Petrella at 'Q' (6 page)

Petrella considered this, and gave Constable Owers certain instructions.

The last members of the staff of Messrs. Mellors and Rapp were usually away by six, and for the next hour the offices were handed over to the cleaners. At a quarter to seven that evening Mrs. Burgess, who was dusting round young Mr. Mellors’s room, was disturbed by a loud ringing of the front doorbell. She hurried to the door and found two policemen on the step.

The older one said, “I don’t wish to alarm you, ma’am, or the other young ladies, but we’ve had a report that a person was seen climbing into these premises by a back window.”

Mrs. Burgess said, “Oh, lor, what will they get up to next?”

“There’s no cause to be alarmed,” said Constable Owers. “If the intruder is still on the premises, we can deal with him. But I think you ought to take these two young ladies to a place of safety.”

The two young ladies, who were Mrs. Burgess’s daughters, nodded vigorous agreement.

“It won’t take us long to search the building. Suppose you walk across the street and have a nice cup of tea?”

This proposal was accepted with gratitude.

As soon as the ladies were clear, Owers said to his younger companion, Constable Brean, “Watch the door, Albert, and tell me if they show any signs of coming back.”

He disappeared into the general office, selected six sheets of paper from the drawer of one of the desks and set to work. He was by no means an expert typist, and it took him nearly ten minutes to type out, in lower case and upper case, on each of six machines, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” followed by, 12 x £3456-78 = 90% ? ! “. When he had finished he replaced all the covers carefully, and went out to reassure Mrs. Burgess and her daughters.

That same evening Petrella called on Father Amberline, who knew more about the lives, characters and intentions of his flock than most parish priests, and told him what he suspected.

He said, “You know the person concerned better than I do. Do you think they
could
have done it?”

“Before answering that,” said Father Amberline, “I’d need to be convinced that it was done at all.”

“I think I can convince you,” said Petrella.

When he had finished, the priest said, “There are certain people of whom I could have said, with certainty, it is impossible. With this person I am far from sure. There is a streak of hardness. If the money was sufficient, they might do it.”

On the Wednesday a coroner’s jury returned a verdict of “suicide whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed” on Mrs. Key and Ronald Blanshard was given authority to arrange for her cremation.

On Thursday morning, Petrella saw Chief Superintendent Watterson.

He said, “It’s about these anonymous letters. I know now who’s been sending them.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I think so. If you look at these lists you’ll notice two odd things. The first is that the accusations aren’t vague and general. They’re all quite definite. Some of them are silly things. Some dishonest. Some bordering on the criminal. In fact, just the sort of things you might expect a solicitor to hear about from his clients in the course of a day’s work.”

Watterson grunted. He had no great opinion of solicitors. Tiresome people who cross-examined policemen and threw dust into the eyes of magistrates.

“The second thing is that no one
except Mrs. Key
has had more than two or three. And she must have had nearly a hundred.”

“You mean that all the others were cover for the attack on her?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“And the object?”

“The object,” said Petrella, “was to finish her. And it succeeded. The letters were written, and the envelopes were typed out by a Miss Eileen Fairweather. She is secretary to young Mr. Mellors, junior partner in Mellors and Rapp. I’m told that she was a conscientious girl, and sometimes stayed behind to finish Mr. Mellors’s letters. This gave her the run of six different typewriters in the general office. She used different machines, and different envelopes, so that Mrs. Key would be bound to open the letters.”

“Clever.”

“Too clever. She didn’t realise that the print of a typewriter can be identified as certainly as a fingerprint.”

He laid six sheets of typing paper and six envelopes on the table, and said, “Central are quite definite about it. There’s not the least room for doubt. Those envelopes were typed on the six machines in the office of Mellors and Rapp.”

“Why did she do it?”

“She did it for forty thousand pounds. She’s engaged to Ronald Blanshard, who is Mrs. Key’s only surviving relative, and inherits that sum under her will. She just couldn’t wait for the old lady to die in the natural way.”

Watterson brightened up. “That’s better,” he said. “That’s something a jury will understand.”

“I’m afraid it won’t come to a jury.”

