Authors: Peter Lovesey
Bloodhounds (10 page)
Peter Diamond was still up after midnight watching television, picking holes in the plot of an old film,
To Catch a Thief.
Stephanie had quit after the first commercial break. "Far be it from me to drag you away from Grace Kelly," she told him. "See it to the end. I'm tired."
She was amused to see that the new kitten stayed on the arm of his chair, ready to pounce on his hand if he moved. It still had no name. Peter had this weird theory that the kitten would let them know what it wanted to be called. She was content to let the little tabby do its own job of winning approval. On the first evening, after the predictable flare-up when he'd spotted the cat-tray, her bruiser of a husband, the tyrant of Manvers Street, had stayed up most of the night with the kitten in case it cried. Big softie.
Then the phone rang.
She was still sitting up in bed reading when he came into the bedroom to hand over the kitten. "I'm going to have to go out, love. That was Wigfull."
Her eyes widened. "He isn't your boss, is he? What does he want at this time of night?"
"He's found a body."
"Personally?"
"So he says. Murder is my pigeon, not his."
"Where is it?"
"On a canal boat."
"In Bath?"
"Limpley Stoke. That boatyard near the Aqueduct. I've got to go."
"It's wickedly cold tonight. There's a frost."
"I'll take it carefully down Brassknocker," he promised.
"I wasn't thinking of your driving. I meant I'm going to freeze in this bed without you."
He smiled. "You'll have warmed up nicely by the time I get in."
"Thanks—I'll really look forward to that. You'll be as cold as Finnegan's feet on the day they buried him."
By daylight Brassknocker Hill offers a series of glorious, gasp-inducing views of the Limpley Stoke Valley. By night the descent from Claverton Down is even more dramatic, for you plunge into a vast, black void with just a scattering of lights. He would have driven cautiously anyway, without the frost warning. At the bottom he turned right at the Viaduct pub, joined the A36 and immediately left it by the traffic lights.
The entrance to the Dundas boatyard is an unprepossessing pull-in over uneven ground a few yards along the Bradford Road. The gate was open, and a few frost-coated cars were parked inside. He bumped over a couple of potholes and stopped beside an empty police car. Nobody was about. There was some kind of notice at the far end of the parking area. He groped in his glove compartment for a torch. The notice informed him: YOUR CAR is AT RISK FROM THIEVES.
There was only one way to go: up a slope toward some temporary-looking buildings that turned out to be the boat-yard offices. They stood beside a stretch of the old Somerset Coal Canal that was used for mooring. His torch picked out a small iron bridge and beyond it a row of narrowboats and other small craft.
Along the towpath he discovered that the moorings extended much farther than he had first appreciated, using both sides of the canal. Fifty or sixty boats must have been tied up there. He flicked the torch over some names painted in the florid lettering that is the canal boat style:
Henrietta, Occam's 's
Razor, Charleen.
They were moored for the winter, he guessed, locked up, curtains drawn, with everything portable removed from the decks. If cars were at risk from thieves, then so were boats.
Presently voices carried to him. A torchbeam speared the darkness and dazzled him. He stepped out toward John Wigfull, two uniformed officers, and a bearded man in a deerstalker hat. They were beside a red narrowboat called the
Mrs. Hudson.
As if to proclaim that it was also a houseboat, some twenty conifers in pots stood along the roof, and there was a television aerial. The interior was lit, but nothing could be seen; the Venetian blinds were closed at all the windows.
"This is Mr. Motion," Wigfull said, with a nod at the bearded man. "He owns the boat."
"Nice boat," said Diamond to Motion. "And you say there's a corpse inside?"
Wigfull said, "We found it together."
"You
found it?" Diamond could have added that Wigfull was supposed to be fully stretched investigating a stamp theft, but there was no need. The point was made in the way he stressed the word
You.
"Peter, can we take this from the beginning? We've got to wait for the SOCOs, so you might as well hear what happened. Mr. Motion walked into Manvers Street this evening and informed us that the missing Penny Black had come into his possession."
"So you've found it." Diamond took a longer look at Motion in his deerstalker, but without shining a torch into his face it was difficult to assess the man in these conditions. "A body
and
the stamp?"
Wigfull continued, "It turned up in a book. He doesn't know how it got there. He happened to be reading from this book at a meeting. There's a club called the Bloodhounds that meets on Mondays—"
"Hold on a minute. The what?"
"Bloodhounds."
"We're a group of local people with a mutual interest in crime fiction," Motion explained in a tone that expressed some irritation with Wigfull. Clearly they'd been over this a number of times already.
