Hardcastle's Frustration (5 page)

‘Thank you for that helpful comment, Marriott. Go home before you depress me further. And my regards to Mrs Marriott.'

‘Thank you, sir, and mine to Mrs H.'

Once Marriott had left the station, Hardcastle settled down to deal with his accumulated paperwork. But first he read
Police Orders
, the daily publication that reported all that was happening, and going to happen, in the Metropolitan Police. He noted with a wry smile that a constable in one of the outer divisions had been dismissed after being found drunk and asleep in a wheelbarrow. Such a punishment carried with it the very real possibility that the man concerned would be called up for the army and finish up in the trenches.

At half past seven, he decided that he had done enough for one day, and donned his overcoat and bowler hat and seized his umbrella.

But before leaving the station, he looked into the front office. The station sergeant reported that all was correct.

‘Anything happened that's likely to interest me, Skipper?' asked Hardcastle.

‘A couple of your lads nicked a pickpocket at the guard change at Buck House this morning, sir, but apart from that, nothing.'

‘Who were they?'

The station sergeant referred to the charge book. ‘DCs Catto and Lipton, sir.'

‘They're not trying hard enough.' Hardcastle had an unfair view of Henry Catto's abilities as a detective, but he was good at his job, and seemed only to appear uncertain of himself in the DDI's presence. ‘They could do better than a couple of dips if they tried.'

Hardcastle had waited nearly half an hour in the fog for a tram to arrive at the stop on Victoria Embankment, and when it did arrive it was crowded. Once he had taken the fares, the conductor alighted and returned to the front of the tram. For the rest of the journey, he walked slowly ahead of it with an acetylene gas lamp. Trams had been known to run down lost pedestrians in such weather, despite the constant ringing of the vehicle's bell.

As a result of the delay, it was nearly nine o'clock before Hardcastle let himself into his house, remembering to shake his umbrella and leave it on the doorstep before he entered. It was the house in Kennington Road, Lambeth, in which he and his wife Alice had lived since their marriage some 25 years ago, and was a few doors down from where the famous Charlie Chaplin had once resided.

‘Is that you, Ernie?' called Alice from the kitchen.

‘Yes, it's me, love.' Hardcastle hung up his hat and coat and, as was his invariable practice, checked the hall clock against his hunter before entering the kitchen. ‘Sorry, I'm late, love,' he said, and kissed his wife. ‘What's for dinner? It smells wonderful.'

Alice turned from the range and flicked a lock of hair from her forehead. ‘I spent fifteen of our meat coupons on a sirloin of beef, Ernie,' she said, ‘which only leaves us three points for the rest of the week. But we've got to have a decent bit of beef once in a while.'

Hardcastle nodded. ‘At least we're better off than the Germans,' he said. ‘I've heard that they're eating cats and dogs over there, and they're making their bread from potato peelings and sawdust.'

Alice stopped what she was doing. ‘Is that true, Ernie?' she asked. ‘Oh, those poor people.'

‘Poor people be damned,' said Hardcastle vehemently. ‘They shouldn't have started it by marching into Belgium.'

‘Yes, I know all about that,' said Alice, who was an avid reader of the
Daily Mail
, ‘but just think of the poor children. They didn't have anything to with the war.'

Hardcastle knew better than to argue with his wife, and changed the subject. ‘Talking of which, where are our children this evening?' He always referred to their offspring as children, even though Kitty was twenty-two, Maud twenty and young Walter had just turned eighteen.

‘Kitty's got the back shift on the buses, Maud's gone out with her young man, and Wally's gone to the Bioscope in Vauxhall Bridge Road with a pal of his to see some film about cowboys and Indians.'

‘It's time Kitty gave up that job on the buses. It's too dangerous.' It was something that Hardcastle frequently said.

‘Well, you try to talk her out of it, Ernie, but I doubt you'll have any better luck than me.'

Hardcastle knew that to be true. Kitty Hardcastle was a headstrong young woman and had taken a job as a conductorette with the London General Omnibus Company to relieve a man to fight. But despite his own attempts to dissuade her, nothing would convince her to change her mind.

‘And what's this about Maud having a young man?' demanded Hardcastle. ‘I didn't know anything about that.'

