Black Ship (35 page)

It was late when they reached Hampstead. They were all exhausted. Brief good nights were said on the pavement, then Daisy plodded up the steps to her front door, followed by the driver with her suitcase. At the top, he set it down. She tipped him, and as he ran back down to help the others, she rang the bell rather than dig for the key in her bag.

Elsie opened the door. “Oh madam, I’m ever so glad you’re back.”

“So am I,” said Daisy fervently, hurrying into the warmth of the hall.

“There’s messages,” announced the parlour maid, lugging the suitcase in and closing the door. “The master rang up, and he may be very late tonight. And that Mr. Lambert called twice, and I know it was him, even if he did have his collar up and his hat down and wouldn’t give his name.”

“Oh no!”

“Yes’m, it was him for sure.”

“What did he want?”

“He wouldn’t tell me, ’m. Said he needed to speak to you or the master, so I told him you was in the North and if he wanted the master, he’d better go to Scotland Yard, and he said he wasn’t going there, thank you very much, the way they treated him last time. He said to tell you it was urgent, but he wouldn’t leave an address or telephone number.”

“Oh dear, I wonder what’s wrong!”

“Not to worry, madam. He said he’d keep coming back till he got hold of you. And there’s one more.”

“One more what?” Daisy asked blankly, her mind on Lambert’s gyrations.

“Message, ’m.” She went to the hall table. “My sister brought round this note. They’re in a terrible state over there, she said, but she wouldn’t tell me what about, and I reckon she don’t really know.”

Daisy’s heart sank. On the whole, she would have preferred to remain in ignorance. Trying to hide a sigh, she said, “Thank you, Elsie. Take my suitcase up, would you, please.”

She opened the note. It was from Mrs. Jessup. Patrick had been asked to go to Scotland Yard to “assist the police with their enquiries.” What did it mean? Mr. Irwin was no help at all, since all he did was reiterate that he “took the gravest view” of the situation, which she and her husband were quite capable of doing for themselves. Would Daisy please come—when she had recovered from the journey, of course—and explain the significance of those ominous words.

There was a blotch that looked alarmingly like a tearstain. Daisy couldn’t imagine Mrs. Jessup crying. Had the note sounded
even remotely accusatory, she would have sent a refusal, wrapped decently in mentions of fatigue and the lateness of the hour. But nothing suggested Daisy or her policeman husband was responsible for the Jessups’ plight.

She decided she’d better go right away. If she took off her coat and sat down, or went to see the babies, she might never get moving again. With a sigh she made no effort to conceal, she called up the stairs to Elsie. “I’m going next door!”

“The only question I want you to ask him,” Alec said to Tom Tring, “is, ‘And then?’ I want you to hear his story just as he chooses to tell it. With any luck, we might learn something from comparing it with what he told me in Manchester. I want it word for word, Ernie.”

“Don’t I always, Chief?” Piper asked, injured.

Alec grinned. “On the whole, unless my wife is present.” Ernie Piper was expert at omitting from his notes the bits of Daisy’s interventions that were best omitted.

On this occasion, close similarity of wording would suggest Patrick was reciting a tale he had learnt by heart. On the other hand, if minor details varied, odds and ends he’d surely remember if they’d actually happened, the presumption would be that he was making it up and had forgotten exactly what he had said before.

Tom and Ernie went out. Alec turned to the pile of reports on his desk. On top were those compiled during his absence.

Mackinnon had returned from Lincolnshire. According to his official typed report, Mrs. Aidan Jessup appeared to have been kept in ignorance of her husband’s and brother-in-law’s activities. A paper clip appended a single pencilled sheet: He had not tried to find out from her the whereabouts of her husband because Mrs. Fletcher had assured him that was already known.

Alec crumpled the paper into a ball and chucked it in the wastepaper basket. Mackinnon was getting as good as Ernie Piper at covering up Daisy’s meddling.

Tom had talked to Whitcomb, who had returned home from the City at about twenty to seven, by taxi because of the rain. He had seen nothing and no one in the garden. It had been dark and wet and he had not been looking.

No one knew where Lambert was, but his landlady, going into his room to dust (so she claimed), thought he had come back while she was out shopping and taken his razor, toothbrush and hairbrush, and some clothes. Alec was relieved that he had shown signs of life. The man was an incompetent, frequently irritating idiot, but one wouldn’t want any harm to come to him, not least because of repercussions from the Americans. Daisy would be glad.

