Authors: Cassandra Chan
Trick of the Mind (20 page)
“I don’t
think
so,” she said earnestly. “You see, I don’t get many calls, and I always have the phone with me, so there’s no need for anyone to leave a message.”
think
so,” she said earnestly. “You see, I don’t get many calls, and I always have the phone with me, so there’s no need for anyone to leave a message.”
Since she had earlier claimed that she often turned the phone off in the evenings, one or the other statement was patently untrue. Carmichael hesitated, on the verge of pointing this out to her, when it suddenly occurred to him that with this particular witness he had an ace in the hole.
“I see,” he said, almost genially. “Well, I’d best return you to your children, then. Willis here will show you where they are.”
Willis looked considerably surprised at this instruction, but nodded and stepped forward at once.
“Pick up the kids and escort her out,” he told Willis in an undertone. He was still too angry to offer Dawn a ride home, or even to call a taxi.
Carmichael sat on in the interview room once they had left, allowing them time to collect the children and vacate his office before he himself returned. He produced his cigar and relit it, using the
metal wastepaper bin as an ashtray. With that inducement, he was able to contain himself and wait the necessary minutes, but then he was up and striding out, having stubbed out the cigar and left the remainder in the bin. But he was only halfway back to his office when he came upon Constable Lemmy hurrying in the opposite direction.
metal wastepaper bin as an ashtray. With that inducement, he was able to contain himself and wait the necessary minutes, but then he was up and striding out, having stubbed out the cigar and left the remainder in the bin. But he was only halfway back to his office when he came upon Constable Lemmy hurrying in the opposite direction.
“There you are, sir,” he said, drawing up short, and then executing a clumsy about-face when Carmichael did not stop. “I thought I’d better come and find you.”
“Ah? And why was that, Constable?”
“Because of what the children told me, sir,” answered Lemmy. “You did say you wanted to hear about anything I found out right away.”
Carmichael’s stride paused in surprise and he turned to stare at his subordinate. Lemmy, it seemed, had actually learned something.
“Yes, indeed, Constable,” he said in a more encouraging tone. “What did the children tell you?”
“It was actually the oldest one, Mandy,” said Lemmy. “She said her mother went out on Tuesday night, after Mandy and the other girls were in bed.”
Carmichael stopped cold. “She said what?” he demanded.
Lemmy obligingly repeated himself.
“And how did Mandy come to know this?” asked Carmichael.
“Well, according to the girls,” said Lemmy, “their neighbor, Mrs. Carlson, sometimes comes to sit with them if their mum has to run out for something. If Mrs. Melton goes out for the evening, there’s another babysitter, but if she’s just forgotten something at the store, it’s Mrs. Carlson who comes round. And on Tuesday night, Mandy couldn’t sleep and came out to ask for a glass of water, and found Mrs. Carlson in the sitting room watching the telly. She gave Mandy her water and let her sit up with her for a few minutes and then sent her back to bed. Mandy went to sleep then, so she doesn’t know when her mother came back.”
Carmichael absorbed this in silence for a moment. “And how sure do you think Mandy is about the day?” he asked.
“Oh, pretty sure,” answered Lemmy. “It all came out when they were asking me what you wanted with their mum. I told them you
just wanted a bit of a chat about something that had happened on Tuesday night. And Mandy said, ‘Oh, the night Mummy went out.’”
just wanted a bit of a chat about something that had happened on Tuesday night. And Mandy said, ‘Oh, the night Mummy went out.’”
“Right, then,” said Carmichael. “We’re off to Walworth, lad. I think we should beat the Meltons home if we drive—we’ve got just enough time before rush hour starts.”
Meeting of the Minds
G
ibbons was reading O’Leary’s report over for the fifth time, desperately hoping it would jog his memory, when O’Leary himself appeared. He tapped on the doorjamb to announce himself and said, “They told me I could just come in.”
ibbons was reading O’Leary’s report over for the fifth time, desperately hoping it would jog his memory, when O’Leary himself appeared. He tapped on the doorjamb to announce himself and said, “They told me I could just come in.”
