Murder Somewhere in This City Page 12

  It would be no use telling Gus, the boss, when he went to see him in the hospital. Gus wouldn’t be interested in small-timers. He had a habit of cutting off Bill’s oral efforts in midsentence with a curt: “Stop blathering, Bill. It takes you half an hour to tell a two-minute tale.”

  But it would make a tale to tell at the club. And his workmate, Stan Lomax, would be interested. Stan would probably know something. At any rate he would figure out an explanation as to why Laurie Lovett and another fellow had stopped Jakes from making a bet with some money he had in his pocket. Happen Stan would know which street-corner bookie the money belonged to. Whoever the bookie was, he ought to have his head examined for trusting Jakes with so much money.

  The man ought to have his head examined. That is what Bill thought. He had that sort of brain. The sight of a much larger amount of money than he had first seen did not cause him to abandon the idea he had first formed. Bill’s brain could not handle more than one idea at a time.

  Moreover, having decided that he would remember to tell somebody about the idea he had, Bill stored it away in the dusty background of his mind and immediately forgot it. Nothing less obvious than a leading question was likely to bring it out again.

  6

  That Sunday night, when Devery went to see his Silver, he gave her grandfather the news that Don Starling was now wanted for murder. To his surprise Furnisher again failed to show his usual lively appreciation of being “in the know” before the newspapers appeared. Nor did he say “I told you so.” He only shook his head, and his old eyes reflected a sober misgiving.

  “He’ll see the papers in the morning,” he said. “Ther’ll be his photo on every front page. He’ll know it’s all or nowt, now.”

  “It’ll be nowt, I think. We’ll soon get him. He won’t be able to move without being spotted.”

  “He’ll be desp’rate. It’ll not be prison he’s thinking about. It’ll be the judge, putting the black cap on. He won’t be saying ‘Thank you, me lord,’ this time.”

  “No, I’m afraid he won’t,” Devery agreed. “It’ll be the end of the road for him. He won’t care what he does.”

  Furnisher looked at Silver before he spoke again. It was a good thing, he thought, that Devery was so busy. Because Devery was too busy to take her out, the girl stayed around the house. She was proper domesticated. Of course she had had no shopping to do since Saturday night. Tomorrow the shops would be open. If she went out, Furnisher would have to make an excuse to go with her, and he would take his old gun. It was more than half a century old, a service revolver of Boer War issue, but it would still stop a man; stop him immediately and permanently.

  The old man’s vigilance was not based on reasonable expectations. Starling had no real motive for hurting Silver. He had made a bargain, and he would gain nothing by dishonoring it. And he would also be very busy saving his own skin. But Furnisher was taking no chances where Silver was concerned, and, in spite of the bold way he had spoken to Starling on the telephone, he had an instinctive fear of the man. It was easy for him to imagine what that dangerous criminal might do out of pique, injured vanity, fancied insult or mere senseless cruel whim. Until Starling was caught, Furnisher was determined to be always in a position to guard Silver. Wherever she went out of doors, there would he be also.

  “Well, the sooner you catch him, the better for everybody,” he told Devery. “But, by gum, watch yourself if you come up agen him.”

  “I will, don’t worry,” Devery replied with a smile. But he was thinking, as other young policemen were thinking at the same moment, that if he got a glimpse of Starling he would take almost any chance to make an arrest.

  “Think on,” said the other man, not entirely convinced. “Our Silver wouldn’t like it if you got hurt.”

  Devery used that remark to open another topic. “Silver and I are thinking of getting married soon,” he said.

  Furnisher was startled. He looked quickly from the young man to the girl. Then he sighed. “Aye, I suppose it’s only natural,” he said. “A bit sooner nor I expected, though.”

  Devery grinned at him. “You were young once yourself, you know.”

  “Yes, and I were a proper buckstick, an’ all. I’ll not stop you. But there’s no need for you to go off and set up for yoursel’s. Silver’ll none want to leave her old granddad on his own. This place is big enough for three—or maybe more.”