And speaking—or rather, thinking—of the Americans, next in Alec’s pile was a lengthy tirade from Superintendent Crane explaining exactly what the U.S. State Department had said to the U.S. embassy had said to the Foreign Secretary had said to the Home Secretary had said to the Assistant Commissioner (Crime)…. Alec skimmed through it. They were all unhappy.

He sent for a cup of tea.

The last of the new reports was Tom’s interview with the Bennetts. They had not changed their story in any material way. They had seen Patrick Jessup, accompanied by—

“Bloody hell!” Alec swore aloud. The constable just entering with his tea slopped it in the saucer. “How could I have forgotten?”

Daisy had
done her best to convince the Jessups that, though probably more conversant with police procedure than the average law-abiding citizen, she was not an expert on the subject. Nonetheless, they hung on her words.

She didn’t want to give false hope, nor to crush all hope. It was very difficult.

“It’s true that the police don’t usually ask a person to go to the Yard, or the nearest police station, to answer questions unless they have strong grounds for suspicion,” she said. “But sometimes it’s just for convenience’ sake or to avoid interruptions, or something like that.”

“Then it doesn’t mean Patrick has been arrested?” Mrs. Jessup asked, hands clasped in supplication.

“No, though it quite often precedes an arrest,” Daisy admitted. “But he did move Castellano’s body, didn’t he? That’s an offence, I believe. I don’t know if it’s a felony or a misdemeanour, but surely it can’t be terribly serious.” She looked at Irwin, who sat with lips pursed, saying nothing. No help there. “They can hold him for twenty-four hours without charging him, I think.”

“If that’s all they’re asking Patrick about,” said Audrey, clinging to her husband, who looked pretty much all in, “does it mean they still might arrest Aidan for killing him? When he’s recovered?”

“I really can’t—”

“Please, madam …” The parlour maid turned pink as everyone looked at her.

“A message from Mr. Patrick?” Mr. Jessup asked eagerly.

“No, sir. It’s my sister, sir, from next door. There’s a gentleman come to call and Mrs. Dobson—that’s Mrs. Fletcher’s housekeeper—said Elsie better come over right away ‘cause the gentleman’s already come by twice when no one’s home and he says it’s urgent. If you please, madam,” she added with a bob towards Daisy.

“Mr. Lambert?” Daisy asked, resigned, and quite glad of an excuse to escape the unhappy Jessups, if only temporarily.

“Yes’m.”

“I’d better go, Mrs. Jessup. I’ll come back if I can, if you’d like me to.”

As she rose, Mr. Jessup followed suit, saying, “We mustn’t trespass on your kindness any longer this evening, Mrs. Fletcher. We all greatly appreciate your willingness to give us the benefit of your experience in … in such matters.”

To a general murmur of thanks, he escorted her to the door of the room. The whole debacle was essentially his fault, Daisy thought. He might have nothing to do with Castellano’s death, but he was responsible for the illegal trade with America that had brought his family into the orbit of the bootleggers.

Enid showed her out. In spite of a biting wind, she paused on the Jessups’ porch, gazing down across the garden. Where could Castellano’s gun be, if a thorough search had not discovered it? Finding it was vital to the Jessup brothers’ defence. She had to persuade Alec to search again.

The Greek maiden in the fountain was silhouetted against a light in the Bennetts’ front room, a light not obscured by a
curtain. They must be watching through their binoculars, gloating over their neighbours’ misfortune.

They couldn’t spend all their time spying. What rotten luck that they happened to see Patrick coming home…. Patrick and … That’s what she’d been forgetting! Patrick and a man with his hat pulled down …

Oh Lord, she thought, not Lambert!

Had Lambert somehow found out Patrick was on his way home, from a trip involving precisely the business it was
his
business to prevent? Had he accosted him, or simply followed him? Had he recognised Castellano as a bootlegger, even as a thug belonging to the “Luckcheese” gang? Could he have …?

No, Lambert was no more capable of cold-blooded murder than Patrick was, or Aidan. He wouldn’t know how to set about it, in the first place, and if he did, he couldn’t carry it out effectively. The pathologist had to be mistaken!

Daisy hurried down the Jessups’ steps and up her own.

