Young Petrella (16 page)

Petrella rubbed his eyes. Surely it was a trick of the moon?

It took an effort of the will to move away from the friendly shelter of the wood. The feel of the heavy gun in his hand helped him.

As he started to move, the voices started. When he stopped, they stopped too. He told himself that it was the noise of his feet, passing through the dry ankle-high grass.

When he reached the dolmen stones, he looked across to the chapel, but it had gone. It was hidden in mist, which crept up, unnoticed, to his knees. If it rose higher and thicker, it might be a nuisance. The left-hand stone, she had said. Petrella knelt beside it. A large piece of turf had been cut. It moved to his fingers. Needing both hands, he laid the gun carefully down beside him. At that moment he looked up and saw the cook, five paces away, staring at him. His hand went to the gun. A foot was on it, a booted foot, which stamped on his fingers.

As he cried out, men came from everywhere: from behind the stones, from the hollow in the field, they rose from the ground. Then the world stopped short on its axis and he himself was diving, upwards and outwards, into space, towards the upside-down river of stars which formed the sky. As he went he heard shouts, and the braying of a siren, but faintly, and more faintly, as he left the busy earth behind him and journeyed outward into space.

There was sunlight in his eyes when he opened them, and a very pretty girl in a nurse’s uniform was doing something to the slats of the Venetian blind, and saying, “Only five minutes, then. No more.”

Petrella turned his head painfully, and saw Superintendent Hazlerigg, with his bowler hat between his hands and a look of sardonic interest on his brick-red face.

“Where am I?” said Petrella.

“At Quimper,” said Hazlerigg, “in hospital.”

Petrella gathered from his tone of voice that all was well.

“Have you got the stones?” he said. “What were they?”

“The Ladbrook emeralds, none other,” said Hazlerigg. “Six lovely stones. But no thanks to you. Or was it? I’m not sure. This has been rather a muddled trip. As I said to the Commissioner, we ought either to have told you a lot more, or a lot less.”

“You warned me to expect help from the French police,” said Petrella. “When it turned out to be that girl—”

“Marianne,” said Hazlerigg thoughtfully. “Yes. She’s in gaol with Clinton. You realise she was not being candid with you?”

Petrella said nothing. He lay and stared.

“The papers you were allowed to discover in her suitcase – the ones that seemed to indicate that she was in the French police – they had, of course, been planted there for you to find. Not that we lied to you. There was help on board. I expect you realise that now. The cook. A very experienced hand. The trouble was,
he
hadn’t been told about
you
.
A bad lack of liaison. But he came to the conclusion that you might be on the side of law and order when he caught you watching the girl through binoculars. That was why he took the shore trip. When you insisted on coming with him, and breathed down the back of his neck in the bistro, he knew exactly where he was.”

“If he knew I was on his side,” said Petrella faintly, “why didn’t he tell me?”

“By then it was too late. Clinton and his friends were wise to you, too. I’m not sure they hadn’t suspected you all along.”

Petrella grasped at the disappearing skirts of reality. “Do you mean,” he said, “that the girl—that she knew? All the time? Then why did she tell me about the broken cups? Why not just send one of her own side to dig them up? Wasn’t it incredibly risky?”

“It would have been risky,” agreed Hazlerigg, “if the stones had ever been in the cups. But they never were. You were told that story simply to make you go on shore. But the cook heard it. He’d fixed a microphone in her cabin.”

“He’d
what
?”

“He’d got them in all the cabins. I tell you, he is a professional, that man. When he heard what was up, he took the boat and went ashore ahead of you and tipped
us
off. It was a close race, but we got there more or less together. Not in time to stop you getting hurt, but in plenty of time to round up
their
party. She’d left a message for them on her early morning swim, so they knew what the plan was.”

Petrella said feebly, “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. What plan? How did the stones go ashore?”

“That bit was really quite simple,” said Hazlerigg kindly. “
You
were carrying them. Six stones wrapped in cotton wool, in the magazines of the gun she gave you.”

At this point the nurse reappeared. “Do you wish to kill the boy,” she said sternly, “with your chattering? Out with you this moment! No, not another word!”

