I

Death in the Post Office

WITH THE JUDGE’S commendation of his officers ringing in his ears the Chief Constable should have been a proud, contented man, but he left the court miserable and ill at ease. Yet if ever there were an open and shut case, surely this was it? The jury had been out for only half an hour, and its verdict of guilty was unanimous. The indictment as presented by leading counsel for the Crown was damning. The accused was found with blood on his hands, a blood-stained weapon beside him, and notes stolen from the little country Post Office whose postmistress had been murdered were found at his home. The defence? Well, all the defence amounted to was the accused’s statement, ‘I didn’t do it.’ Clearly the judge had not believed him, nor had the jury – and the judge had complimented the police for having cleared up a brutal crime so quickly. Could there possibly be any doubt?

Piet Deventer was the youngest Chief Constable in Britain, and although he was fairly hardened to crime he was, perhaps, less hardened to it than long-experienced judges and criminal lawyers. His police career had been somewhat out of the ordinary,^* and while this gave him certain advantages of insight and imagination, he paid for them in emotional sympathy for other people. Why should he feel sympathy for the accused in this case, an eighteen-year-old West Indian youth, convicted on what seemed overwhelming evidence of a brutal killing that had shocked the country? Partly because the boy was West Indian, a black youth transplanted by world economic forces, that had nothing to do with him, to a community alien to practically everything in his own culture, subject to irrational but nonetheless real hostility because of his colour. Piet did not believe that his own force had been in any way prejudiced against the boy because he was black; he did not assume that policemen are automatically saints, but he knew enough about the realities of policing to refuse to accept that the police as a whole are out to ‘get’ people because their skins are black or brown. His own force in North Wessex was predominantly a country police force, and although it had some industrial areas where competition for jobs and housing generated almost inevitable hostilities between white and black, for the most part his constabulary had no problems with immigrants. This boy and his mother were unusual in living in a village where they were the only coloured inhabitants. They were looked upon as ‘foreign’ in the way that country villages regard everyone not born in their community as a foreigner, but until the Post Office murder shocked everyone they had met neither hostility nor abuse. Even after the murder, some of the village people had gone out of their way to show sympathy for the boy’s mother.

Piet had not himself investigated the crime at Netherwick, a picture-book village lying in a fold of the rolling country between Newbury and Wantage. One of the penalties of being Chief Constable was that he had to spend most of his time administering other people’s work. But he encouraged his men to feel that he was approachable and concerned in everything they did, and naturally he had been kept informed of the work of the chief inspector and the detective-sergeant who had done most of the investigating. For all the judge’s compliments on the efficiency of the North Wessex police, there had not been much real detective work to do. The village Post Office, which was also the village shop, was broken into at some time after six o’clock and before eight on a Wednesday morning in April. The Postmistress, a widow in her seventies who lived over the shop, had apparently heard something and come down to investigate. She had been struck several blows on the head with a heavy instrument, killed almost instantly, and left lying in a pool of blood behind the counter. The shop had an early trade in newspapers, and normally opened at eight o’clock. The murder was discovered by the first customer a few minutes after eight. He had dialled 999 from the phone in the shop and waited for the police to come. It was then found that the safe had been unlocked by a key taken from the dead woman, and apparently nothing but money stolen. The exact sum could only be conjectured because it was not known exactly what had been in the safe, but Post Office accountants reckoned it at around £900.

The police were on the scene within three minutes, and detection could scarcely have been simpler. There was a lot of blood, and drips of blood led from the shop to a cottage about a hundred yards away where the boy, Eric Marshall, and his mother lived. The police followed the trail of blood and found the boy in the kitchen, washing blood from his hands, with a heavy knife on the floor beside him. The knife was what is often called a bush knife, about two feet long, with blade and handle forged in one piece. It was of a type used under different names all over the world – in East Africa called a panga, in the English speaking Caribbean a cutlass, in Spanish speaking South America a machete.

