A Coat of Varnish (14 page)

At eight-thirty the big room was half-full of officers, men and women. Briers had become practised in these briefings: he was cheerful, encouraging, tart. They were short-staffed for the present, he said, they would be working till they dropped. That didn’t matter. The first days were important, they all knew, in this kind of case. It wasn’t a good idea to give anyone they were after time to think. He’d have enough time to think when he was inside. For the moment, they had to set to work on all possible lines. There were plenty of villains in the Victoria region. And all over the district. And you couldn’t rule out anybody, and ‘anybody’ is the operative word, yet awhile. Chief Inspector Bale would allocate squads to their stamping-grounds. Things might break tomorrow. They might be at it for weeks. Good luck.

As the detectives left, Bale, apart from Briers the senior policeman present, held back half a dozen. Briers hadn’t given much indication of what he already knew, none of what he might be thinking. These half-dozen were experienced in police enquiries. They were detailed for calls on Lady Ashbrook’s acquaintances, such as had been traced. It meant calls on smart houses in Belgravia, Chelsea, places where rich people live. ‘You’ll have to tread a bit gently,’ Briers said. ‘Don’t press too much, just now. We don’t want the Commissioner to get too many screams over the phone.’

Then Briers nodded to Bale, and the two of them, followed by Shingler and Flamson, moved through the police station to another room, quite small, their private room, containing just a polished table and a few hard chairs. This room was at the back of the station, and the single window looked over the little gardens behind the Gerald Road houses, patches of grass parched in the sun. Shingler put his head out of the door and, as automatically as in America in any office at any hour of the day, called for coffee.

Those three were Briers’ innermost group. They didn’t appear socially homogeneous, no more so than any three middle-ranking members in any occupation. Leonard Bale, who was acting as Briers’ number two, was in charge of the enquiry squads. He was grey-haired, and had a fine ascetic, long-nosed face, looking vaguely ecclesiastical, like an unpolitical and pastoral cardinal. He had champagne-bottle shoulders, such as often went with physical strength. As a policeman on the beat, he had been decorated for acts of courage. Some years before, he and Briers had been on the same official level, detective inspectors together. He had been passed over, given the one promotion to Chief Inspector, and now couldn’t expect more. Briers, six years his junior, had gone right past him in the hierarchy. He appeared to bear no rancour. He behaved as though it were a pleasure to be number two.

Briers, sitting at the table and ringing for an ashtray, asked: ‘You’ve all read the memos, I suppose? What’s the state of the game?’

‘Well, sir.’ It was Bale who answered. He made a point in public of keeping the etiquette, though he was the only one who in private used Briers’ Christian name. ‘The machine is working after a fashion. We shall want more bodies, that goes without saying.’

‘Of course. I’ll get the screws on them upstairs. They can’t let us down on this one. But I want to know what you’re all thinking. What do we know so far?’

Flamson said: ‘Not all that much, guv. Not all that bloody much.’

Flamson was becoming known as the Office Manager, but he was more than that. He was a fleshy man in his thirties, high-coloured, with jet-black hair, one of the dark English, from the heart of the Midlands, accent incorrigible. Both Briers and Bale had a Northern undertone, by now suppressed. None of them came from the working class, but from the social no-man’s-land just above.

‘No, we know one thing for sure, chief,’ Shingler said. ‘Whoever we’re looking for, it isn’t a thug. It isn’t just a layabout.’

‘That stands out a mile,’ Briers said, but not as a snub. Shingler was pushing, intrusive, but he was bright and had been Briers’ particular protégé. He was young for his present rank. That could have happened on merit, but Briers had eased his way. Without being aware of it, Briers had imitated the manner in which Humphrey Leigh had once advised him.

‘Our man,’ said Shingler, ‘knew what he was doing. Let’s take it that he came in via the mews, over the grass, through the garden door. No marks anywhere.’ Shingler, the chief Scenes of Crime officer, had issued a memorandum on all this on the previous night. ‘The boys are looking for traces all over the place. They haven’t found a tiddler yet. The man took one piece of glass out of the garden door. With the old brown-paper trick. Not a thug’s job. No prints anywhere. Not a print in the whole blasted great establishment.’

‘You mean it was a professional?’ Briers was leaning back.

Flamson said: ‘Trying to seem like a thug – could be, could be.’

