The Players And The Game (8 page)

The girl’s name was Hazel Palmer. She had known Louise well at school, and was now a secretary in an engineering office. She had been out with her boy-friend in his car on the night of June 20th, and as they were driving along between Riverend and High Ashley they had noticed a car parked beside the side of the road, and two people getting out. Both were women, and Hazel had noticed them first because one was staggering and the other was helping her. The staggering one leaned against the side of the car, and was clearly visible in the headlights as they passed. Hazel had recognised her as Louise. She had said to her friend Jack Jenkins that it was a school-friend of hers, and that she was ill or drunk. Why hadn’t they stopped? Well, the woman seemed to be looking after her, and Jack had his mind on other things. She thought the woman and Louise had both got out of the back doors, but couldn’t be sure. If there was somebody else in the car she hadn’t noticed. The car might have been an Austin, a Morris or a Ford, nothing unusual anyway. And she had no idea of the number.

And afterwards? Afterwards she and Jack had gone up to Brier Hill, a well-known place of loving couples, and had come home a different way. Then on the Tuesday morning she had gone on holiday, and had been away all the week. When she returned she learned what had happened, and got in touch with the police.

Hazel Palmer did not seem very intelligent, but she stuck to her story through some sceptical questioning by Hazleton. What was the girl wearing? A dress with a mini-skirt, but in the darkness she couldn’t be sure of the colour. What made her so sure it was Louise, when she could have seen her for only a few seconds? She just was sure, that’s all. Could she say where it was that they saw her? She thought so. They were trying to find the place now.

Riverend was a small village just off the main road. Out of the village one road led back to the coast road, the other climbed up into the downs to High Ashley. This was southern England, an unmenacing countryside, the downs no more than gentle hills. Yet it was a lonely road for such a populous area. If you stopped in the right place, a shriek or two would almost certainly not be heard.

Hazleton looked sideways at the girl, who sat between him and Plender. She’s enjoying it, he thought, having the time of her life. Hazleton did not much care for the young. He had two teenagers of his own, and he simply did not understand their attitude to life, or the things that gave them pleasure. If this little bitch is wasting our time I’ll have a few things to say to her, he thought savagely.

She was looking out of the window now, and chewing her lip. ‘Can you ask the man to slow down? I think we are getting near.’ The detective constable in front heard, and slowed to ten miles an hour. They were travelling on the level, with green fields on either side. After a couple of hundred yards she shook her head. ‘This isn’t it.’ She turned to Hazleton, sensing his distrust. ‘It’s not easy, you know.’

Plender smiled at her. ‘We know that. Just tell us when you seem to recognise anything.’

They went on for another half-mile and passed a crossroads. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Slow down, please. It was a bit after that.’ A quarter of a mile farther on she said, ‘Here. Before that bend in the road ahead. I remember I was looking back and we went round the bend.’

They all got out of the car. It was a hot day. Hedgerows ran along both sides of the road, wild flowers of some kind scented the air. There were no marks of a car having stopped. They pushed around in the hedgerows without result. Then the constable who had gone ahead called, ‘Sir.’

They came up to him. Through a gap in the hedge there was a grassy path. At the end of it, a hundred yards back from the road, stood a stone cottage with a tiled roof. The upstairs windows were broken, paint had peeled from the front door. Hazleton picked up a signboard that had fallen into the hedge. It said in faded letters
Planter’s Place.

Hazleton and Plender looked at each other. ‘Edwards,’ Hazleton said, ‘Just take Miss Palmer back to the car while we have a look.’

They made their way in silence through what had once been a garden. A few flowers struggled among the weeds. The front door did not give to the hand and they walked round trying windows and looking inside at empty rooms. On the way they passed an outhouse and a water butt. At the back a small window was two or three inches open. Plender looked at it speculatively. They walked round the rest of the house. There was a locked back door. One window was boarded up, the others shut tight. Hazleton nodded, came back and examined the small opened window. A layer of unsmeared dirt showed on it. ‘All right, what are you waiting for?’

Plender got his fingers inside and pushed. The window creaked open. He put head and shoulders in, then disappeared. There was a crash. His voice came from inside. ‘Landed on some old crockery. Sort of scullery. What shall I open, back door or front?’

‘Neither. One of those other windows. Keep the doors for prints.’

Plender opened a side window and watched with some awe as Hazleton’s bulky body came through. There was a sound of splintering as part of the window sill came away with him. The DCI picked at the wood with a nail, and it flaked off. ‘Dry rot.’

They were in what had obviously been a sitting-room. The fireplace was modern, the flowered wallpaper torn. There was no furniture. Hazleton sniffed. ‘Somebody’s been here. Smell it?’ Plender could smell nothing. ‘And they didn’t come in by any of the windows. Nor did they break in the door. There’s an obvious conclusion, eh, Harry?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The front door was on a spring lock, the back door bolted. In the back room flakes of pastry, possibly bits from a pork pie, were on the draining board. They looked recent.