The table was the first thing which caught your eye as you came into the room. Its legs were of green-painted angle-iron, bolted to the floor; its top a block of polished teak.

Overhead shone five white fluorescent lights.

On the wide, shadowless, aseptic surface the raincoat looked out of place, like some jolly, seedy old tramp who has strayed into an operating theatre. A coat is such a personal thing, almost a second skin. As it loses its own shape, and takes on the outlines of its wearer, as its pockets become a repository of tobacco flakes and sand and fragments of leaves, and its exterior becomes spotted with more unexpected things than rain, so does it take on an intimate life all of its own.

There was an element of indecency, Petrella thought, in tearing this life from it. The earnest man in rimless glasses and a white laboratory overall had just finished going over the lining with a pocket-sized vacuum cleaner with a thimble-shaped container. Now he was at work on the exterior. He cut a broad strip of adhesive tape and laid it on the outside of the coat, pressing it firmly down. Then he marked the area with a special pencil, and pulled the tape off. There was nothing visible to the naked eye on the under-surface of the tape, but he seemed satisfied.

“We’ll make a few micro-slides,” he said. “They’ll tell us anything we want to know. There’s no need for you to hang about if you don’t want to.”

Sergeant Petrella disliked being told, even indirectly, that he was wasting his time. Let the truth be told, he did not care for Scientific Assistant Worsley at all. Worsley had the very slightly patronising manner of one who has himself been admitted to the inner circles of knowledge and is speaking to unfortunates who are still outside the pale. It was a habit, Petrella had noticed, which was very marked at the outset of a scientific career, but which diminished as a man gained more experience and realised how little certainty there was, even under the eye of the microscope.

“All right!” he said. “I’ll push off and come back in a couple of hours.”

“To do the job completely,” said Worsley, “will take about six days.” He looked complacently at the neat range of Petri dishes round the table, and the samples he had so far extracted. “Perhaps another three to tabulate the results.”

“All the same,” said Petrella, “I’ll look in this evening and see what you have got for me.”

“As long as you appreciate,” said Worsley, “that the results I give you will be unchecked.”

“I’ll take a chance on that.”

“That, of course, is for you to decide.” His voice contained a reproof. Impetuous people, police officers. Unschooled in the discipline of the laboratory. Jumpers to conclusions. People on whom careful, controlled research was usually wasted. Worsley sighed audibly.

Sergeant Petrella said nothing. He had long ago found out that it was a waste of time antagonising people who were in a position to help you.

He consulted his watch, his notebook, and his stomach. He had a call to make in Wandsworth, another in Acton, and a third in South Harrow. Then he would come back to the Forensic Science Laboratory to see what Worsley had got for them. Then he would go back to Highside and report to Chief Inspector Haxtell. He might have time for lunch between Acton and South Harrow. If not, the prospect of food was remote, for once he reached Highside there was no saying that Haxtell would not have a lot more visits lined up for him.

All this activity – and, indirectly, the coat lying on Worsley’s table – stemmed from a discovery made by a milkman at No. 39 Carhow Mansions. Carhow Mansions is a tall block of flats overlooking the southern edge of Helenwood Common.

Miss Martin, who lived alone at No. 39, was a woman of about thirty. Neither beautiful, nor clever, nor ugly, nor stupid. She was secretary to Dr. Hunter, who had a house and consulting room in Wimpole Street. She did her work well, and was well paid for it.

The flat, which was tucked away on the top storey and was smaller than the others in the block, was known as a “single” which means that it had about as little accommodation as one person could actually exist in. A living room which was also a dining room. An annexe which served as a bedroom. One cupboard, called a kitchen, and another, called a bathroom. Not that Miss Martin had ever been heard to complain. She had no time to waste on housework and ate most of her meals out. Her interests were Shakespeare and tennis.

Which brings us to the milkman, who, finding Friday’s milk bottle still unused outside the door of Flat 39 on Saturday, mentioned the matter to the caretaker.

The caretaker was not immediately worried. Tenants often went away without telling him, although Miss Martin was usually punctilious about such matters. Later in the morning his rounds took him up to No. 39 and he looked at the two milk bottles and found the sight faintly disturbing. Fortunately, he had his pass-key with him.

