Calamity in Kent, A British Library Crime Classic (21 page)

Chapter XXIII

In Which Shelley Makes a Move

Of course, in actuality I saw the value of Tim Foster's discovery. I knew that what he had found out was likely to be a clue of great importance. But he thought that it was a kind of magic touchstone, which would enable him to prove his innocence of any connection with the murder. I just had to disillusion him on that score.

But at the same time I knew that Shelley would greet this new clue with real joy. It would provide him with the very sort of concrete evidence which he had constantly been complaining was absent in this case.

So I shook off Tim as quickly as I could, telling him not to worry overmuch, but that I would put things right with Shelley. That this was advice easier to give than to follow I knew. But I was now working on Tim's behalf, and, even if he did worry for the time being, it was better to worry in a garage in Broadgate than in a cell at the Old Bailey—and the Old Bailey was what I was trying to save him from.

When I got to the Police Station the old, unpleasant sergeant was there in charge.

“I suppose you want to see Inspector Shelley again?” he said with a sneer.

“Yes,” I said, restraining my impulse to punch him on the nose.

“You can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because he's not here.”

This was a bit of a facer for me. For the first time I had secured what I thought to be really important evidence, and for the first time Shelley was not on the spot to receive it in person when I arrived.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Is there any reason why you should get an answer to that question?” the sergeant asked.

“I don't know that there is, except that I have an important piece of evidence to give him,” I said.

“You wouldn't consider giving it to me, I suppose?” the sergeant said with another sneer.

“I certainly wouldn't. I am working with Inspector Shelley,” I said. “And I have promised to keep him informed of anything that I may find as a result of working for my paper.”

“You'd better come in and see Inspector Beech,” the sergeant remarked, leading the way to an inner room.

This was unexpected. It was not altogether welcome, either. I hadn't seen Inspector Beech since the very beginning of the case, but I knew that I had taken a pretty dim view of the local man. I suspected, too, that he had taken a pretty dim view of me. But I couldn't very well refuse to enter the man's presence, merely because we had taken an instinctive dislike to each other from the start. So I followed the sergeant, hugging the tin with the sparking-plug in it. This was in my pocket, and I didn't intend to take it out if I could possibly avoid it. The knowledge that I had I intended to share with Shelley and with no one else.

Inspector Beech looked up sharply as I came in.

“Well, London?” he snapped.

“I wanted to see Inspector Shelley,” I explained.

“I have already been told this,” answered the local inspector. “But I fail to see why you should be prepared to hand to him any information which you are not prepared to hand to me. After all, as Inspector Shelley has so often said, he and I are working together on this case. We share our discoveries and our opinions, and the fact that he belongs to the staff of Scotland Yard and I to the staff of the Kentish Constabulary makes no difference to our collaboration.”

I thought he was a pompous ass; but I couldn't very well let him see what I felt. I cast about in my mind to think of some way to stall him off until such time as Shelley should arrive. It was an awkward situation.

To think out, on the spur of the moment, some excuse was not at all easy; but I knew that I should have to stall somehow. The main thing was to find out what Shelley was doing, and when he would be back. If, for instance, he had gone to London to carry out his enquiries, I could not expect to hold off Beech until Shelley's return. If, on the other hand, Shelley was merely doing some sort of routine enquiries in Broadgate, I might possibly be able to hold things off while I awaited his return.

“I know that Inspector Shelley and yourself work in close collaboration, Inspector,” I said as smoothly and equably as I could. “But it so happens that I have promised him—not as a policeman but as a man—to tell him whatever I may be lucky enough to discover. And, while I am sure that you and he do not keep any secrets from each other, I should be a good deal happier to await his return than to tell things to you, and to have you hand the information on to him.” Then I thought that this sounded a trifle distrustful, so I added hastily: “It's not that I want to withhold information from you, Inspector; it's merely that I want to keep a promise given in all seriousness to Inspector Shelley a day or two ago.”

