The Killing of Katie Steelstock (15 page)

This seemed to be a signal for general dispersal.

The offices of the
Hannington Gazette
were fifty yards down East Street, on the south side. They occupied the ground floor and the yard of what had once been an undertakers’ establishment. The editor before Jonathan Limbery had been an absent-minded man with a passion for wild flowers, on which he had written a number of booklets.

With the arrival of Jonathan, wild flowers had given way to wilder polemics, without noticeably changing the circulation figures. When Knott was announced, Jonathan was in his shirtsleeves, talking on the telephone. He said to the boy who had brought the news, “Find him a chair in the outer office. I’ll give you a ring when I’m free,” and continued with the call, which was to the news editor of the Reading
Sun.
It was a bad-tempered conversation, at least on Jonathan’s part, which finished with him saying, “Even if you didn’t use it, I think you ought to pay for it,” and banging down the receiver.

After which he sat for a full minute, apparently deep in thought, before stretching out his hand and ringing the bell.

“I can see you’re busy,” said Knott, “so I won’t take up more of your time than I have to. As you probably know, we’ve been questioning everyone who was at the dance on Friday night when Miss Steelstock was killed. Now we’re widening the scope of our inquiries to take in people, like yourself, who weren’t at the dance but who were her friends . . . and acquaintances.” Knott paused slightly before adding the last two words, then said, “Which category would you place yourself in, Mr. Limbery?”

“A friend,” said Jonathan shortly.

“A close friend?”

“If you like.”

“It’s not what I like, sir. I’m just a poor dumb copper asking questions. Do I gather that you
were
a close friend?”

“Yes.”

“A friend of the family?”

Came the faint flicker that Knott was trained to recognise. Without meaning to do so, he had touched a nerve. Follow it up.

He said, “I gathered from Mrs. Steelstock that you were quite a frequent visitor at their house – at one time.”

“If she told you that, why ask me about it?”

“We like to have everything confirmed.”

“Even though they haven’t got a damned thing to do with the crime you’re supposed to be investigating.”

“You must leave it to us to judge that, sir.”

“I can’t stop you asking impertinent questions. I’m not bound to answer them.”

“That’s your privilege,” said Knott. “Then perhaps we could deal with something which might be more relevant. You weren’t at the Tennis Club dance?”

“No.”

“Why not? All your friends were there.”

“I don’t have to account to you for my movements. Just take it that I don’t like dances.”

“A lot of us don’t, sir. But wasn’t there some other reason in your case? Some work you had to finish for your paper.”

Jonathan looked up sharply, as though it had occurred to him for the first time that the Superintendent really had been doing his homework.

He said, “I don’t know who told you that, but it happens to be true. There was an article I had to finish. And it was bloody lucky I did stay in. Otherwise I might have missed the fire.”

“The fire?”

“Quantocks Paper Mills. Just outside Goring.”

“Oh yes. I think I read about it. I didn’t realise you’d covered that.”

“I do a certain amount of local work for the Reading
Sun.”

“I see, sir. A stringer.”

“If you use technical terms, you should use them accurately. A stringer is an amateur. I am a whole-time professional newspaperman.”

“My mistake,” said Knott. “However, I take it you got a call from the
Sun
and volunteered to do them a piece.”

“That is correct.”

“At about what time?”

“It would have been around ten o’clock. I know that I was there by half past ten. When you’re doing a piece for a daily, you have to keep an eye on printing times.”

“Of course, sir.”

“They put the paper to bed at one o’clock, so anything I did give them would have to be dictated over the telephone.”

“And that’s what you did, sir?”

“Yes.”

“At what time?”

“Around midnight. Perhaps a little later.”

“And where would that have been from?”

“From a call box on the Oxford road. Come to think of it, it must have been a little before midnight, because I had time for a quick drink and a sandwich at the King of Clubs. That’s that big roadhouse between Goring and Whitchurch—”

“I know it well,” said Knott, with a smile. “I’ve often dropped in there myself. A nice place. Broad-minded about closing times, too, I found.”

