Clubbed to Death (17 page)

‘There is absolutely no evidence, sir, to suggest IRA involvement.’ Painstakingly, Milton once again explained the reasoning which had led the police conclusively to dismiss the likelihood that terrorists were responsible.

‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin,’ said the Colonel. ‘It’s a scandal, that’s what it is, a scandal. You’re letting these bombers out of jail every day of the week instead of locking them up. It’s plain as a pikestaff. The bloody Hun-lovers were trying to blow this club up because it represents all that is best about England.’

Milton let pass that slur on his country. ‘ “Hun-lovers”?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t understand.’

‘On the side of the bloody Germans during the war, weren’t they? Treacherous beasts, all of them. We should have invaded. Then we wouldn’t have all that trouble we have now. Shoot the ringleaders, that’s what I say. That’s the only way to deal with the enemy.’

‘Ireland was neutral in the last war, sir.’

‘Huh! Neutrality is as neutrality does.’

‘Be that as it may, sir, I’m here to ask you some questions about Sir Conrad’s death. I’m sure you will be as anxious as we are to have the matter cleared up quickly. After all, you don’t want the good name of the club dragged through the tabloid press indefinitely, do you?’

The Colonel’s wrath subsided slightly. He plopped himself down on the nearest chair. ‘Muck-raking guttersnipes, ’ he said. ‘Showing those disgraceful dirty pictures. Gives completely the wrong impression.’

‘Well, the club does have a certain reputation for frankness in sexual matters, sir. Presumably that was why permission was given to the young lady to pose suggestively within the club’s portals.’

As the Colonel began to swell up with rage, Pooley caught Milton’s eye and shot him a warning glance. Milton reined himself in from giving any further vent to his attack of mischievousness. ‘I can see you didn’t approve, sir,’ he said in a soothing voice.

‘I should damn well think I didn’t approve. Never could find out what was responsible for letting that trollop in. Of course I fired a couple of the likely suspects immediately, but I’m still not certain that we nailed the villain.’

‘The likely suspects were, sir?’

‘A couple of dago waiters. Those Mediterranean types, you know.’

It wasn’t the occasion for a discussion of the English notion of innocence until proven guilty. Milton was developing a certain respect for the Colonel’s ability to get him off the main point of the interview. There was a terrible temptation to follow the old buffoon down his byways of prejudice.

‘To get back to Sir Conrad, sir, and taking as a working hypothesis that he was murdered by an insider, I would welcome your advice on what might have been the motive.’

‘Motive, motive. There’s no motive for this kind of random killing. Psychopaths, psychopaths. They’re all around us these days. What are these chaps called who go around murdering lots of people they don’t know?’

‘Serial killers, sir.’

‘Well, if it’s not a terrorist, it’s probably one of those chaps. We’re all going to have to be very careful. Hope you’re going to give the staff a good going-over. Especially the Indians. Very violent streak they’ve got, you know. Remember the carry-on after that communist fool gave them independence in nineteen forty-five?’

‘Mr Attlee, sir?’

‘No. The Hun… that fellow Mountbatten.’

Milton caught himself opening his mouth to defend Lord Mountbatten’s right to be considered an Englishman, but he stopped in time. ‘Rest assured, sir, that we shall be checking the movements and background of everyone in the club. However, at this moment I am addressing myself to the question of motive. Can you please tell us which members of the club might have had a specific motive for wishing to get rid of Sir Conrad?’

‘How would I know? Hardly knew the chap. What’re you suggesting? I don’t go in for gossip. Tittle-tattle is for women and servants.’

Milton’s temper was fraying. ‘Since you had yourself a very good motive for murdering him, I should have thought that you would wish to help me identify anyone else who had.’

‘How dare you, sir!’

Milton and Pooley noted with interest that anger was actually making a large blue vein throb on the left of the Colonel’s forehead. ‘I’ll ring my lawyer and have you sued for libel.’

‘I think you mean slander, sir: I haven’t written it down yet. As you very well know, Sir Conrad was determined to reform the club in a lot of ways which you didn’t like. You would not, for instance, had he had his way, have been able to go on running the provender committee in the disgraceful way you did.’

