The Killing of Katie Steelstock (24 page)

The three men looked at each other. Knott’s face was ugly. The case, which had looked straightforward, seemed to be branching out in unexpected directions. It was an unwelcome development.

“Of course,” said Farr, “it
could
still be unconnected. Or it could be connected in some way which doesn’t make any real difference to your case. All the same, Charlie, I think it might be a good idea to sort it out before the defence starts sniffing round it. It’d be normal tactics for them to raise as many side issues as possible. Muddy the water. Put up a smokescreen. You know what I mean.”

Knott grunted. He could see the force of Farr’s suggestion. It was his belief that defence lawyers would try every dirty trick in the book. And the less plausible their case, the dirtier and trickier would their conduct of it be.

He said, “We’ll have to tackle this from both ends. We want to know what Lewson was doing down here that evening. The first place he’d make for would be the nearest pub. That’s routine stuff. One of Dan’s boys can tackle that. We’ll give him a photograph and tell him to start at the railway station. The London end must be your pigeon, Bob. I asked Division to keep an eye on Ruoff’s place. See if they’ve got anything for us. If they could think up an excuse to look at his records, we might be able to find out who his customer in Hannington was.”

Shilling said, “I’ve got any amount of things to finish here. I could go up on Monday.”

“Soon as you can,” said Knott. They all had a lot to do. He was beginning to regret that he had offered to open the committal proceedings so quickly. It would entail a loss of face if
he
had to ask for an adjournment. Probably the defence would save him the trouble by asking for one themselves. They must be further behind than he was.

Walter Steelstock was standing in the front doorway of West Hannington Manor staring down the drive. The rain was sweeping across the lawns in a gauzy curtain. The farmers might want it, but it was a bore that it should have happened on a Saturday afternoon. He had organised a game of tennis with the two Havelock girls and Billy Gonville. If the game had gone well, he had thought of suggesting a trip into Oxford that evening. Certain plans, which involved Lavinia, were beginning to form in his mind. These followed the sequence which he had been taught in the Cadet Corps at school. Intention. Method. Movement of own troops. Movements of enemy. The enemy, in this case, was his mother. He heard a sound behind him and spun around.

Peter was coming downstairs and taking evident care to do so without making too much noise.

Enemy troops? His mother in the drawing room?

Peter jerked his head toward the dining room and Walter followed him in, closing the door quietly. He noticed that Peter’s face was white. That was either excitement or fear. They affected him in the same way. When he was younger, in moments of stress he had sometimes passed right out. The doctor had talked about puberty and growing pains and had told them not to worry about it. In the last two years there had been no recurrence of the trouble. Now he looked ghastly.

Walter said, “For God’s sake, sit down, Pete, or you’ll fall flat on your back. What’s up?”

Peter sat down, put his elbows on the table and said, “Will they . . . will the court . . . make out that Johnno killed Katie?”

“I should think it’s quite likely.”

“Why?”

“Why would they find him guilty, you mean?”

Peter nodded. Walter, observing the staring eyes and the sweat standing out on his forehead, thought that he looked like a frightened horse. He lowered his voice and spoke slowly. He said, “It’s the note that was found in Katie’s bag.”

“You mean a note from Johnno asking Katie to meet him that night.”

“That’s the obvious assumption.”

“But—” said Peter. And then evidently changed his mind. “Is that all?”

“The rest seems to be circumstantial. The fact that he was known to be a wild character and that he had been very keen on Katie and had quarrelled with her that time at the Tennis Club.”

“That was my fault.”

“Why?”

“He was coaching me at tennis on our court. I kept saying to him that there was plenty of time. And then—there wasn’t.”

“I don’t see that it’s anything to get worked up about,” said Walter. “He’s such a casual chap that he’s always late for everything. If it hadn’t been you, it’d have been some other reason.”

Peter hardly seemed to be listening. He said, “Is that all they’ve got against him?”

“There’s a sort of theory – I’m not sure where it came from – that he’s put up a cock-and-bull story about where he actually was that evening and the police can prove that he’s lying. It’s something to do with the job he says he was on for the paper. That’s all I know about it. We shall have it served up piping hot when it comes to court.”

“And then it’ll be too late to do anything about it.”

“Anything about what?”

