Bloodhounds (11 page)

"No.
The Three Coffins.
I haven't read it yet."

"You'll be lucky to get the time, sir," Baker was bold enough to comment.

"I will, if you lot get your fingers out. The first thing is to find out about what happened last night at the Bloodhounds. Apart from Motion and the victim, there were five others in attendance: four women and one man. I'll give you the names presently. I want them interviewed this morning before the news of the murder breaks. If you're assigned to one of them, play it cautiously. You're on the case of the Penny Black as far as they're concerned. They know they witnessed something bloody unusual. They'll be expecting you, so get them to talk about the moment when Motion opened his book and found the stamp. Try and get a picture of what else happened at the meeting—whether anything was said by the victim or anyone else that could have provoked violence later. See if Sid Towers confided in anyone before he drove to the boatyard. I'm damned sure this murder has its origin in the Bloodhounds, so I want to know what drives these people, their hang-ups, their ambitions, the tensions between them, what they eat for breakfast, and what keeps them awake at night." He turned to Wigfull. "John, have I left anything out?"

Wigfull cleared his throat. "I don't want anyone forgetting that we're also investigating the stamp theft," he said huffily. "This is more than just a pretext for getting the facts about the murder. It's a serious crime that may or may not be connected with what happened to Towers. Be alert. Insist that you get a full account of the events leading up to the discovery of the Penny Black cover, and what happened after."

"Got that? The Penny Black is Mr. Wigfull's baby, and the murder is mine. And if one of you messes up, you answer to me," said Diamond. "Now Inspector Hargreaves will read out the teams."

He was content to let others carry out the interviews. An act of mercy to the witnesses, given the mood he was in. Instead, he decided to walk the short distance across Churchill Bridge and up the Lower Bristol Road as far as Oak Street to look at Sid Towers s flat. He asked Julie to come with him. On the way he thanked her for her contribution to the briefing. "I was too heavy, even by my standards," he admitted. "You got the thing back to what it should be. I don't know what came over me. Lack of sleep, I suppose."

"You're not at your best conducting meetings," she was bold enough to tell him.

"Was I an ogre, Julie?"

"Can I be frank?"

"You generally are."

"You were appalling."

"That bad?"

"The way you jumped on that new man. He was only trying to answer one of your questions. He didn't know that the form is to stay quiet until you've had your say."

"He will in future, won't he?"

"And I know there's a history between you and John Wigfull, but you didn't have to hammer him in front of his team. They know what he's like without you pointing it out."

"I'm not running the Women's Institute."

"A pity. They'd sort you out in no time."

He laughed. "You're probably right, Julie. My wife was a Brown Owl, and she keeps me in order."

She said, "Since I've gone out on a limb already, I might as well say it. You'd get more input from the team if you weren't so domineering. They don't like to speak out."

"Are they scared of me?" he asked, genuinely surprised.

"I don't think you have any idea how stroppy you sound."

He stared over the bridge along the gray ribbon of water. "If you want the truth, Julie, none of them is as scared as I am. Remember, I've been off for a couple of years. I don't know everybody anymore. I call a meeting, and it's a minefield. I can give instructions. I can interview a suspect. Put me in front of a crowd of faces wanting to see how I function as top dog, and I won't say I panic, but my insides don't like it."

"Well, it didn't show this morning."

The traffic halted conversation as they stepped toward the mills and warehouses, long since converted into the engineering and construction businesses that line this stretch of the Lower Bristol Road. Diamond knew the area from the days when he lived on Wellsway. On a fine day, or when his car was giving trouble, he would come this way into the city, down the steps from Wells Road and under the railway viaduct, passing the arches where the winos and derelicts spent the night. It amused him to think that some of these same arches once housed a police station. There was also once a mortuary for the storage of corpses dragged from the Avon.

Most of the Lower Bristol Road was an eyesore that some city planner would want to flatten before long, but there was still a dignity to the mills with their wooden hoist-covers projecting above the street, just clear of the container lorries that rumbled past. This was Bath's oldest surviving industrial landscape, and it was pleasing that the buildings were in use, even if the quays behind them no longer functioned.

To their right was the Bayer Building, a tall red-brick structure more ornate than the others, with arched windows and Bath stone trimmings. Seeing an opportunity to strike a lighter mood, Diamond said, "Bet you can't tell me what this was built for."

Julie gave it a look. "Something to do with engineering?"

"In a sense, yes."

"Plumbing?"

"Stays."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Corsets. Charles Bayer was the corset king. Our great-grandmothers had a lot to thank him for."

"Questionable," said Julie. "Some of them suffered agonies."

"Ah, but he also invented a little item that no woman should be without."

"What's that?"

"The safety pin."

