War Damage (8 page)

‘He went off in the direction of the tube? And he said nothing about meeting anyone?'

‘No,' said Regine.

‘Actually, I don't know for sure about the tube,' said Neville. ‘I didn't see which way he went.'

‘And your meeting with him was entirely accidental, Mr Milner? You hadn't made a prior arrangement to meet him?'

Neville frowned. ‘Of course not, Inspector.'

Plumer turned to Regine. ‘Looking back, can you remember anything about his behaviour, his mood, who he talked to, whether there was any indication he might be meeting up with someone again, later in the evening? The party took place in this room, did it?' Plumer looked round as he spoke.

‘Here and in the dining room and the library – as it's a double-fronted house people tend to wander from room to room,' said Neville. His mood changed; he became unexpectedly chatty. ‘That was one of the reasons for choosing the house in the first place. It's so much better than the normal London terraced house, where you have to live on the vertical. We – that is to say my first wife and I – had been living in Kensington, which I really prefer, as an area, but we were charmed by the layout of this house.'

‘Guests don't have to be manoeuvred up and down stairs,' explained Regine.

‘So you wouldn't necessarily have noticed any tensions.' There was another little silence.

‘Why should there have been
tensions
?'

‘No reason,' said Plumer, pleasantly enough.

Murray added: ‘On the face of it the most likely thing is your friend met his death at the hands of a stranger. Even though we now know he wasn't robbed. We still think that's the most likely explanation. But we have to look at every angle. We can't rule out the possibility that Mr Buckingham knew whoever killed him. His keys are probably still lying around on the Heath somewhere, but they may have been taken – by someone who wanted to get into his house, and who therefore knew something about him; in other words, it wasn't just a casual encounter.'

‘Why not just break into his house, then? Why go to all the trouble of murdering him and stealing his keys?' interrupted Neville.

‘Why indeed,' agreed Plumer, ‘although having a set of keys would obviously simplify matters, particularly for someone who wasn't a professional thief. But this is pure speculation. No witnesses have come forward, although the alarm was raised not so long after he died. Nor is there a history of attacks on the Heath – the only violence up there in the past year or so was the Jewish group, Group 43, that saw off Oswald Mosley's lot. So you will understand why we have to explore the possibility that some of his – your – friends may have helpful information.'

‘But no one who was here that day would have – I mean, the guests who were here that day are my friends, mine and my husband's,' cried Regine. ‘And anyway everyone adored Freddie. I can't think of anyone who would have dreamed of hurting him.'

‘I said information. I didn't say they'd be suspects. We shall be talking to them, hoping for useful information, but otherwise as a matter of form, you understand, a process of elimination. On the other hand, of course, there's still the firearms factor. That does suggest the underworld. We're continuing our investigations there.'

Regine watched them walk down the path. She shut the door and returned to the drawing room. Neville was cleaning out his pipe.

‘Why didn't you tell me you'd met Freddie?'

Neville looked up at her. ‘I didn't say anything about it because he told me he'd met Arthur Carnforth and they'd quarrelled. They met in some low pub in Camden Town and had a row about Vivienne. It got quite unpleasant, apparently. Arthur was rather belligerent.'

‘Why didn't you tell the police that?'

Neville smiled a funny little thin smile. ‘It's old history, kitten. Water under the bridge.'

‘Phil thought he'd seen you with Freddie. I kept trying to ask you, but you just shut me up every time.'

Neville banged his pipe on the coal scuttle. ‘We don't want it getting around that he'd been with Arthur.'

‘Why should it – get around? He wasn't with him when you met Freddie, was he?'

‘No, but … it might look suspicious. We could be in queer street ourselves. They know we went to Markham Square – and it was a bit of a bombshell, when Hilary told me we're not the executors and there doesn't seem to be a will. I only found out when I rang him today.' Neville walked up and down and sucked at his pipe. ‘I thought I had to tell them I'd seen Freddie, but there's no point dragging Arthur into it. And it probably doesn't mean anything at all.'

‘We'd better be going.' But Regine sat down on the sofa and stared at her thick, bluish glass with its flecks of gold. ‘I didn't realise Freddie … he did say something a while ago about Arthur being friendly with Vivienne Hallam these days, but why did he mind so much he tried to stop it? That seems very strange.'

She stood up and he put his arm round her waist. ‘Poor kitten – it's all so beastly, isn't it.'

