Young Petrella (18 page)

Petrella let his man order first. He was evidently a well-known character. He called the landlord “Sam”, and the landlord called him “Mr. Taylor”.

Petrella drank his own beer slowly. Ten minutes later the moment for which he had been waiting arrived. Mr. Taylor picked up a couple of glasses and strolled across with them to the counter. Petrella also rose casually to his feet. For a moment they faced each other, a bare two paces apart, under the bright bar lights.

Petrella saw in front of him a man of young middle-age, with a nondescript face, and neutral coloured, tousled hair, perhaps five foot nine in height, and wearing some sort of old school tie.

As if aware that he was being looked at, Mr. Taylor raised his head; and Petrella observed, in the left eye, a tiny red spot. It was, as the Colonel had said, the colour of a fire opal.

“We showed his photograph to everyone in the block,” said Haxtell with satisfaction, “and they all of them picked it out straight away, out of a set of six. Also the Colonel.”

“Good enough!” said Superintendent Barstow. “Any background?”

“We made a very cautious enquiry at Joblox. Taylor certainly works for them. But he’s what they call an outside commission man. He sells in his spare time, and gets a percentage on sales. Last year he made just under a hundred pounds.”

“Which wouldn’t keep him in his present style.”

“Definitely not! And, of course, a job like that would be very useful cover for a criminal sideline. He would be out when and where he liked, and no questions asked by his family.”

Barstow considered the matter slowly. The decision was his.

“Pull him in,” he said. “Charge him with the job at Colonel Wing’s. The rest will sort itself out quick enough when we search his house. Take a search warrant with you. By the way, I never asked how you got on to him. Has he some connection with the oyster trade?”

Petrella said, cautiously, “Well, no sir. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t. But the report was very useful corroborative evidence.”

“Clever chaps, these scientists,” said Barstow.

“Come clean!” said Haxtell when the Superintendent had departed. “It was nothing to do with that coat, was it?”

“Nothing at all,” said Petrella. “What occurred to me was that it was a very curious murder. Presuming it was the same man both times. Take Colonel Wing – he’s full of beans – but when all’s said and done, he’s a frail old man, over ninety. He saw the intruder in a clear light, and the man simply turned tail and bolted. Then he bumps into Miss Martin, who’s a girl, but a muscular young tennis player, but he
kills
her, coldly and deliberately.”

“From which you deduced that Miss Martin knew him, and he was prepared to kill to preserve the secret of his identity. Particularly as he had never been in the hands of the police.”

“There was a bit more to it than that,” said Petrella. “It had to be someone who knew Miss Martin, but so casually that he would have no idea where she lived. Mightn’t even remember her name. If he’d had any idea that it was the flat of someone who knew him he wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. What I was looking for was someone who was distantly connected with Miss Martin, but happened to have renewed his acquaintance with her recently. He had to be a very distant connection, you see. But they had to know each other by sight. There were half a dozen who would have filled the bill. I had this one in my mind because I’d interviewed Mrs. Taylor only that afternoon. Of course, I’d have tried all the others afterwards. Only it wasn’t necessary.”

There was neither pleasure nor satisfaction in his voice. He was seeing nothing but a nice red-headed girl and two red-headed children.

It was perhaps six months later that Petrella ran across Colonel Wing again. The Taylor case was now only an unsatisfactory memory, for Mr. Taylor had taken his own life in his cell at Wandsworth, and the red-headed girl was now a widow. Petrella was on his way home, and he might not have noticed him, but the Colonel came right across the road to greet him, narrowly missing death at the hands of a motorcyclist of whose approach he had been blissfully unaware.

“Good evening, Sergeant!” the old man said. “How are you keeping?”

“Very well, thank you, Colonel,” said Petrella. “And how are you?”

“I’m not getting any younger,” said the Colonel. Petrella suddenly perceived, to his surprise, that the old man was embarrassed. He waited patiently for him to speak.

“I wonder,” said the old man at last, “it’s an awkward thing to have to ask, but could you get that coat back – you remember—?”

“Get it
back
,” said Petrella. “I don’t know. I suppose so.”

