Murder at Swann's Lake (2 page)

Robbie's mouth was dry, and he suddenly realised, from the puzzled faces which were looking up at him, that he must have stopped his joke mid-sentence. He had to say something, he told himself. He had to say bloody
something
.

“Wally,” he croaked into the microphone. “Why don't you take that young feller over to the bar and give him a drink on the house.”

“Drink on the house!” someone from one of the tables called out with mock amazement. “Has the age of bloody miracles finally come to pass?”

That was better, Robbie thought. Something normal was happening. Something he felt confident he could handle. He located the heckler, a middle-aged man with a red face and a flat cap. “The age of miracles?” he repeated. “No, George. But when it does arrive you'll soon know it – 'cos that'll be the night you'll be able to sup ten pints an' still do what's right by your Mabel when you get home.”

The audience roared. Mabel gave her husband a furious glance, then forced herself to join in with the joke. And Wally had finally led the hard young man in the sharp suit over to the bar and was pouring him a drink.

“Anyway, these two Irishmen I was talkin' about . . .” Robbie continued.

“You weren't talkin' about no Irishmen,” George said, despite receiving a dig in the ribs from his wife. “You were talkin' about a honeymoon couple.”

“So I was,” Robbie agreed. “Well, like I was sayin', Enid's friend tells her about the sausage, an' then she says, ‘That's what you've got to look forward to.' But Enid's a bit thick, you see, and
she
says, ‘You mean he'll bring me breakfast in bed?'”

He was back in his stride, the jokes rolling automatically off his tongue, but his mind was in turmoil. He'd thought he'd made it clear to Sid Dowd that he wasn't interested in doing any business with him. Yet he couldn't have done or Sid would never have sent one of his lads down to the club like this. Unless the lad was doing a bit of freelancing! But nobody freelanced on Sid Dowd – not unless they'd got tired of having their heads attached to the rest of their bodies.

It seemed to have got very hot in the club – almost stifling – and though Robbie had intended to be on the stage for another five minutes, he suddenly decided he'd had enough.

“ ‘. . . yes, but I've never seen one come out of the fly in your trousers and eat a pork pie before',” he said, concluding the joke about the stolen goose. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to get back to the dancin'.”

He walked off the stage to friendly applause and made his way towards the door. He didn't look at the bar to see if the young man in the blue suit was still there. If he was honest with himself, he'd really rather not know.

The club was separated from the rest of the buildings – the house, the adjoining outhouse and the garage – by a cinder yard, and as Robbie crossed it, he could hear some of the larger cinders crunching under the heels of his shoes.

Crunch. . . crunch. . . crunch. . .

He was a fool to let Sid Dowd's lad worry him, he told himself. Things had changed since they'd worked together in Liverpool. It would soon be the 1960s, for God's sake, and the sort of jobs they'd pulled together now seemed so old-fashioned they could have come out of the Ark. Yet did a leopard ever change its spots, especially when it was as
big
a leopard as Sid?

Robbie unlocked the outhouse door, switched on the light and experienced the vague mixture of disappointment and disgust he always felt when entering the room. It had started out simply as a workshop, a place where he could potter around doing the little jobs which he could just as easily have paid someone else to do. There was still evidence of the outhouse's original purpose – the carpenter's bench against the far wall, the tool rack hanging above it – but now, thanks to his wife's insistence, the place had lost the air of a retreat which it had once had.

‘We need a proper office,' Doris had told him.

‘What's wrong with working on the kitchen table?' he'd asked.

Doris had sighed, exasperatedly. ‘There's no wonder you never can never get on in society however much you try,' she'd told him. ‘You've absolutely no idea of the right way to do things, have you?'

And so the workshop had been converted into the office which Doris had felt they needed. A desk had been her first purchase – solid mahogany with brass handles. That had been followed by an oak filing cabinet – mostly still empty – and a black leather three-piece suite. Finally, only the day before, Doris had added a coffee table, a heavy one with a mosaic top. Robbie hated it.

‘And when we've got rid of that workbench, there'll be room for a bookcase,' Doris had threatened.

‘But we haven't got enough books to fill one,' Robbie had protested.

‘Then we'll buy them as well,' his wife had told him.

Robbie walked across the room, past the window which looked out onto the yard and the club, and came to a halt in front of the workbench.

It stays, he decided. Whatever she says, it bloody well stays.

He removed the hammer from the tool rack and tapped the edge of the bench with it a couple of times. It was a very reassuring sound. He'd always been useful with his hands and often reflected that if he'd had a different upbringing, he might have made a good craftsman. But it was pointless to think like that, he told himself angrily – if he'd been a craftsman, he'd never have been able to afford what he had now.

He replaced the hammer in the rack, walked over to his desk and sat down. From this position he could see the club door and noticed how many times it swung open as new people arrived or customers made their way across the yard to the lavatory. It was a good business he had, he thought. Perhaps too good – if he'd just been ticking over, maybe Sid Dowd would have left him alone.

He was getting things out of proportion, he told himself. Not that that was at all surprising the way things were piling up – Sid Dowd bothering him, Doris always on at him, his younger daughter forever doing her best to humiliate him. And now this thing with Terry. What he needed was a break.

“Perhaps I'll go an' see how Alex Conway's getting on,” he said aloud. “Old Alex always appreciates a visit from me.”

He laughed at his own private joke, and wished he could tell it to Annabel – just to prove that his sense of humour didn't consist solely of stories about the things which dangled between men's legs. But, of course, he couldn't tell her. Even if she'd listen.

The light bulb overhead began to flicker and then went out completely. Apart from the small amount of light which filtered in from the club, the office was plunged into darkness.

“Shit!” Robbie said aloud.

