The Reckoning (21 page)

‘Not his name, no. But he did leave a card. He gave it to my husband. Now where did Tom put it?'

For an agonizing moment she seemed unable to recall, her gaze swivelling around the sitting room as if the object might suddenly materialize in front of them. Then she snapped her fingers.

‘Now I remember. He gave it to us as he was leaving.'

She rose to her feet and Lily followed suit. They went out into the entrance hall, where a small table stood. Mrs Singleton pulled out the only drawer and peered inside.

‘There it is.'

She took out a small piece of pasteboard and squinted at it in the manner of one accustomed to using reading glasses.

‘It's a company card,' she announced. ‘He works for Hoover. They must have a branch here. There's an Oxford address. Oh, but look – he wrote his name on it, too.'

She handed the card to Lily, pointing to the pencilled scrawl.

‘Do you see? He's a Mr Leonard Barker.'

Leonard Barker.

As she waved goodbye to Mrs Singleton, who was standing in the doorway, Lily glanced at the card again. She knew from experience that people using aliases often chose a name not unlike their own, and Ballard and Barker were close enough to make her wonder. Could this ‘Barker' be a relative of James Ballard, one they didn't know about?

Granted there had been nothing suspicious about the man's behaviour – Mrs Singleton had been unyielding on that point – but the fact that he'd turned up only days prior to her husband's murder couldn't be ignored. Before leaving, Lily had made a last attempt to jog her hostess's memory and had learned that there had been a period of several minutes when Mrs Singleton had gone into the kitchen to make the cup of tea she had offered their
visitor, leaving him alone in the sitting room with her husband, when presumably some words might have been exchanged.

But about what?

If Barker's purpose had been to identify Singleton as the man he was looking for, what sort of information would he have been after? Given that he obviously hadn't asked Singleton point-blank about the court martial (or Mrs Singleton would have known about it from her husband and reported the fact), might it not still have had something to do with the First World War? Perhaps he had pointed to one of the photographs standing on a table in the corner of the room, a picture Lily had spotted that showed Singleton in uniform climbing out of a dugout, and said something like, ‘I see you were in the war, sir, the Great War. So was my father.'

Nothing more than that, and hardly the sort of thing Singleton would have thought worth reporting to his wife afterwards. But enough to tell the killer – after Singleton had confirmed that he, too, had fought in the trenches – that he had found the man he was looking for.

After that it would have been simply a question of opportunity: of waiting for the right moment. Perhaps Barker had kept watch on the house. He might have seen Singleton setting off for his afternoon walk a few days later and seized his chance.

As for the card and the vacuum cleaner – well, it would be easy enough to get hold of a business card and scribble a name on it; no problem to buy a Hoover machine and pretend it was a demonstration model.

Lily caught her breath. She knew she was in danger of jumping to conclusions. But the urge to pursue the idea was irresistible, and as it happened there was a simple test she could carry out. She could easily find out from the Hoover branch in Oxford whether they had a salesman named Leonard Barker in their employ. A phone call would suffice.

And if it turned out that they had no employee of that name on their books . . . !

Lily's cheeks went hot at the thought. She quickened her pace, heading for the Banbury Road, where she knew she could catch a bus that would take her back to the city centre, and to a public telephone.

The odds were against it: she had no illusions on that score. But it was possible – just
possible
– that she might have cracked the case at a single stroke.

‘Yes, I see . . .
North
Oxford, you say? No, there's no message. I'll ring again tomorrow. Yes, I understand . . . before ten. Thank you. Goodbye.'

Lily put the phone back in its cradle.

‘Bugger!'

Giving vent to her feelings, she backed out of the kiosk to make way for a woman with a shopping bag in each hand, who had been waiting while the conversation she'd been having with the bloke whom the Hoover switchboard had put her through to (and who had identified himself as the sales director) had come to its unsatisfactory end.

