The dead of Jericho (27 page)

'So you didn't go to Jackson's house that night?'

'I certainly did not.'

'Where were you that night, sir?' (Had the 'sir’ crept in from conditioned reflex? Or was Morse feeling slightly less sure of himself?)

'I don't know,' replied Richards in a hopeless voice. 'I just don't know, Inspector. I don't go out much. I'm not a womanizer like Charles, and if I do go out it's usually only to the local.'

'But you didn't go to the local that night?'

'I may have done, but I can't remember; and it's no good saying I can. If I had gone, it would only have been for an hour or so, though.'

'Perhaps you stayed at home and watched the telly?’

'I haven't got a telly. If I was home that night I'd have been reading, I should think.'

'Anything interesting?’

'I've been reading Gibbon recently — and reading him with infinite pleasure, if I may say so— '

'Which volume are you up to?'

'Just past Alaric and the sacking of Rome. Volume Four.'

'Don't you mean Volume Three?'

'Depends which edition you're reading.'

Morse let it go. 'What was the
real
reason for your visit to Jackson's house that night?'

Richards smiled patiently. 'You must have a pretty poor opinion of my intelligence, Inspector.'

'Certainly not! Any man who reads Gibbon has got my vote from the start. But I still think no one actually
intended
murdering Jackson, you see. I think he was after something else.'

'Such as?'

'I think it was a letter — a letter that Jackson had found when he pushed his way through into Anne Scott's kitchen that morning. At first I thought it must have been a letter she'd written for the police — a suicide note — telling the whole story and perhaps telling it a bit too nastily from your brother's point of view. But now I don't think so, somehow. I think the letter Jackson found had probably been received through the post that very morning — a letter from your brother telling Anne Scott that he couldn't and wouldn't help her, and that everything between them was over.'

'Have you got the letter?' asked Richards quietly.

'No,' said Morse slowly. 'No — we haven't.'

'Aren't you going to have to do a bit better than this, Inspector?'

'Well, your brother was looking for
something
— in that shed at the bottom of Jackson's garden. Or was that
you,
sir?'

'In a shed?’

Morse ignored the apparent incredulity in Richards' voice and continued. 'That letter would have been a bad thing for your brother, sir. It could have broken up his marriage if— '

'But Celia
knew
about Anne Scott.'

'Only very recently, I think.'

'Yes, that's true.'

'Do you love your sister-in-law?'

Richards looked down sadly at the concrete floor and nodded. 'I shall always love her, I suppose.'

Morse nodded, too, as if he also was not unacquainted with the agonies of unrequited love.

'Where does this leave us, Inspector?'

'Where we started, I'm afraid, sir. You've been charged with the murder of Jackson, and that charge still stands. So we'd better get back to thinking about where you were on the night when— '

Richards got up from the bed, a new note of exasperation in his voice. 'I've told you — I don't
know.
If you like, I'll try — I'll try like hell — to get hold of somebody who may have seen me. But there are millions of people who couldn't prove where they were that night!'

'That's true.'

'Well, why pick on me? What possible evidence— ?'

'Ah!' said Morse. 'I wondered when you were going to ask me about the evidence. You can't honestly think we'd have you brought here just because no one saw you reading Gibbon that night? Give us a
little
credit!'

Richards looked puzzled. 'You've
got
some evidence? Against
me
?'

'Well, we're not
absolutely
sure, but — yes, we've got some evidence. You see there were several fingerprints in Jackson's bedroom, and as you know I asked my sergeant to take yours.'

'But he
did
! And I'll tell you one thing, Inspector, my prints could quite definitely
not
have matched up with anything there, because I've never been in the bloody house — never!'

'I think you've missed my point, sir. We didn't really get a chance of matching up your prints at all. I know it's our fault — but you must forgive Sergeant Lewis. You see, he's not very well up in that sort of thing and — well, to be truthful, sir — he mucked things up a bit. But he's a good man, and he's willing to have another go. It's important, don't you think, to give a man a second chance? In fact he's waiting outside now.'

Richards sat down on the bed again, his head between his hands. For several minutes he said nothing, and Morse looked down at a man who now seemed utterly weary and defeated.

'Cigarette?' said Morse.

Richards took one, and inhaled the smoke like a dying man gasping at oxygen.

'When did you find out?' he asked very quietly.

'Find out that you weren't Conrad Richards, you mean? Well, let me see now...' Morse himself inhaled deeply on his own cigarette; and as he briefly told of his discoveries, the same wan and wistful half-smile returned to the face of the man who sat on the edge of the narrow bed.

'When did you find out, Morse?' asked the ACC that afternoon.

'Looking back on it, sir, I think the first inkling
should
have come when I went to the Book Association and learned that it had been Anne Scott who had suggested to the committee that Charles Richards should be invited along to talk about the small publishing business. Such a meeting would attract a few people, the committee felt, especially some of the young students from the Polytechnic who might be thinking of starting up for themselves. But "small" is the operative word, sir. In a limited and very specialized field the Richards brothers had managed to run a thriving little concern. But who had heard of them? Who — except for Anne Scott — knew them? Virtually no one in Oxford, that's for certain — just as virtually no one would recognize the managing directors even of your big national publishers. And, remember, the Richards brothers had only just moved into Oxfordshire a few months earlier — half a dozen miles
outside
Oxford itself — and the chances that anyone would recognize either of them in a small meeting were very slim indeed. The only person who
would
have known them both was dead: Anne Scott. So they laid their plan — and decided to follow the same routine as the one which had proved so successful earlier in the week, when it was
Conrad
Richards who drove the Rolls to Oxford and
Charles
Richards who followed Jackson to Canal Reach.

