Frankie's Letter (23 page)

He stepped back from the trunk to get a full picture of the slope leading to the track and caught his sleeve on a mass of brambles. He shook himself free, leaving a snag of tweed on the thorns and there, slightly lower, were caught some blue-grey tweed threads. The murderer's? Maybe. He put a couple of threads carefully in his pocketbook, leaving the rest for the police.

He glanced at his watch. He didn't have long before the police turned up, but he wanted to see if he could glean anything more from the woods. The track pretty soon petered out into a clearing which, from the ruts on the ground, looked as if it was used for turning the foresters' carts. Beyond the clearing, the path was little used, but the grass, ferns and nettles showed signs of the passage of a heavy animal and, in a damp patch of mud, there was the clear print of a horseshoe. Presumably beyond the wood led the fields and beyond them, the Slough.

Anthony walked back to Veronica O'Bryan's body and sat on the grassy verge. He took out his pipe, tamping down the tobacco thoughtfully.

Veronica O'Bryan had found out about the diamonds on Friday night. She'd want to get that information to someone – call them Mr X – as quickly as possible. She'd be wary of the telephone and a telegram was hardly safe, either.

The robbery of the diamonds and maps and Warren's murder had happened on the Sunday, which didn't leave enough time for a letter, from this rural district, to arrive. What she could do, however, was telephone or telegram Mr X to ask him to meet her at a prearranged spot. This spot. Mrs Moulton had said she'd seen Veronica O'Bryan pass by her house into the woods before.

There was another thing, too. He remembered Tara sitting down on the bench beside him on Saturday morning, just before he'd discovered ‘Frankie's Letter'
.
The house is like a morgue. I don't know where everyone's got to . . .
At a guess, Veronica O'Bryan had gone to the post office in the village. She wouldn't want to telephone from Starhanger.

He got to his feet as the whistle of a train sounded in the valley. Walking down the hill to where the trees petered out into a scrubby fringe, he looked down into the snuggle of houses that was Swayling. A gleaming stretch of railway wriggled along the bottom of the valley and he saw a train looking, at this distance, like something from a child's toy box.

He strolled back to the grassy verge. Yes; Veronica O'Bryan had contacted Mr X on Saturday morning and arranged to meet him that afternoon. Granted that Mrs Moulton hadn't seen a car, Mr X had come by train. And that meant that, with even a little bit of luck, someone at the station would have seen him. Anthony smiled grimly to himself. This was hanging together.

By Saturday afternoon, Veronica O'Bryan didn't just have the diamonds to report, she would have wanted help to escape and if the fair-haired robber, Warren's murderer and Chapman's killer was X, then Veronica would have asked in vain.

She had failed. By her own admission ‘Frankie's Letter' was a busted flush and she had moved from asset to liability. The fair-haired X, who seemed to have a pretty short way with human obstacles, shot her and moved her body to the fallen tree.

It was a good place, he thought, both for secret meetings and to hide a body. Apart from the occasional forester it seemed little used and Veronica O'Bryan was literally off the beaten track. If it hadn't been for Mrs Moulton, they could have been looking for Veronica O'Bryan for a very long time.

He looked up as he heard voices along the path and the policemen came into view along the tree-girded track. There were a uniformed constable and sergeant and an older man who turned out to be Major Rendall, the chief constable himself. He drew Anthony to one side, out of earshot of the policemen.

Sir Charles had spoken to him and although the chief constable had no choice but to cooperate, Anthony could tell he was unenthusiastic about surrendering his responsibilities to someone who he felt sure categorized him as: ‘a jumped-up doctor, one of these Intelligence types, calls himself a colonel, by Gad! I'd like to show him what real soldiering is about!'

The fact Anthony didn't actually want to ride roughshod over him, his men or his procedures and had no desire to give orders to his officers, mollified the major, and when Anthony said they were after a murderer in the pay of the Germans who had killed Peter Warren, Cedric Chapman and had probably killed Veronica O'Bryan as well, Major Rendall was beside himself.

‘I've been saying it for years, Colonel,' he snorted, using the title without the audible inverted commas with which he'd adorned it with earlier. ‘For years we've let the scum of the earth stroll in to this country without a by-your-leave and look where it's got us! An innocent woman murdered out-of-hand' – Anthony didn't see fit to correct his impression of Veronica O'Bryan's character – ‘by some damn foreigner.'

