Blood and Judgement (15 page)

“I said it was a good idea,” said Haxtell, “and I meant it. But I think you should have told me what you meant to do, and let us fix it through one of our own contacts.”

“If I’d stopped to think about it,” said Petrella, “I expect I would have, but it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. Not to me personally, I mean. As soon as this case is finished I’m getting out.”

Haxtell looked for ten whole seconds at the furious young man opposite him, and said, at last, “I think I should wait and see, first, what they do want to say to you down at headquarters.”

“You know exactly what they’ll say. Some stuffy old chief superintendent, who’s lived with one finger in the Rule Book ever since he worked his way up off a beat, is going to point out that I have infringed sixteen different rules and regulations by daring to think for myself, and–”

“All right,” said Haxtell placidly. “Don’t take it out on me. And don’t let’s chuck the hand in before it’s finished. I’m as keen as you are to know what really happened up at the reservoir. Let’s find out that first and worry about your future afterwards.”

When Petrella had taken himself off, Haxtell got up, kicked the waste-paper basket with beautiful accuracy up on to the mantelpiece, and said, “Damnation take the silly young idiot.”

That evening, at six o’clock, Petrella was ringing the bell of Flat 5, 74 Parsons Road. The door was opened, and he was not surprised to see the white-faced girl. Under the lights of the tiny hall she looked younger and ghastlier than she had done in the street.

“Jean’s inside,” she said. “I’d better leave you alone now.”

“I hope I’m not driving you out.”

“It’s not really big enough for three,” said the girl.

She opened the door. It was the tiniest flat he had ever seen. Really, it was one small room, most of which was taken up by a bed, and the rest by two chairs, arranged in front of an electric fire. A cupboard, opening out of one of the side walls, was the kitchen. And at the far end an alcove, curtained with sea-green waterproof material, suggested a bathroom. The furniture, carpet and curtains looked as if they had been bought as a job lot in the Tottenham Court Road by someone with a robust taste in colours.

“I’m off,” said the girl. “I’ve got to be back here at seven.”

“This won’t take long,” said Jean. She was sitting in one of the armchairs, and had hardly looked round when Petrella came in. She sounded as if she had started the day tired, and had then got a lot tireder, and now was so tired that it had ceased to matter.

“Sit down,” she said. “I’m sorry about all this secrecy. But you’ll understand when I tell you, I daren’t be seen talking to you.”

“I’m sorry my reputation’s as bad as that,” said Petrella.

She took no notice of it. She was past the point where conversational gambits were picked up and tossed back again. There was something she had to say and she would say it, and that was all.

“You remember when you came to see me before the trial and asked me a question about Rosa. Whether she’d ever met Ricketts?”

Petrella said he remembered.

“Well, it was a pretty good guess. She’d been going with him for months. He was her boyfriend.”

“He was
what?”

“What I said. Sydney Ricketts. He was all her idea of what a man should be. Grey hair, good manners, plenty of money. Of course, he was a phoney. Most of the money was hers anyway. But she couldn’t see that, not at first. I’m not sure you can blame her. She’d only got people like her husband and Boot to compare him with. He must have seemed quite something after that pair.”

“Are you telling me that they were sleeping together?”

“That’s right. When she went out nights, that’s where she went. And another thing, he was looking after her ‘stocking’ for her. All the stuff she was meant to be keeping an eye on for Monk.”

“Of course,” said Petrella. “Of course. Under the floorboard in the kitchen. Don’t mind me. Please go on.”

“That’s all there is, really. When I heard she’d been shot, I thought he might have done it. She’d been getting the idea that he’d been fiddling her over the jewellery. Selling it on his own account. If Monk got out, there’d have to be a showdown, wouldn’t there?”

“Yes,” said Petrella. Curtain after curtain was being ripped down, layer after layer of obscurity dispersed. The puppet figures growing harder and clearer. “Yes, of course there would. Why on earth didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Why?” she said. “Because I was scared, of course. What do you think?”

“Scared of whom?”

“Of Howton, first of all. He’d been smelling round my place ever since you found the body. Then–”

“Yes,” said Petrella. “But after we’d charged him you couldn’t have done him anything but good by speaking.”

“I didn’t owe him anything. Besides–”

“Go on.”

“I didn’t want to talk against Ricketts. I believe Rosa was more scared of him than she was of Boot. And she was a girl who didn’t scare easily.”

Petrella said nothing. She could feel the anger and contempt in him, and she said, “Why should I take any chances? I didn’t want anything more to do with either of them. I was sorry for Rosa, but she wasn’t part of my life. You don’t understand. How can you?” Her voice went up. “What it is, to be a woman, without much money, in London, on her own. Particularly when you get mixed up with those sort of people.”