“I mean, once he’s sworn to his account of what he says he was doing it’ll be too late to go back on it.”

“A lot too late,” said Walter grimly.

“It’s quite extraordinary,” said Dicky Bird, “but it looks as though we shan’t have a single treble in the choir tomorrow. They’ve fallen by the wayside, one after the other. Two of them have got bad colds, another one’s going out with her parents. Tina Gonville says she’s sprained her ankle, although I’ll swear I saw her skipping down the street this morning—”

“There’s nothing coincidental about it,” said his wife.

“What do you mean?”

“Roney and Sim Havelock have been going round saying they’ll scrag anyone who sings in your choir.”

“Why on earth—?”

“It’s something to do with what you said in church last Sunday. They’ve got the wrong end of the stick, of course. But they’ve convinced themselves that because you were sympathetic about Katie, you must be antagonistic to Jonathan. He’s their hero.”

He stared at her. “I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t. It’s mad.”

“It’s very unsettling,” said her husband.

When Knott wanted his assistants he summoned them on the internal telephone. As they got up to comply, their own outside telephone rang and McCourt stopped behind to answer it. When he reached the operations room he found Dandridge and Esdaile examining a dozen photographs which had been spread out on the table. He said, addressing himself to Dandridge, “That was Superintendent Farr on the telephone. Bad news, I’m afraid. Inspector Ray died this morning.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Dandridge. “I had a call from his wife last night.” Shilling and Esdaile gave a sympathetic murmur. Knott grunted.

By this time, McCourt had reached the table and Esdaile moved aside to let him see the photographs. McCourt stared at them bleakly for a moment, then swung around, walked to the door and went out.

“What’s up now?” said Knott.

Esdaile said, “Ian’s upset.”

“You mean that stuff turned him up?”

“That’s right,” said Esdaile.

Shilling said, “When he was with the Met, his first posting was West End Central. He got his face shoved into a lot of shit there. I guess it upset him.”

Knott seemed more interested in the feelings of Sergeant McCourt than he had been in the death of Inspector Ray. He said, “Do you mean that sex upsets him? Is that it, Bob?”

“Not straight sex. I mean, he’s quite O.K. as far as that sort of thing’s concerned. He had one or two rather smooth girlfriends when he was up in London, I seem to remember. They rather go for that ascetic Scots look. What he couldn’t take was perversion. Maybe it was being brought up in a manse.”

“It takes them both ways,” said Knott. “I remember one youngster – I was in recruit class with him – his father was a canon and I wouldn’t have trusted him with my sister or my kid brother. I suppose that’s why Ian pulled out of the Met?”

“I guess so,” said Shilling. “I think it was the Pussycat Case that finished him. It was about that time, if you remember.”

“I remember it,” said Knott with a faint grimace of distaste.

“He asked for a transfer soon after and got himself a job down here. I believe his folk live down here.”

Knott said, “I thought they were Scotch.”

“His father was. His mother’s English. She came down here when the old man died.”

“I think he’s O.K. now,” said Eddie.

“Better put those photographs away,” said Knott.

McCourt came back. He looked pale, but otherwise collected. He said, “Sorry about that, sir,” addressing the apology to Dandridge, and sat down quietly by the table.

“Right,” said Knott. “Now I want to recap. We’ve got a certain amount of information about this porn peddler. I’m not at all sure how he fits into our case, or whether he fits into it at all. But if the pathologist is right and he was killed at the same time as Katie and by the same weapon, we’ve obviously got to fit him in somewhere. Over to you, Dan.”

“Well,” said Dandridge, “we’ve discovered that he got here by the seven-forty. That’s one of the through trains from Paddington. It wasn’t crowded and anyway the man on the gate knows most of the regulars, so he spotted this chap at once. He seems to have drifted off into the town and gone on a pub crawl. He put in an hour at the Station Tavern, moved on to the Masons Arms, where he had something to eat, and finished up at the Crown.”

“Where’s the Crown?” said Knott. He had got up and was examining the large-scale map.

“It’s on the corner of Eveleigh Road,” said McCourt. “It’s near my lodgings. I often drop in there in the evening for a bit to eat and a pint.”

“Is the landlord reliable? I mean, would he make a good witness?”