“I think they had a Friday night extension.” Knott noticed that Limbery was much easier now. “Anyway, they weren’t in a hurry to turn me out. It must have been nearly half past twelve before I left.”

“And came back home the same way.”

“Actually, no. There’s not a lot in it, but the King of Clubs is a bit closer to Whitchurch than it is to Goring. So I came back that way.”

The Superintendent seemed to be visualising the map. He said, “Wouldn’t that mean you had to go all the way back to Reading to cross the river?”

“Certainly not. There’s a bridge between Whitchurch and Pangbourne.”

“Of course. Stupid of me. So that’s the bridge you used?”

“Right.”

“And were home by when?”

A shade of caution was observable in Jonathan’s voice as he dealt with this question. He said, “I wasn’t keeping one eye on my watch the whole time, Superintendent.”

“Naturally not, sir. But we can work it out roughly, can’t we? I take it you came straight back. You didn’t stop for any reason?”

“No.”

“And you’d left the roadhouse by half past twelve.”

“Now I come to think of it,” said Jonathan slowly, “it must have been even later than that.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I remember now. When I was driving through Pangbourne, I saw the clock on the Town Hall. It was a few minutes before one.”

“Then it’s about twelve miles to Hannington. Say twenty-five minutes. That gets you home at twenty past one.”

“I don’t drive fast at night. It might have been any time between half past one and two.”

If the Superintendent observed the way in which the timing was stretching, a little implausibly, toward two o’clock, and so matching itself with the statements made by Windle and Gonville, he gave no sign of being disturbed by this. He said in his smoothest voice, “Quite right to be careful at night. Why did you stop visiting the Manor, Mr. Limbery?”

Jonathan’s head jerked around. There was a moment of silence. Then he said very softly, “Would you mind repeating that?”

“I asked, why did you stop being a regular visitor at Hannington Manor?”

“I thought that’s what you said. I’ve no intention of answering the question.”

“Was it because you’d quarrelled with Miss Steelstock?”

Jonathan said nothing.

“I was referring, of course, to that little tiff you had with her at the Tennis Club – about six weeks ago, wasn’t it?”

Jonathan had started breathing deeply, taking in great gulps of air. It reminded Knott of a diver charging his lungs with oxygen before a deep plunge. He said, “I only mention it because it seems to have been fairly common knowledge. After all, if you conduct your quarrels in public, people are bound to talk about them. But what puzzled me was why it should have made you drop Mrs. Steelstock and her boys. Like I said, you were a friend of the whole family.”

Again that flicker. Keep at it.

“That’s right, isn’t it, sir?”

“I realise now,” said Jonathan, in a voice so thick with fury that the words had some difficulty in forcing their way out, “exactly what people mean when they talk about police harassment.”

“Oh, come, sir. A perfectly straightforward question.”

“You’ve no more right to question me about my personal relationships than I have to question you about yours. Suppose I started asking you impertinent questions about your wife and your girlfriends—”

“There’s a difference. My girlfriend, supposing I had one, doesn’t happen to have had her head smashed in.”

But Jonathan was hardly listening to him. A dangerous and explosive mixture was building up inside him, a mixture of which he hardly understood the elements himself. Contempt for his father and resentment of his authority. Building from that, resentment of the authority of old people over the young, of employers over employees, of the conventional over the unconventional, of the state over its subjects – all personified in this sly and bullying policeman.

The lava belched out, scalding and stinking, but pleasurable to the god of the volcano. He said, “I loathe you and I despise you. You’re a puffed-up nothing. A sadistic little bastard. We’ve all heard about you. How you like tormenting helpless and frightened people. I’m not helpless and I’m not frightened of you, or twenty like you. And I’m glad to answer for everyone you’ve trampled over in your filthy bullying life who’ve been too timid to answer for themselves. I’ve only one message for you. And that is fuck off. Crawl back down whatever hole you came out of and leave us alone.”

Knott said, without a flicker of expression, “I ought to warn you, sir, that everything you say is being recorded.”