Wigfull said, "They bring their books to the meeting and read bits. When Mr. Motion opened his, the cover was inside— and when I say cover, I'm using the stamp collectors' term. I mean the envelope with the Penny Black. It was between the pages at precisely the section Mr. Motion had chosen to read from. Have I summarized the facts correctly, Mr. Motion?"
"Yes," said Motion wearily.
"He opened the book and made the discovery in the presence of six other witnesses. When he realized what it was, he came directly to the station and reported it. That was at five to nine this evening. I was called in and interviewed him from nine thirty onward."
"For almost three hours," said Motion.
"This wasn't a missing budgerigar you brought— in, sir," said Wigfull, displaying some impatience of his own. "It's the world's most valuable stamp." He switched back to Diamond. "Mr. Motion insists that the book never left his hands from the time he started out for his meeting."
"Literally?" said Diamond.
Motion gave a nod.
"I see that you're wearing an overcoat, sir. Did you wear it for the meeting?"
"Obviously not," said Motion.
"You removed it, then, and still held on tosthe book? Not impossible, but not easy."
"You're splitting hairs, aren't you? I put it on a chair for a moment, but it didn't leave my possession."
"So we shouldn't take everything you say as the literal truth. Carry on, John."
Wigfull said, "We've been over this several times."
"You mean you covered the question of the overcoat."
"I established that nobody at the club had an opportunity to place the cover inside the book," Wigfull said, sidestepping the overcoat question. "It was likely that it was in the book before he started out—in which case, the perpetrator must have boarded this boat, got inside and found the book, and planted the cover between the pages. Mr. Motion insists that the boat is always locked. He uses a padlock with a key that is unique."
"Unique? Most padlocks are sold with two keys," said Diamond. Wigfull's complacent manner was bringing out the pedant in him.
"There were two originally," Motion explained. "One fell into the canal at least a year ago. I only have the one."
"Couldn't someone buy a padlock with a similar key?"
"No. Not in England. It's German-made. A strong lock, and expensive. From that locksmith in George Street. Well, you can see for yourself."
Diamond shone his torch on the steel padlock, now unlocked and hooked over an iron staple fixed to the top of the door. When the door was closed, the staple would slot into a hinged metal strap attached to the sliding hatch at the back end of the roof. It looked a secure arrangement. He wouldn't touch anything until the Scene of Crime Officers arrived. Certainly the padlock was heavy-duty. "Do you attach this at all times?" he asked Motion.
"Except when I'm aboard. Then I can close everything and bolt it from inside."
"And do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Always take the trouble to bolt yourself in?"
"Of course I do. I want my home to feel as secure as you no doubt wish yours to be." Motion didn't jib at crossing swords with Diamond. He had the confidence of someone well practiced with words.
Wigfull took up the narrative again. "Naturally, after questioning Mr. Motion about the stamp I decided to accompany him here and see if his story held up. When we got here, the boat was padlocked, just as he claimed. But when he opened it, we found the body inside, lying on the floor of the lounge."
"Before your very eyes."
"What?"
"Just like magic."
Wigfull said huffily, "I didn't find it particularly enchanting."
"But you can't think how it was done."
"Can you? Mr. Motion swears that nobody was aboard when he left for his meeting."
"What about the door at the front end?" asked Diamond.
"Prow," said Wigfull.
"Bolted from the inside," said Motion.
"The windows?" Diamond shone his torch along the side of the boat. There were five in view. "Fair enough," he said, for it was obvious that no one could have climbed through the narrow vents at the top. "No other means of access? Hatches?"
"There's a hatch to the engine, but that wouldn't let you into the cabin."
"You've got some explaining to do, sir."
"
I
have?" said Motion. "I'm more mystified than you are."
"The funny thing is," said Wigfull, "the place in the book where the missing stamp was found is the start of a chapter with the title 'The Locked-Rbom Lecture.' "
"Is that funny?" said Diamond.
"You can't deny it's a strange coincidence. What we've got here is a locked room puzzle. How did the body get into the boat when it was locked?"
"Right now, I'm more interested in the body. Do we know who it is?"
"He's face down."
"So it's male?"
"I examined him briefly to see if he was still alive. There was blood beside his head. He'd gone. No pulse. I don't know if you can see anything between the blinds." Wigfull crouched at the nearest window, but the slats on the Venetian blinds were tightly closed.
"Do you have any idea who this man might be, sir?" Diamond asked Motion.
"None. I wasn't allowed to go in. I unlocked and reached for the light switch and saw the figure lying on the floor ahead of me and said 'Oh my God!' or something similar, and then this gentleman took over. That's all I can tell you."