Which brought Chief Inspector Haxtell on to the scene in a fast car. And Superintendent Barstow, from District Headquarters. And photographic and fingerprint detachments, and a well-known pathologist, and a crowd on the pavement, and a uniformed policeman to control them; and, eventually, since Carhow Mansions was in his manor, Sergeant Petrella.

Junior detective sergeants do not conduct investigations into murders, but they are allowed to help, in much the same way as a junior officer helps to run a war. They are allowed to do the work, whilst their superiors do the thinking. In this case there was a lot of work to do.

“I don’t like it,” said Barstow in the explosive rumble which was his normal conversational voice. “Here’s this girl, as ordinary as apples and custard. No one’s got a word to say against her. Life’s an open book. Then someone comes in and hits her on the head, not once. Five or six times.”

“Any one of the blows might have caused death,” agreed the pathologist. “She’s been dead more than twenty-four hours. Probably killed on Friday morning. And I think there’s no doubt that that was the weapon.”

He indicated a heavy, long-handled screwdriver.

“It could have belonged to her,” said Haxtell. “Funny thing to find in a flat, though! More like a piece of workshop equipment.”

“All right!” said Barstow. “Suppose the murderer brought it with him. Ideal for the job. You could force a front door with a thing like that. Then, if the owner comes out, it’s just as handy as a weapon. But it’s still—” – he boggled over using the word and its implications – “it’s still mad.”

And the further they looked, and the wider they spread their net, the madder it did seem. Certain facts came to light at once.

Haxtell was talking to Dr. Hunter, of Wimpole Street, within the hour. The doctor explained that Miss Martin had not come to work on Friday because he himself had ordered her to stay in bed. “I think she’d been over-using her eyes,” said the doctor. “That gave her a headache, and the headache affected her stomach. It was a form of migraine. What she needed was forty-eight hours on her back, with the blinds down. I told her to take Friday off, and come back on Monday if she felt well enough. She’s been with me for nearly ten years now. An excellent secretary, and such a nice girl!”

He spoke with so much warmth that Haxtell, who was a cynic, made a mental note of a possible line of enquiry. Nothing came of it. The doctor, it transpired, was very happily married.

“That part of it fits all right,” said Haxtell to Superintendent Barstow. “She was in bed when the intruder arrived. He hit her as she was coming out of her bedroom.”

“Then you think he was a housebreaker?”

“I’d imagine so, yes,” said Haxtell. “The screwdriver looks like the sort of thing a housebreaker would carry. You could force an ordinary mortice lock right off with it. As a matter of fact he didn’t have to use it in this instance, because she’d got a simple catch lock that a child of five could open. I don’t doubt he slipped it with a piece of talc.”

“Why did he choose her flat?”

“Because it was an isolated one, on the top floor. Or because he knew her habits. Just bad luck that she should have been there at all.”

“Bad luck for her,” agreed Barstow, sourly. “Well, get the machine working. We may turn something up.”

Haxtell was an experienced police officer. He knew that investigating a murder was like dropping a stone into a pool of water. He started two enquiries at once. Everybody within a hundred yards of the flat was asked what they had been doing and whether they had noticed anything. And everyone remotely connected, by ties of blood, friendship or business, with Miss Martin was sought out and questioned.

It is a system which involves an enormous amount of work for a large number of people, and has only got one thing in its favour. It is nearly always successful in the end.

To Sergeant Petrella fell the task of questioning all the other tenants in the block. This involved seven visits. In each case, at least one person, it appeared, had been at home all Friday morning. And no one had heard anything at all, which was disappointing. Had anything unusual happened on Friday morning? The first six people to whom this enquiry was addressed scratched their heads and said that they didn’t think anything had. The seventh mentioned the gentleman who had left census papers.

Now Petrella was by then both hot and tired. He was, according to which way you looked at it, either very late for his lunch or rather early for his tea. He was on the point of dismissing the man with the census papers when the instinct which guides all good policemen drove him to persevere with one further enquiry. Had he not done so the Martin case would probably have remained unsolved. As he probed it, a curious little story emerged. The man had not actually left any papers behind him. He had been making preliminary enquiries as to the numbers of people on the premises so that arrangements for the census could be put in hand. The papers would be issued later.