Blood and Judgement (6 page)

“Not more than one, then,” said Petrella weakly. “I’ve got a date with a girl.”

When he got to Corum Street, he found that life had ebbed back into its derelict creeks and backwaters. Most of the windows had lights in them, and there were two empty prams in the hall.

When he knocked on the door of Flat D, a voice said, “Come along in, whoever you are.”

Petrella pushed the door open and looked inside. There was no front hall. Flat D proved to be two intercommunicating rooms. The nearest of them was a living-room, with one of those contraptions which becomes a bed at the whisk of your hostess’ hand: the farther one, as far as he could see through the open door, was a bedroom, which, no doubt, could equally easily become a sitting-room.

Standing in the communicating doorway was a fluffy-haired, brown-eyed, comfortable-looking woman of thirty – thirty-five – forty? Petrella’s bachelor mind boggled at the problem.

“Do I know you,” she said, “or have you come to the wrong flat?” It was a Lowland voice, but it had an inner core of toughness, an acquired metropolitan hardness.

“Mrs Fraser?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Detective Sergeant Petrella.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I expect you’re surprised.”

“Not a bit. Is this going to take long enough for me to ask you to sit down?”

“I – well – I don’t know.”

“Sit down, then,” said the lady, relenting a little.

“You said you weren’t surprised,” said Petrella, settling cautiously into a wicker chair. “Why was that? Most people
are
surprised when–”

“The colonel – he lives opposite – told me you’d been asking for me this morning. He said ‘from his face you’d call him a schoolboy, but from his boots he’s a policeman.’”

“And I thought his mind was miles away.”

“Don’t let him fool you. That’s how he makes his living. You didn’t come to talk about him?”

“No,” said Petrella. “I came to talk about Mrs Ritchie. You shared these rooms, didn’t you?”

‘They’re my rooms. She had the use of one of them for a while.”

“Could you tell me about that? When she left, and so on.”

Jean looked at him speculatively, and Petrella got the impression that she was quite used to dealing with policemen; but policemen, perhaps, of a different sort. Not ones who said “Could you” and “Would you”.

“If you like,” she said. “Though it’s all ancient history now. She came here in – when would it be – January or February of this year. Some time about then. She left toward the end of September.”

“Do you remember which day?”

“How should I remember that?”

“Were you surprised when she left?”

“No more surprised than when she came. If you’re a policeman you’ll know that her husband was a criminal.”

“Yes. I knew that.”

“Well, I can read, Mr–”

“Petrella.”

“That sounds foreign.”

“It’s Spanish, actually.”

“Uh, huh. I was saying, I can read. When I saw in the papers that Monk Ritchie was out of prison – and later that he was believed to have escaped abroad – I formed my own conclusions.”

“Yes,” said Petrella. “I thought that was the way of it. What time of day did she go?”

“I couldn’t be certain. I left her here when I went to work in the morning. She was gone when I came back.”

“Without taking any of her things with her?”

“That’s true. But she hadn’t a lot, poor soul.”

“Are her things still in the room?”

“Am I a millionairess? It’s been let twice since then. There’s a Polish lady has it now. Would you like to see it? Madame Jablonski is out. She works in a café. She won’t object, I dare say.”

“How many times would you say the room has been cleaned since Mrs Ritchie left it?”

“Every day. And repainted and papered last month. Madame did it herself. She’s very artistic.”

“Then I don’t think,” said Petrella, “that there’s a great deal of point in my looking at it. What became of Rosa’s things?”

“I packed them in a bag and put them in the storeroom downstairs. Do you want to see them?”

“I’m not sure,” said Petrella. “I may do. First, could you tell me–” He was unwrapping the parcel he had brought with him. Mrs Fraser seemed to sense something either from his tone of voice or from his movements, and she was suddenly still.

“Do you recognize this dress? Or any of these clothes? Or the shoes?”

In the silence he heard a door open on the top landing and the voices of people speaking on the stairs.

“Where did you get them?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment,” said Petrella. “First, if you don’t mind – are they Mrs Ritchie’s?”

“Yes.” She had scarcely looked at them. “They’re hers. In fact, two of them – that and that – are mine. I lent them to her. Where did you find them?”

“We found a woman,” said Petrella, “on the bank of one of the reservoirs. You might have seen it in the papers – but it didn’t make much of a splash.”

“And that was Rosa?”

“From what you tell me, there seems no doubt about it at all.”

“And how – what had happened? Can you tell me that?”

“She had been shot. That’s in the papers now.”

“By her husband?”

“We don’t know that.”

