The Best of British Crime omnibus (64 page)

A stream of cars and taxis prevented him from crossing. He gave her a nod and a wave which were meant to be reassuring. They had the opposite effect. She twisted her head and took a quick look into the restaurant. There was still no sign of her friend. Then, after another anxious glance at Harry, she abruptly came down the two steps to pavement level and started running towards Soho Square.

Something had scared her or she had changed her mind about talking to him. He plunged into the road, handing off a sharply braking sports car and squeezing through the ten-inch gap between it and the car in front. Judy had a start of twenty yards as he set off after her at the double.

Opposite Chez Maurice the driver of a green mini-van started his engine and forced his way out into the stream of traffic moving towards Soho Square. His speed was just about the same as the two running figures.

A big pre-war Rolls-Royce seven seater Sedanca had stopped opposite the entrance to a night-spot proclaimed in neon signs as ‘The Mad House'. Just before Harry came abreast of it the doors opened and out poured half a dozen long-haired youths in studded jeans. Each of them was carrying a musical instrument, the largest of them a double-bass in an enormous case. They were already fairly high and seemed amused by Harry's efforts to get past them.

One of them grabbed his arm, laughing. ‘Say, man, you want to relax! Why not come in with us and we'll smooth you out?'

Harry had to make a big effort to wrench his arm free from the thin but astonishingly strong fingers. In doing so he cannoned into a middle-aged American couple who were surveying, wide-eyed, this piece of local colour. He sent the woman's handbag flying.

He recovered it from the gutter and with minimal apologies returned it to its owner. When he resumed his pursuit Judy Black had disappeared.

Harry raced towards Soho Square, not noticing the mini-van which had passed him and which he now repassed in his turn. He entered the square just in time to see a taxi at the far end turn in to pick up a girl who was waving frantically. Her cry. ‘Taxi! Taxi!' was like a desperate call for help.

Realising that he could never reach them in time, Harry halted and watched. The girl climbed aboard and the taxi moved on up the short section of street to Oxford Street. There it turned right. The mini-van accelerated to follow it.

Harry stood hesitating for a moment. An instinct told him that Judy would head back towards the West End. He decided to chance his luck. In any case there was nothing else he could do.

Moving really fast now he sprinted round the square to the opening of Stratton Street. It cut through to Charing Cross Road. He still had a chance to catch Judy's taxi at St. Giles's circus.

He covered the hundred yards or so in fifteen seconds, most of it on the roadway. Heads turned at the sight of an apparently sane young man who had suddenly gone berserk. Some joker even shouted ‘stop thief!'

Traffic was streaming up Charing Cross Road. Harry had to get to the farther side. Like a rugger player weaving through the New Zealand defence he zigzagged his way through the lethal stream.

Once on the pavement he stood, breathing deeply to recover his breath, his eyes scrutinising the occupants of every taxi that passed. Fifteen private cars and half a dozen taxis went by and then Harry saw a vehicle with a pale-faced girl in dark glasses on the back seat.

He moved out on to the roadway and held up his hand. The driver could not pass without running him down. For a moment Harry thought he was going to do just that. At the last moment he braked and managed to stop an inch from the immobile figure.

He put his head out of the window. ‘What's the game? Haven't you got eyes in your head? Can't you see this cab's taken?'

Harry had moved round beside him. ‘I'm a police officer,' he said quietly but with authority. ‘Detective Inspector Dawson. I want you to take us directly to Scotland Yard.'

As the driver gaped, Harry wrenched the cab door open and stepped inside. Judy Black, taken completely by surprise, was trying to open the door and jump out on the other side. Harry grabbed her and forced her back on to the seat. He slammed the door and shouted to the cabbie.

‘Drive on!'

Still marvelling, the driver engaged his gear and moved on.

Behind him the mini-van, which had endured the hold-up with patience, kept station at a distance of twenty yards.

Harry had sat down on one of the tip-up seats with his back to the driver. That way he could face the frightened girl on the seat opposite. At close quarters she was disquietingly attractive.

‘Now,' he demanded angrily. ‘What is this? What the hell are you trying to pull?'

