Anything For a Quiet Life (12 page)

Shortly after two o’clock on that same afternoon Dr Abrahams, who was the police doctor, had passed through the pier turnstile accompanied by his sons, Pete and Jim. Pete was dancing with excitement. He said, “Hurry, hurry. We don’t want to miss the train.” They dragged their father through the crowd like two small tugs towing a liner.

“Plenty of time,” said the doctor. “The amusement arcade’s only just opened.”

In spite of Pete and Jim’s urging, when they arrived at the ghost train there was already a queue. There were two small girls in the charge of an old lady and a teenaged girl who was trying to control three small boys and a large dog. The rest were unaccompanied children.

The doctor and his sons got the last carriage to themselves. There was a toot, the lights went out and the train plunged into the tunnel.

Dr Abrahams observed the effects with interest. He thought they had been rather skilfully arranged. There were three set-pieces, each one accompanied by appropriate noises-off. The first was the graveyard. It was hung with skeletons which jiggled their arms and legs in time with the tolling of a bell. The children in the carriage ahead of them screamed in joyful unison.

Pete and Jim were silent, but entranced.

Next they arrived at the infernal zoo where there were animals with electric eyes, gaping jaws and a background of banshee howling. The last cavern was, in some ways, the most effective. It was the tomb. In a ghastly green light, to an accompaniment of moaning and sobbing, human heads were displayed projecting through holes in the backcloth: distorted, moronic and leering.

Dr Abrahams was interested to observe that the screaming of the children in the carriages ahead had now a more genuine ring. As their own carriage swung into the third cavern he ceased thinking about this. There was something much more urgent on his mind.

As soon as the train stopped he took out some loose change, gave it to Pete and Jim and said, “I’ve got something to do. Get along to the slot machines. I’ll join you there.”

His sons looked surprised, but scampered off.

The track of the ghost train was circular and operated in both directions so that departures and arrivals could be handled from the same point. The proprietor was getting ready to let in passengers for the return trip when Dr Abrahams stopped him.

He showed him his police card and said, “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to shut up shop. I’ll telephone the police if you insist, but there’s no time to waste.”

The effect of this pronouncement on Cyril Aylett was unexpected. There was none of the bluster and protest that Abrahams had anticipated. Instead, he seemed to shrink. It was as though most of the air had been let out of him. He opened his mouth, but no words came out.

“Quick,” said Abrahams. “Turn out all the comic effects and switch on some proper lighting. You can do that, can’t you?”

Aylett nodded. He pulled out a notice which said ‘Closed for Temporary Repairs’, led the way inside the turnstile, disregarding the protests of the waiting children, and turned two switches. Then he led the way into the tomb. The glaring overhead light had stripped it of all its mystery. Three of the projecting heads could now be seen as rubber masks. The fourth, though it was painted with the round eyes, white cheeks and fat red lips of a clown, was human.

Dr Abrahams ripped down the backcloth. Aneurin Williams had been lashed to the framework of metal girders with his head projecting through the screen. Abrahams said, “Knife. Or scissors. Don’t waste time.”

Aylett scuttled away. The doctor worked on the gag which had been fastened into Williams’s mouth. He had it out by the time Aylett came back with a knife. The doctor glanced at it, but made no move to take it. He was looking at the gag, a fat wad of cloth, with strings attached. It had been chewed into rags and was wet with blood and saliva.

Aylett said, “Oughtn’t we to get him down?”

“Too late,” said Abrahams. “He’s dead. Been dead some little time. Telephone the police. I’ll wait here.”

Chief Superintendent Whaley was not easily moved, but for all his stolidity he was shaken. He said, “Your idea, doctor, is that Williams choked himself trying to chew that gag out.”

“When a proper autopsy has been made,” said Dr Abrahams cautiously, “I think it will show that the actual cause of death was suffocation. Equally, it might have been shock. He wasn’t a young man.”

“Painting and powdering his face – I suppose they meant it as a joke.”

Dr Abrahams said, “A bad joke, that went wrong.” He, too, was upset.

“Do you think Aylett was in it?”

