A Dangerous Deceit (7 page)

Reardon hadn't changed, Joe thought. As usual he'd made it his business to have everything at his fingertips so that he was on top of the job, though he'd done his homework pretty quick to have obtained the details of a cold case that was no part of his present remit. But it had been the only unexplained murder in Folbury for decades; maybe that was why he recalled it almost straight away.

‘DI Micklejohn's case, just before he retired. The Snowman, wasn't it?'

‘That's what the local paper called him, sir. Gross, somehow …' That was how it had seemed to Joe at the time – to dub a brutally murdered man with such a playful nickname – and still did.

‘He was dead, Gilmour.'

The need to be reminded that there was no room for sentiment, even – or perhaps especially – when you were investigating a murder, embarrassed Joe. ‘Yes, sir. Well. There was nothing at all to identify him, apart from a foreign coin in the lining of his jacket – and swarf on the soles of his boots.'

And that had literally been all there was. A well-built, youngish man with his skull caved in, wearing a brown serge suit in good repair, except for where a few seam stitches had given way in a jacket pocket, through which a coin had slipped into the lining. A pair of worn but still good brown boots, with a lot of tiny, sharp metallic fragments embedded deep into the leather soles: swarf, the fine metal residue from cutting and grinding machines.

‘Perhaps not quite a gentleman, then.'

‘Sir?'

‘The brown boots. No gentleman wears brown boots, unless with tweeds.'

‘Oh.' Joe couldn't decide whether Reardon was being tongue in cheek or whether it was a joke he'd missed, or just another of his obscure remarks. His wife was a teacher and he himself was reported to have a passion for books. ‘Well, I'm just wondering if there could be a connection between that killing and this one.'

‘The swarf, of course.'

‘His boot soles had to have picked it up somewhere, but we went round every brass foundry within miles and came up with nothing. The coin in his pocket was a South African shilling, so it seemed possible he'd been a potential customer from there, being shown around one of the workshops. We started with Arms Green and spread out as far as Birmingham. No shortage of machine shops or foundries, brass or otherwise, but none of the managers or owners had ever had any South African visiting them – and there was no reason why any of the men working on the shop floor would have taken particular notice of any stranger being shown around. Happens all the time.'

‘The coin might have been in his pocket for all sorts of reasons. Maybe he collected foreign coins. Maybe he'd visited there at some time. Doesn't necessarily make him South African.'

‘That wasn't ruled out.'

‘And the assumption was that he'd been killed and buried just before the big freeze, before the ground got too hard to dig?'

‘The ground was hard before the snow came. We'd had some heavy frosts and that must have been why he wasn't buried so deep. Waste of energy trying.'

‘And since he wasn't wearing an overcoat, nor a scarf or gloves, come to that, in that weather, he was likely killed indoors and transplanted there.'

‘Right. Though why out at Maxstead is anyone's guess.'

The place where he'd been found was at the edge of a small covert well off the beaten track, though accessible – just – by vehicle. The grave had necessarily been shallow due to the hardness of the ground at the time, covered by an insufficient layer of what loose earth the killer had managed to remove. Scavengers would have found him earlier but for the freezing temperatures; it was only when the snow began to melt and caused the disturbed earth to settle that the corpse's boot had been revealed.

‘Someone who had access to a vehicle of some sort put him there,' Joe said, ‘a car, or even a van. But we never got anywhere with that.' Every year saw the number of private car owners or van drivers increasing, not least in Folbury, and without anything more concrete to go on, an extended search would have been fruitless. ‘Anyway, no one in the area has ever reported a missing man, and no hotel – from here to Brum – ever had a guest, South African or otherwise, who failed to turn up and claim his belongings when he should have done.' Joe watched Reardon as he added, ‘By the way, I – er – went out to Maxstead Court only yesterday. Inspector Waterhouse asked me to let Lady Scroope – sorry, Lady Maude, they say she must be called – know that the enquiries were being suspended.'