Petrella said, “You’d get protection.”

“I would if I was rich, or important.”

“That’s not true,” said Petrella furiously.

“All right,” she said, “don’t blow your top. I’m not saying anything about ‘one law for the rich, and another for the poor’. That’s daft. The law’s the same for everyone. It’s just that there isn’t enough of it to go round. I’ve seen protection for people like me. It means the bobby on the beat being told to keep an eye out for trouble. That’s all they can do. There isn’t even a lock on our street door. Did you know that? And Boot had a key to my flat. Rosa gave him one. And if I’d asked the landlord to change the lock, I’d have had to tell him why. And I’d have been out of the flat at the end of the month. You don’t understand. People like Boot and Ritchie don’t have to use a razor on a girl. They make a little row where she lives and she’s out in the street, or come along and kick up a fuss at work, and she’s out of a job. What’s the use of police protection then?”

“If that’s right,” said Petrella, as if he hated it, but had to say it, “I understand why you wouldn’t want a character like me calling round too much at your flat, but there’s still one thing I can’t understand. Why are you willing to tell me this now?”

“But of course,” she said. “None of it matters now. Boot’s booked, isn’t he? And Ricketts is dead.”

In the sudden silence she looked up sharply.

“Isn’t he?”
she said.

Petrella woke at four o’clock that morning. London is never entirely silent. In the far distance an all-night lorry grumbled as it changed gear on the hill, heading for the Barnet bypass and the Great North Road. Nearer at hand a shunting engine fussed as it pulled a line of freight cars out of a siding at Helenwood Junction. Footsteps rang on the pavement. One of London’s millions was going to or from his work under the pale street lamps.

Petrella turned over for the hundredth time. His head was full and felt hot, and he fancied he was running a temperature. He was trying to recapture a memory. It was not so much a dream as a picture, something visualized on the fringes of waking and sleeping.

He was looking down from above on to the bank of the reservoir. It was late afternoon, but still very warm. They had had a true St Martin’s summer that year. The gnats were singing a descant to the bumbling of the bees. In among the long, sun-dried grass, high up on the slope, a woman was lying. She was lying on her back, staring up at the unclouded sky. A butterfly drifted past and settled on her outstretched hand. He wanted to see whether she would move. Her hand stirred. The butterfly flew off. The woman rolled over onto her side.

There was a movement down on the path. Someone was coming. She raised herself on one elbow, to listen. Petrella forgot about the woman and concentrated his gaze on the point in the bushes at which the newcomer must appear. He had an urgent desire to see who it was. So had the woman. She craned forward so far that she obscured his view.

“Damn her,” he said angrily. “She ought to take her hat off in the cinema.” Then someone was shaking his arm, and it was broad daylight.

“You don’t often oversleep,” said Mrs Catt, his landlady. “I thought I hadden heard you on the move yet. You’ll hardly have time for breakfus as it is.”

Luckily Haxtell was late that morning too, so Petrella’s defection escaped notice. The superintendent had had a telephone message and had gone straight from his house to the office of the director of public prosecutions, where he had spent half an hour with the director himself and had learned, without surprise, that the medical report on the killer of Corinne Hart had made it clear that he was unfit to plead.

As he was leaving, the director said, “I hear that Howton’s solicitors have been nobbling one of your young men.”

“That’s right,” said Haxteil cautiously. “He asked me about it, and I said he could go.”

“I’ve no objection to his going,” said the director, beetling his formidable eyebrows, “as long as he tells
us
anything he tells
them.”

“I’m sure he’d do that,” said Haxtell.

“I hope so. I gather that he is acquiring a reputation for being an independent-minded animal.”

“He’s an extremely hard-working and loyal officer,” said Haxtell.

The director said “Hmmph,” which Haxtell felt to be unfair as it might have meant anything at all.

Back at Crown Road Petrella was waiting for him, and he quickly learned what had happened the night before.

“Do you think she was telling the truth?” he said.

“Why, yes,” said Petrella. In fact, he had not even thought about it. “Why should she lie?”

“She might have been put up to it by Howton’s friends. As a last desperate move to get him off. Sow a bit of doubt.”

“I don’t think they would have had the wit to think it up and I don’t think she would have done it if they had.”

“All right,” said Haxtell. “You’re more likely to know if she’s telling the truth than I am. You’ve seen her. I haven’t. Let’s start from there. Ricketts was Mrs Ritchie’s lover, and she was carrying his child.”