Dr Abrahams thought about it. As a professional man he disliked jumping to conclusions. He said, “The way he reacted when I spoke to him demonstrated that he knew there was
something
wrong. When he realised that Williams was dead—well, that was quite a different matter. He nearly passed out.”

“The ghost train is his outfit. There was a dead man in it. He can’t sidestep that. We’ll pull him in for questioning.”

“I wish you could have pulled him in right away to stop him talking. Too late now.”

Whaley grunted agreement. Like all policemen, publicity was something he heartily disliked.

“One thing did occur to me,” said Abrahams. “You remember that business at the fish restaurant in Brighton. The people who did it took a photograph and sent it to the press. If the object of this operation was to make Williams look a fool, mightn’t they have done the same thing here?”

“You think it’s the same people?”

“I’d think so, yes.”

“I’ll have a word with Maxted about it. He told me he thought the muscle behind the Brighton episodes came from the racecourse. Well, he can attend to that. I’m going to shake down Aylett. He’s the man in the middle.”

Jonas was saying much the same thing to Sabrina. He enjoyed discussing problems with her because she almost always took the opposite view to his and argued it tenaciously. He called her his favourite No-woman.

He said, “Aylett is the key to this.”

“I don’t follow that,” said Sabrina. “Didn’t the boy at the hotel tell you someone had telephoned his father to arrange a meeting?”

“Correct.”

“The idea being that some sort of compromise could be arranged. They’d lay off Shackleton if Williams abandoned his campaign.”

“Right again.”

“Well, Aylett couldn’t do anything like that. He wasn’t in a position to make such an offer.”

“I didn’t suggest it was Aylett who telephoned. Fredericks must have done that. On the other hand, the last thing
he
was going to do was come anywhere near Shackleton. I’ve no doubt he spent the morning parading round Brighton establishing a series of beautiful alibis for himself. No, no. He’d simply have warned Aylett that Louie’s boys were coming and that he was to hide them in the ghost train.”

“How would they get into the arcade? It’s locked until two o’clock.”

“No problem. There’s a back entrance, on a lower level of the pier where the public aren’t allowed to go. If they dressed as workmen and kept their eyes open, they’d slip in easily enough.”

“And what was Aylett supposed to do when Williams turned up?”

“I imagine he’d be hanging round just inside the public entrance to the arcade, out of sight as far as possible. When he saw Williams he’d open it up for him and say, ‘Step inside. Mr Fredericks is waiting for you.’”

“Why should he agree to do anything of the sort?”

“I could think of half a dozen reasons. Maybe he owed money. Or Fredericks had scared him by threatening to put the hard boys on to him. He didn’t strike me as a very robust character.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” said Sabrina. “The plan wasn’t to kill Williams. Just to make him look a fool. As soon as he’d been let out he’d put a finger on Louie’s men and they’d be up for criminal assault at least.”

“Not necessarily. Remember they were waiting for him
inside
the ghost train. It’s pretty dark and they’d probably have put on some sort of mask. All Williams could have said was that he was grabbed from behind and tied up. When they’d finished fixing him up, they could slip out the way they’d come in.”

“Or easier still,” said Sabrina, “wait till the amusement arcade opened and mix with the crowd.” She seemed to be thinking it through, testing it for weaknesses. In the end she said, “You may be right. It could have been done that way. If no one saw Aylett letting Williams in and everyone keeps their heads, the police are going to have the devil’s own job proving it.”

On Monday morning Landless arrived with copies of the local and national papers. He said, “They’re making a meal of it. Lucky they were stopped from publishing the photograph.”

“Then there was one?”

“There certainly was. It was sent to the
South Coast Gazette and News
. A friend on the editorial side showed it to me. Naturally they made a copy before they handed it back to the police. Just in case they might ever have a chance of using it, though I don’t see how they could.”

“Unpleasant, was it?”

“Not just unpleasant. It was—oh, comic and gruesome at the same time and horribly scary.”

“Then thank goodness it wasn’t published.” Jonas had been studying the papers. “The stories are bad enough by themselves.”

Landless said, “Someone’s got to stop this. What are the police doing?”

“I’m afraid I’m not in their confidence. I imagine they’re grilling Aylett.”

“That won’t get them very far. The people they ought to be grilling are Louie and his boys. Everyone knows it was them who did it.”

