Young Petrella (7 page)

When he got home, he was almost too tired to eat, and fell into his bed, and to sleep. It was not the easy sleep of comfortable tiredness and relaxation. He was so near the surface that he saw the lightning, and was wide awake before the thunder rattled the slates of the little house. Then the rain came, in a steady drumming roar, and passed on.

It was in the silence which followed that the still, small voice of conscience said to Petrella, “Of course, you fool, you were looking at the wrong grave.”

It took no more than three minutes to throw on some clothes and then he was out in the street, belting his raincoat as he went. The stars were hidden, but the air felt cooler, and there was a tinkle of fresh water running down the gutters. He climbed the cemetery railings without difficulty – they were designed to keep the children out, not the dead in. On the gravel path he paused for a moment. It was not going to be so easy to find the exact spot he wanted.

When he had stood on the pavement earlier in the evening, he had seen the grey man’s head. And the man had been sitting, or squatting down. Later, when he himself had knelt beside one of the graves, a young couple had passed, and he had been quite unable to see either of them.
Therefore he had been too far down the slope
.
A good deal too far.

The best plan would be to locate Arthur Millichip and move uphill and to the right from there. He used his torch sparingly. There were houses overlooking the cemetery and the last thing he wanted was a prowl car on the scene.

He could almost hear Sergeant Gwilliam laughing.

Away to the south, over the Kent and Surrey hills, the lightning played and the thunder cracked and grumbled. An occasional, single, heavy spot of rain fell on to him out of the black ceiling of the clouds.

He found Arthur Millichip when he had almost given up hope. At rest, awaiting the last call. Up the hill now. When he saw the other cross it was obvious how he had made his mistake. Both were white and both were new. Mass produced, probably by the monumental mason who had his little shop outside the gates. Petrella hooded his torch, and squatted down beside it.

The moment he read what was there, all his fears became cold certainties.

He stepped back onto the path, trotted to the gate, and hauled himself over. A rapid calculation. Two minutes to the nearest call box. Say ten minutes if he ran, straight down the hill, to the police station. Speed was impossible under the black pall of darkness. He chose the phone box.

Sergeant Gwilliam answered the call himself. It took him a few seconds to understand what Petrella was talking about. Then he said, “I’ll get a car to pick you up at Four Ways.”

Less than three minutes later – perhaps five, in all, from the moment in which he had read what was engraved on the tombstone, Petrella was in the CID room talking to Sergeant Gwilliam.

“Annie Lewis,” he said, “wife of George Lewis, née Cole. And it was Cole I saw this afternoon. I’m sure of that, although I’ve only seen photographs. He was sent up before I came here.”

“Slowly, lad, slowly,” said Sergeant Gwilliam. “Let’s look at the fences before we jump them. I know Harry Cole well enough. It was me pulled him in. And his daughter, Annie, married Ginny Lewis sure enough. And Lewis and Cole worked as a pair. Housebreaking, screwing, a little smash and grab. But mostly plain, quiet screwing.”

“When you sent Cole up for his long stretch,” said Petrella, “why didn’t Lewis go with him?”

“It was five years ago,” growled the Sergeant. “I believe there was some trouble between them.”

“Did Lewis buy himself out by turning Cole in?”

“Not exactly. But there was something. . .” The Sergeant put his hand through his hair and stared at the discoloured spot above the door, which looked like old dried blood, but was really a leaking water pipe.

“I’d say that Cole stood the rap for both of them,” he said at last. “Lewis was a younger man. And married to Cole’s daughter, you see.”

“Yes,” said Petrella. He knew enough about professional criminals to know that this could be true. “But if Cole thought Lewis hadn’t kept
his
part of the bargain. . .”

“If he thought that,” said Sergeant Gwilliam, simply, “there’d be trouble.”

The telephone sounded.

Sergeant Gwilliam listened like a man who had been expecting nothing but bad news, and at the end of it said “Thank you very much,” and replaced the receiver reverently on its cradle.

“That was Control,” he said. “I put an enquiry through to them. You are quite right. Cole was released from Chelmsford after breakfast yesterday morning.”

