Bodies from the Library 5, page 7
‘Nothing, sir. It’s getting damned dark, isn’t it? Oh—here’s somebody. No, it’s an outside call.’
‘Who is it?’ said Hazlerigg. ‘I can’t—’
‘It’s Sir Hector McDonnel, sir. He wants to speak to you personally.’
Hazlerigg picked up the receiver. However busy one may be, one does not say ‘No’ to an ex-head of the C.I.D.
Pickup listened to the telephone cackling and wondered what the old Chief could be talking about.
Then he saw Hazlerigg’s face.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the Inspector. ‘It’s very good of you. The flats in Curran Road—yes, I’ll go right along.’
The door banged. Footsteps clattered down the stairs. A car started up.
Walkinshaw paused for a moment outside the door of the flat. As the porter had indicated, it was the only flat at the end of the long corridor.
It was now so dark that he looked down with some surprise at his watch. The time was twenty-five to six, but a hard grey cloak of premature dusk lay across the sky, blanketing sound and movement.
In the exaggerated silence he could clearly hear men’s voices inside the flat. Some way back in the main block a wireless was playing. A car went by in the street.
He touched the bell. The door was opened by a fat man in overalls. He opened it so quickly that he might almost have been waiting with one hand on the latch.
Walkinshaw introduced himself.
‘Why, come in,’ said the man. He pointed to an inner door, then walked ahead and half opened it. As Walkinshaw got there he received a violent blow between the shoulders which shot him forward. His head cracked against the edge of the door, which opened under the impact, and he found himself inside the room.
Two men were looking at him.
‘Do you always open doors with your head?’ said the bigger of the two.
‘Hard-headed Harry, the boy detective,’ said the smaller man.
Walkinshaw said nothing. He was still seeing sparks.
‘Let’s hear from you,’ said the big man. He had a white face under a heavy shock of black hair. Dead white, like the belly of a fish. His accent was American.
Walkinshaw’s head was clearing now. He said: ‘You’re Herman Dods.’
‘Right,’ said the man.
‘In that case,’ said Walkinshaw. ‘I shall have to ask you to come with me.’ He moved forward.
‘Don’t try it,’ said Dods, ‘unless you want to build yourself a new stomach.’ His hand moved, flickered lazily inside his coat, came out holding a gun.
Walkinshaw stopped moving.
‘That’s right,’ said Dods. There was another silence.
‘What are we going to do with him?’ said the man in overalls.
Walkinshaw realised that he had interrupted a move. Shelves and cupboards were empty. Three suitcases stood ready strapped beside the door
‘Go and run the bath full of water,’ said the big man.
‘Hot or cold?’
‘Now, that’s not kind,’ said Dods. ‘Just make it warm. Then we’ll tie this boy up and dunk him into it while we get going. It’ll give him something to think about, keeping his head above water.’
Walkinshaw stood very still. He had realised that his detecting career, so recently and promisingly begun, was already at an end. If he submitted this time he didn’t see that he could ever stand on his own feet again. If he didn’t …
The big man was a full two yards away, watching him. There wasn’t a chance in a million of jumping him. Walkinshaw jumped.
Dods’s arm came up almost slowly and two reports echoed each other. The one inside the room was loud, but it was swallowed up and drowned by the tearing crash from outside as the storm broke and the sky fell in a blinding cataract of rain.
V
Whether the sudden shock of the storm upset his aim or whether the unexpectedness of Walkinshaw’s attack achieved a fraction of a second of surprise will never be known. The result was what counted.
Dods shot high and left.
He didn’t miss Walkinshaw, because a miss at that range would have been impossible, but the bullet, instead of hitting him in the stomach or chest, went in under the collarbone and out by the shoulder blade.
It knocked out Walkinshaw’s right arm, but it didn’t kill him—and it didn’t stop him.
He whipped his left arm round Dods’s neck and jerked him backwards. He then slid to the floor and Dods, who had no choice, slid with him.