‘Well, you're never here to find out, Ernie, are you?' said Alice accusingly. ‘She met a young army lieutenant who she was nursing, and they've got quite keen on each other.' Maud had been nursing at one of the large houses in Mayfair that had been given over to the care of wounded officers. ‘When he'd recovered, he was posted to Armoury Barracks in Hoxton training young soldiers, and he invited her out to the theatre tonight. They've been walking out for quite some time now.'

‘An officer, eh?' Hardcastle was impressed. ‘It's a shame Kitty can't find someone like that. The last I heard she was going out with a City copper, of all people.' He was unreasonably critical of the City of London Police, and regarded it as little less than impertinence that they should have responsibility for a solitary square mile in the centre of the Metropolitan Police District.

It was not until Tuesday morning that Hardcastle received a message from Dr Spilsbury requesting his attendance at St Mary's Hospital.

‘I've just completed my examination of this fellow's cadaver, Hardcastle,' said Spilsbury. ‘It was a single gunshot to the back of the head that did for him.'

‘I take it you've recovered the round, Doctor Spilsbury.'

‘There it is.' The pathologist pointed his forceps at a bullet resting in an enamel kidney-shaped bowl on a side bench. ‘I'd estimate the age of this man to have been in the late thirties.'

‘You're absolutely right, Doctor. He was born on the twenty-third of July 1879, and I was told that he was unlikely to be fit for the army,' said Hardcastle, repeating the information he had received from Frank Harvey, Ronald Parker's manager at the gas company.

‘I can certainly confirm that for you, Inspector. He most certainly was not fit. He suffered from pulmonary emphysema and that would have precluded him from service in the army or navy.'

‘He wouldn't have passed a tribunal to assess his physical fitness for active service, then, Doctor?'

‘Not if I'd had anything to do with it, Hardcastle,' said Spilsbury.

The cab delivered the two detectives to the main door of New Scotland Yard. Followed by a hastening Marriott, Hardcastle, his agility belying his bulk, bounded up the steps that led to the front entrance of the central building. A uniformed constable pulled open the heavy door for him and saluted.

Once inside, Hardcastle immediately turned left and hurriedly descended the staircase. At the end of a long corridor he and Marriott entered the tiny workshop of Detective Inspector Percy Franklin, the Yard's acknowledged ballistics expert. So enthusiastic was Franklin that the authorities at Scotland Yard had eventually yielded to his demand for somewhere to carry out his tests and experiments. On the wall of his tiny workshop there were cutaway diagrams of rifles, pistols and revolvers, and the bench at which the shirt-sleeved Franklin was working was littered with parts of firearms. To the unskilled eye, it seemed that there was no order to them, but Franklin knew every piece and where it belonged and how it fitted.

In furtherance of his passion, Franklin had struck up a friendship with Robert Churchill, the gunsmith, whose premises were in the Strand. The two of them were frequently to be seen sitting by the fire in the nearby Cheshire Cheese public house, enthusiastically exchanging information about firearms. From time to time, Franklin would call in at Churchill's small establishment to watch the gunmaker firing bullets into the heads of sheep, a ready supply of which came from the butcher next door. From these experiments, Franklin had learned, among other things, about how powder burns could determine the distance at which a firearm had been discharged. On one particular occasion, back in 1913, it had helped Franklin to prove that what at first was believed to be a suicide was actually a murder.

‘Good morning, Ernie. Don't tell me, your visit has something to do with a body found floating in the Thames yesterday.' Franklin swung round on his stool, and put down the magnifying glass he had been using to examine a pistol. ‘I've been expecting you.'

‘You're very well informed, Percy.' Hardcastle placed a round on the bench. ‘Dr Spilsbury recovered this bullet from the skull of Ronald Parker, our victim. What can you tell me about it?'

Franklin placed the bullet on a piece of green baize cloth, and with the aid of a jeweller's eyeglass, examined it closely, occasionally turning it this way and that with a pair of forceps. ‘A seven-groove, point four-five-five ball round, Ernie,' he said, at last looking up. ‘It's almost certainly from a military weapon, probably a Webley and Scott, and anything between a Mark One and a Mark Six.'

Hardcastle was impressed by Franklin's apparent expertise, but at once slightly sceptical that the firearms specialist could deduce so much just by looking at a bullet. ‘Can you tell me which particular revolver it came from, Percy?'