“Yes, by all means,” said Gibbons, beckoning. “It’s good to see you, Chris. I’m just reading your report.”
“Report?” echoed O’Leary, drawing one of the chairs up to the bedside and dropping into it. “Oh, about our conversation at the pub? Does it ring any bells?”
Gibbons shook his head, frustrated. “No, I wish it did,” he said. “This murder you’re working on—you seem to have told me about it in some detail.”
“That’s right,” agreed O’Leary. “We spent most of the time talking about jewels and the Arts Theft Division, but you wanted to hear about the Pennycook case, and I gave you a pretty good summary of it.”
“And I don’t remember it at all,” sighed Gibbons. “When I first saw this report, it came as a complete surprise. What do you think, Chris? Do you think I went down to Walworth on a hunch about the Pennycook murder?”
“Well, no, I don’t,” said O’Leary, almost apologetically. “I know
what Carmichael always says about coincidences, but I just can’t see it, myself. You’d put in a long day investigating a robbery and were looking forward to your dinner, and it was an uncommonly nasty night out. If Walworth had been on your way home, I would have said it was barely possible you had stopped to check something out. But as it is, no. If you’d had a thought about the case, you’d have rung me, or left a message at the Yard.”
what Carmichael always says about coincidences, but I just can’t see it, myself. You’d put in a long day investigating a robbery and were looking forward to your dinner, and it was an uncommonly nasty night out. If Walworth had been on your way home, I would have said it was barely possible you had stopped to check something out. But as it is, no. If you’d had a thought about the case, you’d have rung me, or left a message at the Yard.”
“That’s the way it seems to me, too,” said Gibbons, making a face at this conclusion. “Oh, never mind—I’m tired to death of trying to remember. Tell me about something else. How was your date with Brenda?”
“It would have been better if I hadn’t had to leave in the middle of it,” replied O’Leary. “We were just finishing our dinner when the call came in that you’d been shot.”
“Oh,” said Gibbons, discomfited. “Sorry.”
O’Leary grinned at him. “As well you should be,” he said with mock severity. “The least you could do is get shot during working hours instead of in the middle of my date.”
“Very inconsiderate of me,” agreed Gibbons.
“Actually, it’s worked out rather well,” said O’Leary. “Brenda is very anxious to soothe away the trauma I’ve experienced in seeing my friend lying all bloody in the street. I’m going to let her just as soon as I get a spare minute.”
“Trauma? You?” snorted Gibbons. “I’m the one that’s traumatized. I’ve forgotten an entire day, damn it all.”
“Yes, but you’re hardly in any kind of shape to be soothed by Brenda,” pointed out O’Leary.
“All too true,” agreed Gibbons sadly. He had been feeling so ill that it had not occurred to him, but it didn’t take much thought to realize his sex life had just come to a standstill for weeks, possibly months, to come. “Never mind,” he said, impatiently pushing this thought aside. “Tell me what’s been going on.”
“I don’t know much,” O’Leary warned him. “I’ve spent all day on Pennycook—as far as I can make out, Hollings is leaving me to solve the case on my own. God knows he doesn’t seem interested in anything I tell him.”
“Well, I’m interested,” said Gibbons. “Tell me what you found out.”
O’Leary smiled. “I got a break today, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I’ve been working on tracking down some of Pennycook’s old cronies, and I finally got hold of one of them today, a fellow called Reaney. He claims not to have had much to do with Pennycook in the last few years, and he didn’t have much to say to me at first, either.”
“But your natural charm brought him around?” inquired Gibbons sarcastically.
“That’s right,” said O’Leary genially. “That and the beer I bought him—I found him in a pub.”
“And did he know who Pennycook was going to meet that night?”
O’Leary shook his head. “No,” he said, “and I think I believe him. But he did finally say that Pennycook liked to indulge in a bit of blackmail when he got the chance. He called it his ‘pension fund.’ If you ask me, he had a go at blackmailing Reaney over something and that’s what brought their relationship to an end. According to Reaney’s daughter-in-law, he and Pennycook used to spend a fair amount of time together, though she didn’t know what they got up to.”