Petrella caught a glimpse of himself in the glass as they went out of the door. His pyjama collar had somehow escaped from the neck of the sweater he had pulled hastily over it and was sticking up through the collar of his raincoat. He jabbed it back with nervous fingers.

The car was still waiting.

“Cadsand Cottages,” said Gwilliam to the driver. “Stop when you get to the end of the road, and turn your lights out.”

And to Petrella, as they ran along the empty High Street, “No wonder Ginny asked for protection.”

Petrella agreed. He had seen Harry Cole’s face only twice; once in a photograph, once that evening. It was a face with the composed remoteness of a thinker or a killer.

“Stop here,” Gwilliam told the driver. “You can put the car across the end of the road, with the lights out. If anyone comes running, grab them.”

The driver, a long, gloomy man, called Happy, said, “If you say so, Sergeant,” and Gwilliam and Petrella got quietly out. They took care not to bang the car doors. It was very dark but the rain had stopped.

“Ginny lives in the end cottage,” said Gwilliam. “He’s alone now. Since Annie died.”

That was the last thing said. After that, they felt their way. Down the stone-paved lane, across the litter that was part garden, part builders’ yard; round the side of the ramshackle brick building.

The Sergeant gave a grunt of displeasure. The back door was ajar. Then they were standing in a small room, a kitchen by the stale smell of it. And a tap was dripping somewhere.

Gwilliam’s big torch opened up like a searchlight. It was aimed at the ceiling. In the middle of the grey plaster was a darker mark, the size of a plate. In the middle of the plate something gathered; and another drop fell down to the stone floor with a soft splash.

Upstairs, on the floor of his over-furnished bedroom, lay the empty carcass of Ginny Lewis. He had been neatly butchered and left to lie. There was no one else in the house.

After that there was a lot to be done. For Petrella, pressed down by the double weight of the night and of a mortal weariness, things seemed to pass in slow motion. First the cars arrived, then the doctor, then the men with flashlights and cameras, and policemen, and more policemen, and a real, white-haired Superintendent who, although it was only five o’clock in the morning, had somehow found time to shave his pink chin before coming to Cadsand Cottages.

Petrella, forgotten, propped up the jamb of the kitchen door. The bulk of Sergeant Gwilliam loomed down upon him. “Go to bed,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do here.”

“Any sign of Cole?”

“Not a sausage. But we’ve put the net out. Incidentally, it looks as if Ginny was carrying a gun. Only he didn’t reach it quick enough.”

“Then Cole’s probably got the gun in his pocket now.”

“Probably,” said Sergeant Gwilliam. “It won’t make any difference. We’ll pick him up as soon as it’s light.”

Remembering that calm and masterful eye Petrella did not feel so sure. He cadged a lift in a returning car to the foot of Highside and walked off up the hill.

The storm, which had been grumbling about in the background like a much-enduring woman, put out a last long venomous tongue of lightning, and showed Petrella Harry Cole.

He was sitting on a flat gravestone in the cemetery, his head on his hands.

Petrella’s first thought was, if they hadn’t all been half asleep, that was just exactly where the search should have started.

Then he had jumped the railing, and was walking steadily along the grass verge.

Cole was sitting up now. He had Ginny’s gun all right. It was in his hand, and his hand was resting on his knee, steady as the stone he was sitting on. There was enough light in the sky now to see by. Morning was not far away.

“Sit down,” said Cole. “Don’t come any nearer.”

Petrella hesitated for a moment, then his tired legs folded under him and he sat. They both sat, he on one forgotten moss-covered slab, Harry Cole on another, with the new white headstone shining between them.

“She was my daughter,” said Cole at last. “You knew that?”

“I found that out tonight,” said Petrella.

“A cheap piece of stone. If you killed your wife, you’d give her something better than that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m not married,” said Petrella.

“He didn’t even pay for it himself. First he let her die, then he let her rot, under a cheap white stone he never even paid for himself.”

“I don’t—”

“The doctor called it malnutrition. You’re educated. You know what that means, I suppose?”

“I don’t—”

“It means the bastard starved her to death. I know. I was in Parkhurst. They’ve got a good news service there. It isn’t printed. It comes to you along the hot water pipes, in the evening.”