The boy was arrested at once, and enough blood remained on his hands and arms for samples to be taken for analysis. His story was as simple as his arrest. He worked, he said, as a garden boy, and he used his cutlass for weeding. He kept it very sharp, and he had just given it a particularly good edge because he had to cut down a straggly old laburnum in the garden where he worked one day a week – on Wednesdays. He had been swinging the cutlass on his way to work and cut his left wrist. He was then just outside the Post Office, noticed that the door was open, and went in because he knew that the shop sold little tins of plaster for putting on cuts. He had seen the Postmistress lying in a pool of blood, forgot his own injury and tried to pick her up. When he saw that she was dead he panicked and ran home, where he was trying to wash the blood off his hands and arms when the police came for him.

His story was borne out to the extent that he did have a recent cut on his left wrist, and analysis of the blood still left on his hands showed traces of his own blood as well as blood from the Postmistress. It was the same with his cutlass, which had both blood groups on it. Asked how the Postmistress’s blood could have got on the cutlass he said that he had put it on the floor when he tried to help the woman, and he must have put it in a pool of blood from her. Asked why he had gone into the Post Office instead of going home to the cottage just across the village green where he lived with his mother he said he didn’t think there was any sticking plaster at home, and he knew he could get some at the shop. His story about the laburnum tree he intended to cut down was confirmed by Major Hicks, the owner of the garden where the boy worked on Wednesdays. Major Hicks, who had about a quarter of an acre of garden attached to his house, Orchard Villa, said that he had employed the boy on one day a week for about a year. He and his wife were getting on, and finding the garden a bit too much for them. Eric was a good garden boy, worked well without having to be supervised all the time, and had never given any sort of trouble. Major Hicks himself had decided that the old laburnum ought to come down, and he had told the boy last Wednesday to see to it next time he came.

None of this counted for much beside the damning evidence against the boy. Not only was there the blood on his hands and cutlass to be accounted for, but when his home was searched £870 in £10, £5 and £1 notes was found in a drawer in his bedroom. Some of the money was in used notes that might have been taken in the shop or in payment for stamps, but £600 was in new notes, delivered by the head Post Office for the area in readiness for payment of that week’s pensions at the Netherwick sub-office. These notes were in sequence, and their numbers were recorded, so there could be no doubt that they came from the Netherwick Post Office. It was slightly puzzling that there was no blood on the notes, but the prosecution argued that they could have been taken from the safe carefully, or perhaps by holding them in a piece of paper which had been thrown away. Defence counsel tried to make a point of the fact that no blood-stained piece of paper had been found, but at best that was negative evidence and clearly it had not impressed the jury.

Piet’s officers had done what they could to be fair to the boy, and if there had been any positive evidence in his favour they would have presented it. But there was nothing to suggest that the obvious hadn’t happened, that the boy had not broken into the Post Office, killed the Postmistress and made off with the money. His story of finding the Post Office open around half past seven in the morning was just not believed. There was indeed some real evidence against it, for a constable from a patrol car that passed through the village shortly before six o’clock had tried the door of the Post Office to see that it was secure. This was routine police practice on night and early morning patrols, because of the number of robberies at small Post Offices. At six o’clock, therefore, the door of the shop was untampered with, and the possibility of a break-in other than by the boy seemed remote. When the police were called to the shop they found that the lock on the door had been forced and broken away from the wood; what better implement than a strong cutlass?

*

As he came out of the court Piet was slightly sickened by a bunch of a couple of dozen protesters in the cause of Racial Equality. They were well-behaved under the guardianship of a police constable, but carried banners proclaiming HE’S ONLY GUILTY BECAUSE HE’S BLACK, and EQUAL JUSTICE FOR BLACK AND WHITE. Most of the protesters were white, and Piet thought that some of them were probably moved by genuine idealism. But mixed up with the idealism, indeed, battening on it, was a hard core of those who seem to be against all authority, out to stir up trouble between the police and the community for purely political reasons. It didn’t matter to the protesters whether or not the boy was guilty of the crime for which he had just been sentenced – an eighteen-year-old sent to life imprisonment evokes some sympathy in most people, and here was a chance to use decent human feelings to try to blacken the police. Piet wondered what the protesters would say if they knew of his own feelings. Probably they would dismiss them on the ground that a policeman couldn’t possibly have such feelings.