“Didn’t want to know, more like,” put in Gibbons.
“That’s right,” said O’Leary. “Willful ignorance can be a wonderful thing if applied rightly. Anyway, she claims there was some sort of dustup three or four years ago and Reaney hasn’t seen Pennycook since. As she put it, they went from being ‘bosom buddies’ to ‘hating each other’s guts.’”
“Well, the blackmail gives you motive, at any rate,” said Gibbons. “It didn’t seem to me, reading this over”—and he tapped the report on his lap—“that someone would have murdered the old reprobate for the paltry contents of his shop.”
“It would have seemed even less likely if you’d seen the place,” O’Leary assured him. “I dropped in on Mrs. Pennycook after I talked to Reaney, but she’s another case of willful ignorance. The police have always had it in for her Alfred—well, you know the drill.”
Gibbons made a face. “All too well. What about the—nephew, is it? Frank Pennycook, I think it said.”
“That’s right,” said O’Leary. “I had a go at him, too, but didn’t get much. He admitted that his uncle had some private business from time to time, but claims he was never let in on any of it. He says he had no idea that Alfred had an appointment that night, but if he had known, he would have assumed it was for something like blackmail. I’ve been trying to think if there have been any jobs recently that Pennycook might have known about and tried to get in on, but so far nothing’s come to me. Most of the people he knows are past active service, if you take my meaning.”
“More to the point,” said Gibbons, “do any of them have enough money to pay a blackmailer?”
O’Leary shrugged. “Not that I’ve noticed,” he answered, and then looked back over his shoulder as the sound of voices attracted his attention. “Is that someone else coming in?”
Gibbons glowered. “Probably my gorgon of a nurse come to torture me again.”
But it was Bethancourt, smelling of rain and tobacco, and smiling tentatively. Cerberus padded at his side; he smelled of wet dog.
“Hullo,” said Bethancourt. “Is this a special police conversation or can anyone join in?”
“Come in, come in,” said Gibbons. “You remember Chris O’Leary?”
“Yes, of course, good to see you again,” said Bethancourt, reaching out to shake O’Leary’s hand before sinking into the second chair. “Well, well, isn’t this jolly?”
Gibbons glared at him.
“Well, perhaps not precisely jolly,” amended Bethancourt hastily. “But a happy opportunity to compare notes and get all our minds on the same page so to speak.”
“Do be quiet, Phillip,” said Gibbons. “Chris here was just about to tell me how my investigation is going.”
“I did warn you I’d missed most of the news today,” warned O’Leary. “In fact, the only thing I heard was that Inspector Hollings had tracked down some bloke who apparently saw you getting out of a taxi at about half-eight on Tuesday night.”
“In Walworth?” asked Gibbons.
“That’s right. At the intersection of Walworth Road and East Street, or thereabouts.”
“Eight thirty,” mused Bethancourt. “That leaves an hour and a half or so unaccounted for.”
O’Leary gave him an odd look, but it was Gibbons who said, “How do you make that out? Chris here left me at a pub at half-six, and I turned up in Walworth at half-eight. That’s two hours difference.”
“Well, yes, but you had to get from place to place, hadn’t you?” pointed out Bethancourt. “I don’t think it’s pushing things to say you spent fifteen minutes getting from the pub to wherever you went and another fifteen getting from there to Walworth. That’s pretty average for getting about in London.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” said Gibbons grudgingly, “it does make sense. But what on earth could I have spent an hour and a half doing?”
“You might have got a bite to eat,” suggested Bethancourt.
“Not at any of the usual places, you didn’t,” put in O’Leary. “We’ve canvassed those—both the restaurants around the Yard and the ones near your flat. Your landlady told us which places you went to the most, but I don’t think we missed any. We had a small army out on Wednesday hitting every possible place.”
It gave Gibbons an odd and rather unpleasant feeling, hearing about the kind of search he himself had conducted on many occasions, but which on this occasion was directed toward his own movements.