“Old Scotty. Yes, I would say he’d be all right.”

“What time did this chap leave?”

“Apparently he went out twice. Once to use the phone. At least he asked where the nearest box was. So that’s the supposition. The second time was when the pub was closing. He was about the last man out.”

“Which would be when?”

“Officially eleven o’clock.”

Ian said, “Scotty’s fairly strict about that sort of thing. It wouldn’t be later than a quarter past.”

Knott was still examining the map. He said, “It’s beginning to add up. In parts, anyway. Eveleigh Road runs down to the river. Lewson rolls out at a quarter past eleven, not exactly drunk, but tolerably full of whisky. Wherever he was making for, and I guess that’s fairly obvious now, he’d be likely to use the towpath in preference to the main road. If he’d looked at the map he’d know he could get back to the main road easily enough by using Church Lane or River Park Avenue. But for that pathologist’s report – and pathologists are sometimes too bloody clever by half – I’d guess that he slipped on the bank, which is pretty steep there, cracked his head on something sharp, rolled into the river and was drowned.”

“He wouldn’t be the first,” said Dandridge. “Is something bothering you, Ian?”

McCourt had been trying to speak for some time. He said, “Did you say the man’s name was Lewson?”

Knott grinned at him. “It’s all right, son,” he said, “we’ve all noticed it. Lewson. Lewisham. I don’t doubt he was planning to call on the chairman of your Bench and sell him a few more dirty photographs.”

“Well, Mr. Vigors,” said Mrs. Bellamy, “we’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in.”

The sun was shining directly into her south-facing chambers in Crown Office Row, lighting up the spines of the law books which crammed the shelves, focusing on one patch of blinding scarlet which Noel could see was a set of
Famous Criminal Trials.

“I’m afraid that’s right,” said Noel. “I was only consulted late last week. I imagine we could ask for an adjournment.”

“We could,” said Mrs. Bellamy, “but I’m not sure that I shall advise it. We’ll keep our options open for a little longer, I think.”

Ever since he came into the room, Noel had been teased by a resemblance. It was some minutes before he placed it. Mrs. Bellamy was a perfect female counterpart of Oliver Cromwell. There was the same calm sagacious face, the heavy jowls, the impression of rustic, kindly competence, a kindliness qualified by the steel of the eyes and flatly contradicted by the rat-trap mouth, a mouth which had said,
I would cut off his head, were he three times king.

On this occasion this formidable woman was doing no more than studying a long list of names and was seeming to find it puzzling.

“We shall need your local knowledge, Mr. Vigors,” she said. “What we have here is a list, seemingly arranged in alphabetical order, of the witnesses the Crown intends to call. Rita Black, Fire Officer Burt, Dr. Carlyle, Joseph Cavey, Arnold Cowie . . . A more considerate opponent than Detective Chief Superintendent Knott would at least have set them down in the order in which he intended to call them. We might then have had some notion of the parts they were intended to play in his carefully staged melodrama. Detective Sergeant Esdaile, Dr. Farmiloe – that’s a name I remember. What’s Jack Farmiloe doing in your part of the world?”

“He retired there last year.”

“Anything he says will be gospel. Sim Havelock, Detective Chief Superintendent Knott, Police Constable Luck, George Mariner, Mary Mason, Sally Nurse, Olivia Steelstock, Walter Steelstock. Olivia is the mother, Walter the brother, I take it? Quite so. Noel Vigors. Hullo! Slightly unusual to call the solicitor acting for the defence as a Crown witness.”

“I noticed that,” said Noel. “Maybe because I can give evidence of when Katie left the dance – or maybe to talk about a quarrel that took place in the Tennis Club.”

“We shall have to think about that. Anthony Windle, Chief Superintendent Wiseman and that’s the lot.”

“I can place the locals for you,” said Noel. He ran his finger down the list. “Cavey’s the caretaker of the village hall and part-time barman at the Tennis Club.”

“The man who found the body?”

“Right. Arnold Cowie is editor of the Reading
Sun.
Limbery covered local features for him. Including that fire. Which no doubt accounts for Fire Officer Burt. Sergeant Esdaile is local C.I.D. Sim Havelock is a small boy, son of Mrs. Havelock, one of the Hannington magistrates.”