Mistress Murder (15 page)

He had no proof, direct proof, much to Benbow's chagrin. Roberts was even more annoyed, as he was more directly concerned in the drug trade. Feiner could not say that Silver was in on the racket and it was only his word that Albert was dealing in heroin. The evidence would not be good enough to take to court unless they could get some corroboration from another witness or find drugs on the premises.

‘We've got enough to get a warrant for this club, though,' said Benbow. ‘We'd better make arrangements to turn it over pretty soon.'

The addict's mind began to wander after a time and his wits seemed shattered. The detectives left the cell and walked back to the great steel grid that closed the inner side of the entrance arch.

‘I'm sure he's speaking the truth,' said Roberts seriously. ‘Under all that shaking, he's still ticking over mentally. I've seen 'em ten times worse than that and they get better in a week – until they get their hands on the next lot of junk.'

They were checked out of the prison and continued their talk on the way back to the Yard in the car.

‘We can't really expect any tie-up between this chap and the Laskey affair,' said Benbow. ‘The only link is drugs and that's getting so common around the town these days that it needn't be a common denominator at all … so go ahead and knock off this Silver character if you can, we'll come along for the laughs if you don't mind … we're due for a bloody miracle and we may pick up something useful.'

Roberts looked worried. ‘We can't touch Silver unless he's got dope on his premises. I think I could risk knocking off this waiter but, if he doesn't admit anything and we don't get any confirmation, I'll never get a charge to stick.'

At seven o'clock that night, armed with a search warrant, they arrived in Gerrard Street. Benbow, Bray, and Roberts, together with a detective constable and two uniformed PCs, pushed past the doorman with a brief flourish of the warrant and descended into the club.

At that early hour, there were only a couple of hard drinking types at the bar. The band had not yet arrived and all the tables were empty. The detectives, looking more like Yard men than anything television had ever dreamed up, marched past Snigger on their way to the office. If they hoped to catch Silver red-handed with a sack of morphine over his shoulder, they were out of luck. He was sitting behind his desk, fast asleep.

He woke with a start and stared owlishly at the intruders. For a moment he thought it was a return of Conrad's hooligans and fear leapt into his eyes.

‘Who the devil are you?'

‘Police officers – are you Ray Silver?' asked Roberts brusquely.

Silver paled slightly but kept his face well under control.

‘That's me. What d'you want?'

‘We have reason to suspect that you may be in unlawful possession of narcotics in contravention of the Dangerous Drugs Act … in other words, chum, we want to see if you've got any stuff stacked away here.'

Bray, watching Silver's face, could have sworn that he saw relief cross it. He seemed to become unconcerned, almost bouncy, waving his hand around the room.

‘You must be off your chump, boy – but help yourself. I suppose you've got a warrant.'

‘Here it is.' Roberts half-pulled a form from his pocket but made no attempt to show it to Silver.

‘Carry on, then … what bum has been trying to make trouble for me?'

Benbow ignored him.

‘Where's your waiter?'

For the first time, the Eurasian looked uneasy.

‘I don't know – he should be there. Why ask?'

‘He's taken a powder by the look of it,' snapped Benbow, ‘but he'll have some awkward questions to face when we pick him up.'

It took a week to find Albert, as it turned out. Getting a tip-off on the internal phone from the doorman, the waiter had nipped smartly up the rear fire escape and gone to earth in Stepney, until a disgruntled junkie had shopped him to the local police.

Back in the club, the Admiral had another poser for Ray Silver.

‘Ever heard of Jack Feiner?' he rapped.

Silver had never heard the name, although he would probably have recognised the addict's face. He was able to put on a genuinely puzzled expression and shake his head with convincing innocence.

Benbow sighed. ‘Come on then, Roberts, let's have a look around – give me your keys, Silver.'

The proprietor handed them over and sat complacently as the policemen rooted through all his drawers and cupboards. Bray and a PC pulled up the carpets and looked for loose floorboards, they sounded the walls and moved the pictures – all without finding anything incriminating.