“It would be her husband. Who else?”

“We may have to ask you to identify the body formally. Unless we can find a relative. Would you do that?”

“She’d no relatives down here that I know of. She came from Ayrshire. It’s where I’m from myself, that’s how we came to be friends. Yes, I’ll identify her, if I have to–”

“We may be able to do it some other way.”

“I’ll give you the name of the place I’m working.” She scribbled on a piece of paper. “It’s a place that makes sweets. Don’t come after me there. I’ve a reputation to lose.”

Petrella promised. Out in the street, it had started to rain again. He turned up the collar of his coat against it and stumped off. He was thinking about Mrs Fraser, and how nice she was, and how poor. And that she had become neither hysterical nor self-important about the violent death of her friend. He was thinking too deeply to have an eye out for his surroundings, and he missed a quick movement. Behind him, a man had detached himself from the shadows and moved cautiously out. Slowly though he moved, the dip and roll of his progress was unmistakable. Boot Howton looked first to right and left, then climbed the steps of No. 39 and disappeared into the hall.

Petrella was down at the reservoir by half past eight next morning. It was a calm, bright, cold winter’s day, a day of nipped fingers and steaming breath. He found Sergeant Dodds already at work.

A lorry and trailer stood in the open space in front of the cottage and Dodds and three men were offloading a flat-bottomed boat. It looked like an infantry-assault craft.

“Now you have got out of bed,” said Dodds, “you can come and lend a hand. I’m warning you it’s a lot heavier than it looks.”

Between them they staggered onto the landing stage, lowered one side, lifted the other, and heaved. The boat hit the surface with a solid ker-splash, sending a long ripple out over the surface of the water and fetching a protest from a sleepy swan.

“She floats,” said Dodds. “What next, George?”

“The detector gear has to be fixed in,” said the young man who seemed to be in charge of the party. “We can handle that now. Just tell us the line you want to take.”

“You’re to cover a strip,” said Dodds, “ten or twelve feet wide. Say two yards either side of the boat. Go straight across from this landing stage to the far end. There’s a point you can lay on. It isn’t easy to see from here. Where a path goes up through the bushes.”

“I’ll walk round in a minute and stick a flag in,” said the young man. “You show me just where you want it. It’s going to take me a bit of time to rig the gear. I’ll tell you when we’re ready.”

He went into a huddle with his two mechanics, and Petrella heard snatches of conversation about something which sounded like “the fixer magnet”. Then all three men went back to the lorry and started rolling back the tarpaulin.

“What’s it all about?”

“Just a bit of Chris Kellaway’s famous drive and efficiency,” said Dodds. “This is an up-to-date salvage unit. Private firm. George, here, does the frog stuff, when it’s called for. The other two operate the box of tricks. It’s a detector. Something the navy dreamed up for dealing with limpet mines. You can drag an electrical gadget across the bottom and if it comes within smelling distance of any metal it goes ‘ping’. In fact, it goes several different sorts of ‘ping’ and the bright boy sitting in the boat can tell how much metal, and what sort, and how far off, and so on.”

“And then the frogman goes down and has a look at it?”

“Right. And rather him than me this weather.”

“I don’t know,” said Petrella. “You can wear warm clothes inside the suit. As a matter of fact, I’ve always wanted–”

“Not today,” said Dodds. “Have a heart. You get it out of your system some other time. This is strictly a professional job.”

One of the men in the boat looked up from screwing an instrument panel to the cross-thwart of the boat and said, “How deep’s the water?”

Dodds consulted his plan. “Twenty feet in the middle,” he said. “Six feet at the sides. Gravel bottom, shelving gently. Piece of cake.”

The man grunted, picked up a ratchet screwdriver, and screwed in a screw as if he hated it.

“You’ve got to hand it to Chris,” said Dodds. “He does get ideas – sometimes. You take an ordinary piece of water, a pond or a river or a canal. You put a sensitive bit of machinery like this over it, and what happens? ‘Ping’ – and up comes an old kettle. ‘Ping-ping’ and it’s a washtub with a hole in it. ‘Ping-ping-ping’ and it’s an–”

“I get your point,” said Petrella.

“Here you’ve got a nice clear bottom. Shouldn’t be
anything
there except water. So every time she sounds off, it’s worth going down to have a look.”

“And you’re starting on this particular line because you think that whoever it was took the boat rowed her straight across and may have dropped – something or other – overboard. What
are
we hoping to find?”

“Like all good policemen,” said Dodds, “we’re keeping strictly open minds.”