“He was more than a lover,” said Petrella. “He was a safe deposit as well. He was hiding the jewellery for her which her husband had stolen and had entrusted to her before he went to prison. He had made a cache for it in the kitchen.”

He told Haxtell about that.

“And you spotted this when you were on one of your – er – night-diving operations.”

“I ran my finger into the butt end of the screw,” said Petrella. “There’s the scar. I didn’t connect it with anything in particular at the time. It might have been something to do with the gas or electricity. And anyway it was empty.”

“All right,” said Haxtell. “Let’s try to sort it out a bit. Start on Saturday afternoon. Take it slowly.”

“I think,” said Petrella, “that Rosa didn’t go straight from her flat to the reservoir. According to Mrs Fraser, she was out of the house by three o’clock, but I don’t think she got to the reservoir much before dusk.”

“Because she’d have been seen climbing in.”

“Yes, and because it was their routine. She’d go in much the same way that we did, across the far corner of the recreation ground, through the broken gate, and to a pre-arranged rendezvous among the bushes.”

“You think they’d met there before.”

“Oh, I think so, yes. That was where he made love to her. One of the places.” Petrella announced this with such curious conviction that Haxtell looked at him, but only said, “Well, we know she didn’t go absolutely straight to the reservoir.”

“How’s that, sir?”

“She must have stopped somewhere to buy an evening paper. That edition she was carrying is on the streets, in the West End, at three o’clock, but it doesn’t get up to these parts much before four.”

“Right. And she’d taken out the middle sheet, with the piece about her husband on it, ready to show to Ricketts. And folded the rest of the paper away, out of sight. I think she was in a very dangerous frame of mind. Frightened, and angry. Angry with Ricketts, because he’d got her into trouble. Now that her husband was loose, it really was trouble. And angry because she’d begun to suspect that he’d been short-changing her about the jewellery.”

“Selling it for his own account?”

“Yes. That was one thing I noticed about the jewellery sales. The only ones which are definitely tied up with Howton took place
after
the murder.”

“And were quite small pieces. The idea being that he – all right, don’t let’s jump the gun. Go on. She’s lying among the bushes, in a bad frame of mind, waiting for Ricketts to appear.”

“Which he does. I think she stopped for something else too. I think – but this is pure guessing – that she met her husband. They arranged it when they spoke on the telephone the night before. I should think he wanted to see her a lot more than she wanted to see him, but she couldn’t very well say no.”

“You mean, she was afraid he might have heard about her and Ricketts? About the baby?”

“I don’t honestly think that he would have cared very much if he had. It wouldn’t have made him any fonder of Ricketts, I agree, but there was only one thing on his mind at the moment, and that was ready money. The money that she was supposed to have from the sale of the jewellery he had left with her, and which, as she had begun to realize lately, she was seeing very little of. Because Ricketts was doing the actual selling, and Ricketts was hanging on to most of the money.”

Haxtell took time out to consider this. Then he said, “Do you suppose she told her husband about that?”

“I don’t think she had any option. The one thing she couldn’t explain away was that she ought to have had a lot of ready money – which he desperately needed at that moment – and she couldn’t produce it.”

“It’s conjecture,” said Haxtell. “But I think it’s reasonable. So what did they plan to do?”

“What would you have done, sir?”

“Gone and shaken Ricketts down.”

“And that was what they were going to do, too. She would go to her usual rendezvous with him, at dusk. That would give Monk a chance to get into the cottage. For that’s where the remains of the jewellery and the ready money were. No doubt about that. If Ricketts had a hoard, it was in the cottage. Once he had been drawn away from the cottage, Monk was on to a good thing to nothing. Either he found what he was looking for. Or, if he didn’t, he waited till Ricketts came back. There’d have been ways of making him talk.”

“Yes. And what went wrong?”

“What must have gone wrong,” said Petrella,
“is that Ricketts bought himself an evening paper too.”

There was a long silence, while Haxtell turned it all over in his mind. At the end of it, he let his breath out slowly, like a man who has come up from deep water, and said, “It’s an idea. That would be why he took a loaded gun with him to his rendezvous. A war souvenir, that he kept, all greased up and loaded, and tucked away under another floorboard. Do you know, I’m beginning to get the impression that Mr Ricketts isn’t a very nice character.”

“His first wife was afraid of him,” said Petrella. “And he impressed himself so powerfully on Jean Fraser, who, as far as we know, never even met him, that she wasn’t prepared to say a word against him until she thought he was dead.”

“I like this story,” said Haxtell. “Go on, Patrick.”