Limbery hardly seemed to hear him. He was still inflated by the passion of his own rhetoric. He said, “Tell your superiors. Tell the world. The sooner people realise what they’re up against, the better. We point our finger at other countries, but we can’t see what’s happening here. This is a police state. A filthy fascist police-ridden autocracy.”

“Well now,” said Knott, “all countries have got to have policemen. After all, there has to be someone to direct the traffic.”

If Jonathan had been less exalted by the wind of his own oratory he might have detected the purring note of satisfaction in the Superintendent’s voice.

During his service in the Metropolitan Police, McCourt had visited the headquarters of the Forensic Science Laboratory at 109 Lambeth Road on a number of occasions but had never before penetrated as far as the Documents Division, which occupied part of the fourth floor.

A notice beside the lift regretted that it was temporarily out of order “owing to maintenance work” and he resigned himself to climbing the flights of stone steps.

It was three years since he had quit the shabby, crowded, jostling streets of London for the peace of Hannington.

He was a country boy. His father was a Scottish Unitarian minister and his mother the daughter of an Oxford don, so he and his two sisters had been brought up in a house where intellect was treasured and integrity was more than a catchword. It had been planned for him that when he left Glasgow High School he should go to the university and study law. The death of his father when he was eighteen had killed this project. His mother had uprooted the family and moved back south to be near her own folk. It was at this point that Ian had made up his mind. If the academic study of the law was now out of his reach, he would pursue it on its executive side. He had joined the Metropolitan Police as a constable.

The stairs he was plodding up now were no harder than some of the steps he had climbed in those years, but serious application to the job in hand, backed by his educational standards, had won him a place at Bramshill and the early promotion to sergeant for those who survived the course there.

It was an unhappy chance that his first C.I.D. posting should have been to West End Central.

Ian McCourt was a natural puritan. Some of the sights he had seen and some of the things he had to do in London’s square mile of vice had sickened his simple soul. When things had come to a head and he had been offered the chance of transfer to the Berkshire Force, he had jumped at it. He would not only be back in the country. He would be closer to his mother, who needed him now that her daughters had married and gone.

One more flight. He was glad to note that he was hardly out of breath.

It was the arrival of Superintendent Knott which had upset him. He had recognised in him a hard professionalism, an ideal which he had once held himself and which was now slipping out of his reach in the backwater of Hannington.

Mr. Mapledurham, the head of the Documents Division, had been warned to expect him. He examined the photocopy of the letter with expert attention, scratched the back of his neck and said, “A Crossfield Electric, I should say. Not a golf ball, though. The earlier mark.”

Ian tried to look intelligent.

“A lot of machines are turning to the golf-ball type now. It might be an Olympia or a Hermes, but I don’t think so. We can easily find out. Let’s see what we’ve got. Short ‘m’ and ‘w.’ Serifs at top
and
bottom of the ‘I.’ Lateral at the bottom of the ‘T.’ That should be enough to be going on with.”

Remembering Knott’s instructions, McCourt said, “How long will it take?”

“Ten minutes, if the line’s clear.”

“Ten minutes?”

“That’s right. We’ll put it on the computer.” He was scribbling out a message as he spoke and said to the young man who sat at the other desk, “Feed this into the magic box, would you, Les. Gent wants an answer quickish.”

“I’d no idea,” said Ian. “I imagined these things took weeks to work out.”

“Some things take months. Some things take minutes. That’s science for you. If it’d been a Ransmeyer we’d have had a lot more trouble. That’s a communal type face, used by a lot of different machines. I’d guess this is a PLX face, which generally means a Crossfield.”

“Will it make it easier, or less easy, if it does turn out to be an electric machine?”

“It won’t make any difference in identifying the machine. Make it more difficult to peg it down to any one typist. With a manual machine you get variations in pressure. An electric machine smooths them out.”

“But if I got hold of another letter typed on this machine, you’d be able to say for certain that they both came from the same machine? Sorry. That was a bit confused, but you see what I mean.”