The Worm of Death Page 16

  The seaman, who had now started to sing, wove his way along the dark, narrow alley, bouncing from wall to wall like a ball on a pin-table. He struck the wall, a few yards short of the two silent figures, cannoned off it, lurched past them with a guttural curse, then resumed his singing. Arriving on Ballast Quay, the man’s drunken progress took him on a swerving arc to the left, where he tripped over a low-slung chain that separated roadway from pavement, and fell flat on his face. The shock must have fuddled his wits still further: for, on getting to his feet again, he walked straight to the low parapet of the river-wall, tripped over that, and fell in.

  Fortunately for him, it was not high tide. Sobered by the cold water, he floundered his way to the steps. His shouts and oaths, after the splash of his fall, brought heads out of windows, and presently one or two men ran out of houses and helped the seaman up the steps.

  While this farce was being enacted, the murderer slid open a door in the corrugated-iron wall, deposited the victim—now at last dead—amongst the scrap, and walked decorously away in the direction from which the seaman had come.

  CHAPTER XII

  A Silk Stocking

  STANDING JUST INSIDE the breaker’s yard, Nigel Strangeways cast his eye over the dismal scene. A thin, bitter rain was falling—raindrops black with smut from the power station chimneys. Mounds and pyramids of scrap-iron towered above him, the rusting detritus of a civilisation: boilers, bicycles, oxygen cylinders, coils of barbed wire, oil drums, perambulators, automobile engines, cisterns, cog-wheels, pipes, pots and kettles, machinery—all tossed and jumbled together as if by a whirlwind. The oxy-acetylene burners, with which the larger objects in this tangle were broken up, stayed silent to-day: the first arrivals at the yard had found a body there, and soon the police were in occupation, photographing, measuring, poking about for clues in the jungle of metal upon which Nigel’s eyes now dully rested. At last he forced them to look down at the last piece of scrap to have been deposited here. It was covered with tarpaulin. Chief Inspector Wright, his sergeant and the yard foreman stood beside it. Wright, Nigel noticed, was gesturing forcibly: he seemed to have a new lease of life: last night he had complained of the dearth of material facts: well, now he’d got one—and good luck to him.

  Nigel walked over and pulled back the tarpaulin. His eye travelled up from the slender feet, one of them shoeless, along the sodden frieze coat, to the neck. A silk stocking was round it, knotted presumably at the back. He had expected Sharon’s face to be an atrocious sight, and it was. Her eyes stared back into his, with the merciless indifference of the dead. Sharon had not been any great credit to society; smart clothes, smarty talk, selfishness, an appetite for the basic thrills: but this was no comfort to Nigel, who feared he had been indirectly responsible for her death. He pulled back the tarpaulin over the staring eyes and the pretty, snarling teeth. It was 8.45. Half an hour ago, Wright’s telephone call had dragged him out of bed.

  Wright gave Nigel a look both sympathetic and bracing—“Yes, I understand,” it said, “but this is no time for brooding.” He drew his friend aside and leant against a rusting water-tank, from which he surveyed his men at work while he talked rapidly to Nigel.

  “They found her at eight o’clock. Been dead seven to ten hours, the quack says. Autopsy’ll tell us nearer. Strangled—you saw that: probably in the alleyway outside: signs of a scuffle and of her being dragged in here: one shoe found just inside the yard. Face dirty and bruised: must have been thrown face downwards and strangled from behind. Not nice at all. No signs of sexual assault or robbery—left her handbag and purse at home. Sergeant Reed has broken it to her husband. Harold’s in a bad way—Dr. James is with him just now and will take him to Crooms Hill. Harold says he dined out with a business associate, returning home about midnight: didn’t want to disturb his wife—they sleep in separate rooms—so went straight to bed. Reed and Dr. James say they found no scratches or bruises on him. Yes, Simpson?”

  A plain-clothes man had hurried up to report. Several people living in the houses on Ballast Quay had just told him about the episode of the drunken sailor: it was the only disturbance during the night so far reported. Simpson pointed in the direction where the Dutch ship lay.

  “Well, stop her, man,” exclaimed Wright. “What are you wasting time here for?”