“I don’t know whether Rosa lost her temper with him or whether he deliberately provoked her, but there certainly came a moment in their talk when she pulled out the folded page of the paper, and pushed it in his face, and said, ‘You’re not dealing with a helpless woman now. My husband’s out, and he’s in the cottage waiting for you, so you’d better come clean, or else – ’”

“So he shot her.”

“Yes. Quietly, there and then, all among the grass and the flowers, and shovelled a lot of leaves on her, and let her lie.”

“And then went back to the cottage and dealt with Monk too.”

“I think so. It was either that or give up the money. He’d killed once. He’d nothing to lose by killing again. I should think he had everything pretty well packed up for a getaway. An escape route mapped out. A hideout arranged.”

“Yes. And it’s clear why he dumped the second body in the reservoir. It would be a lot less messy and leave fewer traces than dragging it up into the bushes. And if he was going to dump the body, it was sensible to dump the gun as well. What I can’t see is why, having dumped them, he didn’t come back, tie up the boat, and walk quietly out of the front – oh, yes I can, though. The rest of the boys had turned up.”

“That
must
be the answer, sir. There he is, sitting quietly, resting on his oars, in the middle of the reservoir, when – he hears something – sees a light in the cottage, perhaps. He can’t go back, so he goes on. He’d know all about that back way out. He’d probably reconnoitred it earlier, with the idea of making a quick getaway. “

“And Howton? How much did he know or guess about all this?”

“He certainly didn’t know about Rosa and Ricketts. He’s got a tongue in his head, and if he’d known about it, it would have been one of the first things he’d have told his lawyer. My guess would be that Monk had simply told Howton he was going to the reservoir to meet his wife.”

“Or he was seen – or followed. And Howton arrived too late, but in nice time to carry the can for everything. He’d ransack the cottage, no doubt. And he found what was left of the jewellery – the odds and bits that hadn’t been worth selling before. And being a greedy bastard, he couldn’t resist selling them himself. Thus wedging his ugly head firmly into a noose.”

They walked around the structure for a bit, prodding it and picking at it.

“It’s a nice build-up,” said Haxtell. “Very creditable. How did you think of it all?”

Petrella nearly said that he’d seen the essential parts of it in a dream, but he realized in time that this would only increase his growing reputation for eccentricity.

“It came to me in bits and pieces,” he said.

“I’m not sure I don’t like it better than the official version, really,” said Haxtell.

“Of course you do,” said Petrella indignantly. “This is the truth.”

“They’re both theories. There’s just one thing will clinch yours and destroy the opposition. Find Ricketts and fingerprint him. If it’s his print on the gun – there’s no argument.”

“That’s not going to be all that easy,” said Petrella. “Even if Central showed more signs of co-operating, which they aren’t.”

Haxtell felt unable to pursue that one. But he knew, quite well, that a nationwide search with the drive of Scotland Yard behind it was a great deal more likely to be successful than any efforts they could organize themselves.

He said, “The more I think about Ricketts the more certain I am that he’s that rare sort of criminal, a man who looks ahead. I believe we shall find that he had his hideaway all ready. It’d be a lot easier for him if he had someone to help him. An old mother, or a sister, or a fourth wife, or something of that sort. He’d visit her from time to time, and he’d be known, under some other name of course, as her son or brother or what have you. Then all he’d have to do would be to walk away from the reservoir, put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses or a deaf aid or a toupee, or make some other slight adjustment in his appearance – just enough to cover himself if we decide to publish a photograph – and sink comfortably into his new background. That’s the clever way to run away. Sit still.”

The two men stared out of the window. It had begun to rain in the cold, vertical manner peculiar to England at this time of the year.

“He’s careful, all right,” said Petrella. “Almost brilliantly so. That telegram he sent was a real beauty. It worked both ways. If no suspicions were aroused, then it was just Ricketts saying goodbye to his employers. If people ever did get suspicious, then it could be something very different. The man who had disposed of Ricketts, covering up his tracks.”

“That theory wasn’t going to survive the dragging of the reservoir.”

“Why not?” said Petrella, “Nothing might have come to light for a year or more. Perhaps until the Water Board made their next two-yearly tidying up of the shrubbery. I know that our fingerprint people are good – but, good heavens, after a year underwater who was going to say that the drowned man wasn’t Ricketts?”

“It’s no good sitting here telling each other what a damned clever chap he is,” said Haxtell. “What we’ve got to do is to get busy and find him. And we’ve got – what’s today? – Saturday.”

“And the appeal’s on Thursday.”