‘We're not sure the murderer was a foreigner,' Anthony said mildly.

Anthony thought the chief constable was going to go pop. A German running round killing people was bad enough but to have an Englishman doing it was far, far worse.

By the time they'd finished he was so eager to help that he was disappointed when he found all Anthony wanted was to be kept informed of anything his men should uncover and to lend his weight to Anthony's enquiries at the railway station.

The porter, a Mr Hawley, was sitting on his wooden truck, reading a newspaper. The news had travelled fast. Hawley knew all about the discovery of Veronica O'Bryan's body in Ticker's Wood and, with the official presence of Major Rendall looming behind him, Anthony had no trouble in getting the porter to speak about what he felt would be the main topic of conversation for years to come.

‘I reckon we'll be in the paper ourselves when this gets out,' said Hawley, rising stiffly to his feet. ‘You're looking for someone off the Lonnon train, you say?' He scratched his chin. ‘It's been a couple of days now. The Lonnon train . . . There weren't that many on it, as I recall. Peggy Postling and the Sykeses. Young Wilfred Gordon, he's back on leave, and . . .' Mr Hawley looked up brightly. ‘There was another man, sir. He slipped my mind for the moment.'

‘Can you describe him?' asked Major Rendall briskly.

Mr Hawley looked puzzled. ‘I don't know as I can,' he said slowly. ‘I didn't take much notice.'

‘What about his clothes?' Anthony asked, trying to pin the porter down to something concrete.

Hawley shrugged. ‘Nothing out of the way. He had a dark coat, I think, and a bowler hat. There was nothing special about him.'

‘He wasn't fair-haired, was he?'

Again Hawley shrugged. ‘I didn't notice as he was. He was just an ordinary sort of bloke.'

Something in Hawley's answer jarred on Anthony. What on earth was it? He looked at Hawley thoughtfully. Like most railway staff he seemed honest and helpful but . . . Bingo! He'd said ‘bloke'
.

There are few men, as Anthony well knew, as socially aware as railway porters. Their livelihood, like taxi-drivers and hotel commissionaires, depends on them being able to sum up a person's class at a glance, to know that the old lady in the ancient coat is a real lady and good for sixpence, that Flash Harry in his cheap finery will sling a shilling to impress his girlfriend and that a careworn mother or cautious clerk will never part with more than tuppence, however much help they receive. It seemed highly unlikely that Mr Hawley would ever describe a man such as Warren's killer as a bloke.

‘He wasn't a gentleman, was he? A toff?' he asked.

Hawley gave a slow smile. ‘A toff, sir? Not on your life.' The smile faded. ‘There was nothing to him, sir,' he added with a touch of irritation. ‘Nothing you could get hold of, I mean.'

The word ‘nondescript'
formed in Anthony's mind. He gave a jump. Hawley wasn't describing Cedric Chapman's killer but Cedric Chapman himself.

Anthony picked up Mr Hawley's discarded newspaper and there, on the front page, was what he was looking for: ‘Kingsway Tram Victim Identified'
together with a photograph of Chapman. Sir Charles had authorized its release to the press.

Anthony slewed the paper round so Hawley could see it and immediately knew he was right. His face was a picture.

‘Well, I'll be blowed,' he kept muttering. ‘Who'd have thought it? Him! On my platform!'

Major Rendall was less impressed. Chapman was dead and therefore the fun of the chase had departed. He stroked his moustache gloomily. ‘So that's the chappie, is it? Well, he got what was coming to him all right. What was he doing down here, eh?'

‘I don't know,' said Anthony honestly enough, for he didn't. He could guess, but that wasn't knowledge.

The major roused himself from his disappointment. ‘It's a case of tying up loose ends now, eh, Colonel? I suppose we'd better call at Starhanger. Mr and Mrs Sherston need to be officially informed.'

‘Yes, we'd better call,' agreed Anthony. And after that, he thought, he'd better retrieve his bag and leave. He had come to Starhanger to find Veronica O'Bryan and that was exactly what he'd done.

‘So how did Sherston take the news?' asked Sir Charles later that day. They were sitting in Sir Charles's room, the room that always reminded Anthony of a gentleman's club.

‘He was thunderstruck,' said Anthony, lighting a cigarette. ‘His reaction seemed absolutely genuine, Talbot.' He smiled briefly. ‘As a matter of fact he wanted me to investigate.'

