Cat O'Nine Tales: And Other Stories (25 page)

Henry was
unable to attend his own farewell party, as he ended up celebrating his
sixtieth birthday behind bars, and all for a mere Miss Florence Blenkinsopp
doublechecked
the figures. She’d been right the first time.
They were £820 short of the amount she had calculated before the uninvited
guest dressed in a pinstriped suit had walked into the ballroom with his little
bag and disappeared with all the cash. It couldn’t be Angela who was
responsible; after all, she had been one of her pupils at St. Catherine’s
Convent.

Miss
Blenkinsopp dismissed the discrepancy as her mistake, especially as the takings
were comfortably up on the previous year’s total.

The following
year would be
the convent’s one-hundredth anniversary,
and Miss Blenkinsopp was already planning a centenary ball. She told her
committee that she expected them to pull their socks up if they hoped to set
records during the centenary year. Although Miss Blenkinsopp had retired as
headmistress of St.
Catherines
some seven years
before, she continued to treat her committee of old gals as if they were still
adolescent pupils.

The centenary
ball could not have been a greater success, and Miss Blenkinsopp was the first
to single out Angela for particular praise. She made it clear that in her
opinion, Ms. Forster had certainly pulled her socks up. However, Miss
Blenkinsopp felt it necessary to triple-check the cash they had collected that
night, before the little man turned up with his Gladstone bag and took it all
away. When she went over the figures later in the week, although their previous
record had been broken by a considerable amount, the cash entry was over two
thousand short of the figure she had scribbled on the back of her place card.

Miss
Blenkinsopp felt she had no choice but to point out the discrepancy (two years
running) to her president, Lady
Travington
, who in
turn sought the advice of her husband, who was chairman of the local watch
committee. Sir David promised, before putting the light out that night, that he
would have a word with the chief constable in the morning.

When the chief
constable was informed of the misappropriation, he passed on the details to his
chief superintendent. He sent it further down the line to a chief inspector,
who would like to have told his boss that he was in the middle of a murder hunt
and also staking out a shipment of heroin with a street value of over ten million.
The fact that St.
Catherines
Convent had mislaid–he
checked his notes–just over £
2,000,
wasn’t likely to
be placed at the top of his priority list. He stopped the next person walking
down the corridor and passed her the file. “See you have a full report on my
desk, Sergeant, before the watch committee meet next month.”

Detective
Sergeant Janet Seaton set about her task as if she was stalking Jack the
Ripper.

First, she
interviewed Miss Blenkinsopp, who was most cooperative, but insisted that none
of her gals could possibly have been involved with such an unpleasant incident,
and therefore they were not to be interviewed. Ten days later, DS Seaton
purchased a ticket for the
Bebbington
Hunt Ball,
despite the fact that she had never mounted a horse in her life.

DS Seaton
arrived at
Bebbington
Hall just before the gong was
struck and the toastmaster bellowed out, “Dinner is served.” She quickly
identified Angela Forster, even before she had located her table. Although DS
Seaton had to engage in polite conversation with the men on either side of her,
she was still able to keep a roving eye on Ms. Forster. By the time cheese and
coffee were served, the detective had come to the conclusion that she was
dealing with a consummate professional. Not only could Ms. Forster handle the
regular outbursts of Lady
Bebbington
, the Master of
Hounds’ wife, but she also found time to organize the band, the kitchen, the
waiters, the cabaret and the voluntary staff without once breaking into a
gallop. But, more interesting, she seemed to have nothing to do with the
collecting of any money. That was carried out by a group of ladies, who
performed the task without appearing to consult Angela.

When the band
struck up its opening number, several young men asked the detective sergeant
for a dance. She turned them all down, one somewhat reluctantly.

It was a few
minutes before one, when the evening was drawing to a close, that the detective
sergeant spotted the man she had been waiting for. Among the red and black
jackets, he would have been easier to identify than a fox on the run. He also
fitted the exact description Miss Blenkinsopp had provided: a short, rotund,
bald-headed man of around sixty who would be more appropriately dressed for an
accountant’s office than a Hunt Ball. She never took her eyes off him as he
progressed unobtrusively around the outside of the dance floor to disappear
behind the bandstand.
The detective quickly left her table
and walked to the other side of the ballroom, coming to a halt only when she
had a perfect sighting of the two of them.
The man was seated next to
Angela counting the cash, unaware that an extra pair of eyes was watching him.
The detective sergeant stared at Angela, as the man carefully placed the
checks, the pledges and the cash in separate piles. Not a word passed between
them.

Once Henry had
double-checked the amount of cash, he didn’t even give Angela a second look. He
placed the notes in his bag and handed her a receipt. With no more than a
slight bow of the head, he retraced his steps round the outside of the dance
floor and quickly left the ballroom. The whole operation had taken him less
than seven minutes. Henry didn’t notice that one of the
revellers
was only a few paces behind him, and, more important, her eyes never left him.

DS Seaton
watched as the unidentified man made his way down the long drive, through the
wrought-iron gates and on toward the village.