“Knowing isn’t proving.”

“Why don’t they circulate photographs of these thugs, post them up all over the place, with a notice asking anyone who saw them on or near the pier on Saturday to contact the police?”

“Awkward if it turned out that it wasn’t them.”

“It’s easy to make objections,” said Landless, who was getting angry. “But I can tell you one thing. If the people who did this aren’t stamped on, good and hard, and quickly, World Wide are going to have a lot of new customers in Shackleton.”

Jonas’s mind sometimes moved in a disorderly and illogical way. It was activated by stray thoughts, coincidences and impulses. The mention of photographs had summoned up a mental picture of a squat man with a squint.

When Landless had taken himself off, grumbling, Jonas turned to the classified pages in the local directory under the heading ‘Photography’. Some of the entries he was able to dismiss. They were high-class outfits which specialised in studio portraits for weddings and such.

He did not visualise the stout man as belonging to any of them.

In the end he narrowed down the possibilities to three. Instapics, Happy Snaps and Souvenir-pics. He thought he would visit them that evening. By nine o’clock the pier would be shutting down and the photographers would have returned to their shops, bringing the fruits of their day’s work with them. Instapics was the nearest. When Jonas went in he saw that he’d made one good guess. The squat man, a Mr Bugden, was behind the counter.

He said, “’Ullo, Mr Pickett. Don’t tell me. The grandchildren have been after you for that snap you wooden let me take.”

“Not exactly,” said Jonas. “What I want is information. And since I shall be taking up your time, I’m quite prepared to pay you for it.”

Mr Bugden looked at him shrewdly. He said, “Your enquiries wooden relate, by any chance, to the poor old sod they found in the ghost train?”

Jonas nodded.

“Then you can have any information I’ve got for free and welcome.”

“I’m very grateful,” said Jonas. “What I was going to ask about was what you might call the tricks of your trade. To start with, I don’t suppose you take a photograph every time you click your camera.”

“Not always, no. It’s a matter of experience. Fr’instance, people are more likely to buy a snap at the end of their holidays than at the start.”

“How do you know when it’s the end?”

“When the kids have got brown legs and Dad’s nose is peeling.”

Jonas laughed.

Mr Bugden said, “Soften as not a happy family like that will buy the snap. If they don’t, all right, usually it’s just thrown away. A few we do hang on to, such as if you get a shot of someone who’s got some publicity value, like it might be the mayor or the top policeman. If there was some story about them, maybe you could make a sale to the local paper.”

“And you keep those ones?”

“If they’re good pictures, yes.”

“Could you show me last Saturday’s lot?”

“Sure.” He went to a cupboard, selected an envelope and spilled the contents on to the counter. There was a group photograph of the pierrots and pierrettes, who were opening that week at the concert hall, one of a smiling man holding a fish with his wife admiring it (“Won the angling competition”) and a solemn one of a clergyman (“Reverend Tobias Harmer from St Michael’s, always threatening to close down the pier”).

He saw that they all had the date stamped on the back.

“Tell you something else about them. It’s not only the date. The sun being out – I can tell you what time of day they were taken. That sort of detail comes in useful sometimes. See that shadow. That’s the top of the concert hall roof. Just like a sundial. The pier runs north and south, right? So at one o’clock the shadow’s dead central. By four o’clock it’s moved off to the east side.”

“I see what you mean,” said Jonas. He examined the snapshots in front of him. “That man with the fish. The shadow hasn’t reached the middle point. Say half past eleven, or twelve?”

“Just about. And the rector was mid-afternoon, I remember. About three o’clock.”

“Then the sun was shining all day on Saturday?”

“Every blessed moment. Does it help?”

“It shortens the odds, very slightly,” said Jonas. “But it’s still a long shot. Could you give your opposite numbers in Happy Snaps and Souvenir-pics a ring and tell them to expect me?”

“Will do. Happy Snaps will be Major Piper. And don’t forget to call him Major. He likes it. Souvenir-pics is a Mrs French. They’ll both be glad to help when I tell them what you’re up to.” As Jonas was leaving he added, “I wooden say old Williams was a popular man, but we don’t like characters from Brighton throwing their weight around in Shackleton.”