‘What?'

Anthony nodded. ‘That's right. I refused, of course. I told him to wait for the coroner's inquest. I'll have to attend that, of course, as I found the body, but they more or less have to bring in a verdict of murder by Cedric Chapman. Sherston realized that, but couldn't begin to imagine, or so he said, what a crook like Chapman was doing in Ticker's Wood and he certainly couldn't imagine what had taken Veronica O'Bryan there. Now whether he was simply meeting trouble head on, I don't know. After all, he knows exactly who I am, so, if he is involved, he'll know it's an odds-on certainty that I'll investigate Mrs O'Bryan's death.'

‘How did Mrs Sherston react?' asked Sir Charles curiously.

Anthony shrugged. ‘Very badly, considering we know Veronica O'Bryan wasn't one of her bosom chums. When the chief constable told her the news, I thought she was going to faint. That was quite genuine, by the way,' he added. ‘As the doctor on the spot, I can testify to it.'

He paused remembering the scene. Josette had been horrified at the news. ‘I knew it,' she had constantly repeated. ‘I knew she was dead. I just knew it. I knew something dreadful had happened.'

‘Anyway,' he continued, ‘we got her up to her room and I prescribed a sedative and waited until her own doctor arrived. That got me upstairs,' he added. ‘So I took advantage of the situation and, when the maid thought I was safely downstairs, had another look in Veronica O'Bryan's room.' Sir Charles looked at him alertly. ‘I found this,' said Anthony, taking an envelope from his briefcase.

He opened the envelope and carefully shook the contents onto the desk. There were charred scraps of writing paper, browned and burnt, but with the occasional word still visible.

‘They were in the grate,' said Anthony. ‘They'd fallen into the firebox. I should've checked the firebox when I searched the first time but after I found the papers in the jewellery box, I didn't think to examine the fireplace. It struck me afterwards that although Mrs O'Bryan might have thought her letters in the jewellery box were safe enough, she had very little time on Saturday morning to dispose of anything else and the obvious thing to do was burn any incriminating papers. There's at least one sentence – or part of a sentence anyway – that I recognize.'

Sir Charles turned on the desk light and examined the scraps closely. ‘“Frankie's Letter”,' he said. ‘These are notes for “Frankie's Letter”.' He carefully put the scraps of paper back in the envelope. ‘I'll have these read. There's probably more that can be gleaned, but the central fact of them being “Frankie's Letter” is clear enough.'

He sat down at the desk again. ‘So, what now? I'd give a year of my life to grill Sherston, but that's not possible, damnit.' He looked at Anthony squarely. ‘What do you think, Brooke? Is he involved or not?'

Anthony hesitated. ‘He could be,' he said eventually. ‘On the one hand, his reaction to Veronica O'Bryan's death seemed absolutely genuine. On the other hand, if he knew about it, he'd be prepared. When I turned up in company with the chief constable, he'd guess that Veronica O'Bryan's body had been found.'

‘Was he upset?'

Anthony shook his head slowly. ‘Not excessively so, but he did seem shocked. He told me privately that Veronica had been awkward to live with, particularly since he got married. There's been a lot of tension between her and Mrs Sherston.'

‘So why didn't he make her an allowance and suggest she live elsewhere? That's what everyone expected him to do.'

‘I asked him that – or, at least, I made it possible for him to volunteer the information. He was concerned for Tara. He thinks the world of her, you know. She's more like a daughter than a niece to him. Veronica had a very uncertain temper and he thought they were better off living with him where, as he put it, he could help take the burden of motherhood off her shoulders.' Anthony sighed. ‘That rings true. I simply don't know about Sherston. He might be stringing me along. He's clever enough, that's for sure.'

Sir Charles put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. ‘That more or less sums up what I think. Let's say the jury's still out, as far as he's concerned.'

He paused reflectively. ‘“Frankie's Letter” is finished. That's something, a great big something. However, our killer's out there and we still don't know what atrocity is planned for the fourteenth of June. That's getting horribly close. If we can't find out something soon, we're sunk. We know it's something to do with this Irish-German alliance. Incidentally, I've got confirmation of that from another source. We've got a contact in Camden Town who picks up gossip in the Irish clubs. He's heard a whisper of something big planned.'