Yes, they had a salesman named Leonard Barker in their employ, but he was out of the office just then on his usual rounds and wouldn't be in again until late afternoon. Would madam like to leave a message?

Further questioning on Lily's part had elicited the fact that Barker's area included much of north Oxford, which was just where the Singletons' house was located.

Bugger again!

It had been a guess at best, but all the same Lily's hopes had been high, and now there was nothing for her to do but return to London empty-handed. She was only relieved she wouldn't
have to admit as much to Morgan. The Oxford inspector had told her he would be in court all day.

What was it he had said about clutching at straws?

Buttoning her coat with a scowl, she set off for the station. Reaching it with a few minutes to spare before the next train departed for London, she slipped into the ladies' lavatory. As she stood in front of a mirror there, the scowl that she saw on her face brought a smile to her lips in its place. She was reminded of something Aunt Betty used to say to her when she was a child: ‘Don't pull a face. It'll stay that way.'

It was her aunt who had raised Lily, following the death of her mother in the great flu epidemic that had swept the globe after the First World War. Betty's husband, Lily's Uncle Fred, was a uniformed constable stationed at Paddington – thirty years in the force and still going strong, as he liked to say – and Lily always maintained it was the sight of him going off to work each day in his blue uniform that had moved her to follow in his footsteps.

Thinking of them now, she remembered another saying from her childhood, one of Uncle Fred's favourites: ‘When it's not your day, it's not your day.'

Well, this certainly hadn't been one of hers, she thought as she checked her appearance in the mirror and saw to her surprise that the Remembrance Day poppy she'd acquired more than a week ago, from one of the legion of women patrolling the streets of London armed with collection tins, was still pinned to her lapel. The anniversary was past: it was time to remove it.

Reaching up to unfasten the emblem, she winced as the pin pricked her finger and a drop of blood appeared. It rose like a tiny bubble on the end of her finger, redder than the paper bloom she was holding, and she regarded them both with a wry smile.
When it wasn't your day, it wasn't your day . . .

Lily continued to stare at them.

Later that week, when she went to have supper with her aunt and uncle, something she did on a regular basis since she thought of them as her true parents, she would tell them that she still didn't know where the idea had come from: whether it was a case of real inspiration – this said with a broad wink – or simply an association of ideas. But it seemed to pop into her head from nowhere, as if by magic.

‘Bloody hell!'

‘I beg your pardon.' The old biddy at the next basin was outraged.

‘Sorry, luv. It just popped out.'

Lily gave her a pat on the hand and a smile by way of an apology and then, without waiting to see the result, dashed out of the lavatory onto the platform, where her train was just drawing in. Only it wasn't her train any longer.

What she needed now was a taxi.

18

‘Y
ES
,
GUV
. R
IGHT AWAY
.'

Billy put down the phone.

‘Poole should be back any time now. If she's got anything worth reporting, give me a ring. I'll be with the chief super.'

Joe Grace looked up from the file he was leafing through.

‘The lads are all scratching their heads,' he said. ‘They can't understand why you picked her for this job.'

A veteran detective-sergeant, he was the latest addition to their squad, which Chubb had decided needed reinforcing, and Billy had set him the preliminary chore of reading the cumulative file.

‘How about you, Joe?' he asked. ‘How do you feel about it?'

Grace grinned. Thin, with a pockmarked face – and with a record showing as many commendations as reprimands on it – he was every bit as tough as he looked: one of those coppers who trod a thin line, usually managing to stay just inside the law, but sometimes overstepping the mark, which was one of the reasons he'd been stuck in his present rank for close on a dozen years and was unlikely ever to rise above it. Aware of the dangers he presented as a partner – Joe's bloody-minded approach to authority was a byword at the Yard – Billy had picked him for his sharpness and his hunter's instinct.

‘I've nothing against the lass. Mind you, I took her for a budgie.' It was Joe's name for an officer confined to desk jobs. A caged bird, in other words.