  “It’s all under control, sir. Lewis has gone aboard. He’ll hold the ship.”

  Wright nodded at the man, smiling faintly. “Some of these chaps can actually think for themselves,” he said to Nigel. “Would you believe it? All right, I’ll interview him straight away.”

  After giving the sergeant some instructions, Wright untied the silk stocking from Sharon’s neck and handed it to him. As they walked along to Lovell’s Wharf, he remarked:

  “Reed may find that one stocking of a pair is missing—amongst the dead woman’s or Miss Loudron’s. But if the murderer has any sense, he’ll have destroyed the other one.”

  In a couple of minutes they were aboard the Dutch motor vessel. It was one of the ships largely manned by members of single families, who are enabled to purchase them by government grants, paid back in instalments, and who use them as floating homes. The master received them in his cabin. It was spruce and shining, meticulously tidy, a genuine Dutch interior, with potted plants on a table and bright curtains over the windows: it smelt of coffee, cigars and furniture polish. The master’s buxom wife was placidly knitting, while two stolid children finished their enormous breakfast. The master himself could only speak a few words of English; but a younger brother, the mate, was reasonably fluent. After the usual introductions and civilities, the master’s wife removed her children, and Jan, the drunken seaman of last night—a nephew of hers—was summoned. He turned out to be a strapping, gawky young man, suffering from a hangover but not, as far as Wright could judge, a bad conscience as well.

  The mate interpreting, Jan gave what account he could of the previous night. He remembered the last house he had visited, and this could be checked; but he had only vague recollections of his movements thereafter. Wright had to phrase his questions tactfully, for there was a strong atmosphere of family solidarity in the cabin. Jan had certainly met no women on his way back to the ship: never, he soberly averred, did he mix women and drink: one or the other, yes, but not both at the same time. He remembered falling flat on his face over a chain, which accounted for the bruise on his forehead, and then falling into the Thames. There were abrasions on the palms of his hands, caused by the first fall, but no scratches on the backs of them or on his wrists, such as a woman would have made in fighting to tear loose the hands tightening a knot at the back of her neck.

  And as he came along the narrow alley through the scrapyard, just before he fell over the chain, had he seen or heard anything unusual?

  No.

  “Anything at all?” put in Nigel, knowing the literal-mindedness of the Dutch.

  “There was a couple. In the alley. Lovers. It was very dark. I nearly ran into them,” said Jan through the interpreter.

  Asked if he could describe them, Jan blushed and stammered out a few phrases.

  “He says he did not like to look close. He is not a—what is your phrase?”

  “Not a peeping Tom?” Nigel offered.

  “Yes. Just so.”

  “Tell him it may be most important to remember anything—any impression he got about this couple,” said Wright urgently.

  The reply came. “My nephew says the man’s back was towards him. He was about middle height. He seemed to be holding the woman up. My nephew thought she was perhaps drunk.”

  “Tell him we’re most grateful for——”

  “Just a minute,” Nigel interjected. “Is he certain that the person holding up this woman against the wall was a man?”

  The question evidently shocked Jan. He blushed up to the roots of his blond hair.

  “He says, but it must have been a man. They were in the embrace of lovers.”

  “But it was dark. He couldn�
��t swear on his oath that it was not a woman dressed as a man.”

  Jan replied that he could not absolutely swear to it, but he was certain in his own mind.

  With the master’s permission, Wright now got Jan to remove his trousers. A woman being strangled from behind would kick backwards. There was an abrasion on one knee and a bruise beside the other. But, when Wright got Jan to fetch the trousers he had been wearing the previous night, a tear and some dirt on them corresponded exactly with the marks on his legs: Sharon’s heel-less shoes could not have made the tear.

  “Elimination,” remarked Wright as they went ashore, “is the thief of time.”

  “You’re satisfied about Jan?”

  “Oh yes. But I’ve left Reed to go through the women’s stockings on board. Never know what the A.C. won’t ask you if you’ve left undone.”

  “And now what?”

  “Question the Loudrons. Find out where they all were last night.”