The drone of car engines entering the boatyard stopped the conversation. Two bobbing sets of headlights came down from the road and advanced along the towpath: the Scenes of Crime team in the Land Rovers. In no time they were climbing into white overalls and stretching barrier tapes across the towpath, regardless that no one was likely to come along at this hour.
"If you'd open the blinds, we can take a look at the scene without disturbing you," Diamond suggested, but it was getting on for twenty minutes before this request was acted upon. The SOCOs had their procedures and stuck to them.
Eventually the senior man informed Diamond, "Victim is a male, white, aged about forty-five. Light brown raincoat over a blue sports jacket, black trousers, white shirt and black tie. There's a cap beside him, brown. The only injury I can see is the head wound."
"And the weapon?"
"Couldn't tell you. Nothing obvious in there."
Diamond turned to Milo Motion. "Know anyone of that description?"
"No."
"You live alone here?"
"Haven't I made that clear?"
"Not to me." He hesitated. "I'm bound to ask this, sir. Do you have a companion?"
"Absolutely not." Spoken with umbrage.
"They've lifted the blinds now. Would you look at this man and tell me if you recognize him?"
"He's face down."
"From his clothes and general appearance. We can't move him until the doctor has looked at him."
Motion bent closer to one of the windows. "He looks a little like . . . But that's impossible."
"Like who, sir?"
"Like a man called Sid. But he's one of the Bloodhounds. He does have a raincoat like that. No, it couldn't possibly be Sid. He was at the meeting with me until it ended. Besides, what would Sid be doing on my boat?"
Next morning in the briefing room at Manvers Street, Diamond assembled the Murder Squad. It didn't matter that half of them were officially seconded to Operation Bumblebee; Wigfull's people were ordered to attend. Murder took precedence over everything. Even so, the stamp's recovery had given the Bumblebees some encouragement.
Diamond soon put a stopper on that. "You lot may be feeling chipper this morning, but I got sod-all sleep last night. If there's anything to be pleased about, I'd like to know what."
A young inspector recently transferred from Radstock rashly told him what.
"That's the good news, is it?" said Diamond.
"Well, it sounds like good news to me, sir."
"Good news, my arse. You don't know who nicked it yet. Can't take any credit. It was handed in. Jack the lad made us look like the plods we are. What kind of good news is that?"
"It's bad news, sir," the inspector said in a sharp about-turn.
"Wrong again, squire. That isn't the bad news. The bad news is that somebody was killed last night. And there seems to be a link between the murder and the theft." He addressed the entire room. "The victim was a man of forty-six called Sid Towers, a night watchman. Towers was last seen alive in the center of Bath at eight forty-five last night. The body was discovered by Mr. Wigfull, here, and the man who handed in the stamp, name of Milo Motion. Got that? Milo Motion. Time: about one A.M. this morning. Location: on a narrowboat moored at the Dundas boatyard, across the road from the Viaduct pub. Victim was cracked over the head with some heavy object like a spanner. It hasn't been found yet. The divers are already at the scene in case it was thrown into the water, but I doubt it. This killer is smart—and that is an understatement. Milo Motion, who lives aboard the boat, locked up at a quarter to seven to attend a meeting in Bath, and when he got back with John Wigfull at his side the padlock was still in place."
"With the victim inside the cabin," Wigfull himself put in.
"I'd better tell you about the Bloodhounds. Wipe the smile off your face, Keith. These are crucial facts I'm giving you. Milo Motion belongs to a club—a literary society, he calls it—known as the Bloodhounds. They meet in the crypt of St. Michael's—that big church by the Podium—every Monday to discuss detective stories."
He broke off the narrative to point at someone making a sly aside to his neighbor. "Will you shut up and listen to this? Sid Towers, the murdered man, was a member of this Bloodhound club and was present at the meeting. And a strange thing happened. Milo Motion, the owner of the boat, had agreed to read a chapter from a book he'd brought with him. A book of his own, right? This chapter was on the subject of locked room mysteries, which I gather have a devoted following among people who read whodunits. He opened the book at the place he wanted and—what do you know?—there was the missing Penny Black lying between the pages like a bookmark. Everyone was shocked, not least Mr. Motion. The meeting ended early, and Motion came straight to us and spent the rest of the evening being put through the grinder.
"All told, it wasn't Milo Motion's day, getting lumbered with a stolen stamp and a murdered corpse. He insists that his boat was locked all evening, and he was the only person in possession of a key. Yet when he unlocked, the body was found there. So do we charge Motion with murder? Do we, heck! He has a better alibi than the Pope. I told you Towers was alive at eight forty-five. At five to nine, Motion was meeting the desk sergeant downstairs. He couldn't have traveled to the boatyard and back in ten minutes. And the rest of the time he was with John Wigfull. What we have, my friends, is a locked boat mystery."