“Why not? It seems a clear enough case.”

“A case of what?”

The Chief Superintendent started to say something, changed his mind, and said, “Hmm. Murder? Manslaughter? Conspiracy to procure suicide? I see there might be difficulty there. What about demanding money with menaces?”

“She was careful never to ask for money.”

“Public mischief then? Misuse of Her Majesty’s mails?”

“That’s more like it. A fine for a first offence.”

“It doesn’t seem adequate.”

“It will be quite adequate,” said Petrella grimly. “Once her name is mentioned in the papers, there’ll be fifty people round here after her blood.”

Watterson considered the matter. He said, “Do we charge Blanshard as well? Do you think he was in it?”

“There’s no direct evidence against him, but we’ll soon know, won’t we?” When Watterson looked puzzled he said, “As soon as the truth comes out. If he
was
in it with her, you may be sure he’ll stick to his guns, brazen it out, and marry her. They’ll have to move away and live somewhere else. But they’ll go through with it. On the other hand, if he didn’t know about it, he won’t touch her with a barge pole. He’ll refuse to have anything more to do with her. He’s got no other course open to him.”

Here Petrella was wrong.

Three days after the preliminary hearing in the Magistrates’ Court had been adjourned for the defence to consider the technical evidence, a patrolling policeman found Ronald Blanshard’s little car parked in a quiet turning behind Woolcombe Park. Eileen Fairweather was in the front seat. She had been shot through the head. Ronald was slumped over her. After killing her, he had shot himself. He had used a German automatic which his father had brought home as a souvenir on one of his leaves from North Africa.

Woolcombe Park is not in Q Division, and Petrella only learned about it when he read it in the paper the following morning. Hard on the heels of the report came Mrs. Oldenshaw. She was so upset that it was a few minutes before Petrella could gather what she was trying to tell him.

She said, “What shall I do with it? The money, I mean. They say I shall have it all now. I don’t want it.”

“You’d better consult the solicitors,” said Petrella. “They’ll tell you what to do.”

“Oh, them. They just say it’s mine, and I’ve got to have it. I wouldn’t have said ‘no’ to a little bit. That’s what Mrs. Key meant me to have. She didn’t mean me to have it all.”

“If you really want to get rid of some of it,” said Petrella, “why don’t you give it to Father Amberline, at St. Marks.”

His mind was on a very different sort of problem. In front of him on the table was a telex message. “Important. Repeated to all Stations in Q Division and for information to all other Divisions. Arthur Lamson’s conviction was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal at three o’clock this afternoon.”

That morning, because his wife and small son were away at the seaside, Detective Inspector Patrick Petrella cooked his own breakfast. He should have been with them, but his stand-in had broken his wrist in an argument with an Irish lorry-driver and his second-in-command had mumps.

As he walked through the sun-baked streets, from his flat in Passmore Gardens to the Divisional Sub-Station in Patton Street, there was an ache at the back of his neck and a buzzing in his ears, and his tongue felt a size too large for his mouth. Any competent doctor would have diagnosed strain from over-work and packed him straight off on holiday.

The morning was taken up with a new outbreak of shoplifting. In the middle of the afternoon the telex message was brought into his room.

“Important. Repeated to all Stations in Q Division and for information to all other Divisions. Arthur Lamson’s conviction was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal at three o’clock this afternoon.”

Petrella was still trying to work through all the unpleasant possibilities of this message when Chief Superintendent Watterson arrived.

He said, “I see you’ve had the news, Patrick. It was that ass Downing who did it.”

He referred, in this disrespectful manner, to Lord Justice Downing, one of the more unpredictable of Her Majesty’s judges.

“I was afraid it might happen,” said Petrella.

He spoke so flatly that Watterson looked at him and said, “You ought to be on leave. Are you feeling all right?”

“It’s the heat. A decent thunderstorm would clear the air.”

“What we want,” said Watterson, “isn’t a decent thunderstorm. It’s a decent bench of judges. Not a crowd of nitpicking old women. I wonder if they’ve got the remotest idea of how much damage a man like Lamson can do.”

“There’ll be no holding him now,” said Petrella.

