Black Ship (25 page)

“Dash it, Daisy, you’re right. We’ll just have to hope they don’t get to it till tomorrow. Now. Ross, you’ll come with me to Jessup and Sons. Ardmore, it’s a late night for you. You’ll help Sergeant Tring search next door, and then, if you don’t find out where Aidan took a ticket to, you can be off to St. Pancras to see if we can trace him there. Mrs. Jessup gave me a photograph of him.” He handed it over. “Mr. Irwin simply couldn’t think of a reason why she shouldn’t.”

“He’s about as ordinary-looking as a bloke can get,” said Ardmore in dismay.

“Just do your best. I don’t want to have to ask every big-city force in the North to make enquiries at every car-hire firm near their main stations. We may get his destination at the shop, but I don’t want to wait.”

“Can’t trust ’em to tell the truth anyways,” Warren pointed out.

“What are you going to do about Lambert’s disappearance?” Daisy demanded.

“Circulate a description. Why don’t you write one out for me?”

“Right-oh.” Daisy turned to a fresh page of her notebook, glad that being a journalist meant she always had one available when needed for police business.

It was a pity Lambert had been in England long enough for his very American haircut to have grown out. He still kept his fair hair cropped very short, but in an English way. Horn-rimmed glasses, American-cut clothes, and an American accent were pretty distinctive, though. Unfortunately, the face behind the spectacles was about as ordinary as Aidan’s. “Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar, nor mark prodigious” to make him either “despised in nativity” or instantly recognisable.

Concentrating, Daisy missed Alec’s instructions to Warren. As she tore off the sheet and slid it across the table to him, Mackinnon came in.

“There’s a train I can catch if I leave right away, Chief, but I willna get to Boston till after nine. They’re booking a room for me and they’ll take me out to the farm. Should I go this evening or wait till tomorrow morning?”

“Farm people generally retire early. Better wait till the morning. It won’t make much odds. When you get to Boston, ring up for the latest developments here.”

“Right, sir.” He turned towards the door, then swung back. “I’ll be forgetting my own head next. Mr. Tring rang up while I was looking up the trains. He says he has the warrants and he’s on his way here.”

“Excellent. I hope he’s springing for a taxi, as you may if you need to. Go catch your train.” As Mackinnon went out, Alec consulted his wristwatch. “Five o’clock. I want to go and see what visibility is like in the garden.”

“The sky’s cleared,” said Daisy. “It’s lighter today than yesterday. By the way, what time did Mr. Whitcomb walk up through the garden yesterday on his way home from work?”

“Who went to the Whitcombs? Number seven.”

“Number seven?” Warren thumbed unhappily through his notebook. “DS Mackinnon and me, sir. Mr. Whitcomb wasn’t there, and we only asked did he mention seeing anything out of the ordinary. We knew we’d have to try again this evening to talk to all the gentlemen as was off at work.”

“I’d forgotten that,” Alec said ruefully. “I need more men! You’re right, Daisy. Even if Whitcomb saw nothing, the time he didn’t see it may help pin things down. Let’s see…. Tom had better—”

The telephone bell rang in the hall.

“Warren.” Alec jerked his thumb towards the door and the eyebrowless detective constable hurried out. “Ardmore, Ross, come outside and we’ll check what can be seen from where.”

They followed Warren out to the hall. Daisy sat on for a
moment, wondering why Alec was being so obliging about letting her join their conclaves. True, she knew the Jessups better than he did, but such was usually the case when she found herself enmeshed in one of his investigations. In fact, that was almost always why she was involved in the first place. Yet usually he strove to exclude her. Though she felt she had made one or two helpful suggestions, she found it hard to believe he had suddenly realised the inestimable value of her assistance.

There was no understanding it. With a shrug, she went after the men.

She was just in time to hear Warren call Alec back from the front steps. He stood at the rear of the hall, holding the telephone receiver at the full length of the wire and his arm.

“Sir, it’s DC Piper. He’s talked to three booze sellers, two wholesale, one retail on a large scale. They all recognised Castellano’s photo and Lambert’s name, though one of ’em tried to deny it. Castellano came to their houses, not their business places, trying to coerce them into shipping to the U.S. Then Lambert came along to the business, claiming to represent the U.S. government and warning them of dire consequences if they did. Half a mo—What’s that?” he said, stepping back to the telephone under the stairs.

