The Theft of Magna Carta (9 page)

All of the local people were reputable, according to a note from Isherwood, who was keeping discreetly in the background most of the time. He had also telephoned the police nearest the houses of those who had come from outside Salisbury, and checked on twenty more. He confirmed Leech's view; and he had got descriptions of six unidentified people and made out cards for them.

“I know it's a nuisance, but if you could open the shop just for ten minutes while it's still daylight . . . You're very good,
very
good. In about ten minutes, then.” Batten replaced the receiver and looked up in triumph. “We can see that suit I talked about, sir. That's if you'd care to come.”

“Try to keep me away,” Roger said.

The shop was on one side of the market square, with windows at three levels. In the street level window were dresses which looked not unlike Linda Prell's suit, but of different colours. Footsteps sounded inside the shop, and a shrimp of a man with a bald head opened the door.

“Hallo, Mr. Murrow. Very good of you. This is Superintendent West . . . If we could see the pale blue, green, and yellow suit like the one Linda bought the other day . . . oh, Saturday! Then this was probably the first time she wore it . . . Ah!” He almost kowtowed before the suit, which the man soon brought to them on a hanger. “If we could just see it in the light . . . You're very good, Mr. Murrow . . . Will you give me an expert opinion, now: were these strands taken from a dress like this?”

There was a brief pause as Murrow examined the strands. Slowly, he nodded and said: “Yes.”

“You think they were?” Batten's voice rose in excitement. “Can you let us have the maker's description and the colours and design?”

“No trouble at all,” Murrow assured him, beginning to look both eager and excited. “There's a picture of it in the catalogue, very good as regards to the colours, especially.”

He went to a tidy roll-top desk filled with order books and invoices, catalogues and patterns, selected a catalogue and thumbed through it until he came to an illustration of an attractive flowered suit with a high-waisted jacket. Roger studied this, and then turned to Batten.

“Do you have a photograph of Woman Constable Prell?”

“I've several,” Batten answered, but for some reason he hesitated. Eventually he drew out his wallet and selected two snapshots and an enlargement of the girl. Obviously these were not official photographs, but Roger made no comment, simply took the enlargement and placed it near the head of the model.

“If we cut that photograph out and paste it over the model, we've a perfect photograph for colour television,” he said.

“So we have,” breathed Batten. “So we have!” He appeared to be recovered from his brief embarrassment. “Do you think we could take three strands from the hem . . . ? Thank you . . .”

 

“Identical,” declared a young man who worked in the carpet factory at Wilton, a nearby borough as ancient as Salisbury. He put the strands beneath a microscope in the small laboratory at the police station. “Those strands came from identical bales of cloth – even the dye is identical. You can be absolutely sure, sir.”

Roger said warmly: “That's exactly what we needed to know.”

“I only hope it helps to find Linda,” the young man went on. “No news yet, I suppose?”

“Afraid not,” Roger said; and he was surprised how much that truth hurt him.

He arranged for copies of the photograph to be rushed to London, where it should catch the late-news bulletins, then returned to his hotel. He had a hurried meal, went on to the borrowed office and telephoned Isherwood as well as Scotland Yard, prepared a brief statement for the press saying that Linda Prell had been in Gorley Woods, added the description of the suit, sent it up to the Photography Department, where they would make prints for circulation to the newspapers and to police forces, then drove himself to Gorley Woods. He saw the lights in the sky from several miles off, and reached some crossroads where a policeman and two traffic wardens were on duty under a floodlight rigged up among the branches of a tree. Roger stopped as an officer came up to him.

“What's the trouble?” he asked.

“Mostly we can't keep the crowd away,” the man answered resentfully. “There must be a couple of thousand of them near Gorley Woods, come across country from all directions. There was a traffic hold-up before we could say snap. If you want to get through to Blandford, sir, I'd take the first left, and—” He broke off, backing a pace. “It's Mr.
West
, isn't it?”

“And I'd like to go through to Gorley Woods.”

“No trouble about getting there, but if you take my tip you'll turn off to the left as soon as you see the first parked cars. All over the place they are, too close to the road. You keep going into the field and do a half-circle round the cars, sir. It'll look as if you're going over some young barley but if you keep close to the hedge you won't do any harm. Did you follow that, sir?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes thanks,” Roger said.

He checked the impulse to ask if they had found the body, drove on, and followed the instructions closely. Once he was off the road itself the track was very bumpy, but soon he was opposite the main part of the copse and within easy walking distance. He left his parking lights on before locking the car and walking toward the parked cars and the roadway. The light was bright by the copse itself and spread far enough to show couples snuggled down in some cars, others, quite shameless, lying in the fields. No girl was crying “No, no, don't!” here.

Had
the farmworkers heard Linda Prell?

