Young Petrella (17 page)

Petrella trudged down three flights of stairs (it is only in grave emergency that a policeman is allowed to use a private telephone) and rang up the Municipal Returning Officer from a call box. After that he revisited the first six flats. The occupants unanimously agreed that a “man from the Council” had called on them that Friday morning. They had not mentioned it because Petrella had asked if anything “unusual” had happened. There was nothing in the least unusual in men from the Council snooping round. Petrella asked for a description and collated, from his six informants, the following items. The man in question was “young”, “young-ish”, “sort of middle-aged” (this was from the teenaged daughter in No. 37). He was bareheaded and had tousled hair, he was wearing a hat. He had a shifty look (No. 34), a nice smile (teenaged daughter), couldn’t say, didn’t really look at him (the remainder). He was about six foot, five foot nine, five foot six, didn’t notice. He had an ordinary sort of voice. He was wearing an Old Harrovian tie (old gentleman in ground-floor flat No. 34). He seemed to walk with rather a stiff sort of leg, almost a limp (four out of six informants).

Petrella hurried back to Crown Road Police Station, where he found Haxtell and Barstow in conference.

“There doesn’t seem to be much doubt,” he reported, “that it was a sneak thief. Posing as a Council employee. I’ve checked with them and they are certain that he couldn’t have been genuine. His plan would be to knock once or twice. If he got no answer he’d either slip the lock or force it. He drew blank at the first seven. Someone answered the door in each of them. When he got to No. 39 I expect Miss Martin didn’t hear him. The migraine must have made her pretty blind and deaf.”

“All right!” said Barstow. “And then she came out and caught him at it, and so he hit her.”

“The descriptions aren’t a lot of good,” said Haxtell, “but we’ll get all the pictures from the CRO of people known to go in for this sort of lark. They may sort someone out for us.”

“Don’t forget the most important item,” said Barstow. “The limp.”

Petrella said, “It did occur to me to wonder, sir, whether we ought to place much reliance on the limp.”

He received a glare which would have daunted a less self-confident man.

“He would have to have somewhere to hide that big screwdriver. It was almost two foot long. The natural place would be a pocket inside his trouser leg. That might account for the appearance of a stiff leg.”

Haxtell avoided Barstow’s eye.

“It’s an idea,” he said. “Now just get along and start checking on this list of Miss Martin’s known relations.”

“There was one other thing—”

“Do you know,” observed Superintendent Barstow unkindly, “why God gave young policemen two feet but only one head?”

Petrella accepted the hint and departed.

Nevertheless the idea persisted; and later that day, when he was alone with Haxtell, he voiced it to him.

“Do you remember,” he said, “about six months ago, I think it was, we had an outbreak of this sort of thing in the Cholderton Road, Park Branch area? A man cleared out three or four blocks of flats, and we never caught him. He was posing as a Pools salesman then.”

“The man who left his coat behind.”

“That’s right!” said Petrella. “With Colonel Wing.”

Colonel Wing was nearly ninety and stone deaf, but still spry. He had fought in one Zulu and countless Afghan wars and the walls of his top-floor living room in Cholderton Mansions were adorned with a fine selection of assegais, yataghans and knobkerries. Six months before this story opens he had had an experience which might have unnerved a less seasoned warrior. He was not an early riser. Pottering out of his bedroom one fine morning at about eleven o’clock he had observed a man kneeling in front of his sideboard and quietly sorting out the silver. It was difficult to say who had been more taken aback. The man had jumped up, and run from the room. Colonel Wing had regretfully dismissed the idea of trying to spear him with an assegai from the balcony as he left the front door of the flats, and had rung up the police. They had made one curious discovery.

Hanging in the hall was a strange raincoat.

“Never seen it before in my life,” said Colonel Wing.

“D’you mean to say the damn feller had the cheek to hang his coat up before starting work? Wonder he didn’t help himself to a whisky and soda while he was about it.”

Haxtell said that he had known housebreakers to do just that. He talked to the Colonel at length about the habits of criminals; and removed the coat for examination. Since the crime was only an abortive robbery, it was not thought worthwhile wasting too much time on it. A superficial examination produced no results in the way of name tabs or tailor’s marks; the coat was carefully placed in a cellophane bag and stored.