Directly opposite the Bayer Building was the street where Sid Towers, had lived until so recently. Presumably it had once housed the corset workers. Directly below the viaduct—it actually ran under one of the arches—and so close to the main artery to Bristol, Oak Street was not a place many would have chosen to reside in, except from necessity.

The houses were on one side only; a scrap merchant had the other side, with his business concentrated in the arches. The sound of metal-cutting shrilled above the noise of jugger-nauts from the end of the street. Several houses appeared to be empty. One or two presented a trim front, but the majority had surrendered. They were two-story terraced dwellings in local stone stained black at the top by coal dust. Remarkably, considering how small they were, several had been converted into flats.

They had to go under the arch to find Sid's flat, past some children throwing sticks for a dog that looked as if it should have been muzzled.

"This is the number I was given," Diamond said. There was nothing so helpful as a set of marked bell pushes.

"You did bring the key?" Julie queried.

He produced it from his pocket and opened the front door. "He lived upstairs, I gather."

The house they had let themselves into smelled of cat, and the probable offender bolted out of sight behind some rolls of lino at the far end of the hall. The stairs were bare and speckled with pink paint. But when they opened the door at the top, Towers's home turned out to be a barrack room ready for inspection. A narrow passage carpeted in red had four doors leading off. The first, the bedroom, was in immaculate order, the clothes put away, the duvet squared at each corner. The furniture may have been cheap and functional, but everything was dusted.

"The sort of place that depresses me the minute I enter it," grumbled Diamond. "No photographs, no pictures on the wall. Where's the evidence of the man who lived here? It could be a bloody hotel." He opened a wardrobe door and looked at the jackets hanging there and the shirts folded and stacked as if in a shop.

Julie said, "Almost as if he knew he was about to die."

"Not even a copy of yesterday's paper by the bed."

"If he buys one, you can bet it was tidied away before he left the house," said Julie.

"I get a sense of a stunted life when I see a place like this."

"An organized life doesn't have to be stunted," Julie commented. "He put things away, that's all."

"No use to us."

They looked into the kitchen across the passage and still found nothing out of place. The contents of the fridge were meager, but neatly positioned. There was a microwave oven and an electric hob, each spotless.

"Is this obsessive, would you say?" Diamond asked.

The living room was slightly more promising. It had one wall lined to the ceiling with white bookshelves, the books mostly without wrappers, though some had transparent covers and evidently came from libraries. There was a small television set and an armchair facing it. A Victorian writing desk interested Diamond. He opened the front and was gratified to find various things stacked in the pigeonholes: a checkbook, some payslips, electricity invoices, an address book, a writing pad and envelopes, and some second-class postage stamps.

"He liked his John Dickson Carr," said Julie, standing in front of the books. "He's got at least forty here. The other writer he collected has a similar name in a way—Carter Dickson. I wonder if there's a connection."

"Does it matter?" said Diamond, leafing through the address book. It was full of blank pages. The man seemed to have no friends or family worth listing.

Julie removed a Carter Dickson from the shelf.
"The
Reader Is Warned.
Good title." She opened it. "Written in 1939—before the war. So were the Dickson Carrs, weren't they? When was
The Hollow Man
published?"

"Years ago. In the thirties."

"Are these books valuable, do you think? Was he a collector?"

"What are you thinking—that some valuable first edition provided the motive? Hey, that's an idea."

Julie picked a couple more books at random and opened them. "One of these says 'Withdrawn from stock. Warminster Public Library.' The other was bought for seventy-five pence. I don't think a serious collector would give them shelf room. He bought these to read."

"At least we know something about the man," said Diamond.

"I was right," said Julie, having opened another book. "Listen to this from the introduction: 'Carr was so prolific that he kept a second publisher provided with a steady supply of crime novels under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson.'"

Diamond's thoughts had moved on. "It could be army training that makes a man so tidy. Or his schooling. Or prison. I wonder if he had any form. We'll run a check."

"He wouldn't have been taken on as a night watchman if he had a prison record."

"He wouldn't tell them, would he?"

"Don't they make inquiries?"

"Yes, but it wasn't MI5 he was joining. He was only guarding office furniture."

"Who did he work for?" Julie asked.

Diamond picked up the sheaf of payslips. "Our old friends Impregnable."

Chapter Sixteen

Left to finish her breakfast alone, Shirley-Ann took a slice from the toaster and covered it thickly in peanut butter—a secret indulgence. She didn't start work until ten, and finished at four. Civilized hours in theory, but the conditions weren't always so comfortable as the hours, for she was employed handing leaflets to tourists in front of the Abbey. On a warm day in summer, it was pleasant enough. Part of the job was to reinforce the message in the leaflets by pointing out the benefits of a bus tour. She didn't mind talking to strangers. Most of them were easy to approach, regardless of whether they wanted the tour. But on wet days the work was canceled—and that meant no pay, because she was on hourly rates. The most frustrating days were the indifferent, showery ones that are all too common in the English climate. She never knew when Mrs. Battle, the supervisor, would materialize and tell her to go home. Soon it would be over for another season anyway. At end of the month she would go back to stacking the shelves in Salisbury's— if there were still vacancies.