*

What were his feelings? It was impossible to dismiss the evidence assembled for the trial, and the jury had no doubts. And yet . . . Piet had not investigated the murder at the Post Office, but he had talked to the boy while he was in police custody, and in spite of the evidence he had liked him. He could not say that he actually believed the boy’s improbable story against all the evidence, but he felt that something was wrong somewhere. He was too experienced a policeman to believe that a likeable youth could not be guilty of a savage crime, but this boy had a sort of openness about him that encouraged one to believe him, and left a niggle of doubt. What could be done about it was another matter. The boy had been given as fair a trial as anyone could have, and now had been convicted and sentenced. He could appeal, of course, but unless the defence could uncover some technical flaw in the conviction that had so far escaped counsel, judge, and everyone else concerned in the case, Piet did not see how the Appeal Court could possibly upset the jury’s verdict. He must try to put the thing out of his mind.

There was plenty of work waiting for him when he got back to his office, and a particularly urgent job to decide what more could be done than was already being done to catch an arsonist who was going round setting fire to hay barns. There had also been half a dozen cases of matches being dropped into pillar-boxes to set fire to letters. Whether this was the work of one fire raiser or not it was impossible to tell, but the pillar-boxes were within a few miles of the burned out barns, and it was reasonable to assume that the fires were connected. Unless there is suspicion of fraud in making insurance claims or some other direct possibility of gain, arson is among the most difficult of crimes to clear up, because the fire raiser may be an otherwise normal citizen with a spasmodic lunatic urge to set fire to things. Between the bouts of lunacy he may be the meekest and most law abiding of people. This man – or woman, though arson is more commonly a male crime – had already caused tens of thousands of pounds damage to property, and, worse, his latest burning had brought dreadful suffering to six racehorses, four of which had been burned to death, the remaining two having to be put down. The pillar-box fires were less dangerous to life, but a grave menace to the mail and capable of causing infinite distress. The fire raiser had just got to be found. With the cooperation of a farmer Piet’s officers had arranged a decoy-barn, inviting fire with a lot of loose, badly stacked hay, in the hope that a constant watch on the place might catch the person at work. A twenty-four-hour watch had been kept on the barn for a week, with no result other than heavy demands on police manpower, already stretched to undesirable limits. Should the effort be abandoned? The decision had to be Piet’s, and frankly he did not know what to do. He was discussing things with the superintendent in charge of the case when his secretary came in, to hand him a visiting card. Irritated, he was about to give it back to her to ask the Duty Officer to deal with whoever it was, when the lettering on the card caught his eye –Sir Gordon Gregory, KCMG, The Old Rectory, Netherwick. The Netherwick address gave him second thoughts.

‘What does he want?’ he asked.

‘He wouldn’t say,’ the girl replied. ‘He just said it was private, and he wanted to see the Chief Constable personally. He was very polite.’

‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better see him.’ To the superintendent he said, ‘Sorry, John. Hard as it is, I think we’d better keep on a full watch for another forty-eight hours. If we’ve got nowhere by then, we’ll have to reconsider things.’ At least that was decision of a sort.

*

The superintendent went out with the secretary, who brought in an elderly man, tall and very thin, with a full head of nearly white hair. Piet pointed to a chair in front of his desk and the man sat down. ‘It is good of you to see me without an appointment,’ he said. ‘I felt I couldn’t let things rest as they are without at least trying to do something.’

‘You haven’t yet said about what,’ Piet remarked gently.

‘I am so sorry – I’ve been living with things so much that I expect everybody else to know about them. I’ve come about the Eric Marshall case, the boy who was sentenced this morning. I’m not very up to date about how legal aid works in such cases, and I wanted to tell you that I should like to meet all the costs of an appeal.’

‘If there are grounds for an appeal I don’t think you need worry about the legal costs,’ Piet said gently. ‘But I am bound to say that unless some substantial new evidence comes to light I can’t see any hope of the Appeal Court’s reversing today’s judgment.’

‘Then we must obtain fresh evidence. Again I am at a loss on how to set about things. Can you recommend a good private detective? I should be responsible for all the costs, of course.’

‘There is nothing to stop you or anybody else from employing a private detective as you wish, though I’m afraid the police cannot recommend such agencies. But I don’t understand. What is your interest in the case?’