‘That seems to be the general idea. But I think she's better than that. I want you to keep an eye on her.' He saw a scowl begin to gather on Grace's hatchet face. ‘Don't worry. She won't be a burden to you. She catches on quick.'

‘If you say so.' But he sounded less than convinced.

Descending the stairs to Chubb's office, Billy had time to wonder why he'd been summoned. He had talked to the chief super less than an hour before, and only to inform him that there were no further developments to report.

‘We've received a photograph of Ballard and his wife from the St Ives police,' he had told Chubb. ‘I asked Miss Selby if she could let us have one.'

Billy had handed him the faded snapshot, with its dabs of glue on the reverse side showing where it had been removed from a photograph album. Taken on a beach, it showed the two of them – she in a flowered frock, he in white flannels – standing hand-in-hand at the sea's edge with the sunlight falling on their faces.

‘He was a good-looking bloke, all right.' Billy had been struck by the figure of the tall, dark-haired young man pictured in the snapshot. ‘You can see she thinks so too.'

Fair-haired and fair-skinned – and clearly somewhat older than the young man beside her – Hazel Ballard was gazing up at her husband with a look that wasn't far short of adoring (or so Billy thought).

‘And since we're still waiting to hear from the War Office about the court-martial record, I did what Mr Madden suggested – I rang the artillery depot at Woolwich and asked the adjutant if he could get me the names of the officers commanding batteries in the Arras sector around the time of Ballard's trial. One of them is likely to be the bloke who presided at the
court martial. He said it would take a few days to dig out the records, but he promised to get back to me.'

Now, as Billy opened the door to the chief super's office, he stopped in his tracks. Chubb was glaring at him from behind his desk. He had a face like thunder.

‘I've just been speaking to a man called Bannister. He's the director of the Public Record Office. Before I tell you what he said, you'd better sit down.'

Wonderingly Billy obeyed.

‘The record of Ballard's trial has gone missing.'

‘
What?
' Billy jumped to his feet. ‘What do you mean missing?'

‘I mean it's been lifted. Stolen. At least that's my opinion, though Bannister claims otherwise. They've only just found out. Wait till you've heard the whole story, though. See what you think.'

Speechless, Billy resumed his seat.

‘According to this Bannister bloke, towards the end of August they had an intruder who managed to get into a part of the building where they keep restricted material. It's a large room furnished with stacks where documents classified under the thirty-year rule are stored. Some of them had been rifled. Papers were found strewn about the floor and some documents were missing.'

The chief super's tone was derisive.

‘No need to tell you what a state that put them in. It was panic stations all round. They called in Special Branch and, since some of the documents originated with the Foreign Office, MI6 as well. God knows what they were so worked up about: not a lot, if you ask me; probably the fear of leaving some politician with egg on his face. But word of it never leaked out – they made sure of that – and more to the point as far as we're concerned, they never bothered to check the court-martial records. They're not kept in the stacks, they're stored separately in a cupboard – no
one ever looks at them, apparently – and as the cupboard was locked and didn't seem to have been tampered with, they didn't think it worth the trouble to check the files individually. They just took a peek inside, saw nothing was disturbed and let it go at that. As far as I can gather, the cupboard wasn't opened again until this morning, when someone was sent to get the Ballard file out for us to look at.'

Chubb sighed.

‘If there's one group of people I hate dealing with it's civil servants,' he said. ‘They've always got an answer, but it's never a straight one. At first Bannister tried to sell me on the idea that it was probably a clerical error: that the papers in the Ballard folder had somehow got mixed up with another file and it would just be a matter of sorting through them. When I told him, politely, to pull the other one, he finally came clean about that business three months ago. They never did get to the bottom of it. But as it turned out that the documents taken from the stacks didn't amount to much, they decided to let the matter drop. If you ask me, the whole business was staged. The theft of those documents was just a blind: it was meant to lead us in the wrong direction.'