Death of an Elgin Marble (27 page)

Inspector Hegarty ran down the stairs at top speed to the telephone exchange where the police had been given priority. ‘This is very urgent,’ he said to the girl. ‘I need to speak to the police based in Brecon in South Wales. Just put me through to the police station. And after that, can you get me Inspector Billy Ferguson on the line? You will find him at the police station on Deptford High Street.’

Artemis Metaxas was still escorting a number of Greek girls to the College near Amersham every weekend. The money was good. Artemis was putting most of it aside to pay for her wedding dress the following spring. She noticed that the girls were always the same now. Eight of them made the journey on the train with the blacked-out windows. And though they were careful not to talk about what went on during their country outings, Artemis suspected that there was a major event being planned at the College. Artemis’s charges were going to take part. And they were very excited about it.

Six men were crowded round the little table on the top floor of Finch’s Bank in Finsbury Circus. Inspector Hegarty and his two sergeants had their backs to the street, Inspector Kingsley, Powerscourt and the policeman from Deptford, Inspector Ferguson, had a view of the rooftops of the City. Billy Ferguson was in his late thirties, a cheerful soul with ruddy cheeks and jet black hair. He finished reading the note from Wales and passed it back to Jack Hegarty.

‘I don’t like the sound of this, Jack. Do we know anything about the writer, apart from the fact that he says he’s a head teacher? Do we know that he really is a head teacher? The people who write these kinds of letters often think they’re the Pope or Queen Victoria or H. G. Wells.’

‘I’ve spoken to the police station down there,’ said Hegarty. ‘The man who looked into the murder is not on duty today. He’s going to call me first thing in the morning. But they did confirm that Illtyd Williams runs the local school and that the murdered man was on the staff there. That’s all I’ve got at the moment.’

‘Could you tell us, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘what concerns you about the letter from Wales? What exactly don’t you like the sound of?’

Inspector Ferguson sighed. ‘It’s all tenuous so far. I’m going to put two and two together and come up with an answer that’s more than four, if you’ll permit me. The letter only speaks of two men. It speaks of another man kicked to death, trampled on and with cigarette burns on his arms. It’s the cigarette burns that send all my alarm bells ringing. All kinds of murderers have been known to kick people to death, as we are all aware. But the cigarette burns are almost a trademark, a calling card for a particularly violent couple of criminals in my patch known as the Twins. They’re well known for torturing people with cigarette burns among other horrible things. I believe they really are twins, by the way. They act as enforcers, as the muscle behind the throne, if you like, for the gangster who runs Deptford and half of Rotherhithe, Carver Wilkins.’

‘He wasn’t christened Carver, surely?’ Inspector Kingsley asked.

‘No, he wasn’t. I’ve no idea what his real name is, actually. His nickname was originally Carving Knife because he used to carry one around in his coat pocket and pull it out at appropriate moments like Billy the Kid drawing his gun. Then it got shortened to Carver. They say he still walks round with the carving knife in his coat pocket.’

‘What sort of criminal is our friend Carver?’

‘There are a lot of robberies, we believe, almost all of them outside the borough so we don’t get to hear a lot about them. His main activity is protection rackets. We think most of the local shops pay up, maybe some of the more affluent householders, who knows? Obviously all the pubs shell out and the few restaurants in the place. Even the undertaker has to pay his way. If you don’t pay, you get a visit from the Twins. That often means a couple of weeks in hospital for repairs. They collect the money once a week and bring it back to Carver. Most of the prostitutes in Deptford are on the payroll, and the pawnbrokers and the moneylenders. Carver is like a human leech, sucking the lifeblood of the community. And I don’t have to tell you gentlemen that prosecution is virtually impossible. You need witnesses. Once you are known to be appearing as a witness you too have a visit from the Twins and your face is beaten in.’

‘And what, Inspector Ferguson, do you suppose the link might be between Deptford and a sleepy little place in South Wales?’ Powerscourt had been trying to imagine what form such a link might take and failed.