The man did not reply at once. Then he said, ‘I was responsible for bringing Eric and Isabel, his mother, to Netherwick. Does that give me any standing in the matter?’

‘I still don’t understand. If you have, or even think you have, any material evidence you should have gone to the police in the first instance. Did either Inspector Gray or Sergeant Clifford interview you when they were making inquiries at Netherwick?’

‘Oh, yes. The sergeant came to see me because Isabel asked him to. I said that I had known the accused boy and his mother for nearly two years, and I could give both an excellent character. I explained that they had come to Netherwick through Commonwealth Self-Help, a small independent body, independent in the sense that it has no Government finance, of which I am chairman. It is a charity set up some years ago to help find work for Commonwealth citizens established in this country. We are a registered charity, but are severely limited by lack of means. Still, we have been able to do something. Our members keep their eyes open for jobs that immigrants can do, preferably in places away from the big towns. That is what happened in this case.

‘You may know the Golden Fleece in Netherwick? It has a considerable hotel trade and sometimes has difficulty in finding reliable cleaners for domestic work. I heard of such a vacancy, our committee had Isabel Marshall on its books – she was then living in far from happy conditions in a big industrial city – and I recommended her to the management. They were ready to give her a trial, but are short of residential accommodation for their staff. It happened that a cottage in Netherwick that belongs to me fell vacant, so I was able to offer it to Mrs Marshall. She came with her son some eighteen months ago, and I may say has given every satisfaction – indeed, she is such a cheerful, willing worker that the hotel now feels it could not do without her. There was no job for the boy, but in a village like ours there is always work for anybody willing to undertake gardening. I gave the boy some casual work myself, and he, too, was so cheerful and ready to turn his hand to anything that some of my friends began offering him work. In a few months he had as much work as he could handle, going to different people on one day a week, though old Mrs Lamont, who has a lovely garden but is sadly crippled by arthritis, wanted him on two or three days each week. He has proved utterly reliable – if he says that he will come at a certain time to do a particular job, he always comes. He will be sadly missed in the village – he is missed already. I cannot believe that he could possibly have committed this brutal murder. He and his mother are not rich, but they had no particular need of money. Simply, I cannot see Eric being involved in such a crime, and as in a sense I feel responsible for him I want to do anything in my power to help.’

‘It is a generous, kindly attitude, but in the light of all the evidence I’m afraid it is not enough to believe that previous good character proves innocence,’ Piet said.

‘Yes, of course I understand. That is why I thought of engaging a private detective.’

‘There is no need for that in this country. If any fresh evidence comes to light the regular police will at once pursue it. In spite of what some people seem to think the police are as concerned to see that the innocent do not suffer as to see the guilty punished.’

‘Yes, but will you go on looking for fresh evidence? As far as you are concerned, is not the case now closed?’

Piet did not reply directly. In a sense, no case is ever closed, but in practice conviction for a crime means that investigation is over, and that particular case is regarded as finished. But Piet had an instinctive sympathy for this obviously deeply unhappy man, and he was still puzzled by his concern. So he said, ‘Can you explain a bit more fully why you think that a private detective might uncover evidence that the police have missed?’

The man glanced at his watch. ‘It is rather a long story and I don’t want you to feel that I am wasting your time.’

‘If I felt that you would not be here.’

‘I suppose not . . . I have held high office myself. Well, to begin as nearly as I can at the beginning, I must explain that I was the last Governor of Moruga, the ex-British colony in the Windward Isles before it achieved independence. Eric and his mother – her name is Isabel, but she is always called Bella – are from Moruga, so I feel that I have a sort of duty to help them if I can. But there is more than that. I myself was born in the West Indies, where my family were sugar planters from early in the eighteenth century. As a community the old planters have not been well regarded by history – they were slave-owners (though that was not exactly their fault, since it was the custom of the time), they were extravagant, many of them drank too much of the rum distilled on their plantations. But we were not quite all like that. Of course, my own family thought of themselves as English, sought wives in England and sent each generation of our children to England to be educated. But we were also West Indians, living on our own land, with a relationship to those who worked for us that may be sneered at as feudal but that, in our own case, at any rate, was certainly paternal, like that of the best of old English squires towards his tenants.

