After the murky rain-thick morning in the street outside, the mortuary was hallucinatorily bright. Still, for Humphrey, that was scarcely cheering. The smell (was it the clinical smell alone?) didn’t make for ease. He had not been in a mortuary before. It seemed a singular rendezvous. But it was a genuine one. When Frank Briers made a contract, he kept to it. From the outset, he was speaking to Owen Morgan, the pathologist, as though Humphrey were one of them.
Humphrey had heard Briers talk of Morgan, but hadn’t met him. He hadn’t expected anyone so strenuous. He certainly hadn’t expected the joshing those two exchanged, as much a part of etiquette as saying good morning.
Briers had an official reason for calling on the pathologist. It was a piece of forensic business not connected with the Ashbrook case. Questions masterfully disposed of, within ten minutes. ‘Good,’ said Briers. ‘That’s dealt with then.’ He went on to another matter.
‘Oh, something else. Taffy, do you know anything about a doc called Perryman?’
‘What about him?’
‘He was Lady Ashbrook’s doctor.’
‘I thought the name rang a bell. I must have seen it on the files.’ Morgan was quick on the take. ‘Is he involved?’
‘We’re eliminating people who aren’t.’ Briers was including Humphrey into his confidence. ‘He’s still left in.’
‘Can’t you do better than the process of elimination?’
‘If you believe in your own God-given wits, you’d better get out of this job. We’ll find a sensible pathologist.’
Matey abuse duly conducted, Morgan said: ‘I don’t know anything about the man. I might be able to find something out.’
‘Do that. If you get the chance. But don’t waste your time. It’s a very long shot.’
Humphrey was sure that Briers expected nothing in the way of information. That enquiry had been for Humphrey’s benefit, not Briers’ own. It was to show that he was concealing nothing.
Jocular affable insults as Morgan said goodbye. In the street, rain persisting, Frank Briers pointed to a café opposite. ‘I’ve been in there before. That’ll do.’
If he hadn’t been at work, that café would not have done. The only lighting was a strip of neon lamp behind the counter, reflected, not encouragingly, on the streaming pavement. It was a minimal café. They carried cups of milky coffee to a bare zinc-topped table. Frank, who when on duty went without food, and just as absently took any chance of a snack, managed to buy two plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches.
It was about ten-thirty in the morning, and he ate them both. He asked Humphrey what he thought of Morgan, and went in for paeans of praise himself, no false matiness, just praise.
Humphrey was waiting for news. The morning so far had been one of Frank’s curious preliminaries. Preliminaries over, the news came.
‘I have something to tell you,’ Frank said, voice quiet, though there was no one else in the café.
‘Well?’
‘Loseby’s in the clear. Unless he was in it with someone else. He wasn’t in Lady Ashbrook’s house that night.’
‘Definite?’
‘As definite as we can be without having sat in with him and Master Gimson right through that blasted night. That story is true enough. If it hadn’t been, they might have invented something better.’
Briers was half-irritable, as though he oughtn’t to have been bothered. Briers might have been irritable, but he was one of nature’s expositors. This was a minor triumph for the method, warmed by collective pride. Slogging away. Leaving nothing out. He had told Humphrey before, he said, the lads were tapping all the homosexual contacts they had – and there were plenty. He broke out into his occupational grin.
They had burrowed away. Massage parlours. Dance clubs. Date fixers. Tedious work for the lads – again the occupational grin – unless it put ideas into their heads. Most policemen were straight in that respect, not all. One lad, who was a one-hundred-per-cent straight man, had been greeted with the invigorated welcome ‘You’re my sweetie pie’. He wanted to take a dog along the next time. No luck for a long time. Then someone began to run across tracks of Douglas Gimson. Three or four years before, Gimson had been around. He was a cruiser, some of the informants said. He seemed to have dropped out. He might have stopped being a cruiser. There was a boy who shot off his mouth about him.