As he approached the road itself he saw cars parked in all directions and a crowd thick among the trees. A dozen or so police were keeping a space cleared and in this space men were digging. The light was eerie; the curious movements of the men and the shadows they made were eerie, too. The gaping spectators were – macabre, grisly, ghoulish. He saw a tiny flame above his head, falling down, and ducked. It went out. Half-ashamed, he realised that there were people up in the trees, and one had lit a cigarette and tossed the match down. His attention once caught, he saw dozens of figures squatting in the trees and looking down at the working men.

Kempton was here, looking pale in the white lights. He seemed to recognise Roger, instinctively, and looked up.

“Hallo, sir.”

“Hallo. Anything?”

“No, sir, nothing at all. What we at first thought was a grave was old rubbish someone buried weeks ago. Any news your end, sir?”

“If you can call it news. No other suspects were at the gallery.”

“I suppose we ought to have expected that,” Kempton said. “It certainly doesn't help, sir.”

“There's one thing. Those linen threads certainly came from the woman's suit,” Roger remarked.

“I wonder what the hell they did to her,” Kempton said in a growling voice. “It's bad enough when one of our chaps runs into trouble, but when it comes to a woman officer—” He broke off. “I'm pretty sure about one angle, sir.”

“What?”

“She won't be found in these woods. We've seen all the soft ground where she could have been buried and there's no fresh digging. Most of the place is a tangle of roots. There's so little soft ground we haven't had any luck with identifying car tracks or anything else,” Kempton went on gloomily. “I suppose we'd better keep the search going, though.”

“I'm not sure we shouldn't call it off until the morning,” answered Roger. He watched men scraping dirt from the foot of the tree where the policewoman had been tied, but he wasn't thinking of that; he was thinking of the Stephensons and Caldicott, and the fact that he wished he had questioned them himself. Suddenly, he asked: “Know how far it is to Bath?”

Kempton's answer came back as quick as thought.

“Forty miles or so, sir. Are you thinking—” He broke off.

“The same thing as you are,” Roger said. “According to my last report the Stephensons are still in Bath, at the Pump Hotel. I'll tell these chaps to call a halt to this, then we'll get moving.”

He was about to drive off when Batten appeared, triumphantly holding some copies of the catalogue picture with Linda Prell's face superimposed.

“Took them myself, sir, and got a pal of mine to do some prints quickly. Not bad at all, are they?”

“Not bad at all,” Roger agreed. “You get some teleprinted for the Yard and tell them I'd like nationwide distribution – press, television, they'll know. I'll take two with me. Kempton and I are on our way to Bath.”

 

 

My God! Roger thought some two hours later, she's beautiful. He kept his face set as if not at all impressed and looked at Stephenson; he had a faint feeling of revulsion which he seldom felt for a man. It was perhaps the very fair hair and near-albino lashes. The freckles. The unfinished look of his nose and lips.
Had
he been badly burned and been patched up by a brilliant plastic surgeon? No, Roger decided, the mass of freckles would not be there if that were so. But he had never seen a less suited couple, if appearances were anything to go by.

“This is disgraceful,” Sarah Stephenson said coldly. She had an accent which was neither American nor Canadian; perhaps she was English but had lived on the other side of the Atlantic for a long time. Her phraseology and her icy manner were undoubtedly English. “You have no right to invade our privacy at this hour.”

Stephenson grunted: “It's an insult, that's what I call it.”

“I'm sorry,” Roger said briskly. “I hope you will answer our questions here, but if you would prefer to get dressed and come to the police station, I've no objection. We have more facilities there.” He was deliberately aggressive, wanting to push them as far as he could.

He had an odd suspicion: that the woman approved; there was a glint of what might be admiration in her eyes. But that was probably imagination. She had made up for the night, had on no powder but only night cream, yet her features could stand that. Her quilted dressing gown, pale blue in colour, brought out the pale grey of her eyes.

“What do you want to know?” asked Stephenson in a sulky, complaining way.

Roger said sharply: “Inspector. Your notebook at the ready, please. Mr. Stephenson – were you at Leech's picture gallery in Salisbury on Tuesday morning?”

“Sure.”

“What time, please?”

“Oh, I guess—well, maybe around half-past nine until half-past ten.”

“Why did you go there?”

“What's that? What did you say?” The man both looked and sounded vague.

“I said, why did you go there?”

“To see some paintings, I guess.”

“
Why
, Mr. Stephenson?” Roger's voice hardened. There was a limit to how far he could push in this arbitrary manner, but he felt confident so far. Stephenson gave the impression that he didn't even know he was being pushed. The woman, sitting in a small needlework or nursing chair, was also opposite him, and any admiration she had shown had gone. Her gaze was as icy as her manner.

“I heard there was to be an auction and there might be some bargains.”

“Who told you?”

“A friend—an old acquaintance of mine.”

“His name, please.”