  “We thought you’d want us to stay,” said Devery, and he could see that his use of the plural hurt a little. “We’ll do that, temporarily at least. But Silver wants us to do the place up a bit. Some new furniture, and that. We’ll want something of our own, so I’ll buy it.”

  “No need, lad, no need. If ther’s one thing we aren’t short on, it’s furniture.” He looked around the room. “Silver’s been bothering about new furniture for some time. Aay well, I suppose a young woman likes to see a change once in a while. We’ll have decorators in, and if there’s nothing in the shop what you want, you can see what’s in the catalogues of the firms I deal with. Unless—” he looked hopeful—“you’d like to see if there’s owt upstairs you want.”

  Devery looked at Silver, who was following the talk with interest. He made a brief soundless remark to her, and they smiled at each other.

  “Nothing doing, old boy,” he said. “We don’t want to seem ungrateful, but we don’t want any of your antiques.”

  The top floor of Furnisher’s shop-home-warehouse was crammed with his “antiques.” Most of them were pieces of Victorian furniture which were in appalling taste by any standard except that of their period. During his business lifetime he had acquired them for next-to-nothing because people would no longer have them in their houses. He believed that before he died, or shortly after his death, the circular trend of fashion would make them into valuable collectors’ items. He had so much old furniture on the top floor that he did not know what he had. Some of it he had not seen for years, because he did not go up there for an occasional gloat as he might have been expected to do. The furniture was covered with dust, mainly forgotten, and seldom visited. The top floor was a bothersome thing in Silver’s tidy mind. She often threatened to go up there and sail into action with dusters and a vacuum cleaner.

  Now, with her fingers, she repeated the threat.

  Devery replied in a combination of sign and lip language. “You don’t want a duster, sweetheart. Take an axe.”

  The old man took it all in good part. “You’ll see,” he said. “Ther’s some good stuff upstairs. It’ll be worth a mint o’ money one of these days.”

  “I dare say you’re right,” said Devery tolerantly. “But we don’t have to live with it, do we?”

  7

  Martineau’s wife may have been out at teatime—Tea-time on Sunday meant that she had taken a bus journey to see her parents. Fair enough—but she was waiting, unshakably decorous, when he arrived home at half past ten. “Hello,” he said as he entered the house. She looked at him, but she did not reply.

  He went into the kitchen. He was hungry. He had had one sandwich since breakfast, and a few glasses of beer since nine o’clock. Nowadays he always seemed to need a drink after a long day’s work; or perhaps it was not the work but Julia, Julia waiting for him with a grievance. Dutch courage.

  He looked in the oven. His dinner was there: cold, congealed, unappetizing. Part of it was a cold rice pudding. He removed the pudding—he did not want it—and switched on the heat to warm up the remainder.

  From his movements she guessed what he was doing. “Are you going to waste that pudding?” she demanded.

  “I’m not going to eat it, if that’s what you mean,” he replied.

  “It’s sinful,” she said. “I waited all afternoon with the table set.”

  A slight exaggeration. He let it go.

  “How would you like to spend a fine Sunday afternoon sitting waiting to wash up after somebody?” she wanted to know. “So busy. Such an important man. Couldn’t spare one minute in all the l
ivelong day to phone his home.”

  He let that go, too. But: “Did you have tea at your mother’s?” he asked politely.

  That checked her. In the same polite tone he followed up: “How is the old hellion?”

  She was coldly contemptuous. “Guttersnipe talk doesn’t become you,” she said. “But perhaps you can’t help it.”

  “No, I can’t. And she is, isn’t she? Look what she’s done to your stepfather. He started to disintegrate as soon as she married him. One of these days he’ll just fall to pieces, and she’ll be looking for her third.”

  She looked at him with narrowed eyes. He had never been deliberately offensive about her mother before. He never sought trouble as a rule. What was the matter with him?