‘Our old friend the passing tramp?’ Plender suggested.

‘How did he get in?’ Hazleton’s face, square and heavy-jowled with the knobs on it gleaming, was sombre. ‘I’ll tell you something else I can smell, Harry. Blood.’

There were two bedrooms on the upper floor. In the back one the lower part of the wall was splattered with marks of a bright, recent red. Rust-coloured stains were on the floorboards. On the boards, and on a kitchen chair, there was candle grease. He’s certainly got a nose for it, Plender thought. In one corner of the room were some clothes, a pink dress that looked small enough for a child, briefs, brassière, shoes. It occurred to Plender afterwards as pathetic that they should have made such a tiny pile, but at the time he felt only a thrill of recognition. Hazleton prowled round the marks and then said in a harsh voice, ‘Come on, then. Let’s find her.’

They unbolted the back door. The sky was still blue, the sun shone, but to Plender there was now something sickly in the country smell, it seemed to him that the scent of blood was mingled with that of the long grass and the flowers. It was he who opened the door of the outhouse. He saw rusty buckets, an old coal-bin on its side, some bits of corrugated iron. He moved farther in, among empty tins, some old sacks, and lifted these to uncover what looked for a moment like a paler sack beneath. But only for a moment. He went out again and called Hazleton.

The big man went into the outhouse and came out again. He looked at Plender. ‘Pull yourself together. You’ve seen a dead girl before, haven’t you? They look worse after traffic accidents.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want you to drive us back. Edwards can stay here.’

Hazel Palmer sat in a corner of the car, temporarily forgotten. She looked at them and said. ‘You’ve found Louise.’

‘You were right to come to us. She’s dead.’ Hazleton got in beside her, patted her hand and sighed. ‘I wish you read the papers while you were on holiday.’

If one is horrified by medical detail, then the report on Louise Allbright was fairly horrifying as such things go. The cause of death was strangulation by some kind of ligature, but when this occurred she must have been in an enfeebled state, for some four dozen incisions had been made in her body, so that by the time she died she must have been a mass of blood. Most of the cuts were trivial, but some were on her nipples and in the vagina, as well as under armpits and on her face and neck. The incisions had been made with some sharp thin instrument like a razor blade. There were severe bite marks on her neck. When she was found her hands were tied behind her back with electric light flex. There had been no sexual connection, but a sexual assault had taken place in the form of an attempt to force some object up her vagina. Louise Allbright had not been a virgin.

So far the medical details, which did not horrify any of the policemen who read them. They were not of much direct help in giving a line to her murderer, nor was Doctor Otterley, the pathologist, able to say whether more persons than one had been involved. Some of the cuts were deeper than others, so that the light ones might have been made by one hand and the deep ones by another, but this was frankly conjecture. Nor were the fingerprint details of much help. There were a number in the room with bloodstains on the walls where she had presumably been tortured and killed, but most of them were blurred and some were her own. The front door, about which Hazleton had been so careful, yielded only a number of blurred impressions. There were some prints on the outhouse door, but it was quite likely that they were not connected with the case.

The discovery of the body, and the nature of the injuries, however, brought full-scale attention in the press. There were pictures of what was called the murder cottage, and a heightened account of what Hazel Palmer had seen, under the heading ‘Who Was The Mystery Woman?’ All known local sexual deviants were interrogated. Few of them had any record of sadistic violence but they were still interrogated, without result.

The existence of an actual body, as distinct from a theoretical suspicion about foul play, changed the police pecking order. A murder case outside a big city is normally in the charge of the head of the County CID, and when the body was found Paling took over a job for which he was not by nature suited. Paling was aware of his own limitations. He knew himself to be a sceptic, lacking in the positive aggressiveness that makes a really good detective. He soon got bored with interrogating suspects, found many of them distressingly uncouth, and regarded most of the uniformed or plain-clothes policemen he knew as only one or two degrees nearer civilisation.

Paling was a bachelor who lived in an expensive service-flat, and was deeply interested in collecting old coins. He subscribed to the
Numismatist.
He never went to police concerts or dances, and was known at County HQ as the Toff. Such were his disadvantages. On the other hand, Paling had the ability to administer and co-ordinate that many good detectives lack. He took on this role in the Allbright case, giving Hazleton control of day-to-day inquiries. The DCI had the feeling that he was somehow being cheated by a man more sophisticated than himself. Why was it always Paling who made statements to the Press? Hurley received another rocket for his slackness, and had no further connection with the case. Hazleton had, however, formed a good opinion of Plender, and gave him quite a lot to do. It was Plender who conducted an interview which proved vital to the case when he saw Mr Borrowdale of Borrowdale and Trapney, at his office in Broad Street, just off the High Street.