‘Watch how you go, Gilmour,' Waterhouse had warned sourly. ‘No putting your size tens where they shouldn't be.' The inspector had been mortified that he wasn't the one to visit the Dowager Lady Scroope and reassure her that she need give no more thought to the matter of the dead man found on her estate: he was after all the senior officer at Folbury. But the decision had been taken out of his hands by instructions from above that her Ladyship was to be informed immediately, just as he was about to leave to catch the 12.10 for Newcastle.

Considering his reception by the lady and the man called Frith who was with her, Joe could have wished Waterhouse the joy of it. Perfectly polite, of course – thank you very much, Sergeant, good of you to let us know, good afternoon – as if the discovery of the body of a murdered man on the estate had been nothing more than an irritating matter, albeit one best cleared up. Obviously glad to be able to forget the whole business. ‘I think,' Joe said thoughtfully, ‘she was very – er – relieved.'

For a while Reardon said nothing, thoughtfully tapping his pencil on the desk. ‘Then she might not be too pleased if we start making enquiries again. So keep them discreet.'

‘So the case might be reopened, sir?' Joe brightened visibly.

‘Not at this stage, no chance. Doesn't mean we shouldn't bear it in mind, however, while we look at this other one.' He stood up and stretched his legs. ‘Meantime, is there any possibility there might be a bigger room – or possibly a smaller desk – available for me to work from? Since you might be going to have me round your necks for longer than you imagined.'

Joe grinned. ‘I'll see what I can do.' Waterhouse is going to love all this, he thought, but managed not to say it. When the DI returned and learnt that Joe had previously worked with Reardon, he would be sarcastic enough and all too likely to believe Joe had taken advantage of his absence to put himself forward. ‘Hope I didn't speak out of turn, sir. It
could
be a fairly unlikely lead, I suppose. Until we know why Aston was killed.'

‘Detection's full of unlikely leads.'

‘But two murders, not two months apart, with nothing to connect them after all, except possibly a brass foundry …
might
be just a coincidence.'

‘You don't believe that, Gilmour, any more than I do.'

‘Not really, sir.'

Reardon smiled slightly. ‘In this instance we won't dismiss the possibility that coincidences can be helpful. Stand by your convictions, Sergeant. And meantime, I'll see if I can't get a look at DI Micklejohn's original notes.'

Joe remembered Micklejohn: easy-going, coasting towards retirement after thirty years' service. Not wanting to upset the apple cart at that stage, and not really worried that he'd be leaving with his last case unsolved, either. He'd left with the investigation still continuing. Enquiries had gone on in a perfunctory way, but nothing had ever turned up, resulting finally in the decision by the top brass to wrap the enquiries up.

Reardon asked suddenly, ‘You've another sergeant on the strength here? Longton, isn't it?'

‘That's right. Just the two of us.'

‘Think he could cope, if you were assigned to this investigation?'

Joe fought to keep his face from splitting into a grin. ‘Yes, sir.' Comfortably ensconced in what was becoming his permanent position on the front desk, Longton wouldn't exactly jump with joy at the prospect of extra work and having to leg it around – unless it was pointed out to him that it might help him to shed the surplus pounds around his waistline.

‘Right. Then maybe you should leave the uniform at home tomorrow.'

Even better. Joe turned with his hand on the doorknob. ‘Er, there's just one more thing, sir. That reporter from the
Herald
…'

‘Which one?'

‘They only have one – apart from the editor himself and a photographer they hire from the Orthochrome when they need one, plus a young lad. The reporter's a
woman.
Judy Cash. She's always hanging around the station here. She's out for a scoop, and if she connects Aston's death with the Snowman, well … She was the one who dubbed him that, for some reason.'

‘That's what they do, the press … drumming up readers. Beefing up the situation, giving the unknown victim an identity.'

‘I suppose so,' Joe said doubtfully. ‘She also kept hinting we weren't doing enough to find out who he was.'

‘Well, keep her at bay. Don't let her get the idea we're not doing enough this time.'

‘Easier said than done, sir. She might look like the fairy on the Christmas tree but that doesn't fool anybody. Keeping at bay a panther on the prowl would be easier.'

‘You're mixing your metaphors, Sergeant. Never mind, keep at it.'