‘Who are you?' She was literally shaking with fright and the cigarette which she had just lit had fallen from her fingers on to the carpet. ‘What do you want of me?'

‘You know damn well who I am! I'm Harry Dawson. Inspector Dawson, if you like. You phoned me twenty minutes ago—'

‘I – I did?' The girl's voice was incredulous.

‘Why, yes!'

Judy shook her head. ‘No. I never phoned you …'

‘You said you were in bad trouble and wanted to see me—'

Harry stopped. The voice
was
different. There was more Lancashire than Yorkshire in this girl's accent. He picked up the smouldering cigarette, wound the window down and threw it out.

‘What you're saying is that it wasn't you on the phone?' Again she shook her head. ‘Did someone really phone you, pretending to be me?'

‘Yes.'

‘It was a tip-off,' Judy said tensely. ‘They knew I was at the restaurant.'

‘Who's
they
?'

She turned away to stare out of the window. After the first shock of his appearance her confidence was beginning to return.

‘We've been looking all over for you,' Harry said. ‘We want to ask you some questions about the murder of Peter Newton.'

‘I didn't kill Peter,' she said angrily, turning round to meet his eyes. ‘I didn't have anything to do with it.'

‘We're not suggesting you did, but we still think you can help us by answering a few questions.'

‘There's nothing I can tell you. I don't know anything about the murder.'

‘There's a great deal you can tell us. We know, that you've been living with Newton. Haven't you been living with him for over a month now?'

Judy answered coldly. ‘I'm sorry. I can't help you.'

Harry leaned forward and tried to speak in a more friendly tone, to coax her into talking to him.

‘Judy, listen. If you didn't kill Newton then the best thing you can do—'

‘Don't call me Judy,' she whipped back. ‘When I want you to call me Judy I'll say so.'

Harry sighed. He reached in his pocket for his cigarette case. The taxi had negotiated Trafalgar Square and was heading along the Mall.

‘Where are you taking me?'

‘To Scotland Yard. I want you to meet a friend of mine. Inspector Fletcher. He's in charge of, the case.'

Judy gave an almost professional nod. ‘I know Fletcher.'

‘You know him?'

‘I've seen him around. I'm glad he's a friend of
yours.
'

Harry surmised that this girl was a good deal less tough than she tried to make out. He moved over to the seat she was sitting on, letting the occasional seat snap back into place. He offered her his open cigarette case. She hesitated, then took one. Before she had managed to get his lighter out, she had produced her own, lit the cigarette and replaced the lighter in the bag.

Harry lit his own cigarette.

‘Do we have to go to Scotland Yard?”

‘Yes. I'm afraid we do.'

‘Couldn't we go somewhere else?'

‘Where—for instance?'

For a moment he wondered whether she was going to try and buy him off, whether she was like those girls in Peter Newton's collection of photographs. But somehow she did not seem to fit into that category.

‘I don't know. Anywhere we can talk.'

‘I thought you didn't want to talk.'

‘Not about Peter, I don't. But there are other things.'

‘Such as?'

‘Stop the damn cab and I'll tell you!'

Harry studied her face for a moment. She had attempted to run away from him once. This could be another device for trying to elude him. The floodlit shape of Buckingham Palace was looming up ahead. To the left were the dark lawns, pools and copses of St. James's Park. He made up his mind and leaned forward to pull aside the panel in the glass partition.

‘Okay, driver. Pull up here, will you?'

The driver braked gently. He knew that a car was behind him, the same mini-van as he had held up in Charing Cross Road, and he did not want to be shunted from behind.

As he stopped and reached round to open the door for Judy he said: ‘You happy about this, miss?'

‘Yes.' Judy nodded. ‘He's okay.'

Harry paid him off. He was keeping a close eye on Judy to make sure that she did not make a run for it, so he did not notice that the mini-van had quietly gone past and pulled in to the kerb fifty yards farther on.

As the cab drove away he steered Judy to a bench at the back of the broad footway, screened by a clump of bushes growing at the edge of the park.