The thin man had also drawn a gun: but he pushed it away again. Walkinshaw was underneath Dods, and with the two of them threshing round on the floor like twin-hooked salmon, there seemed to be very little chance of getting in a useful shot.
Besides, as he soon saw, it wouldn’t be necessary.
He picked up a bottle off the table, sidled forward for the kill.
The storm hit Hazlerigg’s rescue party as they came skidding into the drive. There was no time to shut windows or lower windscreens. The leading car ploughed up to the entrance with a feather of spray in front of each wheel, and Hazlerigg tumbled out.
Fortunately the porter’s army training stood him in good stead.
‘Your man’s in the flat at the end of the corridor,’ he said. ‘Up those stairs and at the end of the corridor.’
It wasn’t a long sentence; when he started speaking there were eight huge, wet policemen in the entrance hall. By the time he had finished all had gone.
Hazlerigg raced ahead up the stairs. When he came to the door of the flat he paused for a moment to listen, but the drumming of the rain drowned everything. He pivoted on one foot and swung the other foot back and then forward, the sole flat against the door, an inch below the handle.
The door gave and the tide flowed in, across the passageway, and into the front room, like great, grey-blue seals tumbling after a bucket of fish.
The thin man took one look at what was coming and jumped out of the window. It was quite a long drop. The fat man hit one of the policemen once in the face. Roberts, who had played a deal of rugby, took this in very good part. He clasped the fat man round the waist, bore him to the floor and rolled on him.
Dods offered no resistance at all. He seemed relieved when Hazlerigg prised Walkinshaw’s forearm away from his windpipe.
Hazlerigg walked to the window. Two of the police car drivers were helping the thin man to his feet. He seemed to have broken an ankle. There was not much more to do.
The postscript was in Hazlerigg’s official report to the Assistant Commissioner:
I commend to your attention the enterprise and perseverance displayed by Probationary Detective Walkinshaw. It was only from lack of experience that he did not appreciate that hardwood sawdust—particularly when mixed with alum crystals—forms the normal fireproof lining of a certain type of small safe. Taken in conjunction with the dark green paint, this should certainly have suggested that the men who stole the car might be—as proved to be the case—the persons responsible for the Eton Hill robbery. Had he appreciated this point he would not, I feel certain, have attempted to tackle them single-handed.
Hazlerigg paused and chewed the end of his pen. Outside the world was fresh and sparkling from its bath. He hated writing reports. What he really wanted to say was that, in the long run, the thing that mattered most in police work was guts, and that he thought the boy had done damned well. He could think of no official phraseology to convey it.
MICHAEL GILBERT
Michael Gilbert was born on 17 July 1912 in Billinghay, Lincolnshire, the son of Anne Cuthbert, a journalist, and Bernard Gilbert, a McGonagallesque poet and author of an unfinished history of rural life in England. Gilbert was educated at St Peter’s School in Seaford, Sussex, and at Blundell’s School, which he left in 1931. For a short period, he taught at Salisbury Cathedral School and outside work secured an external law degree from London University.
In 1938, Gilbert joined Ellis, Bickersteth, Aglionby & Hazel as an articled clerk. At the same time, and doubtless inspired by his parents, he began writing a novel inspired in part by his time as a teacher. However, career and novel were to be interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which Gilbert served with the Honourable Artillery Company in North Africa. He was captured in 1943 and held as a prisoner of war in Northern Italy, but when the camp guards fled after Italy’s surrender, Gilbert and two other POWs were able to escape.
On his return to England, he completed the final chapters of Close Quarters (1947), but only, he would claim in later years, after he had managed to work out which of the many suspects was guilty! In the same year, he married Roberta Marsden, with whom he would have seven children, and he resumed his career as a solicitor, joining Trower, Still & Keeling. He became a partner in 1952 and remained with the firm until his retirement in 1983, having specialized in copyright and company law.