‘It might have been a professional,’ Briers said absently. ‘Of course, it might have been.’

‘It’s one line anyway,’ Shingler said. ‘I don’t say it’s the only one. We haven’t enough to concentrate on, have we, chief?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But our man isn’t a thug,’ said Shingler, not leaving well alone.

‘Why does everyone take it for granted that we’re looking for a man?’ Bale asked with dignity. ‘It might have been a woman.’

The juniors regarded him with something like astonishment. The ‘old duck’, which was his behind-the-scenes designation, was not expected to make original suggestions. He was liked but not respected, perhaps because he didn’t evoke a particle of fear. They undervalued him. Now they were cheerfully, boisterously laughing.

‘Not impossible.’ Briers stopped the jollity with a hard voice. In spite of his unpretentiousness, his cordiality, Briers did evoke fear, sometimes more than was desirable. ‘Not impossible at all. Nothing rules a woman out. Nothing in the p-m.’

Shingler was anxious to please, but sometimes impatience supervened. Now, brashly, he spoke as though women hadn’t been mentioned. ‘If he is a professional,’ Shingler was saying, ‘he didn’t get much out of it. As I said in the memo, some odds and ends, and about three hundred quid in notes. According to the shops round here, she paid her bills in notes. Crackers.’

Briers said: ‘That ought to come in useful for us.’

Bale added: ‘Yes, we ought to be able to track those notes down, sir. You saw Norman’s memo: she kept the numbers in her little book. We’ve sent them round to all the lads.’

‘Fine,’ Briers said. In an aside, casual and throwaway, he went on: ‘If he was a professional, he wasn’t a very good one.’

‘Agreed,’ Bale joined in.

‘He did some of it like a very good professional. He didn’t leave anything much for us. But, as far as business went, he was very bad. Most professionals would make sure there was something in the house worth taking, wouldn’t they? And they wouldn’t go so crazy, breaking the place up, pretending to be thugs.’

‘What are you getting at, guv? It could be someone pretending to be a burglar, is that what you mean?’

‘I’m not going so far as that.’ Briers was impassive. ‘It’s more likely that it was a stupid professional who lost his head. It’s a great mistake – God knows we’ve all made it – to let yourself get blinkered right at the beginning. Chasing an idea has sunk a lot of detectives before now.’

‘But anyway, guv–’ Flamson began.

‘Anyway what?’ Briers was at his briskest.

‘If I get you right, guv, you’re saying it mightn’t be a burglar out for what he could pick up. You’re saying there’s a chance it wasn’t, and, if so, it wasn’t because she caught someone in the act that she got done in; there would have to have been some other cause. That would make it real murder, for my money. Deliberate, by the look of it.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not,’ Briers said.

Flamson was sweating, and mopped his forehead. He wasn’t easily put off, and was cherishing a small triumph of his own. ‘Well, then, we ought to be looking at the background. Why should anyone finish the old girl? Might be money. Who would get her money if she was polished off? I was thinking about that yesterday afternoon.’

‘It isn’t very brilliant. We should all have got there as soon as we were organised. More or less routine.’ Shingler spoke with a sharp smile, not pleased. He realised that Flamson had been the first to catch Briers’ thinking, or as much as he had given any hint.

‘I got there yesterday afternoon.’ Flamson was sweating more, looking replete, like a man after a self-indulgent feast. ‘I had a word with Len Bale, didn’t I?’

Bale gave a gentle nod.

‘We ought to find out about her will. Routine if you like, Norman. We’re coppers, you know. Old Len called her solicitors – letters from them in her papers, a bit more routine, that was. They saw the point, Len says. They’ll get the will read inside a week.’

Briers gave an approving cry: ‘Well done, George.’ Then agreeably to Bale: ‘Well done, Len.’ Then he said: ‘If it turns out there is anything in this line, it won’t be so nice and easy, you know. I don’t specially fancy having to deal with the old lady’s kind of people. I haven’t had much to do with them, but they’re good at closing ranks. You get me – we shouldn’t be playing on our home ground.’

That Tuesday morning, just at the time when Briers and the other detectives were conferring, Humphrey was in his sitting-room reading the day’s
Times
. He had already picked out the reference to the murder. That didn’t require excessive vigilance. There was a headline on the front page. Other papers had had more dashing headlines, he had no doubt. In newspaper terms there was not much competition. The financial gloom; the weather, still no indication of change, people talking – difficult to believe in England – of fields burning up and the prospect of drought; the Belgravia murder. The murder had most appeal.

