Chapter Five

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 the Sunday 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 situation 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 Echo artist’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.