the one who looked after the precious and semiprecious stones of the East, including ivory and porcelain. All three managers, when on buying trips abroad, also bought baskets and wickerwork, wood carvings, and a great variety of curios at prices so absurdly low that at times they seemed to make more profit out of these trifles than from the more expensive products.

  The family partners in the firm, Cox and Shieling Limited, were still active in the business although they did not travel much; they concentrated on their extensive holdings in London property. The firm was one of the most widely known in the Far East; it was much more familiar in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, and Bangkok, for instance, than it was in London.

  Bessie Smith glanced up as the door leading from Greenwood’s office opened; the silence when her clattering typewriter stopped seemed profound.

  “Bessie,” he said, “I think it’s time I checked the carpet factories in Mirzapur and Bangalore; I haven’t been too pleased with the quality of the carpets we’ve been getting lately.”