From the
Folbury and District Herald
:

Folbury Police were called in yesterday to look into the accidental death of Mr Arthur Aston, fifty-three, well known in the area as the owner of Aston's Engineering Company, who was found dead in the foundry adjacent to his machine shop on Tuesday morning.

‘A tragic accident,' commented Mr Stanley Dowson, foreman at Aston's Engineering, who found his employer lying dead when he went into the foundry. Mr Aston, though previously thought to be in good health, had apparently collapsed and fallen into a heap of sand some hours earlier, but as the foundry was not working that day was not discovered until later in the morning. Mr Dowson said, ‘He must have tripped and knocked himself out when he fell into the sand. He was a good employer and will be much missed.'

The police, and Mrs Lily Aston, the deceased man's wife, declined to comment. An inquest is to be held next week.

Dearest Plum,

I could scarcely believe my luck when Butterworth sent me to cover the sudden, unexplained death of Arthur Aston – because I didn't exactly clothe myself in glory in his eyes over reporting the Snowman case, did I? I'd raised too many questions for his liking. As editor and owner of the paper, it's in his interests to keep in with the police, and neither he nor they liked my pieces hinting at incompetence in their failure to discover the identity of the Snowman – or the few bits I'd managed to get past Butterworth when he was ‘hors de combat'. The police blamed their failure on having had so few clues to work on (which I knew meant none!) and it's fairly evident they've now abandoned all hope of solving the case.

Harold Butterworth doesn't really approve of women reporters – he thinks they have a disregard for deadlines, not to mention slipshod grammar, spelling and punctuation. As if the
Folbury Herald
ever had deadlines, and as if his own grammar, spelling etc. is faultless – even when he's sober! But men who do have those sort of abilities don't exactly see the
Folbury & District Herald
as a stepping stone to Fleet Street, so he has to make do with me and young Ernie, who's only just left school and can't be trusted yet to cover anything more than WI meetings and then not always. He's stuck with me and he thinks I'm stuck with the
Herald,
which is true, in a way. Well, of course, I'm a woman, I have to take what I can get and be grateful for it, have I not? Especially when there's something more rewarding in the offing.

All the same, I have to keep myself thoroughly in hand when he's around. Be a good girl and eat my porridge. There'll be plenty of better things than porridge if things go as we plan – and I don't see why they shouldn't. I am more than halfway there with Felix.

And ‘stuck' really doesn't cover it, does it? I'm here by choice, after all. It fits in very well, working on this provincial rag. It's given me the chance to become friendly with Felix by getting involved with that group of his, this WSG, Workers' Support Group – although it amuses me to know that most of them only tolerate me because I occasionally get the odd article into the national press and they realize they need support of that kind more than ever after the colossal failure of the General Strike last year. They are a joke, really, so pathetic, so amateur. Except perhaps for Mesdames Evans, Trefusis and Barton-Smythe, the ex-suffragists. They can't ever forget that they fought tooth and nail for the vote, chained themselves to railings, were dragged by the hair to police cells, sent to prison, force fed and all the rest of it. And I dare say they're prepared to do it again for what they see as a cause – courageous women! They despise the men in the group for what they regard as weakness and I must say I see their point. Most of them seem to have lost the heart for fighting – just when they ought to see it's more necessary than ever before. But that isn't my problem, since it's Felix I'm really interested in, not that rag tag and bobtail lot. And when I say interested, I mean interested, Plum. It need not affect our relationship. Try to remember, darling, why I'm doing this.

Meanwhile, Arthur Aston, dead in his brass foundry. A second mysterious death, barely six weeks after the discovery of the last is juicy, for Folbury, anyway. Harold Butterworth dithered about letting me cover it, but since he didn't trust me to ‘hold the fort' either – i.e. sit in the office in case something turned up – and more likely because he obviously had the mother and father of a hangover, out I was sent. It's more than time he got a grip on himself. Frank, the old stalwart I replaced, now retired, was seemingly content to jog along in the same old rut, but at the same time it's quite evident that he'd been carrying Butterworth for years.