Alec strode into the room, leant with both fists on the desk, and loomed threateningly over Patrick Jessup. “You blazing fool!” he snarled. “Why the devil didn’t you tell me there was someone with you?”

Patrick blinked up at him. “What …? Oh, Callaghan. D’you know, I’d almost forgotten about him.”

Alec dropped into the chair behind the desk, hastily vacated—without comment—by Tom Tring, who in turn dispossessed Ernie Piper. Ernie leant against the wall and selected a fresh, well-sharpened pencil from his endless supply.

“Callaghan,” Alec said sarcastically. “We progress. Why did you not tell me about your friend Callaghan?”

“He’s no friend of mine,” Patrick protested. Alec just looked at him. He wriggled under that hard, cold gaze. “Actually, there were several reasons.” Alec let him wriggle. “Well, he wasn’t a
friend, but he looked after me in America. Sort of like a guide, but he called himself my ‘protector.’ He worked for the man I was dealing with.”

“Name?”

“I’m not supposed to … Well, all right, he calls himself Frank Costello, but I think he’s Italian, not Irish. He’s not our customer. He runs the bootlegging for him. Callaghan—Mickie Callaghan, but that may not be his real name—he is Irish, though—he came to England with me. I don’t think Michael Callaghan was the name in his passport, actually. Customs took away his gun. I didn’t know he’d brought it, or I’d have told him they wouldn’t allow it into the country.”

In which case, Alec thought, forewarned he’d have taken precautions and smuggled it in. One must thank heaven for small mercies. He waited.

“It didn’t seem fair to get him mixed up in our troubles when … when Aidan accidentally killed that man.”

“Lord preserve me from chivalrous fools!”

Patrick flushed. “Anyway, he skedaddled pretty quick.”

“You saw him go?” Alec asked sharply.

“Well, no. But when I looked for him to ask him to help me get Aidan into the house, he wasn’t there.”

Alec exchanged a glance with Tom, who nodded with a look of enlightenment.

“I was quite glad, as a matter of fact,” Patrick went on. “I didn’t really want to take him home.”

“Not the sort you’d want to introduce to your mother?”

“No. That was another reason for not mentioning him, keeping him out of things altogether.”

“And? You had other reasons?”

“Well, once I’d not told you about him, it seemed best not to complicate matters. There didn’t seem to be any point, and I thought you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“It didn’t cross your mind … No, why should it? You believed your brother had killed Castellano.”

“Accidentally!”

“Accidentally. As it happens, Castellano did not die from the crack on the head. He was murdered, deliberately, probably while he lay unconscious.”

“And you think … You thought … No wonder …” Patrick’s mouth dropped open as realisation dawned. “Oh Lord, you think Callaghan did it? While I was taking care of Aidan?”

“And then scarpered. You’re not off the hook yet, but it seems likely. If you had informed us right away of his existence, we might have had a chance to catch him. Still, however long the odds, we’ll have to give it a shot. Let’s have all the details.”

Elsie had left Lambert standing in the hall, a mark of disapprobation with which Daisy heartily concurred. It was quite the wrong time to drop in without an invitation.

Lambert seemed uncharacteristically pleased with himself, as Daisy could see, because he had hung his hat on the coat tree and his coat collar was for once turned down. Nana fawned adoringly about his ankles, obviously remembering all those wonderful walks she had taken him on.

“Good evening, Mrs. Fletcher. I thought I’d never catch you home.”

“Good evening.” She hoped he hadn’t had his wallet pinched again and come looking for a bed. Then she remembered that he had rescued her from a sticky wicket next door, albeit inadvertently. “Do come in, Mr. Lambert, and tell me what I can do for you.”

She led the way to the small sitting room and waved him to a chair. “May I get you a … Oh, no, of course, you don’t drink. I’ll ring for coffee.”

“Never mind that.” He was too excited to sit down. “I’ve collared him!” he announced triumphantly, striding back and forth.

Daisy was not too excited to sit down. She slumped into a chair and enquired, “Collared whom?”

He looked at her in surprise. “The murderer, of course.”

Daisy sat up. “The murderer?” she asked incredulously. “You mean the man who killed Castellano?”

“The guy in the park out there. That’s his name?” His eyes gleamed behind the horn-rimmed glasses. Daisy noticed a bruise on his cheek. “Oh wowee! That’s one of the guys I was sent to find. I’ve seen him about, but I never could discover his name. Oh wowee!”