The boy was identified. Actually, not a boy, about thirty. Name of Darblay, which might have been faked. Stagehand, did some modelling. Frenzied. The lads had put the pressure on him. He had sponged on Douglas Gimson for money (in the clubs, he had yelled about that). The Captain made him take it, Darblay screamed at the policeman. Douglas Gimson was generous. Darblay liked money. Sooner or later Gimson got tired of being sponged on. Threats. Might have been blackmail once upon a time. Not dangerous now. Anyway, Frank doubted whether Douglas Gimson would have been a pushover for blackmail. So Darblay had become a telephone pest. The police knew all about telephone pests. There were thousands. Darblay took to ringing Gimson’s clubs – the respectable ones – and asking, in a histrionic voice, is Captain Homosexual Gimson in? Once or twice he came to Gimson’s apartment block, discovered that he had gone out to dinner, found his host’s address, and on the phone elocuted the same question. He seemed to think that, if he promised to stop the campaign, Douglas Gimson would pay him off.
He also seemed to have developed an obsession for spying on Gimson. Most evenings before the theatre, he took to watching the entrance to the apartment. It wasn’t just a coincidence that, on that Saturday in July, he was there as usual. Once that was established, the lads really got to work, said Briers. He was a hysteric, they didn’t like him. They put the pressure on. Senior officers joined in; once Frank himself. ‘But I wasn’t needed. The team was on the job.’ Fairly soon they extracted one fact. Darblay had seen Loseby (whom he had met during his peaceful period with Douglas Gimson) enter the apartment that evening. The time he gave was about 5 p.m. Near enough to what Loseby and Gimson had themselves told the police. Darblay had hung about until getting on for theatre-time. Loseby hadn’t left by then.
So far this statement was in line with the Loseby story, that he had been with Gimson all evening, all night, until the following morning. Though it wasn’t relevant, he and Gimson both claimed that he had been there the whole of the Sunday.
It might have been a fluke, Frank remarked, but one of the lads asked Darblay what he had done during the rest of that night. Darblay said that they couldn’t be interested in anything else he had done. They became pressingly interested. What had he been doing that night? He blustered and began to shriek. ‘What do you think a bleeding stagehand does? Would any of you fancy the bleeding job?’ What else have you done? What else? They went on.
Both Frank and Humphrey knew the technique of this kind of questioning off by heart. One officer kept saying: ‘Phone calls. How many did you make?’ Darblay became enraged. How many? How many calls about Captain Gimson? It took an hour or two before Darblay admitted that he had phoned Gimson’s flat five times from the theatre during the performance. He hadn’t liked the look of that Lord Loseby going there. He had asked whether Captain Gimson was in. What words had he used? ‘What the hell does it matter? They knew who I was,’ Darblay screamed. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’
Who had answered? ‘Yes, yes.’ Sometimes one, sometimes the other. It must have made a row, so the policemen said; there are telephones on both sides of that bed.
After the theatre? Had he rung again? Yes, yes, yes. More than once? Yes, yes, yes. Until what time? He couldn’t remember. Midnight? He expected so. After midnight? Yes, yes, yes. Until they took the receiver off.
‘If it had been me,’ Humphrey said, ‘I can’t help feeling that I would have done that quite a long time before. It must have got in the way of an evening’s gentle entertainment.’ Briers said that he had asked them why they hadn’t. Apparently, Gimson was waiting for a call from his mother.
‘I must say, it’s an odd way for anyone to get out of trouble.’ Humphrey went on: ‘But it does seem pretty convincing, doesn’t it?’
‘It does. It stands up all the way round. By the by, I asked them why they hadn’t told me; it might have saved us plenty of man hours. They said they had mentioned phone calls. But they certainly hadn’t mentioned the subject. That would have got us going.’
‘Why ever didn’t they?’
‘You tell me. You know these people.’
Humphrey reflected later, it might be that Loseby wasn’t ashamed of much under heaven, but perhaps he was ashamed of looking ridiculous. Neither he nor Gimson could have guessed at Darblay’s timetable, or thought that it was any use to them. What was certain, they would have had to try hard to appear more ridiculous.
‘I hope you told them that they had been insufferable fools. Trying to suppress things.’