“If it was mine, I wouldn’t bother. But it isn’t. I find it’s my cousin Tom’s. I’d forgotten all about it, until he reminded me.”

Petrella stared at him.

“Do you mean to say—”

“Tom stayed the night with me – he does that sometimes, between trips. Just drops in. Of course, when he reminded me, I remembered—”

“Between trips,” said Petrella, weakly. “He isn’t by any chance an oyster fisherman?”

It was the Colonel’s turn to stare.

“Certainly not,” he said. “He’s one of the best-known breeders of budgerigars in the country.”

“Budgerigars?”

“Very well known for them. I believe I’m right in saying he introduced the foreign system of burnishing their feathers with oil. It’s funny you should mention oysters, though. That’s the thing he’s very keen on. Powdered oyster shell in the feed. It improves their high notes.”

Petrella removed his hat in a figurative but belated salute to the Forensic Science Laboratory.

“Certainly you shall have your coat back,” he said. “It’ll need a thorough clean and a little stitching, but I am delighted to think that it is going to be of use to someone at last.”

Helenwood House was built, in the early years of the last century, by a successful Special Pleader. He built generously (for he had a wife and eleven children to house), in brickwork, cream-painted stucco and imitation Bath stone; and he surrounded his home with a garden and a high iron fence. Those were spacious days, when tea-brokers from Mincing Lane drove out to their mansions on Muswell Hill, and the nightingale sang on Highside.

The years went past, Highside descended in the social scale and Helenwood House descended with it, but more slowly for it was insulated from the march of time by its high fence and by an ever-thickening jungle of shrubs and trees.

Its barrister-owner died, but the complex settlement which he had made lived after him, and the tentacles of the law gripped Helenwood House more tightly even than the ivy which now enshrouded it. Had it been taken in hand in the twenties or thirties it might have been rescued, and opened up and turned into an apartment house (for which there is great demand in Highside), but by this time it was under the control of trustees and was occupied by two elderly ladies, and five cats.
Buprestidan
, the borer, and
Anobium domesticum
, the deathwatch beetle, made lodgement in the timbers; and, creeping out from the shrubberies,
Polyporus destructor
, curiously miscalled dry rot, cast its dripping cloak over the brickwork of the basement and reached up white and yellow fingers to make a meal of the ground-floor woodwork.

The best thing for all concerned would have been a direct hit from Hitler’s air force, but where so many more useful buildings suffered Helenwood House remained, decrepit but intact.

In the late forties it was inhabited by one old lady and seventeen cats, and the local authority toyed for a time with the idea of serving a dangerous structure notice on the occupant, and might have done so, had the old lady not quietly died, leaving only the cats to serve the notice on. The property then became the subject of protracted litigation.

Detective Sergeant Petrella knew a certain amount about all this, as he knew a certain amount about most of the houses and people in his manor. To him Helenwood House was a place whose defences had constantly to be watched and strengthened against the incursion of children to whom the ruined house and rampant shrubberies were a fascinating playground; jungle and enchanted palace in one. And against tramps who would force one of the many broken and boarded-up windows and sleep quite happily in the basement, along with
Anobium
and
Buprestidan
.

It was Mrs. Catt, Petrella’s amiable landlady, who called his attention to Helenwood House one morning when she brought him his tea.

“Someone’s going to do
what
?” said Petrella sleepily. He had spent much of the previous night in unsuccessful watching of a warehouse and brought himself back reluctantly to the problems of a new day.

“Do it up,” said Mrs. Catt. “Regardless of expense.”

“That old mausoleum,” said Petrella. “It’d be cheaper to start over again than mess about with that.”

“It’s a house of great character,” said Mrs. Catt, who had the sort of mind that believed in house agents’ advertisements. “Architect designed, on four storeys.”

“It’s a death trap,” said Petrella, and finished his tea at a gulp. He had a lot of work to do that day. Most of it was connected with young Maurice Meister, who was fast qualifying as Highside’s leading juvenile delinquent. His current activity was “milking” telephone boxes, and he had a sideline in stealing from parked cars. Crime was the hereditary occupation of the Meisters. Maurice’s father was none other than “Bull” Meister, the suspected organiser of the famous mail-van robberies in which fifty thousand pounds’ worth of old pound notes, on their way to the pulping mills, had been diverted into the pocket of Bull and his gang. He was at that moment serving a three-year sentence, not for any of his more lucrative crimes but for cutting off the right ear of one of his subordinates with whom he had had a difference of opinion.

