Killer in the Shade (9 page)

‘Well?' Drury prompted, careful not to register impatience.

‘Carol's in danger. I told Rollo. This proves it,' she said, hurrying the words.

Drury pointed to the brooch. ‘I'm not sure what this proves. In fact — '

He didn't go on. Mellie Smallwood had burst into tears. Drury gestured Moore, who was on his feet, to take her out.

‘I'll be in touch with Dick Temple,' he said. When Moore would have spoken he added, ‘Not now,' and repeated the gesture.

As soon as the door closed after Moore and the girl he dialled another extension number and told the listener at the other end, ‘Miss Smallwood's leaving with Tom Moore. I want her watched for the next twenty-four hours.'

Bill Hazard came in as Drury hung up and asked a question with his eyes.

‘We'll take a look at that warehouse. What's left of it.'

In Little Venice the fire was out and the fire brigade had gone. A constable remained on guard at the gutted premises. Drury asked the man a few questions, then returned to the car and told Hazard, ‘Edgware. We'll see if Pallard's returned.'

He hadn't, and the lanky character with yellow teeth and hair like strands
from a damp hayrick who introduced himself as the head barman said he didn't know when the boss would be back, and he didn't think Mrs Tucker did either. Mrs Tucker was the housekeeper who took care of the flat attached to the Burroughs Hotel. She was middle-aged, with dyed brown hair, surprisingly good legs under her short skirt, and an inbuilt air of suspicion which a too-red smile did nothing to adulterate.

Listening to her denials, Drury wondered if she had ever met the man who employed her. She made him sound like a stranger about whom she knew nothing and could guess less.

The unsatisfactory interview wasn't over when the chief barman appeared to say the Yard wanted Superintendent Drury. At that Mrs Tucker's mind behaved like a needle in a well-worn groove.

‘Mr Drury will take the call in here, Sid.'

There was no question as to who was the boss in Vince Pallard's absence.

Drury picked up the phone when the
house connection was made. He asked three questions and grunted twice before he replaced the receiver. Mrs Tucker's bright, beady gaze was full of fresh suspicion.

‘Vince?' she said.

It was a good guess, if that is what it was.

‘He's been picked up on Western Avenue.'

‘For what? What's he done?' the woman snapped, anger winding a steel thread through her tone.

‘For being dead.'

‘Oh, my God!'

‘He was shot three times, and a gun was found by the body. The fingerprints found on it are being checked out.'

The angry woman said waspishly, ‘You don't have to waste time being clever. I know who killed him — that swine with the dark glasses. I warned Vince. I told him he was a damned fool. You know what he said? He couldn't help himself. I ask you. I ask you,' she repeated, biting through the words with her porcelain dentures. ‘Just
like he was queer for that damned dropout.'

As the car sped away after the shooting of Vince Pallard, Rollo lay uncomfortably in the back thinking miserably of the mess he had made of things. Too late, he was blaming himself for not contacting Superintendent Drury. So far as he knew, Tom Moore was dead, and now he was threatened because he had blundered into learning too much.

The blindfold dragged over his closed eyes had been taped too tightly, tearing at the skin, and there was an ache in his back from lying half doubled over where he had been thrust out of sight. But lurching to the roll of the car, with new pains invading his mistreated body every few minutes, he forced himself to keep from contemplation of his own plight.

He kept telling himself he had to think of Carol.

This crazy bandit in dark glasses who looked like a hippie someone had created
out of the body of a near-blind forger, was a night creature, who lived by preference in darkness, when no one saw his face unmasked.

A new-style invisible man, one concealed in a false body. In daylight he used those glasses, hippie clothes and hairstyle, a character few looked at once, much less twice. At night he could discard those glasses because in darkness he saw things as other men did in daytime.

He had no idea of how long the car had been travelling, but he knew when it had left behind the London suburbs and was passing through a countryside of trees and open fields. The air was different as it blew through the open window beside the driver. Occasionally a man said something in a low-pitched voice, when someone else would grunt an unintelligible answer. Conversation didn't flourish and it certainly wasn't encouraged. At times a cigarette would be lit and the interior of the car would reek of the exhaled smoke until the air from the window beside the driver shredded the fug. Later the window was
closed as rain beat down, but after the shower it was opened again. The car did not stop.

Not until shortly after the wheels churned across gravel. Then Rollo was hauled, full of cramps, from his doubled-up position and, with a man on each side propping him up, forced to walk up the steps of a porch. He was taken into a room in a house and dumped on a settee. The men went out and more time passed before he heard the door open again, close, and the sound of an electric fire being plugged into a wall socket. Next his limbs were untied and then the taped blindfold was removed from his face.

He lolled against the settee in darkness save for the glow of the electric fire, which was behind the settee, so that its shadow was large on the wall facing him.

From behind him the voice he hated asked, ‘How long have you known Carol Wilson?'

His answer surprised himself. ‘Long enough to fall in love with her.'

‘Your bad luck, Hackley. Had you not
done so you wouldn't be here now. I've no alternative but to kill you before tomorrow.'

The killer in the shade.

The phrase echoed in Rollo's angry and bemused mind like a mocking promise, but he struggled to find understanding. Even a madman had reasons. Mad reasons.

He asked, ‘Why the hell did you have to drag me here?'

‘I'm going to give you a chance to make a real scoop. You won't see it in print, but it will carry your name. You'll be famous for a few hours. That's more fame than most people manage in a lifetime.'

Mad, Rollo repeated to himself, but he was wanting the other to continue with this incredible folly. The speaker went on, quite unperturbed at the lack of response in his audience.