‘The big key is the one for the safe,' sneered Silver with offensive helpfulness.

Benbow felt from the start that they would find nothing in the office and cursed silently. The big safe held a few hundred pounds in cash, some ledgers, stock books, and an empty steel drawer. There was nothing else to be seen in it.

Benbow was turning away in disgust when he caught a wink from the Drug Squad man. Roberts made a gesture with his thumb that clearly meant that he wanted Silver out of the room.

‘Nothing here, Bray,' said Benbow loudly. ‘Take Mr Silver out into the other rooms here and ask him to open all the cupboards for you, and try to find that bloody waiter.'

He threw the bunch of keys over and Bray shepherded the grinning owner outside. When the door had closed, Benbow dropped to his knees beside Roberts who was still staring into the safe.

‘What's all the mystery?'

‘Look – in the crack where those runners for the drawer are fixed.'

The sergeant pointed to a pair of supports which were welded on to the sides of the safe to support the drawer. Benbow craned his thick neck nearer.

‘Ah, that white stuff, you mean – in the cracks?'

‘Yeah, might be nothing but if it's dope we've got something to throw at him – he's so damn cocky that he's obviously unloaded all his stock. He must have got a whisper somehow.'

As he spoke, Roberts was carefully brushing the few grains of white powder from the runners into a clean envelope that he took from the desk. There were a few more on the opposite side and he added these to the collection.

‘No need to put that greasy swine on his guard if it is morphine or heroin. And if it isn't, it'll save us from looking damn fools.'

They went to the bar and with the help of the detective constables, shifted all the bottles, pulled down the glasses, and explored the cupboards below the great engraved mirrors.

Snigger looked on uneasily and almost blew a blood vessel when he saw one of the men push aside his pile of carefully prepared cigarette packets in order to tap the back walls of a cupboard. For a moment, he thought that the detective was going to look through the cartons themselves but, at the last minute, he collected them up and replaced them. Snigger let his breath out in a long controlled sigh of sheer relief, but he was soon disturbed again by Benbow summoning him to the office.

Leaving Molly to look after the disarranged bar, and the two already inebriated patrons, he followed Silver and the policeman back to the room at the rear of the club. Here Benbow and Roberts put them through a snappy interrogation.

Where was Albert? Did they admit to any dealing in drugs? Did they know of any addicts amongst the customers? A string of accusative questions fell like water on so many ducks' backs. Snigger maintained a shocked indignant pose, while Silver blandly denied knowledge of anything at all.

Eventually, Benbow gave up and led the procession back to the front door. The Eurasian pranced behind, still sweating slightly but as cocky as a fat bantam.

‘Barking up the wrong tree, Inspector. Your snout must have been having you on … you ought to know I run a respectable business.'

He watched them drive off, blissfully unaware of the few grains of dusty powder carefully tucked away in Sergeant Roberts' breast pocket.

Chapter Twelve

A grey, cloudy dawn was breaking when Gunther Frey set out with his poodle on their regular morning walk.

Gunther worked in an office in the centre of Munich and it was an act of faith with him to take Mitzi out before she was left alone in the flat all day. Every morning, they left the door in Morassistrasse and walked along the embankment to the Ludwigsbrücke, where they crossed the Isar.

It was cold and wet underfoot, the weather having changed from the mildness of the previous evening. Mitzi pranced along at the end of her red lead, while Gunther, still half-asleep, trudged behind with his head buried in the upturned collar of his overcoat. The street lights were still on as the pair crossed the bridge.

They walked along the path that split the river lengthwise, across the top of a breakwater that joined up two islands in the river. Behind, on one island, lay the great bulk of the Deutschsmuseum. Ahead, the flood weir carried on to the next island which carried the Maximilianbrücke. The grey waters swirled sullenly alongside Gunther as he stopped to unhook the little dog's lead.

Mitzi shot off, pirouetting and prancing on the deserted path. The grey sky and the sodium lamps shone on the water as Gunther tramped on, thinking about his income tax. The surroundings were too familiar for him to spare them a glance. Then Mitzi darted away and began to yap incessantly.