“I was shot at about nine,” he said, ignoring the winces this statement caused in his listeners, “so I might still have been planning to pick up something to eat on my way home—it wasn’t that late.”
“You could have run into someone,” said O’Leary.
Gibbons shrugged. “I could have done almost any thing,” he said, sounding discouraged.
“What you couldn’t have done,” said Bethancourt, “is run straight off to Walworth after talking to Chris here—getting from the Feathers to Walworth couldn’t take two hours unless you walked. I rather think this rules out the idea that you went off to
check out a sudden inspiration about the Pennycook murder, don’t you?”
check out a sudden inspiration about the Pennycook murder, don’t you?”
“It does,” agreed Gibbons, who was annoyed that he himself had not grasped this immediately. “Not,” he added, glancing at O’Leary, “that we thought that was terribly likely.”
O’Leary shook his head in agreement.
“No, I suppose not,” murmured Bethancourt. “Still,” he added, brightening, “it’s nice to know for sure.”
Gibbons eyed him. “You seem to be in a suspiciously happy mood,” he said.
“I’m trying to lighten the atmosphere,” replied Bethancourt.
“The atmosphere doesn’t need lightening,” growled Gibbons, “it needs clearing up.”
“Well, we’re all doing our best,” said Bethancourt. “It’s not easy without you, you know.”
“Carmichael’s going nuts without you,” put in O’Leary.
Gibbons smiled at these attempts to cheer him, but it was a halfhearted expression. He didn’t care if they were all finding it heavy going because he resented their having the opportunity to investigate when he did not. The fact that most of the time he felt too awful to think about anything but his personal well-being did nothing to alter this sentiment, and he was in enough of a pet that the illogic of it all left him unmoved. Then he frowned as a thought occurred to him.
“This fellow says he saw me getting out of a taxi?” he asked.
“That’s right,” said O’Leary. “On Walworth Road and East Street.”
Gibbons’s frown deepened. “I wonder why I took a taxi,” he said. “I usually only do that if I’m in a hurry.”
Bethancourt and O’Leary stared at him.
“That’s true, isn’t it?” said Bethancourt, who frequently took taxis himself.
“I don’t normally take them myself,” said O’Leary thoughtfully. “Although …”
“Although what?” asked Gibbons when this comment did not resolve itself.
“Well, I was just thinking that it was a miserable night out,” said
O’Leary, almost apologetically. “It was the sort of weather that I might have taken a taxi in just to keep out of the rain.”
O’Leary, almost apologetically. “It was the sort of weather that I might have taken a taxi in just to keep out of the rain.”
“Did you take a taxi to meet your date?” asked Gibbons.
O’Leary shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “But I was picking Brenda up, so I had to.”
“But there’s a financial element at work here, isn’t there?” interrupted Bethancourt. “I mean, that’s why the two of you don’t hire taxis that often—because it’s expensive, right?”
Gibbons rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
“So, you normally only take taxis when you’re in a hurry,” said Bethancourt, “or possibly when the weather is bad enough.” He paused for a moment, and then shook his head. “I can’t think of a reason you’d be in a hurry to reach Walworth by half-eight, not unless you had an appointment there.”
He cocked his head in question at the others.
O’Leary spread his hands. “You didn’t have a date,” he said. “You’d have mentioned that when we were talking. What else could you be running late for at that time of night?”
“Maybe,” said Gibbons after a moment, “maybe I was just wanting my dinner and in a hurry to finish whatever it was I was doing. That and the weather might have made me decide to take a taxi.”
“It’ll help a lot once we find the taxi driver and find out where you were coming from,” said O’Leary.
“Well, we’ve already got a rough idea of where he could have come from,” said Bethancourt.
“We have?” demanded Gibbons.
“Perhaps I should have said we’ve got an outside limit,” said Bethancourt. “I mean,” he added as the other two men merely stared at him, “short of a dire emergency, there’s a limit to how much you would spend on a taxi, particularly if you just wanted to finish an errand faster.”
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