  In their most vehement squabbles she had never once thought that their marriage might be broken up. They were husband and wife, and if they quarreled, well, he was in the wrong. It was—as she saw it—her duty as a wife to try and make him behave like the man she wanted him to be. She thought that she railed at him for his own good, to keep him up to the mark, to suppress his natural—but deplorable—masculine proclivity for low pubs, low companions, slack behavior and general vulgarity. She would have been shocked and humiliated if she had known that he had wearily ceased to care what happened to their marriage, and that once or twice he had actually wished that she would leave him.

  Her belief in the permanency of their union was reasonable. She was a product of the police tradition of happy marriage. If a policeman was not happily married, he had to pretend to be. Even in so-called enlightened times, divorce or separation was frowned upon by police authorities. Policemen had to be respectable, and ambitious policemen had to be very respectable. A break between Martineau and his wife, with maintenance or alimony decided in court, would destroy all his prospects of promotion. His wife never suspected for one moment that he would consider parting from her and ruining his career.

  So, now, she could see only one reason for his unusual aggressiveness. He was intoxicated. He concealed it very well, but he had had too much to drink.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “I am not drunk,” he replied.

  “You ought to think about your position before you go and get too much to drink in a pub. You ought to think about your wife and your home. You’ve got responsibilities.”

  “Responsibility. Singular. If it were plural there’d be a different atmosphere in this house.”

  Not that again, she thought. Always on about children! It was getting worse! Of course, drunken men always got sentimental about little toddlers.

  She did not answer him, but rose from her chair and began to set the table. She thought she had better get out his supper and carry it from the kitchen. She was afraid that—being drunk—he might stumble and spill gravy on the carpet.

  “You needn’t bother. I can do it,” he said.

  She brought the warm plate and put it on a cork mat. “Get your supper,” she said.

  He began to eat.

  “How is it?” she asked.

  The roast beef was tender. “Not bad at all,” he said.

  “It was lovely at dinnertime.”

  He grunted something which might have been agreement, or sarcastic comment.

  “It serves you right,” she said.

  “You sitting there with nowt to do but natter, that serves me right too,” he replied.

  To hell with her. She could clear out of it for all he cared, and damn the promotion.

  Still Julia did not perceive what was in his mind. “It’s always a mistake to argue with inebriated people,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

  After supper he played the piano until she knocked on the bedroom floor.

  8

  The next day, when people had read their morning papers, the telephone operators at Police Headquarters became very busy. There was a great increase in the number of citizens who thought they had seen Don Starling. The police knew that nearly all of them would be mistaken, but they patiently investigated each report. That was work for subordinates, and Martineau left it to them. He phoned Vanbrugh at the County office.

  “Anything new from the hinterland?” he wanted to know.

  “A little,” the County inspector replied. “We found a shepherd who saw a dark-blue car at about half past ten on Saturday morning. It was standing in that little dead end which comes out at the Moorcock.”

  “Near the lane leading to the quarry?”

  “Yes, quite near. He thinks it was a taxi, but he has no idea of the number or the make. He’s not even sure if it had a Hackney Carriage plate.”

  “Not a very satisfactory witness, but his time is right, if he’s sure of it. That was their second getaway car, my boy. But where do you suppose they went from there?”

  “I’ve been working on that. The check points were set, both on the Lancashire and Yorkshire sides, before they could have got away from the quarry. If Don Starling was with them, as we surmise, they could never have got through a check point. But there’s one way they could have missed all the checks, if one of them knew his way.”

  “That other little road from the Moorcock?”

  “Yes. I told you it went through to the main Granchester-Huddersfield road, which was checked. Well, it turns out that it crosses a road which passes through a place called Scammonden. From there they could have sneaked right out of the checking area.”

  “And gone where?”

  “Joined the traffic on the Wakefield and Doncaster road.” The races again, thought Martineau. Always the races. The heavy traffic going to the St. Leger.