‘I did.’ Briers gave his toughest smile. ‘I also told him, Douglas Gimson, that if he’s obliged to pick up young men he’d do better to stick to his own class. He wouldn’t be so likely to get into this kind of mess.’
Then Frank Briers turned irritable again.
‘That’s something we’ve tidied up anyhow. But there’s one spot where we haven’t been so clever. I blame myself, Humphrey, I blame myself.’
This had been on his mind all morning, Humphrey thought. Briers enjoyed success, but failure touched him more – which might make for efficacy, but not for animal comfort.
‘It’s the girl Susan. We may have missed a trick.’
Then Briers went into an angry description, angry but still lucid. Susan had come off her bogus story, she had no option, Briers told Humphrey. Now she said that she must have been thinking of some other night. Briers broke off, temper no better, into words about Susan’s behaviour. Now she had Loseby safely in her clutches, he said, she didn’t give a tinker’s curse for his night out with Douglas Gimson. She took homos and their doings like a cup of tea.
Then Briers got back to business. He thought they knew, he said, when Susan met Loseby after that weekend, and she agreed to cover him with the bogus story. It was some time on the Monday afternoon. That story carried her, too. Now it was all blown. It doesn’t enter. Briers went on, voice sharpened: ‘What does enter is where the young lady really was on the Saturday evening. The worry is we could have missed something. It’s a great mistake to sit back and think you’ve got all you want. It’s one of the oldest mistakes in the book. We went on plugging about Loseby, but somehow we swallowed the girl’s story. We took it for granted she’d been with him part of that night, anyway. It’s my own fault and no one else’s.’
‘What about her, then?’
‘The trouble is it doesn’t make such sense, either. We may have missed a sighting. Or else it seemed so far-fetched we didn’t follow it up.’ Frank Briers was talking roughly, as though, in spite of his protestations of self-blame, it was really Humphrey, totally innocent, who deserved to take it.
‘Come on.’ Humphrey had had long experience of bosses when they had slipped.
‘There may have been a sighting. It didn’t seem likely enough to take seriously. Those mews flats at the bottom of the old lady’s garden – someone told us there had been a girl hanging about when they went out to dinner. About eight on the Saturday night. They came back later, couldn’t be sure of the time, somewhere between half-past ten and eleven. The girl, they thought it was the same girl, was still walking about between the mews and the street. They didn’t pay much attention to her. Medium height, smartish clothes, slacks – might have fitted anyone. They didn’t know Susan from Adam – why in God’s name does no one know anyone else in London? Photographs – yes, it could have been her, but it could have been hundreds of other girls. The lads asked her about it, as a matter of course. But she laughed it off. That was the time she was sticking to her old story with Loseby left out. She couldn’t be in bed in a flat she and Loseby sometimes borrowed – which happens to be true, she always gets her back-up stories right – she couldn’t be in bed and walking about the mews at the same time, could she? So it didn’t seem worth going on. And it’s getting too late now. If they didn’t see much then, they’re not going to after a couple of months.’
‘It’s not very plausible, is it?’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘If she were there, waiting about for hours, she couldn’t have been in the house–’
‘We managed to work that out for ourselves.’
Humphrey received that snub with a faint smile.
‘So in a direct sense she would be more or less let out. No one would do a murder, and dawdle about for ever. Unless they were quite mad.’
‘She’s as sane as you are. We managed to work that out, too.’
‘It doesn’t seem plausible. Surely it’s long odds it was a girl waiting for a man to come back to one of those flats.’
‘That’s what we thought.’
‘If by any miracle it was Susan,’ Humphrey was brooding, ‘I suppose she might have known who was in the house – or who she imagined might be.’
‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs.’
That was said with something like a return to good nature.
After a while, Frank said: ‘Do you believe she was there?’
Humphrey said: ‘If she was there, she ought to have seen someone or something.’
It was Frank, quicker than Humphrey, who had seen another possibility, which was still obscure that morning. Frank went on: ‘If she did see someone, we can make up for lost time. God knows we’ve lost enough time. We’ll have to get to work on her, of course.’
‘Will she talk?’
‘She’ll talk all right. Whether she’ll talk anything like the truth, that’s quite another matter.’