‘I was born a few years before the First World War, before the old plantation life had gone for ever, and in my early childhood, before I was sent to England to go to school, my beloved nurse was a black woman, and all my playmates were little black boys. We sailed fishing boats, swam in the sea and hunted together. Of course, I was the young master, but that never affected my own relationship with my friends. We had no colour bar as it was known in other parts of the world; there was no need for one, for the European community in our part of the world was so small, possessed, if you think in such terms, of so much economic power that there was no competition between us and those of other races. You must believe me when I say that I do not think of Eric and Bella as black – they are fellow countrymen, fellow West Indians.

‘The war of 1914–18 changed the sugar trade. Britain, and other European countries, unable to import the cane sugar they wanted because of the war at sea, all turned to the development of beet sugar, and after the war beet sugar farmers were naturally reluctant to abandon what had become for them a lucrative crop. The day of the independent sugar planter in the West Indies was over – with freight charges across the Atlantic to be met we could not compete with the beet sugar farmers of Europe. Also, I fear, we were mostly incompetent. We had not modernised plantation methods and machinery as we should, and it was more profitable for the big sugar merchants and refiners in England to buy up sugar plantations for themselves than to buy sugar from independent producers. My father who, of course, had been in the OTC at school came back to England in September 1914 to join up, and was killed on the Somme in 1916. After the war there was nothing to keep us in the West Indies. My mother, whose home was not far from Netherwick, came back to live in England. I did fairly well at Oxford and went into the old Colonial Service. I served in Africa and in Hong Kong, and then, as I told you, became the last Governor of Moruga. I had already bought the Old Rectory at Netherwick as a home to retire to, and when the Union flag was hauled down in Moruga I left the Service. But I did not lose interest in those whom I still regard as my people and, with a few friends, established Commonwealth Self-Help to do what we could for Commonwealth immigrants here. We do not limit our help to West Indians, but for various reasons, partly their knowledge of English as their own language, the West Indians have proved most suitable for the kind of help that we can give.’

The man spoke with a simple dignity that Piet found moving. His story seemed scarcely relevant to the Marshall case, but Piet did not want to hurt his feelings.

‘Did you regret Morugan independence?’ he asked.

‘Regret? No. It was my job in nearly five years as Governor to prepare the Morugan people for independence, and I did it as well as I could. Inevitably, in many ways I was sad but I could sympathise with the political desire to cut loose from Britain. In my private view we should have done better, both for ourselves in England and for our ex-Colonial subjects, if after the war we had done more to encourage investment and to strengthen rather than to weaken the old links with the Crown. But it may be that events had gone too far to be re-directed. In any case, I was a servant of Her Majesty and it was my task to carry out the policy decided by Her Majesty’s Government. How much do you know about cutlasses?’

The sudden change of subject took Piet by surprise. ‘In what context?’ he asked.

‘In the context that matters, that has brought me here, the Netherwick murder case. Eric is supposed to have killed the Postmistress by hitting her on the head with his cutlass. But I was brought up with cutlasses from my earliest childhood, and I tell you that no West Indian would ever use a cutlass like that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The cutlass – or you may think of it as a machete – is the most important tool of life to a West Indian country dweller. It is a little different in the towns, but even a townsman is brought up to use a cutlass properly. For one thing, he keeps it sharp and uses it for its cutting edge – to cut down trees and bushes, to chop firewood, to trim planks for building, for everything. Eric’s cutlass was very sharp. If he had used it to kill old Mrs Denny he would almost have cut her head off, not battered her with the flat of the blade.’

‘How can you know?’

‘Because I am a West Indian, because I was taught to cut through the husk of a coconut with one stroke of a cutlass. Eric was a country boy, and he was ten when his mother brought him to England – she had come a year or so earlier for domestic work in hospitals. She saved money to bring Eric here, believing that an English schooling would give him the best chance he could have in life. She could not know of the economic forces making for unemployment and limiting the opportunities for boys like Eric. He would have been unemployed in Moruga. And he was not unemployed in England, for he had built up a trade for himself as a garden boy. He and his mother were quite comfortably off, and they deserved to be. Eric had no wild or extravagant tastes. He had a pushbike, no motorcycle. He loved music and he spent a little money on records, mostly classical, though he had some West Indian songs. He had a guitar which he had taught himself to play, and he was saving up to try to buy a piano. I encouraged him by saying that when he had a piano I would pay for him to have lessons.’