  “You think they went a-racing?” he asked.

  “They could have. They would have, if they had any sense. Nobody would notice ’em in race traffic, once they got in the thick of it. There’d be hundreds if not thousands of cars and taxis filled with ugly mugs. And if they did happen to be caught with the money on the way back, well, they’d won it at the races.”

  “That seems to be a good assumption.”

  “Good enough to work on till it’s disproved. We can try and find out if anybody saw Don Starling at Doncaster. And who he was with.”

  “The gang would separate, surely.”

  “They might, and they might not. They’d probably think they were safe once they got on the course.”

  “H’m, possibly,” Martineau assented. “Thanks a lot. I’ll keep you up-to-date with what we get.”

  “I’m hoping you will,” said Vanbrugh. “I’m hoping we catch the lot of ’em, with enough evidence to swing ’em.”

  After that, Martineau put out the word for all officers in contact with informers to find out if Don Starling had been seen at the St. Leger meeting, and in what company. Then he turned his attention to the call book.

  “Anything good here?” he asked.

  The clerk grinned. “Starling’s been seen all over the place,” he said. “And sometimes in two places at once. Take your pick, there’s plenty to do.”

  Martineau’s glance followed his finger down the pages. The name “Mrs. Lusk” caught his eye. He read the item which concerned her. Some woman peeping through a window alleged that she had seen Don Starling walk to Mrs. Lusk’s door and try it, and hurry away. Apparently he did not knock, he just tried the door. That was early on Saturday evening. Lucky Lusk would be working behind the bar at the Lacy Arms at that time.

  “So what was the idea?” Martineau pondered. “One would expect the door to be locked.”

  No police officer had put his initials in the margin beside the item. Martineau wrote “Attention H.M.D.—Insp.” and said: “I’ll have a word with the lady.”

  He looked at his watch. It was too early for Lucky to have gone to work, and he thought he might find her at home. Devery was out on an inquiry. All the men were busy. He decided to go alone.

  He stopped the police car at Lucky’s door. When he knocked, she appeared at a bedroom window. She was wearing a bright silk dressing gown, and she had a com
b in her hand.

  She opened the window. “Hello,” she said. “Wait a minute, I’ll come down.”

  She was still wearing the dressing gown when she admitted him. “You’ve come too late,” she said as he followed her into the house. “Ten minutes sooner, and you’d have caught me in the bath. Woohoo! What a thrill!”

  He was admiring the rear view of her, and the way she walked. “A thrill? For whom?” he asked, for the sake of saying something.

  “For me, sonny boy. And for you, if you’re human. I’m worth seeing, let me tell you.”

  “Now you’re making me sorry I was late.”

  They were in the living room. She turned and faced him. “No!” she said, wide-eyed in mock wonderment. “I don’t believe it! You are human!”

  She was vitally attractive: full of life. The dressing gown, which was rather long and full, suggested intimacy and vulnerable femininity. Martineau was stirred by a quite strong feeling of concupiscence. It was years since he had lusted after a woman other than Julia; and a long time since he had wanted Julia.

  Well, there was nothing to be done about it. “I came to ask you a few questions,” he said.

  “Oh-h-h-h!” she exclaimed in disgust, and flopped into an armchair. He sat down facing her, and gave her a cigarette. The thought of her was still worrying him a little.

  “I came in a police car,” he said. “We can’t use those for errands of private amusement.”

  Her eyes twinkled mischievously. “Why not?” she queried. “That makes it official. If you come sneaking around with your hat over your eyes the neighbors’ll know you’re up to no good.”

  He grinned at her. Lucky was a good woman—so far as he knew—but her sporty brand of humor would get her into trouble some day. “Give over,” he said. “You’d be frightened to death if I made a pass at you.”

  “Try it and see,” she challenged, but she was still sprawling quite unguarded in the chair, smoking her cigarette.