  “You think this must be linked up with Dr. Piers’s death?”

  “I’ll take a bet on it. No robbery. No sexual interference.”

  They walked on in silence for half a minute.

  “But why?” asked Nigel. “To stop her mouth? I was sure she’d finally told me all she knew about the night he died. And the Loudrons knew—or at least must have assumed—that she’d done so. Why silence her after she’d told all?”

  “Two possible reasons,” Wright briskly replied. “She didn’t tell you all: she may have had some piece of knowledge whose significance she didn’t realise. Or——”

  “Don’t say it. That’s what’s on my mind. Or she may have been killed because she’d told me too much. Killed out of sheer spite.”

  “Ye-es. But that doesn’t quite fit in with the murderer’s actions up to date—the cold-blooded, planned murder of Dr. Piers, and then the sitting tight and letting us make the running.”

  They were at the entrance of the corrugated-iron passage. A police car waited in Lassell Street, on their left. When they had got in, Nigel said:

  “Why was it so dark in the alley last night. Doesn’t it have a street lamp? Or was it the effect of liquor on Jan’s eyes?”

  “There’s one of those concrete lamp-standards at either end of the alley. Both the globes are smashed. Presumably by X. The lights were on all right when the Cutty Sark closed.”

  “That proves it was a premeditated crime. I wonder how X got her out of the house into the alley?”

  “Assignation by telephone? Anyway, it must have been somebody she knew well—and trusted.”

  When the car got to 6 Crooms Hill, Nigel surprised his friend by saying he would go home: he wanted his breakfast, and he needed to think—a process he refused to initiate on an empty stomach.

  “You can tell me later all about the Loudrons’ alibis and which of them you have arrested,” said Nigel. “I leave the interviewing to you with perfect confidence.”

  “Very kind of you to say so, I’m sure,” replied Wright, equally sardonic.

  Half an hour later, Nigel pushed aside his empty plate and took a fourth cup of coffee. Clare, who had been reading the paper while he ate in gloomy silence, looked up at him.

  “You feel bad about this.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you couldn’t have prevented it. Or could you?” Clare added.

  “I wish I knew.”

  “You liked Sharon?”

  “In a way. She made several attempts to get me into bed with her, and it’s difficult to dislike an attractive woman, I find, who does that.”

  “Did she succeed?” Clare equably inquired.

  “As it happens, no.”

  “You didn’t like her enough for that?”

  “I suppose not. Anyway, she would keep asking me at such inconvenient times.”

  Clare went off into one of her rare gales of laughter. When it had subsided, Nigel said, “I’m obsessed with the silk stocking motif. Poor Sharon got hers wetted that night by the waste-pipe of Dr. Piers’s bathroom: then she was strangled with one. Is it just a coincidence?”

  “Justice sometimes works through coincidences, they say. Poetic justice.”

  Nigel gazed dimly at her. Then gradually his face lit up. “Poetic justice? I wonder. I think you’ve hit something,” he muttered. “Yes, it could make sense. Now I must go upstairs and think.”

  He thought all that morning and by lunch time a pattern had formed in his mind: an almost complete pattern, but there was one piece missing—a key piece, it might well be, without which the pattern must remain no more than a plausible construction of the mind. Someone had said something which would give him this piece and lock the whole business together: he had a dim idea that the secret he sought lay in the intonation rather than in the actual words.

  Putting on his mackintosh, Nigel went out into the rain. A lorry ground up the hill: written on its side was the legend PROCESSORS OF BUTCHERS’ waste. He crossed into the park, and began walking rapidly, past Wolfe’s house, across the football ground, through the flower garden with its brooding cedars, and down the path running parallel with Maze Hill. He walked twice round the periphery of the park, uphill and downhill, reviewing in his mind the conversations he had had with each person concerned in the case, while the cold rain beat down on him.

  On his third circuit he varied the route, walking to the pond and pausing between the water and the magnolia and camellia trees to gaze at the ducks. “No, it’s not here,” he heard himself glumly muttering to a mallard, as if it had failed him. He moved on, but ten paces farther stopped dead. A slow burn. He had got it after all, though the formula had not been quite word-perfect.