Over the next 50 years, while maintaining a successful career as a solicitor, Gilbert wrote more than 80 novels. In the words of Francis Iles, he was a ‘determined experimentalist’ and his work includes historical mysteries, detective stories and realistic police procedurals, as well as thrillers dealing with terrorism, apartheid or espionage, such as Be Shot for Sixpence (1956) and the tales of Mr Calder and Mr Behrens (1982). Gilbert also wrote around 150 short stories as well as stage plays and scripts for radio and television. Like many authors, he drew on his own experiences. His time in the Italian POW camp provided the background for Death in Captivity (1952), while the novel that some regard as his masterpiece, Smallbone Deceased (1949), is set largely in a solicitors’ office.
In interviews, Gilbert regularly recounted how he would write during the 50 minutes it took to travel to London by train from Sole Street station in Kent. Seated always in a less crowded first-class carriage, he aimed to write a minimum of two sides of foolscap on the way in, while keeping the journey home for research. What he also made clear in interviews, but is less often remembered, is that he always planned at home what he was going to write about. Typically he made a synopsis of the next two chapters in a legal notebook, which he would then flesh out during the morning commute. Ideas for plots and characters generally came from his work as a solicitor or while walking on the North Downs, but the mayhem of The Night of the Twelfth was inspired by the antics of a cherubic choir boy. Gilbert also reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement and the Sunday Telegraph, wrote several true crime studies and edited three widely praised anthologies: the Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes (1986); Prep School (1991), an anthology of reminiscences of school life; and Crime in Good Company (1959) for the Crime Writers’ Association.
As well as being a founder member of the CWA, Gilbert was a member of the Detection Club and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Perhaps his greatest honour, however, was being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. He died on 8 February 2006 at his home, the Old Rectory in the village of Luddesdown near Gravesend in Kent.
‘Sugar-Plum Killer’ was first published as a five-part serial in the Daily Herald between 18 and 22 December 1950. The authority on Gilbert’s work, John Cooper, has noted that some years later Gilbert reworked the story to include Patrick Petrella; as ‘Kendrew’s Private War’ it was first published in Argosy in April 1959 and collected in Even Murderers Take Holidays and Other Mysteries (2007).
VACANCY WITH CORPSE
Anthony Boucher
I
Felicity Cain’s hair had started out to be red. It had stayed red until halfway through her high school days. This was why she had come to be known as ‘Liz’. You can’t call a freckle-faced carrot-top Felicity. That suggests lace and dimity and demureness, and there was nothing demure about Liz, not even after her hair turned the brownish blond you’ve seen in her publicity pictures.
The freckles had vanished when the red hair changed colour, but her eyes still had a greenish glint, and her spirit was still flamboyantly flame-crowned. Yet, here in the quiet, civilized atmosphere of the fashionable cocktail lounge, atop San Francisco’s most impressive skyscraper, with the clink of ice and glass to soothe the ear, she was more strikingly lovely than Ben Latimer ever remembered. It was a beauty that fascinated him, left him oddly breathless.
Out of the broad plate glass windows there was a noble view of the bay, bright with the afternoon sun. But he had no eyes for the view—not when Felicity was around. She had her arm in a sling, the result of an aeroplane accident—she was America’s most noted aviatrix—but the injury made no difference to Latimer. She still looked good to him.
He grinned as he set down his glass. ‘You’re like the bay, Liz,’ he said. ‘Wonderful.’
She smiled back. ‘You really mean I’m an institution, like the Barbary Coast, the cable cars—and the Cains! See any guide book.’
Ben Latimer winced. ‘No. You’re wrong.’ He waved his arm. ‘See that view. At first glance it’s perfect beauty. But look again and you notice a carrier and a couple of destroyers. There’s toughness under that beauty.’
‘La, sir!’ Liz said. ‘And likewise fie. Is that any way to speak of the woman you love? Don’t you know I’m all sweet femininity? At least as long as this damned arm keeps me grounded.’
Ben laughed. ‘It’s funny, Liz. When I think about you, it’s always with red hair. Even when I look at you I can’t get over being surprised.’
‘And when I think of you I still see you back on campus in a Letterman’s sweater. I just can’t get used to the idea that you’re now a policeman.’