Bert often told her that she ought to look for a full-time job. Her stock answer was that she was waiting for him to open the private health club he was forever promising to start in Bath. Then she would wear a white suit and be the receptionist. Bert really did have this dream of going into partnership with one of the top hotels and equipping it with the latest gym facilities, a swimming pool, steam rooms, saunas, and sunbeds. The only problem was finance. Up to now, the bank hadn't been willing to float a loan.

This morning she left the flat slightly earlier than usual, and she was glad she did, because as she turned out of Russell Street a police car drove up. That they were coming to call on her was confirmed later, when she met Polly Wycherley. The astute Polly, who must have known where to find her, came up to her in the Abbey churchyard and asked if she could take a few minutes off work. From the tense way Polly spoke, it was a request that couldn't be turned down. They cut through Church Street to the Bath Bun, the tea shop in Lilliput Court, near Abbey Green.

The shop had a cosy, tucked-away feel, situated as it was in a sunken court off one of the less busy streets. Shirley-Ann often escaped there. The framed mirrors on the pink walls and the brown-and-fawn zigzag design on the carpet weren't to her taste, but not much natural light penetrated there, so something had to be done to brighten the interior.

No other customers were inside at this time, which meant that the corner table was available, the only one with padded chairs. On the wall to Shirley-Ann's left was a greenish print of the Rokeby Vertus, the one showing the rear view of the naked goddess admiring herself in a mirror. Bert had once joked that they were the best buns in the shop. It wasn't the kind of humor likely to appeal to Polly. This morning her little mouth was pinched into something like a stitched wound.

"Have you heard about Sid?"

Shirley-Ann had not. She was deeply shocked when she was told. The news had been on local radio at eleven.

"It's worse," said Polly. "He was found on Milo's narrow-boat."

"Milo's?"

"Last night, after our meeting."

"Oh, no, Polly!"

"But Milo couldn't possibly have anything to do with it," Polly pointed out. "He was at the police station telling them about the missing stamp." She felt in her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. Her hands were trembling.

"Sid murdered?" whispered Shirley-Ann. "I can't take it in. He was such an . . . inoffensive bloke. Who would want to harm him?"

"I'm as puzzled as you are," said Polly. "And the police aren't giving anything away. Have you had them call on you?"

"No." Shirley-Ann didn't like to say at this stage that she'd seen them stop outside her flat.

Polly said, "They came to me soon after nine. They must have known, but they didn't let on. He was killed last night, you see. I thought it was just about the Penny Black, but obviously it wasn't." Her face, usually pink, was blotchy this morning.

"You don't mind if I ask?" said Shirley-Ann. "What did they want to know?"

"The police? Everything I could tell them about the meeting and the Bloodhounds. Even when I spoke of Sid they didn't give me a hint that he was dead." Polly fumbled with a button of her coat. "It was underhanded not to tell me. I said things I wouldn't have mentioned if I'd known he was dead, poor lamb."

"What things?"

"Oh—that he's so quiet you forget he's there a lot of the time. And worse. I think I said he was dead wood. It makes me feel mean-minded."

"I'm sure no one could accuse you of that," Shirley-Ann tried to console her.

"Why me? Why didn't they go to someone else?"

"I suppose because you're the chair." Shirley-Ann drew back, and the conversation ceased while their order was taken. Once the girl had returned to the kitchen, she said, "What was he doing on Milo's boat? Are they friends?"

Polly frowned slightly. "Not as far as I know."

"He must have had some reason for going there. How did he know which boat it is?"

"That's no mystery. We had our Christmas party on the boat. Sid was there. It's called the
Mrs. Hudson.
I remember telling you." Polly's pale eyes studied Shirley-Ann.

"So you did." She held Polly's steady gaze.

Polly eventually said, "Sid knew Milo wouldn't be aboard the boat. We all knew he was going directly to the police station, and they were sure to keep him there for ages asking questions."

Shirley-Ann asked, "Do you think Sid was up to something?"

"It certainly looks like it, going out to the boatyard at that time of the evening. And the whole point is that he wasn't alone. The person who attacked him was aboard the boat as well."

Shirley-Ann felt goose pimples rising on her skin. "The only people who knew Milo was going to the police were ourselves. That means one of the Bloodhounds must have murdered Sid."

Polly folded her arms. Her lips twitched as if she couldn't bring herself to say any more.