Arthur Lamson was once described by the papers as the unofficial mayor of Grendel Street. He ran a gymnasium and sporting club, was a big donor to all local charities and had a cheerful word and a pat on the head for any child, or a pinch of the bottom for any pretty girl. He was also a criminal, who specialised in protection rackets, employing the youths who hung around his gymnasium to break up the premises – and occasionally the persons – of anyone who refused him payment.

Since he took no part in these acts of violence himself he had been a difficult man to peg. Indeed, he might have continued untouched by the law for a very long time if he had not fallen out with Bruno.

Bruno was a fair-haired boy, with a deceptively open face and a smile which showed every one of the thirty-two teeth in his mouth. He was a great favourite with the girls, and it was over a girl that the original trouble arose. There were other differences as well. Bruno had an unexpected streak of obstinacy. When he was not paid as much as he had been promised for a job he had done for Art Lamson, he spoke his mind, and spoke it loudly and publicly.

Lamson had decided that he must be disciplined. The disciplining took place in a quiet back street behind the goods depot.

Whilst Bruno was in hospital, having his jaw set and the bottom half of his right ear sewn back on, he came to certain conclusions. He told no one what he proposed to do, not even Jackie, the girl he was secretly engaged to. He went one evening to a quiet public house in the Tooley Street area, and in a back room overlooking the river he met two men who looked like sailors. To them he talked, and they wrote down all that he said, and gave him certain instructions.

A month later Bruno said to Jackie, “I don’t think any of the boys know you’re my girl, so you ought to be all right, but you’d better lie low for a bit. I’m going to have to clear out of London.”

Jackie said, “What are you talking about, Bruno? What’s going to happen? What have you done?”

“What I’ve done,” said Bruno, “is I’ve shopped Art Lamson. The Regional boys are picking him up tonight. With what I’ve been able to tell them, they reckon they’ve got him sewn up.”

Jackie put both arms round Bruno’s neck, her blue eyes full of tears, and said, “Look after yourself, boy. If anything happened to you, I don’t know what I should do.”

Very early on the following morning two cars, with four men in each of them, slid to a stop opposite Lamson’s house. Two men went round to the back, two men watched the front, and four men let themselves into the house, using a key to unlock the front door. Petrella was one of them. Grendel Street was in his manor and it was his job to make the actual arrest, and to charge Lamson on information received, with the crime of conspiring with others to demand money with menaces and to commit actual bodily harm.

The nature of the information received became evident at the preliminary hearing in the Magistrates’ Court. It was Bruno. And it was noticed that never once, whilst he gave his evidence, did he look at Lamson or Lamson at him.

This was in March.

The trial started at the Old Bailey in the first week of June. Bruno was brought to the court, from a safe hideaway in Essex, in a police tender which had steel bars on its windows and bullet-proof glass.

On the second afternoon, he gave his evidence to the Judge. Under the skilful questioning of his own counsel he repeated, even more clearly and comprehensively, the facts which he had already stated to the Magistrate. At four o’clock he had finished, and the Judge said, “It will be convenient if we break now. We can begin the cross-examination of this witness tomorrow morning.”

Counsel bowed to the Judge, the Judge bowed back, the Court emptied, and Bruno was taken down a flight of steps to the basement where the van awaited him.

As he stepped out of the door, a marksman on the roof of a neighbouring building, using an Armalite rifle with a telescopic sight, shot him through the head.

“And that,” said Watterson, “was that. The jury had heard Bruno’s evidence, and they convicted Lamson. Of course, there was an appeal. The defence pointed out that although plenty of people had given evidence of being intimidated, the only witness who actually identified Lamson as the head of the organisation was Bruno.”

And Bruno had not been cross-examined.

“How can you accept his evidence,” said Mr Michaelson, Q.C., in his eloquent address to the Court of Criminal Appeal, “when it has not been tested, in the traditional way, by cross-examination. Bear in mind, too, that the witness was himself a criminal. That he had, by his own admission, taken part in more than one of the offences with which the accused is charged. The law is slow to accept such evidence, even when it has stood the test of cross-examination—”