‘You know I am practically blind by normal standards, but I have night sight. What you don't know is that I am as clever with a pen as Humphrey Peel, who is dead. Dead,' the speaker insisted.
There was a pause in which Rollo sat listening to the other's ragged breathing, as though the man was struggling under some emotional stress and trying to control his feelings.

‘Humphrey Peel was released from jail after being sentenced to five years on perjured evidence. He left prison determined to collect compensation. Oh, the cops kept tabs on him, but within a few months Humphrey Peel was dead. In his place there was a criminal many times more able to baffle the police. That new personality was made in prison, Hackley. You're going to have the chance to tell the truth.'

‘No one will believe it,' Rollo said.

‘That is an immaterial side issue,' said the man he couldn't see. ‘Few believe the Bible today, but it is still the world's biggest best-seller. To get back to my story. There are persons I can trust and some I can't. Those I can't trust will be removed.'

‘Like Vince Pallard?'

Again his own reaction surprised Rollo. He expected a display of anger, but
instead received a reasoned reply.

‘Vince was a fool. He didn't know when loyalty was required. Maybe because he had never learned what it was. No one will miss him unless it is that Tucker woman who poses as his housekeeper.'

When the speaker paused Rollo had his next question lined up. ‘How will finding my fingerprints on the gun that killed him help you?'

The man laughed on a jarring note. ‘You sound bitter, but I can make allowances. You should remember that most criminals who are caught overlook at least one important detail. I shall avoid that mistake. Always, when I do something that will be investigated by the police, there will be a clue pointing in another direction.' There was a pause before the speaker said in a lower voice, ‘You see, a crime that points in no direction can be a mistake. It usually ends up pointing to a prison cell. No matter what the police suspect, your fingerprints will be on the murder weapon. The police will not be able to ignore that basic fact. Nor will they be able to get past it.'

Rollo's cramps and body pains had largely subsided. He started to lift on to his feet, wishing to turn and confront his strange inquisitor in the fire-glow, but the man said sharply, ‘Sit down and remain facing the wall, you fool. I have you covered with a gun. Get it into your damned head that you can do nothing — nothing, except what I tell you.'

The words were uttered as though the speaker hated him. Rollo pressed against the back of the settee, his mind dizzy. Then the angry voice changed back to that slurring, almost introspective sound.

‘But I'm going to tell you something else. Tomorrow a branch of the National City Bank will be raided if there is a power cut, and there will be. Those strikers have got the bit between their teeth. Only one thing will take them back to work — cash. Well, their obstinacy is my opportunity.'

‘Robbing a bank is very different from lifting jewels from a private house or even a closed West End shop,' Rollo insisted, hoping to rile the other.

He didn't succeed.

‘Of course, but that is allowed for. Just as I have allowed for never using the same cover twice.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘The warehouse to which you followed me is by now a fire-gutted ruin.'

Rollo shivered. ‘What about Moore?'

‘Your companion? I think he recovered, tried to get away, and fell from a window into the canal and was drowned.'

‘Oh, my God!' muttered Rollo, appalled by this news.

‘If he were alive he would probably think you perished in the flames.'

‘Like Humphrey Peel in the flat in Cotswold Crescent.'

‘Precisely. I used that flat once, and then it was destroyed. I refused to make the mistake of using it twice. Now you are shocked by what you consider my ruthlessness. Am I right?'

‘You're mad.'

‘Don't be tedious. It's the worst fault in any writer.'

‘Then prove you're sane.'

‘Ah! Clever of you. But I can do just
that simply because you are to die, in order to complicate things for the very persistent Superintendent Frank Drury.' The man behind Rollo made sounds that suggested he was laughing at a private joke. ‘I'm sane, Hackley, because I'm able to tell you that the remains found in the upstairs flat at Cotswold Crescent, and formally identified as those of Humphrey Peel, belonged to a certain Anthony Arbuthnot.'

‘The missing plastic surgeon!'

‘Of course you would know of his disappearance, you're a journalist. But in that case you must understand why I am sane.'

Rollo shut his eyes, tired of that large black shadow on the nearby wall, and silently allowed the other full marks for a scheme he must have spent those years in prison perfecting. He had had his face changed from the police mug shots. Not enough to make him look suspiciously different, but the differences would show in close-ups and they would be important. The dark sunglasses and the restyled hair, especially over the face,
would make recognition difficult. He remembered how he had seen the man enter the dining-room at the Burroughs Hotel and jumped to the conclusion it was Peel because he had allowed for the differences hair-style and appearance made from the photo Tom Moore had shown him. It was Humphrey Peel with his hair and whiskers made to look like the man behind him. Remove the hair and whiskers and change the clothing and the differences created in the face by Anthony Arbuthnot would become important.

Also, the man who had created those differences was dead.

As Rollo Hackley would be now that he had been told too much to allow him to remain alive.

‘No questions?' mocked the other's voice, a sharp-edged intrusion in a growing silence.

‘When do I get to write what I know?'

‘Soon. I've a typewriter waiting in another room.'

‘The point, though. I don't get it.'

‘Drury will. It'll read like someone on
LSD or a killer who has shot a man trying to throw the suspicion on someone else, a last desperate expedient.'

The reasoning behind that struck Rollo as possibly faulty. The trouble was he couldn't find the fault.

‘All right, then, suppose I refuse?'

‘Refusal could hurt Carol Wilson.'

The reminder was as crushing as a physical blow. Rollo made the effort to rally.