“So Castellano
was
a bootlegger!” Alec exclaimed. He sent Ross and Ardmore out, shutting the front door after them against an icy draught. As he turned back, Warren reappeared, receiver at arm’s length.

“Do you want him to go on, sir? Seems there’s a list as long as your arm.”

“Not now. Tell him to meet me at Jessup and Sons at quarter past six.”

Warren retreated again. After a brief muffled colloquy, he once again reappeared, without the receiver this time.

“Get this, sir: Piper says one of the blokes is already exporting to America. At least, he admits he’s sent one smallish shipment. Castellano tried to bully him into selling to a diff’rent gang over there. He says he told Mr. Lambert he didn’t want to
get mixed up in a battle between gangs and he was getting out of the transatlantic trade.”

“Good heavens,” said Daisy, “Lambert won one. If only by default!”

Daisy went off upstairs to visit the twins.

Leaving Warren to man the phone, Alec went out. As Daisy had said, the clouds had cleared. In the west, the sky was still pale blue; a cold wind blustered, already drying out and scattering the neatly raked piles of fallen leaves. He wished he had put on his overcoat. He nearly went back for it, but his men were waiting. It had been a long day and the end was not in sight.

Far from clarifying matters, Ernie Piper’s report amounted to confusion worse confounded. It meant Castellano had had a motive for killing Lambert, yet Castellano was the one who had ended up dead.

Self-defence? The bootleggers’ emissary had been done in with cool deliberation. Pending the autopsy report, Alec reminded himself. Ridgeway had been pretty certain, though.

Alec was utterly unable to see Lambert as a cold-blooded murderer, or even a hot-blooded one, except by mistake.

And where did the Jessups come into all this?

Time enough to puzzle over that when Tom arrived. For the moment, Alec was glad of something practical to do.

Ross and Ardmore were down by the fountain, in the centre of the garden. He could see them quite clearly from his own front steps. There was a lamp standard opposite the house, at the top of the path, and another at the bottom, but none in the middle. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t recognise the men from here if he didn’t know who they were. The glow of their cigarettes was not visible, though he could tell from their gestures that both were smoking.

The Bennetts had field glasses, of course. Alec wondered whether they had really seen anything.

He waved. The motion caught the eye of Ross, the taller of the two. He waved back. They went round to the far side of the fountain, nearer to the trail where the body had been dragged across the lawn. There followed an ambiguous melée. Alec had told them to do whatever came to mind, as they didn’t know what had really happened. He could make out that they were involved in a struggle, but not exactly what was going on. Then one dropped to the ground. The other followed suit.

The first was supposed to lie on his back, the second to kneel over him, hands to throat. What with the twilight, the marble maiden with her urn, and the eighteen-inch-high rim of the pool, Alec could only assume they were sticking to his orders.

By the time he reached them, both were standing again, Ardmore brushing himself off.

“Get down again. I want to take another look from below.”

“Have a heart, sir,” protested Ardmore. “It’s bloody freezing lying on the flagstones.”

“It’s Ross’s turn. You can just freeze your knees. Wait till I get down to the lamppost.”

From the bottom of the slope, though Alec made allowances for the deepening dusk, the scene was even less intelligible. He could see the kneeling figure silhouetted against the pale marble and the paving beyond, but Ross, lying on the flat at just about his eye level, was virtually invisible.

Alec looked back at the Bennetts’ house. Their ground floor was only a couple of steps above street level. The view from their first floor, however, would be considerably better than his own from down here.

The best he could do was to take anything they said with a pinch of salt. Perhaps they’d decide they didn’t have anything to say after all.

He walked back up.

“Any help, sir?” asked Ross.

“Not really. Certainly not enough to narrow the time frame.
I take it you could see each other well enough to proceed with whatever nefarious business took your respective fancies?”

“Easy,” Ardmore averred.

“It’ll have to be tried again in full darkness, when the only light comes from the streetlamps. Does either of you know whether there’s a moon tonight?”

“Quarter moon,” said Ross promptly, “rises after midnight.”

“Perfect. How do you know?”