This sally produced a blustering but largely inarticulate monologue from which the words ‘MP’, ‘head of Scotland Yard’, ‘no respect’, ‘outrageous’, ‘appalling’, ‘risked my life in the service of my king’ and ‘don’t know what the world’s coming to’, cropped up from time to time. At the end of his tirade he seemed curiously tired, and emptied of invective. There was a long silence.

‘Oh, very well then. Yes, of course I thought he was an interfering shit. Not enough to murder him, mind. I’m a good law-and-order man myself. All for hanging. You’ll find people in favour of capital punishment don’t go round murdering people.’

Milton chose to ignore this dubious proposition. ‘Go on, sir.’

‘Well, I wasn’t the only one. Nobody on the committee liked what he wanted to do. But we’d have stopped him, the proper way. The members trust us. They don’t want a club full of namby-pamby bleeding hearts.’

‘Surely only Mr Chatterton had as much to lose as you, Colonel Fagg?’

‘Oh, you know about the wine sales and all that do you? Perfectly legitimate of course. Like everything I did myself. But yes, I grant you that might have seemed a bid odd to the members if it hadn’t been explained properly.’

‘I should think the amount of money spent subsidising the residents would have seemed rather odd to members as well. It would be hard to justify living as well as you do while paying only a pittance for the privilege.’

‘Lot of fuss about nothing. I suppose there might have been a bit of unpleasantness. Soon have won them over.’ Fagg was shifting uneasily.

‘But the other committee members were in the clear compared to you two really, weren’t they sir?’

‘Like hell they were. All decisions taken by one of us were ratified by all the others in committee. One for all and all for one, eh. The Four Musketeers. Well, I suppose the five if you include Pinkie Blenkinsop.’

‘What would you have done if the Admiral had won the day and put the club on a sound financial footing?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean that presumably you would have been required to pay for your bed and board in the normal way without subsidy. In other words, as happens in other clubs.’

‘Oh, dare say we’d all have found the money somehow.’

‘D’you have any income other than your pension?’

‘Can’t see what business that is of yours. I have enough, enough. I’d have a lot more if it wasn’t for bloody death duties.’ The remembrance of past wrongs seemed to strike him hard. He reached into his right-hand pocket and pulled out four snuffboxes. ‘D’you mind?’ he enquired, with unaccustomed civility.

‘No, no, sir. Go ahead, please.’

Milton and Pooley had had this ritual described fully to them, graphically and with actions, but it still held great fascination. From the other pocket emerged no fewer than ten further receptacles. There were round ones, oval ones, rectangular and square ones, made of silver, gold and pewter. To Milton’s relief, the Colonel did not investigate the contents of all of them: there was, apparently, a system. With considerable care he selected four, returned the others to his pockets, opened the chosen ones and sniffed in a discriminating fashion. Three more lids were shut and boxes returned home and finally a large pinch of the selected substance was taken to the right nostril, another to the left. Then after a hearty sneeze, Fagg appeared ready to resume his duties as interviewee. From the point of view of the audience, his appearance was not improved. He had managed to acquire a brown mark on his right cheek and in the centre of his chin, and a dark smear had appeared on the front of his shirt: this he had made worse by diligent rubbing. Another sneeze dawned and he reached yet again for his handkerchief, an object which Milton felt was about as disgusting as anything he had ever seen outside the occasional severed head in a motorway accident. When the sneezing fit was over, Milton resumed.

‘Do you consider any of your colleagues on the committee to be capable of setting up a dynamite booby trap, sir?’

‘No.’

‘Would you have been capable of doing it yourself?’

‘Dare say fifty years ago, when I was a second lieutenant. Though can’t say I ever had call to.’

‘Surely some of your colleagues, like you, have distinguished military records?’

‘Stuff and nonsense. There’s only Pinkie really. Oh, Fishbane did a bit. Others were all backroom boys. Nowhere to be seen when the shrapnel was flying. Suppose Meredith-Lee was the most active of all of them. Maybe he did it himself.’ This appeared to tickle what Colonel Fagg would no doubt have described as his sense of humour. The laughter abruptly changed into sneezes and the handkerchief routine was gone through again. This time he had to wipe away tears and the handkerchief left an intriguing and almost symmetrical pattern below the deep, black bags under his eyes.

‘You have no further information that might be of any assistance, sir?’