Petrella said, “Look here—” but he might as well have tried to stop a gramophone by talking against it. The light was coming up fast, and the little, cold morning wind blew into his face.

His fingers touched something small and hard. It was the extension switch of his torch. The torch itself was somewhere behind his back slung to the belt of his raincoat. He started to joggle the switch. Three short. Three long. Three short. Someone must be looking from their window by now.

Time went by.

“You’re young,” said Cole suddenly. “Too young to understand what it is to hate. A man can live on hate. Did you know that?”

“It’s a poor food,” said Petrella. His fingers kept working.

“It can be meat and strong drink, and a fire to warm you through the long winter nights, when the heating isn’t working in the cell, and you’ve nothing but one blanket over you. It was easy. He knew I was coming. He lived with fear. I lived with hate. It’s a good bargain, boy.”

“It’s a foul bargain,” said Petrella. He was suddenly quite cool, for he had heard the sounds he was waiting for. A car, coming fast, up the hill. Its lights went out and it stopped at the corner.

“There’s one thing you didn’t know,” he said. “The grape vine must have missed out on it. Ginny Lewis never killed your daughter. Neither killed her nor let her die.”

“Why do you trouble to tell such lies, boy?”

“I’m not lying, and you know it.”

Look at him. Talk at him. Keep his attention. Big Gwilliam was over the wall behind Cole, and coming with the fast, controlled rush which had once sent him across the line at Twickenham with half the English pack on his back.

The gun in Cole’s hand shifted slightly. It gave a small, sad crack, and he folded on to the ground under an avalanche of bodies. But he was dead before they touched him.

That took a little time to sort out too. And it was the uncomfortable hour of six when Petrella and Sergeant Gwilliam turned their back on Highside Cemetery, and the body that still lay there.

“Funny,” said Gwilliam, “that he should have gone without knowing that Ginny Lewis, whatever his sins, had no part in Annie’s death. The prison grape vine told him that Annie had died, and been buried by public funds. It forgot to tell him that Lewis was inside as well. On a two-year stretch for receiving.”

They both looked at the dead man, flat on the grass, like a doll with the stuffing out.

Petrella thought of Ginny Lewis. Two men, both empty. One empty with fear, the other empty with hate. He looked at his watch. It was too late to think of going to bed. If he hurried, he would just be in time to catch Mr. Gosport.

You do not mention the Nipper in Highside police circles except with a smile. For in his brief and exciting career he managed to cause quite an extraordinary amount of unpleasantness and ill feeling.

It started with Chief Inspector Haxtell being summoned to an interview with his Divisional superior, Superintendent Barstow. (“There’s a little matter I’d like to discuss with you, Haxtell.”) Barstow was big, red and almost permanently angry. In this case, no doubt, there were excuses. He himself had received a rocket from the District Chief Superintendent, and his interpretation of discipline was that if you got a rocket, you passed it on, without delay and at compound interest, to your own immediate subordinates.

Haxtell came back to Highside Police Station, kicked the wastepaper basket, and sent for Detective Sergeant Gwilliam.

“They’re getting worried higher up,” he said, “about the Nipper.”

“Yes,” said the Sergeant, cautiously. He was an expert weather prophet.

“Apparently the local Chamber of Commerce has taken the matter up. I’m afraid the Superintendent and the Mayor haven’t been seeing eye to eye since that row they had over the last civic function. Most unfortunate. Now the Mayor sees an opportunity of taking it out on Barstow, so he’s jumped in with both feet.”

“And the Super jumped on you?” suggested Gwilliam, who had known his Chief Inspector for a very long time.

“Between these four walls, yes,” said Haxtell. “Though the interview wasn’t remarkable for any really constructive suggestions.”

“It’s a devil of a problem,” said Gwilliam. “Look at it how you will. I suppose it’s no good telling these shopkeepers and people that it’s largely their fault for keeping so much cash around the place.”

“No good at all,” said Haxtell. “You know what they’d say: ‘What are the police for? What do we pay all these rates for?’”

“Another thing,” said Gwilliam. “It can’t be a fluke that the Nipper always gets into the office or shop or whatever it is, when it’s empty. No doubt he cases each job carefully, but if people would only be a little more discreet. . .”