She nodded, the lump in her throat threatening yet again. She'd been tearful on and off all day. She was grateful for Neville's comforting arm and pressed her head against his shoulder. But Neville had been out in the darkness too, that evening. And why had he needed cigarettes so suddenly? He always kept lots of them all over the house – he'd known how to get them, all through the war, he'd never gone short, he'd positively hoarded them.

seven

T
HE DETECTIVES DROVE UP TO
Jack Straw's Castle, the tavern at the top of the Heath, and settled down over a pint. Plumer had a new packet of Player's Navy Cut. Murray, who'd smoked around ten a day until he came within Plumer's orbit, feared he was fast becoming almost as heavy a smoker as his superior. Lighting up had become automatic. But now he resisted.

‘What did you think of the Milners then?'

‘I thought they were fairly straight with us,' said Murray. ‘She's a real looker, isn't she – very striking. He was a bit prickly, I thought. But I felt they were genuinely upset about it all, her anyway.'

‘Why did they dash round to Buckingham's house like a couple of electric rabbits when the gate goes up?'

‘To get hold of the will? He's the executor.'

‘That's what he
says
. Tearing round like that – it looks suspicious. And now it turns out there isn't a will, and he isn't the executor! Very fishy. Did he just cook up the story as some kind of explanation? And why? What were they bothered about? Possibly they wanted to get their hands on something – incriminating material – the dead man was a criminal himself, remember. Don't ever forget that. Everything about his private life was against the law. There may have been letters – we may get wind of others like him – a whole network of perverts. They may have suppressed all kinds of evidence. Have you thought of that?'

Murray hadn't.

‘The dead man was a photographer, wasn't he. Maybe some of the pictures he took weren't just portraits and ballet. The prints we looked through were harmless enough, but that doesn't prove anything. That one in his bedroom, for instance. Now why would a flaming pervert have a photo like that in his bedroom?'

Murray felt he was going red. ‘It was just a portrait,' he said. ‘You're not suggesting—'

‘I'm not suggesting anything. But there is something I don't quite like about it all. A queer's shot dead. His wallet's stolen, only it isn't. The Milners rush round to his house. No signs of disturbance, but no sign of a will either. Photographs missing – and an address book. That says blackmail to me – bearing in mind his private life. Nothing else stolen, so far as we know, although there were plenty of valuables. And what about Milner just happening to meet him by accident? I think he was keeping something back. What was all that about?'

Murray shook his head. ‘D'you think he was trying to cast suspicion on someone else? After all, what was he doing wandering about at that time – more or less the time of the murder?'

Plumer nodded. ‘We need to find out more about that lot. Where's the list then?'

Murray brought it out, unfolded it and spread it on the low table in front of them. ‘I'll check their backgrounds, sir. The name Alan Wentworth strikes a chord. I think he was mixed up in that trial where some commie was up for murder; got off on appeal earlier this year. You remember the case. I'll have a word with a chap I know in Special Branch. I have a feeling the name was Wentworth – bit of a fellow traveller before the war. But there can't be anything suspicious about him now. She's put down here he works for the BBC.'

‘All these long-haired, arty Hampstead types, don't trust any of 'em. The BBC's full of pinks and pansies. Keep away from Special Branch too, we don't want them poking their noses in.'

‘Yes, sir.' He hesitated. ‘They've no reason to, though, have they?'

‘I'm just saying, on principle.' As they went down the list, Plumer seemed disappointed that the Milners' guest list wasn't more exciting. ‘It's not politics we're interested in, it's blackmail,' he said. ‘With a man of this kind, that's what you always want to look out for.'

‘But – if you're suggesting the stiff was being blackmailed, shouldn't he have been the killer, not the victim?'

‘Perhaps that was the intention. Perhaps someone turned the tables on him. Blackmailers are a nasty breed, very nasty.'

After a further round of bitter, they emerged into the chilly night. Scarves of mist gathered along the trees.

As they drove away Plumer repeated: ‘Between ourselves, we've got a problem. The chief isn't keen on having us upset a lot of high-ups, well-known people, not that the Milners and their pals are really well known, not most of them anyway.'

It was the second time Plumer had said that. It was odd. Plumer was not the deferential type. And normally neither was the superintendent. ‘The dancer's famous,' he said, stating the obvious.

‘Yes, yes, I know that. Covent Garden, part of the war effort, got a gong. But we've got to go carefully. He's like a cat on a hot tin roof over this one. Look – there's a crime wave on, haven't you noticed. And this blighter was shot. Superintendent Blatchford wants it solved double quick, but he doesn't want a lot of scandal about queers and pansies. Member of the underworld, criminal fraternity, that's what we're looking for.'