Since it was a
clear night and the streets were empty, it was not difficult for DS Seaton to
follow the progress of the man with the bag without being spotted. He must have
been supremely confident because he never once looked back. She only had to
slip into the shadows on one occasion, when her quarry came to a halt outside a
local branch of the Nat West Bank. He opened his bag, removed a package and
dropped it into the overnight safe. He then continued on his way, hardly
breaking his stride.

Where was he
going?

The young
detective had to make an instant decision. Should she follow the stranger, or
return to
Bebbington
Hall and see what Ms. Forster
was up to? Follow the money, she had always been instructed by her supervisor
at Peel House.

When Henry
reached the station, the detective sergeant cursed. She had left her car in the
grounds of the hall, and if she was to continue pursuing the bag man, she would
have to abandon the vehicle and pick it up first thing in the morning.

The last train
to Waterloo that night trundled into
Bebbington
Halt
a few minutes later. It was becoming clear that the man with the bag had
everything timed to the minute. The detective remained out of sight until her
suspect had boarded the train. She then took a seat in the next carriage.

When they
reached Waterloo, the man stepped off the train and made his way quickly across
to the nearest taxi rank. The detective stood to one side and watched as he
progressed to the front of the queue. The moment he climbed into a cab, the
detective walked briskly to the top of the queue, produced her warrant card and
apologized to the person who was about to step into a cab. She jumped in the
taxi and instructed the driver to follow the one that had just moved off the
rank.

When the driver
pulled up outside the Black Ace Casino, the detective remained in the back of
her cab until the man had disappeared inside.

She took her
time paying the cab driver before she climbed out and followed her quarry into
the casino. She filled in a temporary membership form, as she didn’t want
anyone to realize that she was on duty.

DS Seaton strolled
onto the floor and glanced around the gaming tables. It only took her a few
moments before she spotted her man seated next to one of the roulette wheels.
She took a step closer and joined a group of onlookers who formed a horseshoe
around the table.

The detective
sergeant made sure that she remained some distance away from her quarry
because, dressed in a long blue silk gown more appropriate for a ball, he might
spot her and even wonder if she had followed him from
Bebbington
Hall.

For the next
hour she watched the man remove wads of cash from his bag at regular intervals,
then
exchange them for chips. An hour later the bag
was clearly empty because he left the table with a glum look on his face, and
made his way toward the bar.

DS Seaton had
cracked it. The anonymous man was siphoning off money from the evening events
in order to finance his gambling habit, but she still couldn’t be sure if
Angela was involved.

The detective
slipped behind a marble pillar as the man climbed onto a stool next to a lady in
a blue suit with a short skirt.

Did he have
enough money over to pay for a prostitute? The detective stepped out from
behind the pillar to take a closer look, and nearly bumped into Henry as he
began walking back toward the exit. Later, much later, DS

Seaton thought
it strange that he had left the bar without having a drink. Perhaps the woman
on the stool had rejected him.

Henry stepped
out onto the pavement and hailed a taxi. The detective grabbed the next one.
She followed his cab as it made its way across Putney Bridge and continued its
journey along the south side of the river. The taxi finally came to a halt
outside a block of flats in
Wandsworth
. DS Seaton
made a note of the address and decided that she had earned a taxi ride home.

The following morning,
DS Seaton placed her report on the chief inspector’s desk.

He read it,
smiled, left his office and walked down the corridor to brief the chief
superintendent, who in turn phoned the chief constable. The chief decided not
to mention it to the chairman of the watch committee until after an arrest had
been made, as he wanted to present Sir David with an open-and-shut case, one
that a jury could not fail to convict on.

Henry deposited
the cash from the Butterfly Ball in the overnight vault of Lloyds TSB just a
couple of hundred yards away from the hotel where the Masons were holding their
annual dinner. He must have walked about another thirty yards before a police
car drew up beside him. There wouldn’t have been much point in making a dash
for it, as Henry wasn’t built for a change of gear.

And in any case
he had already planned for this moment, right down to the last detail. Henry
was arrested and charged two days before the watch committee was due to meet.

Henry selected
Mr. Clifton-Smyth to represent him, a solicitor whose accounts he had handled
for the past twenty years.

Mr.
Clifton-Smyth listened carefully to his client’s defense, making copious notes,
but when Henry finally came to the end of his tale, the lawyer only had one
piece of advice to offer him: plead guilty.

“I will of
course,” added the lawyer, “brief counsel of any mitigating circumstances.”

Henry accepted
his solicitor’s advice; after all, Mr. Clifton-Smyth had never once, in the
past two decades, questioned
his
judgment.

Henry made no
attempt to contact Angela during the run-up to the trial, and although the
police felt fairly confident that she was playing Bonnie to his Clyde, they
quickly worked out that they shouldn’t have arrested him until he’d gone to the
casino a second time. Who was the woman seated at the bar? Had she been waiting
for him? The Special Crime Unit spent weeks collecting bank stubs from casinos
right across London, but they couldn’t find a single check made out to a Ms.
Angela Forster, and even more puzzling, they didn’t come up with one for a Mr.
Henry Preston. Did he always lose?