“I’d better have a word with him,” said Petrella.

He found the Colonel engaged in writing a letter to the
United Services Journal
on the comparative fighting qualities of Zulus and Russians. He listened to the composite descriptions of the intruder, and said that, as far as one could tell, they sounded like the same man. His intruder had been young to middle-aged, of medium height, and strongly built.

“There’s one thing,” said the Colonel. “I saw him in a good light, and I may be deaf, but I’ve got excellent eyesight. There’s a tiny spot in his left eye. A little red spot, like a fire opal. You couldn’t mistake it. If you catch him, I’ll identify him for you.”

“The trouble is,” said Petrella, “that it looks as if he’s never been through our hands. Almost the only real lead we’ve got is that coat he left behind him at your place. We’re going over it again, much more thoroughly.”

Thus had the coat grown in importance. It had improved its status. It was now an exhibit in a murder case.

“Give it everything,” said Haxtell to the scientists. And the scientists prepared to oblige.

That evening, after a weary afternoon spent interrogating Miss Martin’s father’s relatives in Acton and South Harrow, Petrella found himself back on the Embankment. The Forensic Science Laboratory observes civilised hours and Mr. Worsley was on the point of removing his long white overall and replacing it with a rather deplorable green tweed coat with matching leather patches on the elbows.

“I’ve finished my preliminary work on the right-hand pocket,” he said. “We have isolated arrowroot starch, pipe tobacco and a quantity of common silver sand.”

“Splendid!” said Petrella. “Splendid! All I have got to do now is to find a housewife who smokes a pipe and has recently been to the seaside and we shall be home and dry.”

“What use you make of the data we provide must be entirely a matter for you,” said Mr. Worsley coldly. He was already late for a meeting of the South Wimbledon Medico-legal Society, to whom he had promised a paper entitled: “The Part of the Laboratory in Modern Crime Detection”.

Petrella went back to Highside.

Here he found a note from Haxtell which ran: “A friend of Miss Martin has suggested that some or other of these were, or might have been, boyfriends of the deceased. I am seeing ones marked with a cross. Would you tackle the others?” There followed a list of names and addresses ranging from Welwyn Garden City to Morden. He looked at his watch. It was half-past seven. With any luck he could knock off four of them before midnight.

In the ensuing days the ripples spread, wider and wider, diminishing in size and importance as they became more distant from the centre of the disturbance. Petrella worked his way from near relatives and close friends, who said: “How terrible! Whoever would have thought of anything like that happening to Marjorie,” through more distant connections who said: “Miss Martin? Yes I know her. I haven’t seen her for a long time,” right out to the circumference where there were people who simply looked bewildered and said: “Miss Martin – I’m sorry, I don’t think I remember anyone of that name,” and, on being reminded that they had danced with her at a tennis club dance two years before, said, “If you say so, I expect it’s right, but I’m dashed if I can even remember what she looked like.”

It was in the course of the third day that Petrella called at a nice little house in Herne Hill. The name was Taylor. Mr. Taylor was not at home, but the door was opened by his wife, a cheerful redhead who banished her two children to the kitchen when she understood what Petrella was after. Her reactions were the standard ones.

Apprehension, followed, as soon as she understood that what Petrella wanted was nothing to do with her, by a cheerful communicativeness. Miss Martin was, she believed, her husband’s cousin. That is to say not his cousin but his second cousin, or something like that. Her husband’s father’s married sister’s husband’s niece. So far as she knew they had only met her once, and that was quite by chance, six months before, at the funeral of Miss Martin’s mother, who was, of course, sister to her husband’s uncle by marriage.

Petrella disentangled this complicated relationship without difficulty. He was already a considerable expert on the Martin family tree. Unfortunately, Mrs. Taylor could tell him nothing. Her acquaintance with Miss Martin was confined to this single occasion and she had not set eyes on her since. Her husband, who was a commercial traveller for Joblox, the London paint firm, was unlikely to be back until very late. He was on a tour in the Midlands, and it depended on the traffic when he got home. Petrella said he quite understood. The interview remained in his memory chiefly because it was on his way back from it that he picked up his copy of the laboratory report on the coat.