The replacement bulbs were in the house, and he didn't feel like getting up to go and fetch one. Not at that moment, anyway. It had been a long day and the sight of Phil – the young man in the blue suit – had first made him nervous and now exhausted. He folded his arms on the desk, rested his head on them and went to sleep.

Detective Sergeant Gower stood in the shadow of The Hideaway's garage and looked longingly at Robbie Peterson's office. It was in darkness, which meant that Robbie wasn't there. But he could also clearly see that the door was open an inch or two. It wasn't like Peterson to be so careless – to present him with such an unprecedented opportunity. He wished he had a search warrant, but he didn't have enough evidence to obtain one – and anyway, he was not officially on duty.

His colleagues called Gower ‘The Toad', and though it might not have been a very kind title, it was certainly accurate enough. He was squat and only just met police height requirements. In addition, he was cursed with bulging eyes and a skin which could have been a ‘before' advertisement for any of the well-known brands of acne cream. But there was nothing toad-like in his attitude to his work. There, he was more of a fox terrier – pursuing his investigations with dogged determination, and never, ever, letting go once he'd got his teeth into something. And he'd got his teeth into the Peterson family. True, Annabel was his main target for the moment, but Robbie had always been his ultimate objective, and the open door just might provide him with a short cut.

Gower looked across the yard at the club. He wondered whether Robbie Peterson was inside The Hideaway at that very moment, and
if
he was, how long he was likely to stay there. It wouldn't do for a policeman to be discovered – unauthorised – on private property, even if the property in question was well-known to belong to a notorious villain. No, getting caught would do his career no good at all. On the other hand, since fate had clearly given him his chance . . .

It was two short strides to the window. Gower pressed his nose against it. He could see the workbench which was catching the small amount of light that shone from the club, but the rest of the office was in total darkness. Which meant that once he was inside – and as long as he stayed away from the bench – he would be completely invisible to anyone coming out of The Hideaway.

He rapidly formulated a plan. He would go over to Robbie's desk, from where he should get a good view of the yard, and when there was no one out there, he would quickly draw the heavy curtains. Once he had done that, he could switch on his torch with impunity and get down to some serious investigating.

Gower pushed the door open, stepped inside and closed the door softly again behind him. Phase One completed entirely satisfactorily.

The sergeant set off in the general direction of the desk. In the darkness, he should have walked slowly and cautiously, but caution had never been Gower's way, especially when he had the scent of his quarry in his nostrils.

It was his speed which was his downfall. If he hadn't been going so fast, the collision between his right shin and the coffee table would not have hurt half so much as it did. If he hadn't been going so fast, he might have stayed upright instead of lurching forward into the blackness.

Gower put his hands out in front of him for protection. His knees hit the floor with a sickening crunch. His torso landed heavily against the edge of Robbie's desk, knocking the wind out of him. But it was the thing his right hand made contact with which alarmed him most. He was touching a head – a brylcreamed head – which was lying on the desk.

Fighting for breath, Gower struggled to his feet. There was a man asleep at the desk! But could he
really
be asleep? Could he have received that jolt from the sergeant's hand without waking up?

Still gasping, Gower reached into his jacket pocket for his torch and switched it on. The beam fell on the hammer first – a perfectly ordinary woodworking hammer which was lying there on the desk. He moved the beam a little higher and it settled on the head which his outstretched hand had touched, and which undoubtedly belonged to Robbie Peterson. If anything could actually be said to belong to a corpse. And a corpse was definitely what Robbie was – because nobody, not even a hard case like him, could have survived having a six-inch nail driven deep into his temple.

T
he old lady was sitting on her usual bench by the Serpentine and was studying the people who passed by with the eye of a connoisseur. So far that day she had seen no one who really interested her, but the couple approaching, hand-in-hand, looked very promising.

The man was perhaps twenty-five years old, and nearly six feet tall. His brown hair was neatly cut and his clothes showed that he took pride in his appearance. His features were perhaps a little
too
regular to earn him the title of handsome, the old lady thought, but by any standards he was certainly attractive. The woman was smaller and a little younger – probably no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. She had jet black hair, flashing dark eyes, a wide, passionate mouth and an oval chin. She looked foreign – possibly southern European.

The old lady allowed herself to indulge in her favourite game of imagining their histories. The man, she decided, had probably gone to a good school and was now something in the City. The woman was more difficult, but it was possible to believe that she was some kind of exiled aristocrat.

The couple had almost drawn level with her. The exiled aristocrat gave the old lady a warm smile. “Isn't a beautiful day?” she said with a slight accent.

“Very nice indeed for the time of year,” the old lady agreed.

The couple walked on, and the old lady watched them with a sigh of regret. Separately, each of them would have been enough to gain her approval, she thought. Together, they looked like a fairytale come true.

“You made that old dear's day,” Bob Rutter said, as he and Maria passed the boathouses.

“You think so?” Maria replied. “I only smiled at her.”

Rutter squeezed her hand. “A smile from you is enough to make
anybody's
day.”

He meant it. He thought her smile lit up a room, and he was sure he'd still have considered that true even if he hadn't been totally, helplessly in love with her.

A uniformed constable was on duty near the edge of the park. He recognised Rutter, and saluted.

Maria giggled. “You really are an important man, aren't you?” she said mischievously.

“No, I'm not,” Rutter contradicted her. “But I'm going to be.”

Maria's hand tensed. “In Spain, that policeman would not have saluted,” she said.

“Because I'm only a detective sergeant?”

“Because we have no chaperone with us, and are holding hands in a public place. He would not have saluted because he would have been too scandalised even to raise his arm.”

“Then it's a good job we're here, and not in Spain.”

“Perhaps,” Maria said wistfully.

Rutter felt instantly ashamed of being so insensitive. “You really miss your homeland, don't you?” he asked.