‘I don’t know and I won’t pretend to know, my lord,’ Ferguson replied, ‘but I’m going to find out. I’m going to speak to my governor when I get back to the station and suggest that I and a couple of my men take a little trip to the valleys. Fresh air will be a welcome change from Deptford.’

‘I wish you luck with the Welsh,’ said Inspector Kingsley. ‘They’re so suspicious of outsiders. I hope they won’t clam up on you just because you don’t sound like you come from the next valley.’

‘I’ve had dealings with the bloody-minded Welsh before,’ said Inspector Ferguson, and it sounded from his tone as if the memories were not happy ones. ‘That’s why I want to take two others with me. We can interview the policeman, the schoolteacher and the schoolteacher’s wife all at the same time. They won’t have a chance to get together and cook up some pack of lies then.’

‘I think that’s an excellent plan, this expedition to the Land of My Fathers,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I wish it God speed and good luck.’

‘We’ll keep going with the letters, so we will,’ said Inspector Hegarty, ‘we might find some more gold dust, who knows?’

On the way to the underground at Liverpool Street Inspector Kingsley threw in another piece of information. ‘Our Greek friend, my lord, Kostas, we’ve been looking into his past, as you know.’

‘You mean the late Kostas? The man under the train?’

‘The same. It transpires that before he worked for the British Museum he did similar work for a place called the Hellenic College near Amersham. Do you know anything of it?’

‘Not yet,’ said Powerscourt.

One thought troubled him on his way home. He wondered as he always did on his own about the whereabouts of the Caryatid. Where was she now? It was becoming like losing a daughter, he said to himself. What troubled him was the link, if there was one, between gangsters in Deptford and the murder of a schoolteacher in the Brecon Beacons. And how on earth could those two events be linked to the theft from the British Museum? And, last but not least, was there a link between Deptford, South Wales and the urbane man, possibly bald, who drove Deputy Director Ragg round the streets of London in a taxi?

Inspector Ferguson laid his plans carefully on the train to Wales. He himself would speak to his opposite number who had looked into the death of Carwyn Jones. Sergeant Bennett had the advantage of being Welsh. His family had left the principality when he was sixteen to look for work in London. He had told Inspector Ferguson that he could still understand the language. His mother, he said, spoke to him in Welsh every time he went home for the weekend. Bennett’s task was to speak to the other policemen who had been involved with the death at the undertaker’s, well away from their superior officer. The third man in his command, Sergeant Broome, was to speak to the widow and see what news he could find. Broome was always being teased in all the stations he had ever worked in about his looks. At one point it looked as though he was going to be stuck with the nickname Sergeant Adonis, but the usage faded when most people using it realized that they had no idea who the original Adonis bloke actually was.

Initially, all three were to have a disappointing day. Sergeant Broome used all his charms on Megan, the widow of Carwyn Jones. He managed to make her smile, something she had rarely done since her bereavement. But he realized that she knew very little about what her husband had been doing. She didn’t even know that he had been going to meet two men from London in the Green Dragon on the day he died. She thought, she told the Sergeant, that there were money troubles, but Carwyn never bothered her with those kinds of worries. Broome was convinced she was telling the truth. When he asked if there was anything else she would like to tell him, she shook her head sadly. ‘He was a good man, my Carwyn, whatever people might say. He didn’t deserve to end up like that.’ When pressed about whatever people might say, she just repeated that he was a good man.

Sergeant Bennett found it virtually impossible to get the sergeant and the constable who had been called to the undertaker’s where Carwyn Jones’s body was already lying in a coffin to talk. They had found him, they said. They had made out their reports. There was very little else to say. To the Londoner’s disgust they didn’t even speak in Welsh.

Inspector Ferguson found a common interest with his Welsh colleague in mountains. They both liked walking in the highest places they could find. The Brecon Beacons, Inspector Davies assured Inspector Ferguson, afforded some of the finest mountain walking in the kingdom. And Davies performed one other service for his visitor. He took him to meet the head teacher who had written to the Caryatid Committee and left the two of them alone together, reasoning that the teacher might be more forthcoming to a stranger from the capital than he would be to a man who lived two streets away.