“His mother’s just as bad,” said Petrella to Chief Inspector Haxtell. “I’d say she was running the Meister crowd herself now. Keeping it warm till Bull comes out again. What do you expect a boy like Maurice to do? Sell tracts?”

“I expect him to behave,” said Haxtell, sourly. “And if he doesn’t, I expect you to tell him where he gets off. So don’t let’s have you getting soft about juvenile delinquents.”

That evening Mrs. Catt re-opened the subject of Helenwood House.

“What I was telling you,” she said without preamble, “it’s being converted. Into six self-contained apartments, of convenient size.”

“You’re not thinking of moving, are you?” said Petrella. The thought was alarming. He knew that he would never find lodgings which suited him so well.

“S’not me,” said Mrs. Catt. “S’my married daughter. They’ve been living with his family. S’not a good arrangement.”

Petrella agreed. Highside, being within easy travelling distance of the centre of London, had an even more acute housing problem than most boroughs.

“They’ve saved money, both of them. Not enough to buy a house, but then they don’t want a house. They want a flat.”

Almost everyone in Highside wanted a flat.

“How much are they paying?” said Petrella. He was wide awake, this time, and the implications of what he was being told did not escape him.

“Each applicant,” quoted Mrs. Catt, “is asked to put down the sum of five hundred pounds. Three hundred of which will be used towards conversion of the premises, two hundred being considered as rent for the first year.”

“How many apartments?”

“Six.”

“There’s a catch somewhere,” said Petrella. “Work it out for yourself. I don’t say the house would cost much to buy. The owners would be glad to get rid of it. But there’d be legal fees and so forth. Say you did all that for a thousand pounds. Right? Well six times three is eighteen. That leaves you eight hundred pounds to develop the property with. Why, that wouldn’t deal with the dry rot alone.”

The gloom on Mrs. Catt’s face deepened.

“It did sound almost too good to be true,” she said.

“Who’s the operator?”

Mrs. Catt produced a piece of paper from her pocket, and the fact that she had it ready confirmed Petrella’s suspicion that his landlady had not introduced the subject of Helenwood House entirely by chance. He read:

“Utopia Building and Development Projects Limited”.

“It’s a good-sounding name,” said Mrs. Catt.

“It sounds all right,” said Petrella, pocketing the paper. “But the only word I should believe in myself is the last one.”

Scotland Yard possesses a small Company Fraud Department and Petrella knew Sergeant Brennan who was in charge of it. Brennan had spent his early years on a beat round the Old Kent Road. He had been promoted to his present job when his superiors discovered that he possessed the sort of mind that delighted in solving difficult crossword puzzles or in playing several games of chess simultaneously.

“These sort of people make me sick,” he said to Petrella. “Give me a drunken Irishman with a bottle. You do know where you are with him. It’ll take a few days to ferret out, because all the shares, you can bet, will be in the names of nominees. We can usually dig out the real holders, but it takes time.”

Petrella thanked Sergeant Brennan, and made his way back to Highside. He found Mrs. Catt looking even more worried.

“I bin asking round,” she said. “From what I hear this company’s been showing these flats to dozens of people. There ought to be a law against it.”

“I thought it must be something like that,” said Petrella. Having no further duty that evening he strolled out on a course which would bring him past the top end of Helenwood House. Sure enough there was a triumphant red SOLD notice nestling amongst a clump of giant elders. Petrella noted the name of the agents, Messrs. Prentice and Partners, and was on the point of moving on when something caught his eye.

Bending forward, he gripped the rusty, spiked, iron upright which formed part of the formidable boundary defences at this point. He twisted it, and it lifted, coming up through the rail. A foot from the top the metal was worn bright with friction in the socket. What he had found was a well-used back door. The gap was wide enough to admit a large boy, or a slim policeman. Petrella squatted down and eased his way through, replacing the bar behind him. For the next few yards he had to crawl, then he got to his feet.