‘Now,' Harry prompted. ‘What kind of things are we going to talk about – Miss Black?'

‘Well, we could talk about – your father, for instance.'

They had reached the bench. From a dozen yards away a street lamp cast deep shadows through the branches that now hung over their heads. Judy sat down. She had thrown her cigarette away and was now reaching for another one.

‘What do you know about my father?' Harry asked her very quietly. He felt a peculiar nervousness, a sense that he might be on the verge of some discovery that would destroy the image which he had built up of the father whom he had worshipped almost as a hero.

This time she accepted the light he offered her. She inhaled deeply and then breathed the smoke out slowly before she answered.

‘I know who killed him.'

The driver of the mini-van parked fifty yards farther on, leaned across and lowered the window on the passenger's side. He put his head out just far enough to see the couple settle themselves on the park bench and the flame of the lighter as they lit their cigarettes.

He slid back into the driver's seat. He had not stopped the engine. He engaged a gear and moved off towards Buckingham Palace. He was a small man with the hungry, lean look which some jockeys have. But Marty Smith was not a healthy specimen. His cheeks were pocked by the marks of acne and he had a facial twitch which caused his right lip, nostril and eye to flicker every few seconds. It was as if one half of his face was continually wincing as a result of a flat-handed slap.

He drove carefully round the Queen Victoria Memorial and came back down the Mall, now on the opposite side. A little way past the park bench where the couple still sat, he turned left, and parked the van facing the boundary at the back of Clarence House. It was not an authorised parking place but there were no coppers about. He climbed out, invisible under the shadows of the shrubs and trees and stared thoughtfully across the road. He would have given a lot to be able to hear what those two were saying.

‘I met Peter about a year ago. I'm an actress, you know.' Judy smiled and then corrected herself. ‘Well, a dancer, really. It was Peter who persuaded me to come down from Liverpool. He got me a part in that show at the St. Edward's theatre which was such a flop.'

‘I gather he'd put quite a bit of money into it.'

‘He had. But it didn't seem to worry him. He had plenty of the stuff and I must admit he was pretty generous with it. That's why in the end I accepted his invitation to move in with him.'

‘Do you know where his money came from?'

‘He told me he was in the property business. And he also had an uncle who died and left him a quarter of a million.'

‘Hmm,' Harry sounded dubious. ‘How did he treat you?'

Judy took out a fresh cigarette and lit it from the stub of the one she was smoking. ‘We were very happy – at first anyway. Peter was really a very amusing person and good company. Then a funny thing happened—'

‘Go on,' Harry prompted. Without much interest he was watching the small man who was dodging his way across the road. He disappeared down some path that led into St. James's Park. ‘What sort of thing?'

‘Well, we came back from a cocktail party the other night – it was the night before your father was killed. Peter was in a terrific mood. We were supposed to be going to Paris the next day. He said my education would not be complete until I'd been to Maxim's and the Tour d' Argent.'

‘But you didn't go,' Harry prompted.

‘No. It was very eerie. It must have been about ten when the door-bell rang and this man in evening dress came in. I was—well, I wanted to get some more clothes on so I skipped into the bedroom.'

‘Did you see the man? Do you know who he was?'

‘I recognised his voice straight away. His name is Arnold Conway. Peter and I had been out once or twice with him and his wife Sybil. But he was talking to Peter in a way I'd never heard before. It made me frightened, but I couldn't help listening.'

‘Can you remember what he said?'

Judy's brow puckered as she made the effort to remember. ‘No, I can't really recall the words. Peter was obviously surprised to see Conway and asked him why he had come. And Conway told Peter that he had to be at Highgate Golf Club at ten o'clock sharp because that was the time Tom Dawson was going to be there. Peter made some sort of protest, but Arnold didn't give him a chance.'

She stopped, glancing nervously at Harry's face. ‘Well, go on,' he said.

‘There's nothing more. I walked out into the sitting-room then and Arnold suddenly became all affable. He left almost at once. Peter was obviously terribly upset but I was too. The idea of cancelling a trip to Paris for the sake of a game of golf …'