‘No. Sorry, Superintendent, or whatever you are. Absolutely nothing. Have to count me out, I’m afraid. All very mysterious. Quite sure that you’ll find in the end that I’m right and it was set up by murdering bog-trotters. Always keep them out of the club myself. Very strict recruitment policy here I can tell you. The thing about the Paddies is that some of them can pass as English if they’ve been brought up here. Bear that in mind when you’re going over the staff with a fine-tooth comb.’

‘Virtually all the staff appear to be foreign, sir, other than what one might call the old retainers.’

‘Huh! Well, I don’t know. There’s that new chap, Robert. Check him out. You never know.’

‘He was injured by the bomb, sir.’

‘Exactly. My point, exactly. Chap might have just set the bomb and been taken unawares when it went off a bit early. Check it out, check it out.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Milton dispiritedly. ‘I think we’ll leave it at that for now.’

Amiss responded to the bell almost immediately. He looked at them and smirked. ‘How did you get on?’

‘I suppose you could say that we got a lot of interesting, philosophical reflections on national characteristics, the inadequacy of police methods, his own probity and old-fashioned virtues. Oh, yes. He did finger the most likely murderer.’

‘Yes?’

‘Robert O’Amiss. Piece of unimpeachable logic. He knows it’s bound to be a Paddy: we say it must be an insider. Since he can point to no Irish employees, there must be somebody English who’s second-generation Irish and passing for English. You follow me?’

‘Just about.’

‘So among what you might call the floating waiting population, there’s really only you.’

‘I knew that some day it would come out about my Irish grandmother,’ said Amiss. ‘Mind you, she was a Belfast Protestant, but I don’t suppose that would cut much ice with Colonel Fagg. Well, before you clap the handcuffs on me, would you like me to procure you some tea?’

‘What I could really do with,’ said Milton, ‘is a very stiff drink. But being a martyr to duty I’ll settle for tea. We have got absolutely nowhere.’

‘But it’s a day of softening them up, sir, really, isn’t it?’ said Pooley.

‘I know, I know, Ellis, but Christ, what a crew. What a bloody crew.’

‘I think I’d better provide you with toasted teacakes as well,’ said Amiss sympathetically. ‘You don’t sound to me to be in the right condition to spend time with Fishbane.’ With a low snigger, he bowed and left.

19

«
^
»

‘OK, Ellis, take out the tray and bring on the sex maniac.’ Milton took a last bite of teacake and a last gulp of tea and lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. Pooley deposited the tray in the Coffee Room and went up to the gallery where Fishbane was awaiting a summons. From the bottom of the staircase he could hear Fagg’s angry voice bellowing ‘damn cheek’. By the time he reached the table where Fishbane was listening in silence to his enraged colleague, with splendid timing the Colonel had got on to ‘bloody young whipper-snappers’.

Normally, Pooley was concerned to hide his upper-class origins from the general public as well as from his police confrères, but occasionally Eton came in useful when he wanted to discomfit a member of the public who was treating him like PC Plod. He summoned up from the past the accent he had spent years discarding and bowed to the two men.

‘Colonel Fagg. Mr Fishbane. I beg your pardon, gentlemen. I am sorry to disturb you, but Detective Chief Superintendent Milton has asked me to tell you, Mr Fishbane, that he would be grateful if you would be so kind as to spare him a little of your time. Would you care to accompany me now or follow in a couple of minutes when you have finished your conversation?’

‘I’ll come now,’ said Fishbane. Pooley thought he sounded rather relieved.

They walked down the first flight of stairs in silence. Then Fishbane asked, ‘Have you been a policeman long… Detective Sergeant? Have I got that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right, sir. A few years.’

‘And before that?’

‘I was at university and then in the Home Office for a time.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Pooley, sir.’

‘You’re not by any chance related to the Worcestershire Pooleys, are you?’

Pooley cursed himself for letting his vanity give him away. ‘Yes I am, sir,’ he said, throwing open the door of the Rochester Room thankfully. ‘Mr Fishbane, sir.’ He scuttled round the table hoping there would be no further genealogical scrutiny.

‘Good afternoon, Detective Chief Superintendent,’ said Fishbane affably. ‘I gather that your sergeant is related to my old friend Reggie Pooley. How close are you, Sergeant?’