Hazleton’s obvious conclusion from the fact that the windows of the cottage were closed, and the doors not broken in, was that entrance had been made with a key. A key meant the estate agents, and they were Borrowdale and Trapney. They were the oldest-established agents in Rawley, but the flyblown pictures in their offices, the threadbare carpet and the general air of gloom made it clear that they were not the most successful.

Success, indeed, seemed an alien word in the presence of Mr Borrowdale. He was a lank man in his sixties with large hands bearing reddish knuckles the size of walnuts, which cracked occasionally, and a few strands of black hair plastered over an otherwise bald yellow head. His laborious voice was that of a preacher who has long since lost most of his congregation.

‘Yes, Planter’s Place is ours,’ he acknowledged. The idea obviously did not cheer him. He went to a filing cabinet, took out a sheet of paper and handed it to Plender, who saw that it contained the typed details of the property, beginning ‘A DELIGHTFUL COUNTRY COTTAGE in need of some renovation.’ He put the paper in his pocket. ‘It’s been with us for, oh, a couple of years now. It was owned by a man named Medina who had been a tea planter in Ceylon and then came home. He wanted a place of his own, and named it accordingly. A humorous name, you see. But it wasn’t his for long, poor fellow. Has dry rot, you understand.’ He lowered his voice as if he were referring to bad breath. ‘It may be that this unhappy affair will stimulate some interest. People do like a house where there has been a murder. But there will still be the dry rot. Selling houses today, Mr Plender, is not easy.’

Plender was momentarily diverted. ‘I understood prices were going up all the time.’

Mr Borrowdale cracked his knuckles. ‘So they are. But all the business here goes to these newfangled agents, the ones who produce advertisements saying that a place is falling down and is very ugly, and yet manage to make it sound a bargain. Gammon of Gammon and Moody is very strong on that. He and Pilbeam get all the new business that’s worth anything. Do you know Pilbeam? I understand he’s a very go-ahead man.’

He showed every sign of being able to continue for a long time in this vein. Plender broke in. ‘I’d just like to get straight about your procedure in letting people look at empty houses. Do you go round with them?’

‘Sometimes. When it seems justified. In the case of Planter’s Place I fear that wouldn’t be the case.’

‘You take a note of their names and addresses, give them the keys, and let them go out alone.’

There was a rusty noise like a crow’s caw which Plender did not identify for a moment. It was Mr Borrowdale laughing. He wiped his eyes with a large, not very clean handkerchief. ‘In theory that would be the procedure.’

‘But not in practice?’

‘In practice junior staff is junior staff, idle and inefficient. That has been my experience in recent years. I dare say Gammon may get some bright young fellows, but even Gammon was telling me when I met him at the yearly conference–’

It was clearly necessary to cut Mr Borrowdale short. ‘Do you mean you’ve got no list of the people who were given an order to view?’

‘I have a list.’ He handed it across the table and Plender saw that there were ten names on it. ‘But it is far from complete. People have come in, they have been given the key, no note has been taken of their names. I fear that often happens.’

‘You would have no record of them at all?’

‘I fear not.’ Mr Borrowdale paused, cracked his knuckles, decided to confide still worse news. ‘In some cases keys are not returned.’

‘I see.’

‘We make allowances for that.’ A wan smile said that estate agents, Gammon and Pilbeam apart perhaps, needed to make allowance for every sort of human frailty. ‘We always keep one extra set of keys for every property. Then if a set is not returned we have another one made. Our bill over the year for new keys would surprise you.’

‘Do you know whether anybody kept the keys for Planter’s Place?’

‘By the law of averages I should say it would be two or three people each year.’ Another wan smile appeared, like weak sun breaking through cloud. ‘But we know, don’t we, that the law of averages doesn’t always work.’

That was the effective end of an interview which left Plender feeling rather low-spirited. The names on the list were checked out, and none of the people appeared to have any conceivable connection with the case. There this line of approach finished, in an end apparently dead. When the whole thing was over, however, Plender realised that there was a question he might and perhaps should have asked, a question that arose from what had been said. If he had asked the question, would the answer have made any difference? He was never able to make up his mind. But nobody else commented on his omission, and like a wise man Plender never mentioned it.

It was Plender also who talked again to Ray Gordon. The journalist’s movements on that Monday evening had involved going from one place to another in search of a story, and they had proved almost impossible to check in detail. It was not this, however, so much as the nature of his relations with Louise that interested the police.

‘Look, I’ve told you, I didn’t have any relations. I said that when I first spoke to you.’

‘You didn’t say then that she’d been passed on to you by the Lowson girl. I still don’t see quite how that could happen.’