Beech, I thought, looked a bit taken aback at this. He was, naturally, not too pleased at the attitude I had taken, but there was little that he could do about it. I was not a criminal; I was not even a hostile witness, whom he could argue into submission. There was little, I thought, that he could legally do to force me to give him whatever information I had in my possession. For a few moments he frowned in an angry manner. Then his brow seemed to clear suddenly.

He said: “Inspector Shelley should be here shortly, Mr. London and I presume that you would then be prepared to hand over whatever it is that you have in the nature of evidence.”

“Certainly,” I replied.

“He is in Broadgate. He has gone to take a statement from someone involved in the case,” the Inspector explained. I was not at all sure that I liked this change in attitude; but it got me out of what might have been a nasty hole.

“Mrs. Skilbeck?” I asked. It was a shot in the dark but it went home. There was a sudden change in expression which seemed to me to indicate that he had decided that I knew more about this affair than he had first thought.

I wasn't at all sure whether I had really impressed him, or whether he was merely making the best of a bad job. But I had no need to think this over any more, as at this moment Inspector Shelley came in.

“Good-morning, Inspector,” he said to Beech. “Hullo, Jimmy!” This with a friendly nod to me, which I was sure did not pass unnoticed by Beech.

“Any luck?” Beech enquired.

“A fair amount,” Shelley said. “I think that we have got hold of a statement that will lead us somewhere useful. The trouble is that we have no concrete evidence as yet to support it. And we still haven't solved the most awkward problem of the whole case—the problem of how those bodies got into the lift without the locks being tampered with. That is something that I'm still absolutely stumped over.”

“Mr. London here has some evidence which he wants to give you,” Beech explained. “He said that he preferred to keep it and hand it over to you in person.”

There was a touch of annoyance in Beech's tone. I saw that, in spite of the man's changed attitude, he still rather resented my refusal to give him the information.

“Well, shall we all adjourn to my room?” Shelley suggested. I thought that he would probably have preferred to have had his talk with me without Beech being present, but as things were he had no legitimate excuse for getting me away from this local man.

Anyhow, we all moved down the corridor to the office that had been allotted to Shelley. Here the Scotland Yard man settled down in his armchair, filled his battered old briar with his favourite mixture, and clearly intended to make a long session of it.

“Who speaks first?” Beech asked, when we had all installed ourselves in chairs.

“Well,” said Shelley, “provided you remember that this is not for publication until I give the word, Jimmy, I think that we might give you an outline of what has happened since I saw you last.”

I nodded. “You know that you can trust me, Inspector,” I said. “I don't give my paper anything that you may say off the record. All I want is to get the background material right; then I can deal with the more confidential stuff as you release it for publication.”

“Good.” Shelley puffed out a cloud of pungent smoke and resumed. “You know that Mrs. Skilbeck has been saying nasty things about Timothy Foster,” he said, “flinging about accusations in the most wholesale way.”

“She repeated her accusations to me,” I remarked.

“Yes. Well, I thought that it was time that she was asked to give us an official statement that would give us something really concrete to build on.”

“You have been to see her?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did she give you anything which seemed likely to be in any way useful?”

“Yes…and no,” Shelley said doubtfully. “She gave me a good deal of information which tended to confirm what I'd previously suspected. But she didn't give anything that would prove what she has been saying about Timothy Foster. In fact, I rather think that her accusations of murder against Foster are pure hot air. I think that she has, for some reason, got her knife into Foster and that she is prepared to say anything at all that will hurt that young man. It may well be that she genuinely thinks that he is the murderer, and that in consequence she is prepared to accuse him of it, even to the extent of telling lies, if she thinks that those lies will tend to make us feel more suspicious about him. She is, in other words, that dangerous person who has made up her mind about the case from the start, and is prepared to twist her ideas to meet those prejudices.”

This was almost exactly what I had thought about Mrs. Skilbeck, and I said as much to Shelley, “And you don't think Foster is guilty?” I asked.

“I wouldn't go as far as to say that,” he replied. “But I would say that I don't think that Foster is guilty for the reasons that Mrs. Skilbeck advances. He may be innocent and he may be guilty; but I don't think that what she has to say has any real bearing on the question.”