“I’m a sort of amateur astronomer, sir,” Ross explained as they walked up the hill. “Very amateur. My great-uncle left me his telescope. Trouble is, you can’t see much in London skies, what with smoke and fog and clouds, but I keep a track of the moon’s phases, in case there’s a good viewing night. You’d be surprised how often knowing comes in handy.”

“Good for you. I hope that’s Sergeant Tring,” Alec said, lengthening his stride as a taxi pulled up in front of number 6.

The cab rose perceptibly on its springs as its passenger climbed out. Definitely Tom.

When they reached the pavement, he had just paid off the cabbie. “Hope that’ll go down on expenses, Chief.”

“Certainly. I ought to have told you to take a taxi if you were successful.”

“Right here in my pocket, Chief.” Tom patted the relevant part of his extensive anatomy. “Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

They went into the house. Warren’s scarlet face peered out from his telephone cubby.

“Any phone calls?”

“Not a whisper, sir.”

“Did my wife come down yet?”

“No, sir.”

Heavy Teutonic thoughts of
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
crossed Alec’s mind. But much as she loved the babies, Daisy could barely boil an egg and was by no means a regular churchgoer. Besides, she was occasionally helpful in his work, and he was a modern husband, content to allow her hers. Still, he didn’t send someone up to invite her to join them.

“All right, Warren, you’d better come and listen to this. Leave the door open in case the telephone rings.”

They went into the dining room. Tom extricated the search warrants from an inner pocket and spread them on the table. “I managed to get hold of old Fanshawe,” he said. “He’d give you a warrant to search Buckingham Palace if you asked him nicely.”

Alec looked them over. “Very good. Tom, you’ll take Ardmore next door. Ross will go with me, and Piper’s meeting us in New Bond Street at six-fifteen. I have to interview the Jessups,
père et fils.
The search there will concentrate on their papers, so Ernie’s the best one for that. We have a Yard car, but we’ll have to leave in a minute, so let’s fill you in quickly on what you’ve missed. Discussion will have to wait until tomorrow.”

He gave a succinct exposition of the results of their enquiries to date. Ross, Ardmore, and Warren also listened closely, he was pleased to see. “Have I missed anything?” he asked them.

Ross spoke up. “About Sergeant Mackinnon going to Lincolnshire after the young lady, sir?”

“Thank you. Yes, he’s on his way. It’s not to be mentioned to any of the rest of the family. Apparently, there’s no telephone at the farm, but I don’t want to risk their somehow getting a message to Audrey Jessup. Tom, just run through what you’ll be looking for next door.”

“Most important, I reckon, Chief, is clues to just what happened last night, though what they might be is anyone’s guess. Also, any indication of where Mr. Aidan went. Some sort of weapon Castellano could’ve been hit with—that’ll be difficult till we get a better description from the pathologist.”

“And Castellano’s gun,” put in Ardmore.

“Ah!” said Tom. “That’d put the cat among the pigeons, right enough!”

“Wait till half past six,” said Alec, ignoring the ring of the telephone, which Warren dashed to answer. “Ask permission to search before you start waving the warrant. If I’m not back
when you’re finished, go round the Circle and see if you can catch those who were out this morning. And have another go at the visibility question—Ardmore, you can explain that to Mr. Tring. Warren’s to stick to the telephone. When you get home tonight, Tom, you’ll have to present my apologies to Mrs. Tring! Come along, Ross; we’d better get a move on.”

They went out to the hall. Daisy was coming down the stairs. She waved and called, “Are you leaving? Toodle-oo, darling. See you—”

“Sir!” Warren popped out of the cubby. “Sir, it’s Superintendent Crane, and he doesn’t sound too happy!”

“
Oh Lord!
I can’t talk to the Super now,” Alec groaned. “Daisy, tell him I’ve left, will you, and see what he wants now.”

“Me!” said Daisy in ungrammatical outrage.

But her outrage was wasted on the closing front door. With a sigh, she went to the telephone.

“Spitting fire!” Warren warned her, disappearing into the safe haven of the dining room.

She picked up the phone, held the receiver at what she hoped was a safe distance from her ear, and raised the transmitter to her mouth. “Mr. Crane?” she said cautiously.

“Who the …?” Even at arm’s length, his bellow was deafening. “Mrs. Fletcher?” The voice moderated, and Daisy ventured to move the receiver towards her ear. “This is Crane. I must speak to your husband.”