‘We've done what we could in that direction. And the shooting was so amateurish.'

‘It's early days, whatever Blatchford says. We'll have to go back and try again. Apply more pressure. And as for amateurish – whoever shot the pansy probably did time in the war, not square bashing. A lot of these young hoodlums have no idea, they are bloody amateurs.' Plumer looked at his companion. ‘I know what's on your mind: Rita Hayworth. I'm right, aren't I. And I've nothing against you going and seeing her again. You might get her talking when her husband's not around. See if you can get anything out of her – romance her a bit, if you like. Never hurts to turn on the charm. And she probably knows as much about the dead man as anyone – and what her husband was up to, if anything. Worth a try, you never know. Don't get carried away, mind. Go easy. Always remember these sort of people have a different moral code from ours. We need to talk to the lawyer too. I suppose theoretically he is still an executor.'

‘The guest list – shall I follow them up as well?'

The chief inspector dropped Murray at Archway underground station before turning north-east towards his home and his meekly understanding wife in faraway Chingford.

Murray bought an evening paper and tried to read it in the tube going home, but he hadn't got over his astonishment at his boss's words. Romancing Mrs Milner! That Plumer, a model of moral rectitude, should have suggested flirting with a married woman had deeply shocked him. And he couldn't help wondering how Plumer behaved when ‘turning on the charm' – if he ever had, which was hard to imagine.

Yet perhaps the older man had more intuition than Murray gave him credit for, because as the train rumbled southwards, Paul Murray could not let go of the mental images of
her
: the white skin against the smooth black material of her dress, the curve of her backside as she'd risen so gracefully from her chair. His eyes wandered over the sports pages, but he was seeing the way her hands scrunched into her curls and feeling the warmth of her smile and the ingenuous gaze of those wonderful green eyes.

When he came out of Clapham North station the air seemed grimier and the streets dingier. As he walked towards the terraced house he rented with his mother – one in a long, long road of identical Edwardian houses, each façade top-heavy with crude plaster ornamentation – he sank into a mood of glum fatigue, and when he reached home, he found the house shabby and the furnishings sparse after Downshire Hill.

‘How the other half lives, Mother,' he said as she set a plate of cottage pie and cabbage in front of him. She did her best with the rations, but what depressed him about their life at home was the acceptance of drabness. The Milners' house had been so bright and colourful, but for him and his mother austerity had little to do with temporary shortages, it was rather the fabric of life itself; austerity was their
lot
, and always had been.

Paul Murray's father had died when he was eight. He'd got a scholarship to a grammar school and his mother had gone out to work as a char to keep him on after fourteen to sit the School Certificate, but the expense had been a tremendous strain. The school had wanted him to stay on even longer and do the Higher Certificate, but that was out of the question.

He'd joined the force as soon as he could after leaving school. At least the police offered a career; it was better than an office job and with more prospects. When war broke out he'd have liked to join up, but there was his mother and little brother to think of. He didn't know how she'd manage if he got killed. So he'd stayed on all through the war. People thought you had it easy back in Blighty. That was a laugh, he thought bitterly. The home front had been far from bloody safe. And as if criminals didn't have to go on being caught even if there was a war on. The amount of crime there'd been in the war; it was unbelievable! The callousness of it sometimes – looters going in after a raid and pulling rings and jewellery off corpses, lifting anything they could lay their hands on, handbags with ration books, absolutely anything. And talk about the black market … As he sat with his cup of tea and his cigarette at the end of the meal he felt himself descending into a mood of self-pity. If only he had medals and tales of wartime bravery in action with which to dazzle Mrs Milner.

But he pulled himself together. He had been brave in the war. He'd risked death many times. He'd chased gangsters and deserters. He'd saved bomb victims from toppling buildings and chased army deserters from them too. Now he was determined to solve this sinister case, and as he pictured again the overripe body of the masculine-looking man said to be a flamboyant homosexual, he wondered at what Neville Milner had said: that the late Freddie Buckingham was one of his wife's closest friends. How could such a beautiful woman sully herself by friendship with such a character? And how could her husband allow it?

His tea drunk, he left the house again, to telephone his fiancée, Irene, from the box at the end of the road. He'd applied to have a telephone installed in the house, he could afford it now, but there was a lengthy waiting list, even for a policeman, although Plumer had promised to pull some strings.

It would be Irene's birthday soon. He had to think of a present, and of somewhere more exciting to take her than the Gaumont restaurant on the Broadway.