The frogman now appeared, carrying a red-and-white survey flag on a stick, and he and Dodds wandered off together to mark the aiming point.

Petrella looked at his watch and remembered that the reason he was there was that he had a date with Mr Lundgren at nine o’clock.

Punctual to the minute, a smart little car drew up on the gravel sweep and the resident supply engineer jumped out.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” he said. “How are things progressing – what on earth’s going on?”

“It’s a treasure hunt – modern style,” said Petrella, and explained.

“I hope they don’t disturb a pair of little crested grebes,” said Lundgren. “This is the first year they’ve wintered here. Their nest’s over there, near where those two men are standing. What the devil are they waving that flag for?”

Petrella explained this too.

“Let’s stick flags up all round and have a regatta. Why not!” said Mr Lundgren sourly, and Petrella registered the thought that if Superintendent Kellaway had been just that little bit more tactful he would have told the supply engineer what he planned to do and got him on his side first.

“Do you mean to say,” went on Lundgren, “that you’re working on the assumption that the murderer shot this woman – she
was
shot, wasn’t she? – I thought it said so in the papers – and then took the boat, and rowed it across, and sunk it, and went up the path and climbed over a ten-foot fence. Why didn’t he walk out of the front gate? It’s locked, but it isn’t all that difficult to climb over. I’ve done it myself before now, and I’m no gymnast.”

This was precisely the point that was worrying Petrella, so instead of answering the question he asked one himself. “In fact,” he said, “had you noticed that the boat was missing?”

“No,” said Lundgren. He sounded a bit upset about this. “I expect we should have spotted it when we made a proper check. That would be when the next man came in.”

“And the house.”

“We’ll look at that now. I brought the keys with me.”

“Are we the first people to go in since Ricketts left?”

“Bless you, no. We may be a bit unbusinesslike, but we’re not as bad as that. One of our property managers went over it as soon as we heard Ricketts had gone. Turned off the gas and electricity, and checked that Ricketts hadn’t walked off with any of the Board’s property.”

“And had he?”

“On the contrary – now which of these two is the front-door key? – I seem to remember that he’d left quite a lot of his own stuff behind. We had it inventoried and stored away–”

(Petrella thought, Where did I hear that before? Of course, Rosa’s friend Jean. “I packed them in a bag and put them in the storeroom downstairs.” Two lots of belongings, waiting for two people to come back and claim them.)

“What sort of things?” he said.

“Bed linen and curtains and things like that. All these doors are apt to stick. Give it a push.”

Cold and dark and silent, the house awaited them, an old woman, her hands folded, expectant of indignities.

“Smells damp to me,” said Mr Lundgren. “We’ll have to get it thoroughly aired before the next man comes in. I’ll go and open the shutters. Then we shall have a bit more light.”

One door on the right of the tiny hallway opened into the living-room; another, at the end, into the kitchen. The stairs rose straight out of the hall.

“It’s a simple sort of but and ben,” said Lundgren, “but it’s handy. There’s a nice bedroom, and a modern bathroom and lavatory upstairs. Main drainage, of course. And electricity, only it’s turned off just now.”

“I expect it’s very nice,” said Petrella, repressing a shudder. “When it’s warm and cheerful. Just at the moment–”

“I’ll open the shutters.”

They gazed round the living-room. The carpet had been rolled up and the floor scrubbed. An imitation-leather sofa and two armchairs were stacked together in front of the unprotected grate. Petrella ran a finger along the top of the nearest chair, producing a faint powdering of greeny white mould. Lundgren was right. The place was damp.

“We had it cleaned right out. I expect we shall redecorate before the next man comes in.”

“Yes,” said Petrella. “What I’d like to do is have a word with the man who saw it first. Did he get the impression that Ricketts had taken his time about going? Had he packed all his things up carefully? That’d take time, you see. Or did he just cram what he wanted into a suitcase and push off?”

“I’m not sure,” said Lundgren. “There was something in the report – I’ve got it at the office. I’ll look at it when I get back. No, I remember. It was the washing. The laundry had delivered a week’s washing. It was still in the porch when our man came round.”

“There’s nothing in that,” said Petrella. “Anyone might forget their washing. Let’s look upstairs.”

The bedroom was furnished simply with a bed, now stripped to its springs, a chest of drawers and cupboard. The chest and cupboard were empty and clean.

“Some of the things left in here would certainly have been his,” said Lundgren. “The sheets and pillowcases, for instance. The blankets and bedding were supplied by us. That vase now – I’m not sure–”

“Even if I’d had plenty of time,” said Petrella, “I think I might have managed to leave that behind.” The vase was pink, and embossed with tiny green oyster shells which formed the words “A present from Whitstable.”

