Chapter Three

A Hole In The Ground

“See that?” asked West.

“Yes, sir,” said Venables.

“Did you notice it before?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid not.”

“What size would you say the patch is?”

Venables gulped, as the other man turned to look at him.

“About six feet by two, sir.”

“Coffin shaped,” West remarked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Seen any spades on the premises?” asked West.

“Yes, sir—there’s a small shed over there.” Venables turned and pointed. He was acutely aware of something very sharp about West’s manner: he had a sense that he was really seeing the man in action.

“Quicker we dig the better,” West said. “Get two spades, will you? Or a fork and a spade.”

Venables hurried back to open the door of a wooden shed built against the wall, reached inside to grab a spade hanging upside down from a slanting nail, and then snatched his hand away. Supposing there were fingerprints on the handle. He was torn between doing what West had told him, and following his own cautious way. He looked over his shoulder to see West bending down, then squatting on his haunches and looking at the newly stamped grass. Supposing any prints on the garden tools were the only ones and so the only clues, thought Venables. Then he saw West’s head jerk upwards. Again, he felt as if he had been caught out looking rather like a fool.

“Hold it!” called West.

“I—er—yes, sir.”

“There might be fingerprints,” West added.

“That’s—that’s what suddenly struck me, sir,” declared Venables, rejoicing.

“Go and get my box,” ordered Roger. “We can make a quick check.”

Venables was glowing again, and although he didn’t run he went off in a hurry. He disappeared without once looking back. Had he looked back he would have seen that West was smiling, more relaxed than he had been for some time.

In fact, Roger was feeling much more pleased than he could reasonably have hoped. The discovery of Margerison’s body had, in itself, been a break: the address had been an even greater one: the behaviour of the girl-wife suggested that she knew more than she had admitted, and before long, she was going to have a very nasty shock indeed. She was going to learn that her husband was dead and might have been murdered.

The human being in Roger responded to this with some disquiet; he had a feeling that the news was going to hit her very hard indeed. But the policeman in him, the detective, could see only the other aspect: that if she came to believe that he had been murdered, then she would want vengeance; and so, she was much more likely to talk. If she kicked her heels at the Yard for an hour or two she would really be in a highly nervous state; and the other news would almost certainly break down her resistance.

It was a cold blooded way of looking at the situation: but how else could a policeman look at it?

Venables, for instance.

He liked what he saw of Venables very much indeed. There was something in the young man’s appearance which reminded him of one of his two sons: Richard, who was carving out a career in television. It was the dark bushy hair and the clearly defined eyebrows which caused the resemblance, as well as the very quick mind. There were hundreds of good detectives at the Yard, young men especially, but the really outstanding ones were few and far between. It was far too early to say, but Venables certainly had promise: and because of that, Roger had tried him out on the spades. Once he had told the other to go and get them he had squatted down, ostensibly to examine the turf, actually to see what Venables did. He, Roger, had been on the point of calling out to stop him from touching any of the tools, and had felt deep satisfaction when, before the warning had passed his lips, Venables had drawn back as if stung. The way he mumbled: “That’s—that’s what suddenly struck me, sir,” was comical in that it sounded and he looked guilty and apologetic.

It was worth a lot of mistakes to come upon a really top class detective mind.

Roger’s thoughts flashed back to the night of the robbery when he had been called out of bed to go to the docks. There were the high walls, like a prison, the Port of London Authority police on duty, the cobbled roads, the railway lines, the floodlights on the ships being unloaded, the clanking of metal and the hooting of train whistles, the big lorries carrying the huge containers for the liner trains. This shipment of South African gold had been loaded into a lorry, for taking to the Bank of England. Special police, armed guards, every obvious precaution had been taken. What no one had anticipated was that the driver of the lorry was working with the gang of thieves.

He had been David Margerison.

He had given the guard sitting up front with him a doped cigarette: morphine filled. When the man had lost consciousness he had pulled up at a corner where the rest of his gang had waited. Trusted by the guards at the back, he had called to them through a microphone to say his companion had lost consciousness. They had opened the bulletproof back doors, to investigate: and been overwhelmed by the waiting thieves.

It had been as smooth a coup as any Roger could remember; on a par with the Great Train Robbery, and in some ways carried out more efficiently. Now, he could imagine that the lorry had been brought to this house and unloaded; or more likely, unloaded into smaller vans and brought here in manageable parcels. Gold was one of the heaviest metals to handle.

He had checked every possible angle, would have sworn he had covered every thing and everyone; yet he had been careless with Angela Margerison. Oh, he could shift the blame: he could claim, rightly, that he had received the Commander C.I.D.’s approval not to have Angela followed after the first month. But he should not have taken the watch off her. Looking back, he still didn’t know why he had. It was one of those inexplicable lapses to which all men are subject, but for it to have happened in this case …

The bullion robbery had coincided with a dearth of news. Headlines ran across every front page, editorials demanded action, the Yard had seldom been under greater pressure. And because he was the Yard’s glamour boy and because he was in any case always a target for the Press, he had been featured, first as the man who would track down the perpetrators of a daring robbery, then as the man who had failed. Every week or two a newspaper disinterred the story, creating new sensation upon sensation. One, only a few weeks ago, had asked in its headline:

SHOULD THE YARD’S GLAMOUR BOY RETIRE?