Just for a moment something happened to the man. It was as if his mask of pretending that he did not know what all the fuss was about dropped, and there was a hint of triumph in his eyes as he answered.

“Frank Caldicott.”

“C-A-L-D-I-C-O-T-T?”

“Sure, I guess that's how you spell it.” The mask was down again; the man's voice even sounded different: diffident.

“Where does Mr. Caldicott live, Mr. Stephenson?”

“At Whiteside Court. Number 27, Whiteside Court, St. John's Wood.” Stephenson gave the “saint” its full pronunciation, did not contract it in the English way. Moreover, it was Caldicott's right address.

“And you just went to the gallery to look?” Roger put a lash of scepticism in his tone.

“Sure, sure,” Stephenson muttered, and then he flared up. “Say—what is this? Can't a man go and look at some paintings without being hauled out of bed in the middle of the night? Is it a crime in Merrie England to look at works of art or something?” He made the last word sound like “sumpun” but his indignation seemed real. “So I went to the Leech Gallery to look at some paintings Frankie told me might be easy to buy. He said he thought there was a genu
ine
Gainsborough and a genu
ine
Turner. If that had been true and I could have bought them at a good price that would have been quite a day. Yes, sir, quite a day. But when I got there what do you think?”
Wadderyertink.
“There were so many dealers you couldn't even breathe. Those prices would have hit heaven itself. So we got out. Why, we had so much time on our hands we went to look at the cathedral, and I'm not the world's hottest cathedral buff. No, sir.” He glanced at the woman, who hadn't stirred and now showed no expression at all. “Let me tell you something, Superintendent, let me tell you this. If it hadn't been for my wife I wouldn't have put my nose inside that cathedral. Not even my nose. No, sir.” He drew back and threw his arms up shoulder high. “Did I commit any crime, Superintendent? You tell me that: did I commit any crime?”

At last, he stopped.

A glint of satisfaction showed in the woman's eyes, as if she felt he had ended on a note of triumph. Kempton, in Roger's view, kept a straight face but obviously felt disappointed. Roger turned away from Stephenson as if acknowledging that his challenge had failed. He glanced at the bedside table, at a man's watch and some coins in neat piles, keys, a pigskin wallet. He saw a thin book lying face downward, and the title read:
Salisbury Cathedral.
He wondered what page it was open at, edged toward the table, and looked again at Stephenson, whose “Did I commit a crime?” still hovered on its ring of indignation.

Roger said coldly: “I don't know.”

Stephenson gasped: “You don't know what?” The words came out as if they were whining out of a punctured balloon.

“I have no idea what you did after you left Salisbury,” Roger replied coldly.

Stephenson looked at him, mouth agape, speechless. Roger seemed to stumble, and put out a hand to save himself. The woman said in ice-cold anger: “That is insulting.” Roger pushed the bedside table and grabbed at the head of the bed. Money, wallet, keys, and book all slid toward the floor. Stephenson was still too dazed to help, no one else was near enough. Roger caught the book but could not save the other things. And a smaller book, in green, fell out; he had seen the book when Batten had taken him around the cathedral; it was called
The Sarum Magna Carta.
Genuinely unsteady, Roger straightened up and dropped onto the bed, putting the books on a pillow. He looked shaken as he stared down at a rug which he had rucked up. For a few moments the scene was like a tableau, all the four standing or sitting absolutely still. Both the woman and Stephenson were glaring at Roger, and the woman's lips seemed to be quivering with rage.

Roger looked up, as if baffled.

“Clumsy oaf! I
am
sorry!” He moved from the bed quickly and bent down to pick up first the wallet, then the coins. Kempton rounded the bed to help him and after a few moments Stephenson joined in, too. Sarah stood aloof until the last coin had been picked up and Stephenson had placed the money in little piles – pennies, new halfpennies, two-, five-, and ten-pence pieces and some fifty-pence pieces. “I
am
sorry,” repeated Roger. “All fingers and thumbs today. It's been a rough day. Mr. Stephenson, did you see this woman yesterday?”

He took a photograph from his pocket and held it out, his fingers were deliberately unsteady. It was one of the prints Batten had given him of Linda Prell's face superimposed on the model's face. Stephenson, jolted out of his earlier mood, glanced down. He did not move a muscle of his face, and there was a noticeable pause before he answered.

“Yes. She—”

“A moment, please.” Roger became much less aggressive but was still authoritative. He thrust the picture in front of Sarah, who looked down at it, eyes still frosty. Unlike the man, she reacted noticeably; she was startled.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Where, please?”

“She was in the gallery yesterday morning.”

“That's right, she was,” Stephenson remembered. “She was quite a woman.”

“Have you seen her since?” asked Roger.

“Since?” echoed Stephenson. “Hell, no.”