One of Wigfull's team said, "He could have hired someone."
"Motion could?"
"Couldn't he?"
"To do a killing on his own boat?" said Diamond on a shrill note of disbelief.
"You said we're dealing with someone smart, or better than smart. Maybe this is the ultimate in bluffing."
"I don't see it, but I'm willing to listen if there's more to this theory."
There was not. Julie Hargreaves filled the silence that followed by saying, "Shall we discuss the stamp theft first?" She had worked with Diamond often enough not to be cowed by his black moods.
John Wigfull said, "Actually, I was about to propose the same thing."
"Do you want to take over?" Diamond offered. He spoke mildly, and it might have been sincerely meant. It was impossible to tell.
Wigfull didn't answer.
"This is your baby," Diamond pointed out.
Wigfull was practically squirming in his chair. The stamp theft
was
his baby, only there was no way he could dandle it on his knee with any pride.
Julie cut the tension by saying, "Sir, can we establish first that Milo Motion is a fall guy and not a thief? Whoever did the Postal Museum job—which was cleverly carried out, remember— he took some risks courting publicity with those verses—whoever did it was unlikely to hand the stamp in meekly, as this man Motion did. It would be a surrender, and a pathetic one at that."
"Go on."
"Is that a fair point?" said Julie, unwilling to be hustled. "I'd like to know if anyone disagrees."
Diamond looked to his left. "John?"
"It sounds reasonable to me," Wigfull was forced to commit himself. "After several hours with Motion, I can't see him as a master thief. He's bright, certainly. A loner. Eccentric, shall we say?"
"If you mean homosexual," murmured Diamond, "why don't you say so?"
"Because I don't know," Wigfull snapped back. "I didn't ask. His sexual preferences don't come into it. If you're asking me to make a guess, I'd say he probably is gay, but that's a superficial impression."
"Say it, John," said Halliwell. "The man's a jam duff."
"What does that make you?" said Diamond. "A paper-weight?"
Wigfull was striving to make a serious point. "I don't think Motion has the bottle to carry out a theft, let alone bluff his way out of it."
"Are you sure there isn't a partner?" Diamond pressed him.
"He doesn't live with anyone, if that's what you mean. I just said he's a loner. To come back to your question, Julie, yes, he's been set up, in my opinion. We're looking for someone else."
Julie said, "Then we ought to look at motives. Why steal the stamp if you intend to give it back? The other day we were expecting a ransom demand. It didn't come."
Keith Halliwell said, "The stamp was just a pawn in a far more serious game."
"You're linking it to the murder?" said Julie.
"Of course. You sacrifice a pawn to achieve a better position."
"What better position?" asked Diamond.
"It ensured that Motion would go to the police and be questioned for some hours. His boat was unoccupied. Time enough for the killer to murder Towers and get away."
"Except that we don't know how he got into a locked boat or what brought Towers there."
"The locked room mystery," said one of Wigfull's team. "Isn't it remarkable that the Bloodhounds meet to discuss locked room mysteries and now we have one of our own?"
"Two," said Diamond, and now he began to function more constructively. "There's the mystery of the stamp and the mystery of the murder. It may be that Keith is right, and the stamp theft was a tactical move in a more serious game. We'd better keep an open mind. Since the stamp came up first, let's confine ourselves to that for a moment. Milo Motion can't explain how the Penny Black got between the pages of his book, which incidentally was
The Hollow Man,
by John Dickson Carr—if that means anything at all to a crowd of bozos who never read anything except the
Sun.
He kept it on a shelf on his boat with his other books. He had no visitors during the past week. On the evening of the meeting, he removed the book from the shelf and took it to the Bloodhounds. It didn't leave his possession at all. He's very clear about that. So what are we left with? The stamp was already between the pages when he took
The Hollow Man
from the bookshelf. John and I have seen the boat. It isn't very long. About sixty-five feet. Motion says he bolts it from the inside whenever he's aboard and padlocks it from the outside when he isn't. If the thief planted the stamp, he found a way to beat the locks and bolts. The cabin area of that boat is a perfect locked room. No hatches. No way in by the windows, which just have a narrow vent at the top. There's a door at either end. One end is bolted from the inside. Chubb security bolts at top and bottom. We've seen them. The other is locked from outside with this strong, close shackle padlock, and there's only one key—on a ring in Motion's pocket."
Keith Halliwell suggested, "Could the thief have unscrewed the fittings on the door?"