‘Did you tell the police what you thought about the cutlass?’

‘No. I wasn’t asked, and I did not know about the kind of wounds Mrs Denny had until I heard them described in court today. I did tell your sergeant one thing about the cutlass – that it was normal for a West Indian boy to use a cutlass for weeding a garden. He came to see me because he had learned that I brought Eric and his mother to the village, and I told him what I knew about their background. He said it seemed funny for the boy to be carrying a long knife if he was just going to work in a garden and I explained that Eric used his cutlass for everything. I could give no evidence about the crime in the Post Office, and although he was polite he didn’t stay long.’

‘You have an interesting point about the wounds on Mrs Denny’s head and I think defence counsel might have cross-examined the doctor who gave medical evidence in more detail. But I can’t think that it would have made any difference to the verdict. The woman was killed by blows on her head, and a blood-stained weapon capable of inflicting the wounds was found.’

‘Yes, but it wouldn’t have been used in that way.’

‘I respect your feelings, Sir Gordon, and your experience. If there is an appeal the point you make can be gone into – I shall see that it is gone into. But I don’t know if the boy’s lawyers are considering an appeal. They may feel, and on the evidence I should be inclined to agree with them, that it would be wasting the time of the Appeal Court, that it could do the boy no good and might count against him if there were ever a question of his release from prison.’

‘That may be a legal view, but I know Eric is innocent.’

In spite of himself Piet was impressed. This distinguished old man might be talking like a fanatic, but he was certainly not mad and however valueless his views might be as evidence they raised – not exactly a doubt, but a feeling that the case against the boy might have been taken a little too much for granted. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘I came to you for advice.’

‘You asked if I could recommend a private detective and I said that I could not. I also said that there was nothing to stop you from engaging one if you wished.’

‘Do you think a private detective might be able to find evidence that the police have missed?’

‘Possibly – God knows, we are not infallible, and sometimes private detectives have succeeded where the police have failed. But I think this happens more often in novels than in real life. It is partly a matter of resources – no private agency can match the organisation of the police. My own feeling is that you would do better to leave things in our hands. Frankly, I don’t see much hope of upsetting the verdict in court today, but I shall think over what you have said and if any new line of inquiry suggests itself I shall see that it is followed up. The police are concerned with justice as well as with getting convictions. That may not be a fashionable view of the police, but I am a policeman, and it is the truth.’

‘I do not doubt you, Chief Constable. I said when I came that it was good of you to receive me, and your reception is not at all what I expected – I expected politeness, but I expected you to dismiss me as quickly as you could as an old man with a bee in his bonnet. Instead, you have given me a patient, sympathetic hearing. I am content to leave matters in your hands. May I come to see you again if anything else should occur to me?’

‘Of course.’

*

Piet was profoundly worried. Trying to analyse why he was unhappy about the case he said to himself, ‘I am a policeman. I must go by the evidence. On the evidence here the boy is guilty, and could not be anything else.’ Really, there had been next to no defence. The boy pleaded Not Guilty and went into the witness box. He repeated his story about cutting his wrist, seeing the Post Office door open, and going in to find the Postmistress dead. He stood up to cross-examination well enough. Why did he not call the police? Because he was frightened that he would be blamed for the killing. How did he explain the money found in his drawer at home? He could not explain it, and he had not put it there. That was about all. No one in court except Sir Gordon Gregory had believed his story. The judge had summed up fairly, saying that while the jury might find the boy’s story hard to accept he had told it consistently, and his excuse that he ran away because he was frightened was, in the circumstances, not unreasonable. He was entitled to the benefit of any doubt that the jury might feel about the prosecution’s case. The jury had felt no doubt, and in passing sentence the judge had remarked ‘You have been convicted on the clearest possible evidence.’ Obviously the judge was in complete agreement with the jury. Yet Piet had felt no sense of triumph, only an unhappiness that he could not explain. The visit by the old Colonial Governor had offered nothing in the way of evidence, unless one could accept that West Indian habits in the use of cutlasses was evidence. It was not. Rifles are normally used to shoot with, but men have been killed by being hit on the head with the butt of a rifle. A heavy knife may be normally used for cutting, but it does not follow that it cannot equally be used for hitting with the flat of the blade. The old Governor’s belief in the boy’s good character was touching as faith in humanity, but it could be dismissed as sheer sentiment, compounded by the old man’s nostalgic memories of his own childhood. And yet Piet remained unhappy. He did not believe in hunches, and he could not admit to anything as strong as a hunch that there had been a miscarriage of justice. And yet the evidence seemed somehow almost too perfect. How could it be too perfect? Piet remembered the old maxim that in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the obvious explanation is the true one. There could, of course, be that hundredth case. But there was simply nothing to indicate that rare occurrence when all the inferences drawn from circumstantial evidence are wrong.