  Nigel strode home, took off his clothes, and went to sleep, body and mind exhausted.

  At nine o’clock Wright turned up. He tossed a bulky sheaf of typescript at Nigel, who ran his eye rapidly over the pages while Clare cooked a ham omelette with chipped potatoes and the inspector ate it. Nigel had something of the late T. E. Lawrence’s capacity for getting the meat out of a book at phenomenal speed. The verbatim interviews with the suspects, which Wright had given him, ran to a large number of typescript sheets; but he had mastered the gist of them by the time the inspector finished his second cup of strong coffee.

  “Well, how does it strike you?” the latter asked.

  “Peculiar about these alibis. Four out of five very much the same as for the night of Dr. Piers’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “So Walter Barn did take my advice.”

  According to the evidence they had given Wright, Walt had cycled down to 6 Crooms Hill after supper, and been with Rebecca in her room till shortly after eleven. This time, they did not play gramophone records all the evening: they had a heart-to-heart talk, which apparently brought them to a satisfactory conclusion about their future. James Loudron had met Walt in the hall, when he arrived, and had heard Rebecca saying goodbye to him at the front door when he left: but there was no corroborating evidence that Walt and Rebecca had remained in her room over this period of two and a half hours.

  “However,” said Wright as they discussed it, “the crucial time is after 10.30, when the Cutty Sark closed: probably a bit later: we’ve got a witness along there who heard a smashing of glass—thought it was local hooligans—around 11.15.”

  “X putting out the street lamps at either end of the alleyway? Incidentally, how did he do this? Swarm up the concrete standards with a hammer?”

  “No. The padlock of the door into the breaker’s yard was forced during the night. I take it X did this first, then pinched a long, metal scaffolding-pole—there are dozens lying about in the yard—to reach up with and smash the globes.”

  “Walt Barn would have had about ten minutes to get there and do this, after leaving Crooms Hill. Not enough, surely?”

  “Not on foot, perhaps. But he had a bicycle, remember.”

  “So has Rebecca.”

  “Oh Nigel, surely you can’t suspect her?” said Clare. “Not this time.
”

  “Why not?”

  “If she or Walt killed Sharon, and did it after 11.15, surely they’d have given each other an alibi for a longer period than they have.”

  “That’s a good point, of course,” said Wright. “But the trouble is, we’ve no outside evidence yet that Miss Loudron went straight to bed, as she claims, after Barn left: or that Barn cycled straight home—no one at his own house heard him come in.”

  “What about Graham Loudron?” Clare asked.

  Graham’s story was that, after dining with James and Rebecca, he had gone up to his room, read a book, listened to the radio and turned in at eleven.

  “Short and simple,” Nigel commented. “Like last time. Except that Sharon was not keeping him company.”

  Clare shivered and looked distressed. She had never quite got used to Nigel’s occasional brutality of statement, even though she knew it to be a sign of anger, not of insensibility.

  “You questioned him about the book and the radio programme?” asked Nigel.

  “Of course. He had no difficulty with that. Why should he? The murderer didn’t have to start work till after eleven. If Graham is our man, we’ll turn up sooner or later somebody who saw him leave the house, front door or back, or going along towards the scene of the crime. But the telephone call seems to clear him.”

  “Will someone please enlighten me?” said Clare.

  “Not a confinement this time. Dr. James says he received an emergency call at 11.10, just as he was about to go up to bed. Caller—muffled voice and all, James did not recognise it—said his mother had had a fit and their own doctor was out. Gave an address in East Greenwich. Said the street was between the Woolwich Road and the river. Rang off. James got out his car and in five minutes had reached the district indicated. Swanned around looking for this street. Found it. But there was no house of the number given him by the caller. Walked up and down the length of the street to make sure. Assumed it was a hoax. Turned round and drove home. Got back at 11.40. So, if what our Dutch friend saw just after 11.30 was the murderer and his victim, Dr. James was at least near the scene of the crime at the crucial period. He could have smashed the lamps at 11.15 on his way to a mythical call, shown himself walking up and down the street in question, returned to the alleyway——”