The Belgravia murder: the phrase caught on, outside London, even outside England, with a good many who had no idea where and what sort of place Belgravia could be. The murder looked like remaining news for some time to come, as Briers and his superiors at Scotland Yard had foreseen.

The official announcement told nothing, except that the police were treating Lady Ashbrook’s death as a case of murder, and that Detective Chief Superintendent Briers was in charge of the investigation. When Humphrey read that, he felt pleasure, quite unqualified. Briers couldn’t help but read the statements of the day before and Humphrey, knowing how rapidly he worked, expected to be called for within hours. Humphrey looked forward to it. He had both affection and respect for Briers, perhaps the special affection that one felt for a successful protégé. Humphrey hadn’t had success himself, but he enjoyed it in others. There was a touch of vanity, too, in the self-congratulation at having backed a winner.

The
Times
obituary was formal and factual, not long, and not given the premier place. Family, marriages, son the present Marquess. Prominent in London society between the two wars. Public work. President of Conservative Women’s Association (1952–63), Anglo-Norwegian Society, Cancer Research Trust.

It wasn’t much of an obituary. Possibly some friend would be upset enough to add something a trifle less bleak, which, Humphrey thought, wouldn’t be difficult to do.

In the middle of the morning, the telephone bell rang. He heard his own name being asked for, in a light modulated voice. Then: ‘Loseby here. Look, I need a bit of help. Can we talk?’

‘What about?’ Humphrey was not forthcoming.

‘I’m in a bit of a fix. You’re a wise man, aren’t you?’

‘What is all this?’

‘Can we talk? It would be a help–’ Tone persuasive.

‘I suppose so, if you want.’ Humphrey, with some sense of what might be coming, was recalled to old official caution. ‘Not on the telephone, though. And you’d better not come here. They’re probably trying to trace you.’

They met in a café, chosen by Loseby, fading, smelly, but well occupied, towards the far end of the King’s Road. Loseby might be anxious, but he still looked blooming, the golden young man, and he was still ready to order a plate of spaghetti bolognese.

‘They told me at HQ,’ he said equably enough. ‘You were asking for me on Monday.’

‘Not unnaturally,’ Humphrey replied.

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘So I discovered.’

‘I was in London, actually.’ Loseby shone with his innocent, great-eyed, shameless smile. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s not what I think. You’ll have to explain yourself to the police, you must realise that. What were you doing?’

Loseby was still smiling, quite easy.

‘Oh, come, you know what I’m like.’

‘Do I?’

Loseby wasn’t put off. ‘I thought I needed a bit of relaxation. In the best possible way. So I got a few days’ leave. Grandmother’s health was a pretty good excuse. After all, I used it before, didn’t I?’

‘And you didn’t come near her?’

‘Unfortunately not. I rang her up on Saturday afternoon. She said she was fine.’

‘Where were you?’

Loseby answered: ‘Round about the place. Not so very far away.’

‘Where?’

Loseby suddenly spoke in a correct formal tone. ‘I’d rather not say.’ Then the shameless smile again. ‘I holed up somewhere comfortable. Very suitable for relaxation.’

‘With a woman?’

‘You’ve said it, I haven’t.’

Loseby shovelled away at his spaghetti. Humphrey in his time had conducted a good many interrogations. He stayed silent. The young man would have to speak.

In an unperturbed fashion, the young man did speak.

‘I told you, I’m in rather a fix. You see why. Now what do I do?’

Humphrey took his time, and then asked: ‘Are you telling me the truth?’

‘Why ever shouldn’t I?’

‘There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t. I’m not going any farther unless you tell me that you are.’

Loseby gave his sweetest smile. ‘Do you want me to swear on the Bible?’

‘Not specially.’ Humphrey responded with a smile not so sweet. ‘You’d be ready to do that if you were lying in your teeth, wouldn’t you?’

Loseby laughed out loud. ‘All right. No, I am telling the truth. I haven’t said where I was exactly, or who I was with. It might surprise you. I want to keep it to myself – unless it’s necessary, of course. After all, you might give me the credit for behaving like an English gentleman.’