‘Now then, Mr Williams,’ said the Inspector, ‘perhaps you could tell us a little more about what you mentioned in your letter to the Caryatid Committee?’

‘That’s all there is. I have nothing to add. It didn’t say on the appeal that the police were going to read the applications.’

‘Come, come, Mr Williams. You must have realized that the only people authorized to catch the thieves would be the police, so the police were the only people who could judge which piece or pieces of information might be the most useful.’

‘Did you say pieces of information plural? Do you mean that the reward might be chopped up into pieces, that there could be two or even three winners?’ Illtyd Williams could see his reward shrinking before his eyes.

‘I don’t know the answer to that, I’m afraid. It’s possible but we just don’t know yet. I come back to my original question. Could you please tell me more about your letter?’

‘I’ve told you. I’ve got nothing to add.’

‘I am assuming that some, if not all, of the information came from the dead teacher at your school, Mr Jones. Would that be right? Did you have a conversation with him before he died?’

‘Inspector Ferguson, I’m tired of telling you, I’ve got nothing to add.’

The policeman from Deptford was as tough as any other Inspector in the Metropolitan Police. But he had another side to him. He had a passionate hatred of injustice, of unfairness, of cruelty, even though he met some if not all of those qualities every day of his working life. There was a look in the head teacher’s eyes he had seen all too often before. Small shopkeepers on Deptford High Street, honest landlords who ran public houses filled with the dishonest in his borough looked at him like that. They were afraid. Illtyd Williams was very afraid. Thinking of the description of the corpse in the undertaker’s, Inspector Ferguson could understand only too well what they were afraid of. Boots in their faces. Vicious kicks to the head. Cigarette burns all over their bodies.

He knew most of his colleagues would turn tough and start talking about obstructing the course of justice, of the penalties for refusing to cooperate with the police, of possible time in a prison cell. Inspector Ferguson didn’t think that would work. Whatever he said, the head teacher would be more frightened of the violence brought by the Twins than he would be of the police. In any terror contest, the villains would win. His only hope was to persuade Illtyd Williams that he could help secure the arrest and trial of the criminals who had beaten his colleague to death. That way the threat to his own safety and his own limbs would be removed.

‘Mr Williams,’ he began, ‘let me take you into my confidence. I would ask you not to repeat what I am about to say. We think, we are not sure yet, but we think we know who these men from London are. They have criminal records going back many years. Our problem is that nobody is prepared to give evidence against them. Let me ask you a question. Did you actually see the two men who came on the train?’

‘I did not, as a matter of fact.’

‘Well, that’s good news for you. If you didn’t see them, they didn’t see you. They will have no idea who our informants are. They don’t know we’re here, the villains in London. If you didn’t see them, you couldn’t identify them. That means you are safe from their violence because they don’t even know you exist.’

Illtyd Williams didn’t look any happier. But the Inspector thought some of the terror might have gone from his eyes.

‘With your help, Mr Williams, we can put these people away. If the two men can be convicted of the murder they will hang. They will be out of your life for good. Now then, I come back to where I started. What else can you tell me about what you wrote in your letter to the Committee?’

Illtyd Williams stared at the policeman from London for a long time.

‘It’s quite simple really,’ he said, and Billy Ferguson knew he had crossed into new territory. ‘Carwyn wrote me a letter before he died. I think he must have done it when he knew these people were coming down from London to talk to him. He’d started the whole thing off, you see.’

‘What do you mean, Mr Williams, he’d started the whole thing off?’

‘He was short of money, see. Once he heard about the missing Caryatid he thought it might have had something to do with what was going on here some time ago. Lucas Ringer the undertaker knew a lot about it. Carwyn wrote to him, asking for more money or he’d tell his cousin in the police force. Ringer sent the letter off to London. You know the rest.’

‘I know some of it. You spoke in your letter of big barns in Wales and hammering heard in the night, enormous coffins being sent away to Bristol for transit to God knows where. What else do you know, Mr Williams?’

‘I only know what Carwyn said in his letter. That’s all.’

‘Very well,’ said Inspector Ferguson, ‘could I ask you for a favour? Could you bring me to meet this Lucas Ringer? Right now?’