Franklin emitted a short, contemptuous laugh. ‘Not unless you can show me the weapon, Ernie.'

‘I will, Percy, you may rest assured.

‘Well, I hope you do, Ernie,' said Franklin, ‘because I can't tell you anything more until you do. I'm not a bloody magician, you know.'

‘Really?' said Hardcastle. ‘And there's me thinking that you were.'

‘Come into the office, Marriott,' said Hardcastle when the two detectives were back at Cannon Row police station. He settled himself behind his desk and filled his pipe. Once he had lit it to his satisfaction, he leaned back in his chair, a reflective expression on his face. ‘We'll have to give some serious consideration to this here murder of ours, m'boy.'

‘D'you think Parker's wife had anything to do with it, guv'nor?' said Marriott, lapsing into the informality of address that his chief had used.

‘Not unless she owns an army revolver, m'boy.'

‘Daisy Benson's husband might have one, guv'nor. She told us he was a staff sergeant in the Army Ordnance Corps.'

‘But would he have had a revolver? The Ordnance Corps isn't an active service regiment, is it?' Unusually for Hardcastle, he was admitting that Marriott's knowledge of military matters was superior to his own.

‘Not in the same way as the artillery, the infantry, the cavalry or the Tank Corps, but the Ordnance Corps is responsible for supplying weaponry to the army. If Staff Sergeant Benson works in an ordnance depot, he'd be able to lay hands on a revolver without any difficulty, and cover up the loss by showing that it had been condemned as unserviceable.'

‘That's all very interesting, Marriott,' said Hardcastle, reverting to the formal mode of address, ‘but there's only one flaw in your theory: Daisy Benson said that her husband is in France. So how does he shoot Parker, wrap him up in a sugar sack and drop him in the river, even if he'd known that Parker was enjoying Mrs Benson's favours?'

‘He might've come home on leave and caught them at it, sir. And if he had, I don't suppose it's the sort of thing Daisy would've told us about.'

‘He needn't necessarily have caught them in the act,' said Hardcastle, unwilling to let Marriott tailor the enquiry to fit in with his own theory. ‘He might've been tipped off, despite what Daisy Benson said about her neighbours not suspecting anything. I can't even scratch myself without my neighbours appearing to know about it. Anyway, he wouldn't be the first soldier to get that sort of letter while he was at the Front.' He put his pipe in the ashtray. ‘But that's all pie in the sky. We need solid evidence.'

‘We've only Daisy's word for it that her old man's in France, sir,' said Marriott, unwilling to give up on his notion. ‘For all we know, he could still be in Aldershot. If he was ever there in the first place. What's more, he could've been on leave at the time Parker was topped.'

‘Well, that's easily resolved, Marriott. Have a word with Colonel Frobisher's people.' Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Frobisher of the Sherwood Foresters was the assistant provost marshal of London District, and as such was Hardcastle's point of contact for all matters military. ‘But you needn't bother the colonel. Drop in on his clerk, Marriott, and see what he can tell us. What's his name?'

‘Sergeant Glover, sir,' said Marriott.

‘Ah yes, that's the fellow.'

Charles Marriott crossed Whitehall and strolled the short distance to Horse Guards Arch where the APM had his office. Buses ground their noisy way up and down the broad thoroughfare, and the pavements were thronged with pedestrians, many of whom these days, wore either army or navy uniform.

The outgoing King's Life Guard had just been relieved of its twenty-four-hour stint of duty and Marriott, never tiring of a sight he had seen on many occasions, paused to watch the khaki-clad troopers ride through the archway on their return to Hyde Park Barracks.

Sergeant Cyril Glover of the Military Foot Police looked up in surprise as Marriott entered the office.

‘Blimey, your guv'nor not with you this morning, Charlie?' Glover was accustomed to seeing Marriott in the company of his DDI.

‘Not today, Cyril. He does occasionally let me out on my own.'

‘The colonel's not here at the moment, Charlie, if it was him you wanted to see,' said Glover. ‘He's gone to Duke of York's HQ to give evidence at some court martial they've got going on there. Apparently some idiot of a second-lieutenant got involved in a fist fight over a woman outside the Army and Navy Club, of all places,' he added, shrugging as though such events were an everyday occurrence.