“Why should he have seen her since?” demanded Sarah. “Isn't it time you told us what—” She broke off, catching her breath, and to Roger she seemed to be overacting very slightly. “Is that the—the missing policewoman? We heard about her on the radio.”

“Policewoman?” echoed Stephenson. “You mean— Jeeze!
That
girl.”

“She disappeared after leaving the gallery,” Roger said. “Are you sure you didn't see her again?”

“What are you insinuating?” demanded Stephenson, in the sharpest voice he had yet used. “That I'd forget a woman like that? Are you crazy?”

“I see what you mean,” Roger said, putting the photograph back into his pocket. “She left the gallery just after you, and we haven't seen her since. We hoped you had.”

“No,
sir!
” asserted Stephenson.

“What do you think has happened to her?” asked Sarah.

“We don't yet know,” Roger said grimly. “We only know that she was in the gallery to take photographs of the people at the preview, and disappeared.”

“I only wish I could help,” Stephenson said. “I surely do. I didn't see any camera, though.”

“I still don't understand why you had to come here about this as late as it is,” Sarah said coldly before Roger could comment. “Is there any special reason, Superintendent?”

“We have to catch up with everybody who wasn't identified at the gallery,” Roger replied, and then flashed a smile for the first time since he had arrived here. “Forgive me if I've been too brusque, Mr. Stephenson, I'm very pressed for time and worried about that young woman.” He paused and then asked a mollified Stephenson: “Can you remember exactly what you did after you left the gallery? And whom you saw. That might help a great deal.”

“Why, sure,” Stephenson said. “I've got a good memory, there isn't much I forget. Eh, honey?” He told Roger exactly what he had done, omitting only his brief talk first with Sarah, then with Ledbetter. He mentioned passers-by, mostly approaching Leech's. He seemed much more in control of himself and anxious to show that he had taken no offence.

It was half-past twelve before Roger and Kempton left.

 

Neither Stephenson nor Sarah spoke for a few moments, just stood staring at each other. At last Stephenson went to the door, took the “Do Not Disturb” sign from the inside handle and opened and hung it outside. No one was in the passage. Stephenson locked the door and went to the window, standing to one side and peering out. The two policemen were crossing the road toward a parked car: Roger's Rover. They got in and the car moved off.

At last, Stephenson said: “I could cut their throats!”

“It's as well you didn't,” Sarah remarked dryly.

“Next time,” Stephenson rasped.

“Do you think they know—” Sarah began.

“They don't know a thing but they may guess plenty,” Stephenson answered. “He's got a mind, that West. He wanted to jump us into saying more than we did. You did fine, honey, real fine.”

“I don't understand why he came to us,” Sarah said.

“Because the woman followed us and someone noticed,” answered Stephenson. “And maybe Caldicott made them take notice. But no one can tie us in with Ledbetter and his pal, you don't have to worry. Ledbetter's just a rental-car man and who would recognise him down here? We won't hear from the cops any more.” He put his arm round Sarah's shoulders and eased the dressing gown off their pale smoothness. His hands looked repellent against the soft skin. “Honey, they sure did wake me up. How about helping me to get to sleep tonight?”

She said: “If that's what you want.”

For a moment, gown and nightdress on the floor by her feet, she looked like a marble statue. But she did not stay like a statue for long.

 

Roger went to the Bath police station, which he had visited on his way to the hotel as a courtesy. The senior officer on duty had been called out on a suspected hijacking of a lorry load of cigarettes, so Roger did not stay. He drove toward Warminster and Salisbury without saying much. Bath itself was deserted but the great terraces of streets on the hills were shown by the clear street lamps, and lights dotted among the trees in and up the side of the valley.

Soon they were on the winding road which climbed steadily upward, making fair speed because the headlights of oncoming cars gave them good warning. They were on a straight stretch when Roger asked: “Anything strike you as noteworthy, Alan?”

“Well—” Kempton began, but didn't finish.

“Go on.”

“Well, you would certainly have made them crack if—” Kemptom floundered. “I—er—I suppose the truth is that I didn't quite understand what you were after, sir.”

“Alan,” Roger said. “That pair is hiding a lot. Whether it's to do with Linda Prell's disappearance I don't know but they are certainly hiding a lot. When I showed the photograph to Stephenson he didn't move a muscle.”

“I noticed that,” Kempton answered.

“So he was keeping himself under rigid self-control,” Roger declared. “The woman did a better job in her way, even though she was a long time realising that the sensible thing was to recognise the girl of the photograph. We shook them badly, but they didn't crack.” He slowed down for a corner, and then went on: “Did you see the guidebook?”

“The one on Salisbury Cathedral?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they're certainly touring the district,” Kempton pointed out. “Aren't they?”

“Obviously. Sarah Stephenson made him go to the cathedral, he says.”

“You would be surprised where my wife drags me sometimes,” Kempton said, only half-laughing.

“And he took the book to bed with him.”