“Not absolutely my taste,” agreed Lundgren. “But some people like that sort of thing. Here’s the bathroom.” This, too, was bare, except for a cork bath mat and several dozen rusty razor blades, which had been overlooked on top of the medicine cupboard.

“Well, he took his toothbrush,” said Lundgren.

“And his towel. Let’s try the kitchen.”

Here there was more to be seen. The room had been scrubbed and tidied, but they found a cupboard full of tins and packets – corn flour, tea, sugar (turned by the damp into a granular lump), and other accessories of the kitchen. In the larder stood a plate with a remnant on it that defied immediate analysis. There was a crusted saucepan pushed away on a shelf over the gas stove, and beside it a dry kettle.

“It’d be interesting, too, to know if he left any washing up behind him. That’d be a pointer to the time of day he left. Perhaps your man could tell us that? And by the way – I don’t think I ever asked you. What day did he go?”

“Now, that I can tell you exactly,” said Lundgren. “I found the copy of his telegram on my desk when I got to my office that Monday. It had been sent off two days before, on Saturday night.”

Petrella swallowed hard.

“Saturday?”

“That’s right. Saturday, September 22nd. I was due to start my holiday on the following Friday – that’s how I know.”

The world, which had been rotating comfortably on its axis, stood still; then started again with a lurch. Petrella said softly, “What a fool! What a fool! What a brainless, clueless fool!”

Lundgren gaped at him.

“Myself, I mean. Fool not to ask such an obvious question right at the start.”

“Is the date important?”

“Certainly it’s important. In fact, right now it’s the most important thing in the case. We’ve got to get hold of Ricketts, and get hold of him quick. Do you know where he is?”

“Well,” said Mr Lundgren. “No. Really, I’m afraid I don’t. We never made any real effort to trace him. We were sorry he left us, but he wasn’t a criminal or anything. Why is it suddenly so important to know where he is?”

From outside, on the reservoir, there came a shout. One of the men in the boat was on his feet and calling to the bank. Then the excitement seemed to subside. The man sat down again.

In this space of time, Petrella had come to an important conclusion. He wanted Lundgren’s help. And he would only get it at the cost of telling him the truth or a good deal of it. And this he did.

When he had finished, Lundgren said, “I must say, it sounds pretty conclusive to me. The woman was Rosa Ritchie, you say?”

“Almost certainly, yes. The dental check should be conclusive. But I think we might assume it.”

“And she was killed on Saturday, September 22nd. Most probably in the afternoon or evening, wouldn’t you think? The other men go off duty at one o’clock on a Saturday. Except for Ricketts.”

“Exactly,” said Petrella. “
Except for Ricketts
. And your evidence shows that he cleared out that same evening. Do you happen to remember exactly what time his telegram to you was sent off?”

“I don’t remember,” said Lundgren. “But I’ve got the confirmation copy in my files. Would you like to see it? I can run you back to my office in the car.”

“Grand. I’ll have to telephone my superintendent. We’ll arrange to have the place gone over thoroughly. And I’ll need help for that. Not that we’re likely to find much now.”

“You don’t think, do you,” said Lundgren, as they got into the car, “that Ricketts–”

“Shot Mrs Ritchie?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not impossible. It doesn’t quite fit in with one or two other things. I think this is the sort of case where it’s a mistake to jump to conclusions.”

He caught Kellaway at his desk and told him what had happened. After he had finished speaking, there was a very slight pause. It was as if the superintendent was trying to fit the news into an existing pattern of notions, and the rough edges would not quite match. Then he said, “Yes, of course. That’s a vital piece of news. I’ll have a team sent down right away to go over that cottage with a tooth-comb. Keep on at the Ricketts angle and let me know what happens.”

In Lundgren’s office, a little research produced the telegram.

“That’s our private stamp,” said Lundgren. “It shows that it was dealt with here on the morning of September 24th. Otherwise it’s exactly as it was received. Dispatched from Leicester Square Head Post Office, you see, at 9:45 p.m.”

The telegram was addressed “Metropolitan Water Board North West Area” and said, “Am leaving job and cottage tonight going Blackpool Regret inconvenience Writing Ricketts.”

“Terse, and to the point,” said Petrella.

“It was a considerable shock,” said Lundgren. “When a man pulls out suddenly like that, you can’t help wondering if everything’s in order in his department. Not that Ricketts handled any of our money.”

“Everything at the cottage was in order. And his gear?”