"The padbar and staple, you mean?" said Diamond. "Nice try. We looked at it ourselves. The screws are rusty, so any recent interference would show. There isn't a scratch."
"The hinges?" someone else put in.
"They aren't accessible from7 outside—and they haven't been tampered with."
Halliwell said, "Someone must have a duplicate key, whatever Mr. Motion says."
"We've checked with the locksmith. It isn't possible. It's a feature of these locks, which are German-made, that each one is unique. There
were
two keys, but he dropped his spare one in the canal over a year ago. I simply don't believe that some passing bandit could have fished it out and knew which padlock it fitted."
Halliwell was a stubborn cuss. "If he put his keys down somewhere, someone could have done the old Plasticine trick and got an impression."
"
If,
" said Diamond. "But he insists that they are always in the pocket of the trousers he is wearing."
"There's the flaw. Can we believe him?"
"I'd say yes."
"There's got to be some explanation."
"You might be interested in what Dickson Carr had to say on the subject." Diamond felt into his jacket pocket and with a flourish produced a paperback of
The Hollow Man.
"Chapter seventeen is 'The Locked-Room Lecture,' the one Milo Motion planned to read to the Bloodhounds. The author states among other things that the explanation of a locked room problem is invariably disappointing."
" 'So simple when it is explained,'" murmured Wigfull.
"What?"
"A quote from a Sherlock Holmes story."
"This is John Dickson Carr," Diamond said brusquely. "I was going on to say that in this lecture he classifies most of the methods used in locked room mysteries. I won't bore you with them all. He dismisses secret panels, secret passages, and so on as trick stuff, beneath contempt. He's pretty scathing about murders that are committed without the murderer actually entering the room, by gases, mechanical devices, and so on. And about suicide, when the gun disappears up the chimney on the end of a piece of elastic."
The gun on elastic earned some chuckles.
"As a variation it can be whisked out of a window. Then there are bullets made of ice that melt without a trace. There are poisonous snakes, impersonations, disguises, tricks with time. But the section of most interest to us is the one on ways of tampering with door locks. As Dickson Carr sums it up, there are three categories. First, the murderer can use bits of string and metal to turn a key which is still in a lock, but on the wrong side of the door. This doesn't apply to our problem. Secondly, he can remove the door hinges, as someone suggested, but in our case it didn't happen. Thirdly, he tampers with the bolt, using string or metal. One of our sets of doors, you'll recollect, was bolted from inside. However, the bolts aren't the primitive things Dickson Carr was describing in 1935. They're finger-bolts, set into the wood, invisible from the outside, and I defy anyone to open them with string, plastic, or anything else. If the killer isn't Milo Motion—and it can't be, for reasons I've stated—then he or she must have found a way of unfastening the padlock."
"Which is impossible," said Wigfull. "This is a sophisticated padlock with only one key, which remained in Mr. Motion's possession throughout the time I was questioning him."
"Are you certain it was locked when you arrived at the boat with Mr. Motion?" Julie Hargreaves asked.
Wigfull nodded. "I watched him closely. I had my torchbeam pointed at the lock. I saw him take the key from his pocket and use it. There was a click as he turned the key, and the shackle of the padlock sprang open. I haven't the slightest doubt that I saw the padlock being unlocked."
"Do we have a time for the murder?" Fred Baker, one of Diamond's more senior detectives, asked.
"You know what pathologists are like about times of death," said Diamond. "All he would say—if I can call the phrase to mind—was that the external symptoms were not inconsistent with a time of death up to four hours prior to when he examined the body. We know the poor sod was alive four hours before."
"And what was the cause?"
"Give me a break, Fred. We haven't had the postmortem yet. It was pretty obvious that he'd received a heavy blow on the head, but if I tell you he died of brain damage you can be damned sure the postmortem will show he choked on a fishbone."
After a short pause, Keith Halliwell asked, "What do we know about the victim? Was there any bad blood between him and Motion?"
"Apparently not. Motion claims they were on cordial terms. He says Towers was an introvert, excessively shy. Hardly ever joined in the discussions at the Bloodhounds. Wouldn't even look you in the eye unless he was forced to. He worked as a night watchman in a furniture warehouse. Monday was his night off."
"Any family?"
"No. He lived alone in a top-floor flat in Oak Street, off the Lower Bristol Road, under the railway viaduct."
"Did he drive?"
"Good point. How did he get to the boatyard? He owned an old Skoda. And before anyone asks, yes, it was one of the cars parked near the entrance. We can safely assume that Sid Towers drove there after the Bloodhounds' meeting broke up. On the passenger seat we found a plastic bag containing a secondhand copy of—you guessed—a John Dickson Carr novel."
"The Hollow Man?"