They had done themselves proud. No inch of its surface, interior or exterior, had escaped their microscopic gaze. Petrella cast his eye desperately over the eight closely typed foolscap pages. Stains on the exterior had been isolated and chemically tested and proved beyond reasonable doubt to be in two cases ink, in one case rabbit blood and in one case varnish. A quantity of sisal-hemp fluff had been recovered from the seam of the left-hand cuff and some marmalade from the right-hand one. A sliver of soft wood, originally identified on the Chatterton Key Card as
Pinus sylvestris
, was now believed to be
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana
. In the right-hand pocket had been discovered a number of fragments of oyster shell and a stain of oil shown by quantitative analysis to be a thick oil of a sort much used in marine engineering.

Petrella read the report in the Underground between Charing Cross and Highside. When he reached Crown Road he found Haxtell in the CID room. He had in front of him the reports of all visits so far made. There were two hundred and thirty of them. Petrella added the five he had completed that afternoon, and was about to retire when he remembered the laboratory report, and cautiously added that, too, to the pile. He was conscious of thunder in the air.

“Don’t bother,” said Haxtell. “I’ve had a copy.” His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of proper sleep. “So has the Superintendent. He’s just been here. He wants us to take some action on it.”

“Action, sir?”

“He suggests,” said Haxtell, in ominously quiet tones, “that we re-examine all persons interviewed so far,” his hand flickered for a moment over the pile of paper on the table, “to ascertain whether they have ever been interested in the oyster-fishing industry. He feels that the coincidence of oyster shell and marine oil must have some significance.”

“I see, sir,” said Petrella. “When do we start?”

Haxtell stopped himself within an ace of saying something which would have been both indiscreet and insubordinate. Then, to his credit, he laughed instead.

“We are both,” he said, “going to get one good night’s rest first. We’ll start tomorrow morning.”

“I wonder if I could borrow the reports until then,” said Petrella, wondering at himself as he did so.

“Do what you like with them,” said Haxtell. “I’ve got three days’ routine work to catch up with.”

Petrella took them back with him to Mrs. Catt’s, where that worthy widow had prepared a high tea for him, his first leisured meal for three days. Sustained by a mountainous dish of sausages and eggs and refreshed by his third cup of strong tea, he started on the task of proving to himself the idea that had come to him.

Each paper was skimmed, and put on one side. Every now and then he would stop, extract one, and add it to a very much smaller pile beside his plate. At the end of an hour Petrella looked at the results of his work with satisfaction. In the small pile were six papers: six summaries of interviews with friends or relations of the murdered girl. If his idea was right, he had thus, at a stroke, reduced the possibles from two hundred and thirty-five to six. And of those six, only one he knew in his heart of hearts was a probable.

There came back into his mind the visit that he had made that afternoon. There it was, in that place and no other, that the answer lay. There he had glimpsed, without knowing it, the end of the scarlet thread which led to the heart of this untidy, rambling labyrinth. He thought of a nice red-headed girl and two red-headed children, and unexpectedly he found himself shivering.

It was dusk before he got back to Herne Hill. The lights were on in the nice little house, upstairs and downstairs, and a muddy car stood in the gravel run-in in front of the garage. Sounds suggested that the red-headed children were being put to bed by both their parents and were enjoying it.

One hour went by, and then a second. Petrella had found an empty house opposite, and he was squatting in the garden, his back propped up against a tree. The night was warm and he was quite comfortable, and his head was nodding on his chest when the front door of the house opposite opened, and Mr. Taylor appeared.

He stood for a moment, outlined against the light from the hall, saying something to his wife. He was too far off for Petrella to make out the words. Then he came down the path. He ignored his car, and made for the front gate, for which Petrella was thankful. He had made certain arrangements to cope with the contingency that Mr. Taylor might use his car, but it was much easier if he remained on foot.

A short walk took them both, pursuer and pursued, to the door of the King of France public house. Mr. Taylor went into the saloon. Petrella himself chose the private bar. Like most private bars, it had nothing to recommend it save its privacy, being narrow, bare and quite empty. But it had the advantage of looking straight across the serving counter into the saloon.