And what could now be done? Piet could not simply reopen the case and send officers to investigate all the ground that had been covered already, to repeat an investigation that had led to conviction by the unanimous verdict of a jury. He had not been speaking in comfortable platitudes when he told Sir Gordon Gregory that the police were concerned with justice as well as getting convictions. That was perfectly true, as well as being deeply ingrained in his own personal feelings as a policeman. Where there was public doubt about a conviction the Home Secretary could order an inquiry, and the police could properly reconsider all the evidence, and look for previously unknown facts to justify a new interpretation. That was not likely here. The thin racial demonstration outside the court was a cardboard show, put up by some ‘dial-a-protestor’ group. Piet did not see any reputable body claiming that the evidence had been fabricated and that an innocent black youth had been convicted. There was public horror at the crime and public satisfaction that a demonstrably justified arrest had followed so quickly. No sane person could regard the jury’s verdict as reflecting any racial animosity.

*

There was one thing he could do, indeed ought to do, and that was to see Detective Chief Inspector Gray and Sergeant Clifford to congratulate them on the judge’s commendation of their work. There was time for that before this horrible day ended, so he sent for them both. ‘I just want to tell you personally how proud I am of the honour you have brought upon the Force,’ he said. Then, ‘I am going to rule that we are not on duty. I’d like you both to have a drink with me.’ There was a small drinks’ cabinet in his room for occasions when he had special guests, and he went across to it. ‘Whisky, gin or sherry? I can offer all of them, I think.’ The two officers settled for Scotch, and Piet poured three glasses. ‘Well, here’s to a couple of good policemen, and to our Force as a whole,’ he said.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the chief inspector.

‘It was a horrible case to investigate,’ Piet said.

‘Well, sir, we were lucky in being called so quickly, and lucky in finding so much evidence on the spot.’

‘Luck, perhaps, a little . . . But it was good police work to follow up the evidence at once. Did either of you ever have any doubts?’

‘Not a shadow of doubt,’ the chief inspector said. ‘That boy is as guilty as hell.’

‘And you, Sergeant?’ Piet asked.

‘Well, sir, you can’t doubt the evidence. But I must admit the boy seemed a steady, quiet lad, and everyone in the village gave him and his mother a good name.’

‘Clever devils, they were,’ said the chief inspector. ‘There was no evidence against the mother and nothing to charge her with, but I bet she’d been watching the Post Office as well as the boy. They knew when the pension money was delivered, and just when there’d be enough in the safe to make a break-in worthwhile. The only time the boy told the truth was when he said he panicked . . . But he panicked because the Postmistress came down, and that was why he hit her over the head. If he’d had the sense not to run home but to go somewhere else to clean himself up we might never have got on to him. It’s a good thing the real bad ’uns often don’t have much sense.’

‘I thought at first that running home as he did rather bore out his story,’ said the sergeant. ‘But you can’t have things both ways, and when the forensic people found the woman’s blood on his arms and on his big knife, there was no getting away from it. I can’t disagree with the chief inspector, sir, or with the court, but somehow it’s not a case that I shall ever feel happy about.’

* See A Sprig of Sea Lavender and Festival