He had never felt less like retiring.

He had never been more conscious of failure, either. After all, if he had had the girl wife watched she might have led the police to this house while the crooks and the gold had still been here.

He wasn’t sure the gold had even been here!

Where the devil was Venables with his kit? He felt suddenly chill, shivered, and moved towards the house as Venables appeared, carrying the case which looked so much like a doctor’s bag, taking long strides but nevertheless looking over his shoulder at the small window of the inner room.

“Sorry it took so long, sir.” With anyone else Roger would have growled: “Why did it?” but he could not, the other’s manner was so disarming. “There was a message for you from the Yard. I waited for it over the telephone.”

“What message?” asked West.

“Is there any pathologist you would particularly like for the autopsy on the body of David Margerison?”

“Yes,” Roger answered. “I would like Dr. Appleby.”

Venables gave a broad and happy smile.

“Then that’s just right, sir. The message was that it would be Dr. Appleby if you didn’t call back within half an hour.”

Roger grunted.

He took the case, put it on top of a metal coal bunker, and opened it, taking out a bottle of grey dusting powder – old fashioned Fuller’s Earth – and a pair of paint brushes, both camel hair. He dusted the handle of the fork and spade, and handed one brush to Venables, who drew it gently over the shiny part of the handle, he ran the brush over the shaft, just as carefully.

Roger did the same to the spade, with the same care.

By the time he was half through he felt sure of the final result, but he finished before he spoke.

“Nothing here.”

“Nor here, sir.”

“Wiped clean,” remarked Roger. “Your professional job again.”

“Couldn’t have been much more thorough, sir, could it? But—” Venables broke off, as Roger picked up the spade and moved towards the grass.

“But what?” asked Roger.

“Er—doesn’t matter, sir.”

“I’d still like to hear.”

“I was thinking of Gross, sir. And Glaister.”

“Ah,” said Roger. “The authorities.”

“They are pretty good, sir, aren’t they?”

“First class.”

“And they both say virtually the same thing, that the criminal always leaves some clue behind. I know it sounds sententious, but they do, sir.”

“Like all clichés, it’s based on truth,” Roger remarked.

“Absolutely, sir!” Venables gave his most expansive grin yet, and dug the fork into the ground. Roger made a line with the spade, around the coffin sized piece of grass, and then began to dig. He rather enjoyed it. The earth was soft, and the spade went in fairly easily. He took off half a dozen sods, and then paused.

“Notice that?” he asked.

“They’ve been cut and put down recently, sir.”

“Yes. Our man’s mistake, perhaps.” Roger now began to dig deeper, acutely aware of the speed with which Venables dug, lifting turf after turf. Then suddenly a man came hurrying.

“Here, sir! Let me do that!” It was Green, who seemed outraged that Roger should be digging. He almost pushed Roger aside in his eagerness to take the spade. He looked excited, too, and he turned to Roger, one foot on the shoulder of the spade itself. “I’ve had the same story from three neighbours, sir.”

“Can you whistle and ride?” asked Roger.

“Eh? Oh—dig and talk at the same time!” Green gave a guffaw and dug deep. “Yes, sir—haven’t heard that phrase for a long time! These people who lived here were thought by the neighbours to be night workers. Two of them drove lorries which were sometimes parked outside. Kept themselves very much to themselves, sir, the neighbours saw very little of them.”

“That figures,” Roger said.

“Undercover work, sir!”

“Who did the gardening?” Roger asked.

Without a moment’s hesitation, almost as if he gave it no thought at all, Green answered: “The women, sir, two of them. No one ever saw the men in the garden except for a few minutes at a time.”

All the while, Green dug; and he might have been a trained gardener, even a grave digger, for he drove the spade in with smooth precision, his movements neat and powerful. The soil was nearly black. At the other end of the patch, Venables was now doing little more than scratch the surface. Neither the rhythm of Green’s digging nor the rhythm of his reporting was disturbed.

“You say three neighbours all said the same thing?”

“Pretty well, sir. I’ve got the answers down, verbatim.” For the first time Green paused, to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. “Any idea what we’re digging for?”

“Anything from gold bullion to a body, I should think.”

Green said, wiping his forehead with the same sleeve and speaking with exactly the same almost casual deliberation as he had before: “A body is more likely, I’d say.”

Roger went tense.

“What makes you think so?”

“Not often my nose deceives me,” said Green. “Don’t you notice the stench?”

Roger looked down at the hole the other man had dug, saw nothing but the dark earth, but fancied that there was a faint odour of decay. Green bent down to sniff, distended his nostrils with the delicacy of a rabbit. Then he drew back.

“It’s decaying flesh all right,” he declared. “We ought to dig very carefully now.”

“Yes,” Roger said. “We’d better have more tools and more men. Better have the photographer here, too, quickly. Go and fix it, will you?” Green slammed the spade into the side of a flower bed, and went off with a “Right, sir!” flung over his shoulder. He did not appear to glance at Venables but that might have been quite deliberate.

For Venables was leaning heavily on the handle of his fork. His face was a greenish grey; he looked as if he would faint at any moment. He did not glance up as Roger called his name, then sprang forward to save him from falling.