I could see that Beech was getting impatient at this exchange of opinion. It appeared to me that the discussion seemed to him to be of merely academic interest. And, like most purely practical men, Beech had an extreme distrust of theoreticians.

“But you said,” Beech now broke in, “that Mrs. Skilbeck had given you some valuable information. What you've said up to now seems to suggest that the information she gave you—if it was information at all—was of no value.”

“She told me the truth about Tilsley,” replied Shelley. “She had no concrete clues to support what she said, but I had already come to the conclusion that what she told me was true, and her statement was therefore in a sense collaboration of my ideas.”

“And what was that?” I asked eagerly. At last, I told myself, the case was coming round to a solution.

“That was that Tilsley was working for a gang, mainly concentrated on the south and east coast, which was distributing cocaine.”

Beech whistled softly. I saw that, in spite of his assertion that he and Shelley were working so closely together, he really had little idea of what had been in the mind of the man from Scotland Yard.

“No evidence for it?” he asked.

“None,” said Shelley. “But what we had found out previously about Tilsley's activities had made me suspect something of the kind. You will remember that he was dealing in all sorts of things; the one quality they all had in common was that they were fairly small and that they could be sold at a price much above their normal value.”

“That's true,” Beech admitted. “But we shall have a devil of a job to prove it, you know.”

I thought that it was time that I sprang my bombshell on the two policemen. I fished in my pocket and produced the sparking-plug in its little tin.

“You see this plug, gentlemen?” I said.

They both sprang from their chairs and made their way over to my side of the table. It was really quite impressive to see the two men waiting for my revelation. I chuckled gently to myself.

“Watch,” I said. I took the plug out of its tin, fiddled with it until I managed to get the screw that Tim Foster had undone. Then I gently unscrewed it, tipped the body of the plug up on a sheet of paper, and made a gesture, demonstrating the white powder that came out of it.

“Where did that come from?” asked Shelley.

“Tim Foster's garage,” I said.

Shelley looked puzzled. “But I thought that you were convinced of Foster's innocence,” he remarked.

“So I am,” I explained. I went on to describe how the plug had come into Tim's possession, and how it had been left behind because it was, as Tim thought, faulty.

Shelley touched the white powder with his finger-tip and put a tiny portion of it gingerly on his tongue. He moved his tongue around his mouth, and then grinned.

“This is just what we wanted, Jimmy,” he said.

“You think it's cocaine?” I asked.

“Not a doubt of it.”

“And it gives you the concrete evidence that you want, to connect Tilsley with the cocaine deals that Mrs. Skilbeck mentioned?”

“Quite right.”

Beech held out his hand. “I should like to apologise, Mr. London,” he said. “I admit that I didn't trust you, but now I see that Inspector Shelley, here, was correct in his judgment of you.”

I smiled. “That's all right, Inspector,” I said. “The more or less hardened newspaper man is pretty well accustomed to being mistrusted and misunderstood.”

“But don't forget, Jimmy,” said Shelley, “this leaves some of our worst problems still unsolved.”

“Such as…?”

“Well, first of all, the fact that the bodies were found inside a lift with locked doors. That is the worst problem of the lot.”

“But what do you think happened?” asked Beech.

“As I view it, Tilsley was a comparatively minor figure in this drug-distributing scheme. Probably he was doing a bit of blackmail on the side. The chief of the gang thought that he was finding out a bit too much about what was going on, and therefore decided to deal with him. Margerison suspected what had happened, and maybe did something to hold the man up to ransom in some way. So he too had to be dealt with. Those two murders are all of a piece, and the whole thing hangs together well enough. I'm a little bit less satisfied with the other business—the attack on Bender. He clearly knows very little if anything about what was going on in Broadgate; but the criminal may have thought that Bender knew more than he actually did, and have therefore decided that he had to be dealt with accordingly. The only thing that really puzzles me there is why that attempted murder was done so differently from the other successful crimes. Why was Bender not attacked in the lift? That's what really puzzles me most. I think that if we could solve that mystery we should have the solution of the whole case.”