‘I took Sally Lowson out a few times. She was a good dancer and she’s quite a piece, if you like big girls. Then, I don’t know, she seemed to go off me.’ His nutty face screwed up into displeasure at the idea. ‘One night she just said “We’ve had it,” and that was that. I suppose a journalist on a local paper wasn’t interesting enough for her. Snobbish bitch.’

‘And how did Louise come into it?’

‘Then she said, “I’ll tell you a girl who’s really got hot pants for you, Louise Allbright. You should do something about her sometime.” So I took her out a couple of times. Three, actually.’

‘But she hadn’t.’

‘Hadn’t what?’

‘Got hot pants for you. You said you didn’t make her.’

‘I told you what she was like, that she wanted excitement but was too timid to go out and get it. She was the sort who’d settle down in the end with a man twice her age and then complain about having a dull life.’

Plender also went round one evening and had a chat with Paul Vane about the incident at the tennis club. Vane, a tall, handsome but rather nervous man, laughed at the idea that it might have rankled with Gordon. What sort of girl was Louise, Plender asked.

‘I’ve no idea, I hardly knew her.’ Vane was looking at a spot behind Plender. He turned and saw that Mrs Vane had come into the room. ‘She seemed pleasant enough. Very young.’

‘My husband takes a kindly interest in young girls,’ Alice Vane said from behind Plender.

‘Alice, for God’s sake.’ She walked out of the room. ‘Another beer, Sergeant?’

‘Thank you, sir, very nice of you.’

Vane poured whisky for himself and splashed soda on the tray. ‘My wife’s nervy. She hasn’t adjusted yet to life down here. It’s nonsense, what she was saying.’

‘About your kindly interest in young girls, sir?’

‘Yes. I mean, it
is
a kindly interest if you want to use that phrase, nothing more.’

‘To go back to that bit of bother at the tennis club–’

‘It was really absolutely nothing.’

‘You took Louise Allbright home afterwards.’

‘Yes, I believe I did. Why?’

‘You’re employed by Timbals Plastics in London, is that right?’

‘I’m their Personnel Director. Why?’

‘Louise’s father is with them too, only he’s here in Rawley.’ Plender pretended to look at his notes. He remembered perfectly what Mrs Allbright had said, and now repeated it. ‘His wife said one of the bosses at Timbals brought her home that night and wanted to make love to her, but she wouldn’t let him.’

Plender was surprised by Vane’s reaction to what was really not more than a routine inquiry. He actually flinched away, as the sergeant put it to Hazleton later, as if you’d stuck a branding iron in front of his nose. The struggle for self-control lasted only a few seconds. Then Vane was himself again, a man rather too eagerly friendly.

‘That’s preposterous.’

‘You mean it’s not true?’

‘After what you call the bit of bother – and believe me, even to call it that is to exaggerate it out of all proportion – we stayed there talking and playing darts. Then I drove her home and kissed her good night. Nothing more.’

‘It’s not true that you tried to make love to her and she wouldn’t let you?’

‘Absolute rubbish. Who did she say this to?’

‘Her parents.’

‘I should say she was showing off. Trying to impress her father because he works at Timbals.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Plender had become perceptibly more distant in the course of the conversation. ‘As a matter of form, could you tell me where you were on the evening of June twentieth?’

‘I expect so.’ He looked at a pocket diary. ‘A fairly ordinary day. I caught the six-something home, was back here just before seven-thirty. Then I stayed in the rest of the evening, had dinner, watched TV.’

‘Just stayed in with your wife? Nobody called, no telephone calls, you didn’t go out?’

‘No,’ Vane smiled, at ease now. ‘I’ve just remembered. We had a cold meal, which Alice had made in advance because she felt a migraine coming on. She’s taken to playing a lot of bridge, and I believe the concentration on it is bad for her. She ate nothing, went to bed around nine o’clock. Later on I worked on some papers I’d brought home from the office.’

‘I believe your daughter lives here?’

‘Yes. But she was out till midnight. She’s moved out altogether now, taken a flat in London with friends. The younger generation, you know.’

Plender left it at that. There was nothing against Vane really, nothing beyond his wife’s hostility and his own embarrassment on the subject of young girls. They ran a check with CRO, but he had never been charged with any offence.

Hazleton himself talked to Sally Lowson, feeling that this was appropriate in dealing with the daughter of a friend of the Chief Constable. He had a whisky and a bit of a chat first, and was impressed by the wall panel and the drinks tray. He was impressed too by Sally, who seemed to him a fine figure of a young woman. When he was left alone with her he smelled something. Sex? Fear? A mixture of both perhaps, but anyway something that he found exciting. If I wasn’t a married man with a couple of kids, and if I were a few years younger, I’d take this girl out and I bet before the evening ended I’d have screwed her, he thought.