'Perhaps from the little we've learned about the two brothers' characters this wasn't surprising: it was Conrad who'd always been ready to play second fiddle, and Charles who'd always been the more dynamic. So they decided to swap roles again for the Friday evening, with Conrad taking his brother's place in a talk which — very much at the eleventh hour — had been brought forward, thus almost certainly cutting down what would have been a meagre audience at the best of times. Charles had already written out his notes for the speech, and Conrad probably knew more about the workings of the business, anyway. Conrad, I'm sure, was quite happy to do this; what he adamantly refused to do was to go down to Canal Reach. As ever, in his own mild way, he was quite willing to co-operate wherever he felt he could — but it had to be
Charles
who went to face Jackson. Now, I'm fairly sure in my own mind, sir, that although Charles Richards wasn't reckoning on murder, he was determined to get that letter back — or else. He tried to scare Jackson and pushed him around from room to room as he tried to find what he wanted — the letter which would implicate him deeply in Anne Scott's death, and pretty certainly put paid to his marriage — and possibly his business, too. And when they got to the bedroom he got so exasperated that he literally shook the life out of Jackson against the bed-post. At that point Charles Richards was in a tight spot. He knew his own name was likely to crop up somewhere in police inquiries into Anne Scott's death, and he realized how vital it was that Conrad, who was at that very moment talking to an audience under the alias of 'Charles Richards', should be given an utterly unassailable alibi. So he rang up the police — and then he got the hell out of Jericho and waited at the Martyrs' Memorial for Conrad to pick him up.'

'He didn't find the letter?'

'So he says — and I'm inclined to believe him.'

'What about the change of date for the meeting? Was that deliberate?'

'I don't really see how it could have been, sir: there wasn't the time, I don't think. No. Charles had to go to Spain on business some time this month, and it so happened that one of his girl friends told him that she could get away, too, and join him. But only during that week. So Charles pleaded urgent business, the meeting was changed, and the brothers took full advantage of— '

'Lucky for them, wasn't it? Keeping the audience down, I mean.'

'Luckier than you realize, sir. Miss Universe or World or something was on the telly that night and— '

‘I’m surprised
you
weren't watching it, Morse.'

'Did they pick the right girl, sir?'

'Well, personally I'd have gone for Miss — Go on!'

'I should think things must have looked pretty black as they went home that night and talked over what had happened. But very soon one thing must have become increasingly clear to the pair of them. Perhaps all would be well,
if only they could keep up the pretence.
The real danger would come if the police, in connection with Anne Scott's death, discovered that the "Charles Richards" of the OBA talk was not Charles Richards at all — but his brother Conrad, because
the speaker
that night had an alibi that no one in the world could shake. So the brothers made their decision. Celia Richards had to be brought into the picture straight away, and Charles had no option but to tell her everything about his affair with Anne Scott and to plead with her to take her part — a pretty big part, too — in the deception that followed.'

The ACC nodded. 'Ye-es. You'd better tell me how they worked that.'

'To an outsider, sir, I think that one thing about this case would seem particularly odd: the fact that Sergeant Lewis and myself had never been
together
when we'd met Conrad Richards; and, at the same time, we'd neither of us met the two brothers when
they
were together. Let me explain, sir. I met Charles Richards — or rather the man I
thought
was Charles Richards — for the first time at the OBA, when his physical appearance was firmly fixed for me
as
Charles Richards. As it happened, I did ring up the
actual
Charles Richards the next day, but the line, as I well remember, was very poor and crackly, and we ended up almost shouting to each other. In any case, I'd only heard him speak the once — and it just didn't occur to me that the man I was speaking to was any other than the man I'd sat listening to on the back row. Then, a day or two later, I rang Charles Richards again; but he was out at the time and so I left a message with his secretary for him to ring back. As we now know, sir, the two brothers were able to solve that little problem without too much trouble. When Charles received the message, he got
Conrad
to ring me back. Easy. But I asked for a meeting with him the next day, and that took a bit more organization. When I called at Charles Richards' office I was treated to a neat and convincing little charade by Celia — acting as the receptionist — and by Conrad — playing the part of Charles. It was, by the way, sir, at that point that I should have taken more notice of one very significant fact. Celia asked
me
for a cigarette that day — something she surely would never have done if the man who was with her was really her husband, because I was later to learn that Charles Richards was a heavy smoker. Anyway, I suspected nothing at the time, and the three of them must have felt encouraged about keeping up the pretence if the police were to bother them again.'

'Then we were a bit unlucky. Lewis and myself paid a
surprise
visit to Abingdon one afternoon, to get Conrad's fingerprints. But I didn't join him for a start, sir. I had another er lead to follow up, and so I wasn't with Lewis when he called at the office and met Conrad — the same man who'd twice passed himself off to me as
Charles.
We had reason to believe that Conrad might have been involved in things somehow, and we wanted to find whether his prints matched those found in Jackson's bedroom. So Lewis got the prints — Conrad's prints — and of course they matched nothing, because it had been
Charles
who had been in Jackson's house. That same afternoon we returned to the Richards' firm — but we were too late. We searched the offices that the brothers used, and as you know we found the blackmail note in Charles's desk. But the real clue I missed, I'm afraid. It was pretty clear from the ash-trays full of stubs that Charles was virtually a chain-smoker, but in Conrad's room there was no physical sign whatsoever of smoking and not the faintest smell of stale tobacco. Then we made a final visit to Abingdon, when Celia and Conrad — this time with ample warning — put on another little performance for me, playing the parts of a reconciled couple very cleverly. But they were wasting their time, I'm afraid. You see, there were two reasons for my visit. First, to get the man I'd been interviewing to the front door so that Lewis could see him and so corroborate what we'd suspected — that the man I'd been meeting all the time was in fact
Conrad
Richards.'