She had stopped at a railing on the deep side of the weir and here, wagging her trim little tail, she kept up a persistent staccato yapping.

‘Ach, be quiet, for Heaven's sake,' muttered her master, walking past. Mitzi stayed put and Gunther had to come back to her. ‘Right, back on your lead then,' he threatened, as she continued to stare down and bark at the river.

As he stooped to fix her lead to the collar, he casually followed her intent gaze down into the swirling waters. Bobbing sluggishly in a blind angle of the concrete buttresses, were the shoulders of a man.

Every few seconds, eddies in the water would roll the body slightly so that the back of the head and buttocks appeared. The second time this happened, Gunther's horrified eyes saw a jagged wound at the back of the lower ribs, as if something had burst out from inside, bloodied flesh gaping from a long tear in the jacket.

He took a grip on himself and looked to see if the river was likely to dislodge the corpse from the backwater and carry it over the weir. It seemed to be making no progress downstream, however, and taking a chance on its not getting swept away in his absence, Gunther Frey began running with Mitzi back to the Ludwigsbrücke and the nearest telephone.

‘One bullet is still in there, lodged in the spine.' The pathologist announced this blandly to the court judge, who, to his sorrow, had to be present at all criminal post-mortem examinations in Munich.

Two mortuary attendants lifted the big body from the X-ray machine in the comer, to the stainless-steel operating table in the middle of the room. The scene was the basement chamber that was the forensic mortuary of the Munich medical college, not far from the part of the river where the body had so recently been found.

The judge sat uncomfortably on a hard chair at the side of the bare white-tiled chamber. ‘What about that wound in the back?' he asked.

‘Pah! A red herring – nothing to do with the death.' The pathologist, Korb, was a small hard-faced man with sparse red hair.

‘One bullet entered the front of the chest and didn't come out again. The other went in the throat and straight out of the side of the neck.' He waved a rubber-covered hand at the corpse as the attendants settled it on the table. ‘That gash must have happened as the body was floating down river, probably caught against a tree stump or a bridge support.'

He turned back to the body and, knife in hand, stood impatiently while the assistants fussed around getting things ready. A police inspector and a uniformed patrolman stood by as Korb began his examination.

The elderly judge slumped in his seat with a sigh. He had seen too many post-mortems, but they still revolted him. He envied the British system, where the only contact the judiciary has with blood and gore was through the hygienic medium of foolscap documents.

Korb was looking intently at the exterior of the body again, before starting to cut. The clothing had already been carefully removed and lay on a side table, each garment labelled and packed in a plastic bag.

The pathologist studied the face, neck, and stomach, then an attendant rolled it over for him to see the back. Eventually he came back to the neck again.

‘Shot twice from the front. Probably the first shot was in the neck. It could hardly have been fatal – it passed through the windpipe but missed all the important arteries – too far forwards.'

‘Why was it the first shot, Herr Doctor?' asked the police inspector respectfully. Korb was one always to be used with respect. His acid tongue and temper were renowned in Bavarian police circles.

‘Because the wound in the chest must have penetrated the heart and caused almost immediate death,' snapped Korb. ‘One would hardly shoot a mortally wounded man a second time in such a trivial manner.'

The inspector had reservations about a shot through the windpipe being trivial, but he kept his mouth shut.

‘What sort of range was he shot from, doctor?' asked the judge.

The pathologist thumbed at the spread out clothing and then pointed at the neck of the corpse.

‘Not much help from the suit after being stirred around in the Isar for hours, but the skin here tells us a thing or two.'

The judge rose and walked over to the post-mortem table. He saw a neat hole punched in the throat at the front, with a faint speckling of black on the surrounding skin.

‘This one was pretty close, but not contact,' explained Korb, ‘The entrance hole is not jagged from the tearing effect of the cartridge gases as it would be at a mere few centimetres range, but it was near enough to produce this tattooing from flecks of un-burnt powder on the surrounding flesh.'