‘Detective-Lieutenant, Liz, please,’ he corrected her. ‘Can you imagine the society pages of the papers writing up the marriage of a Cain to a mere policeman?’
‘I know.’ Her green eyes sparkled with glee. ‘At our wedding, do we line up your squad, or whatever you call them, and march out of the church under an arch of crossed rubber hoses.’
Ben shook his head. ‘No rubber hoses in war time,’ he said solemnly. ‘In fact, we haven’t had a single voluntary confession since the rubber shortage started.’
Liz fished in her glass, and said, ‘I like onions better than olives any time.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Why? What should be?’
‘Whenever you begin making irrelevant remarks like an Odets character, I know you’re shying away from something that bothers you. What is it?’
Liz hesitated. ‘I don’t know how to converse with a policeman.’
‘That’s never bothered you before.’
‘I’ve never done it before. I mean I’ve always just talked to Ben—my Ben!’ A smile softened her face, a smile such as you never saw in any of the press photos. ‘Now I want to consult with Detective-Lieutenant Latimer.’
Ben Latimer frowned. ‘What on earth kind of official business can you have on your mind? Remember I’m on Homicide.’
Liz vigorously nodded her brownish blond head. ‘Uh-huh.’
It wasn’t a gag. Her face was serious. She kept it averted as she carefully drew geometric patterns with the cocktail’s tooth-pick.
‘All right,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll try to look official even though I’m in plainclothes. What’s the trouble? Anybody I know? No, that doesn’t sound official. What, madam, is your complaint?’
‘It isn’t mine. It’s Graffer’s.’
‘Your grandfather? You mean there’s something sinister about his illness?’
‘Of course not!’ Liz smiled. ‘Graffer’s illness, God bless him, is just age and heart and things. You don’t think Dr Frayne could be fooled, do you? This is something else. It’s—it’s funny. Ben, if you hated a man and he was going to— to die, wouldn’t you just say to yourself, “Goody, goody,” and that’d be that?’
‘No,’ Ben said reflectively. ‘That’s not the way some minds work. You might say, “Damn it, he can’t die all by himself and do me out of the pleasure of killing him.” Is that what you mean?’
‘Uh-huh. Graffer’s been getting notes. Crazy notes. The Black Angel cannot claim you who belong to us. Strange things like that.’
Ben frowned. ‘It happens to every judge, I guess, if he’s been on the bench as long as your grandfather was. Half the time they’re from neurotic cranks. Are they signed, these notes?’
‘With a rubber stamp of a pointing hand. You know, what printers call a fist. I don’t know what it means.’
‘The Fist.’ Ben nodded. ‘It’s an imitation Black Hand racket which sprang up in the Italian colony here. And your grandfather did send Almoneri and de Santis to the gallows.’
‘But it’s so silly,’ Liz insisted. ‘That was twenty years ago. And now, when maybe he’s dying, why should they suddenly write him threatening notes? Perhaps I shouldn’t take them seriously. It must be some screwy kind of a gag. But Graffer wanted me to tell you about it.’
Ben shook his head. ‘I don’t know if it’s silly, at that. You remember Vitelli wasn’t hanged? He got paroled a few weeks ago. He managed to disappear somehow and he hasn’t been reporting either to parole or alien authorities. Does your grandfather want a police guard?’
‘Uh-huh. Only quiet-like. You know Mother. You know what a policeman in the house would do to her. Especially at a time like this with my cousin, Sherry, coming and the servants changing all the time. Also, Graffer didn’t tell anybody but me. Not even Graffer’s secretary, Roger Garvey, knows. So could you arrange it somehow?’
‘I’ll fix things.’ Ben spoke in reassuring tones. ‘If it’s to be secret, I can’t do more than put a couple of men to watch the entrances to the house.’ He groped in his pocket. ‘Here—give your grandfather this whistle. It may set his mind at ease.’
‘Thanks, Ben. It seems so funny, talking to you official-like. You never did mention your work around me. Not even when you were on that suitcase murder and all the papers were full of it. Then, again, maybe I’d better not know too much. Just keep you for my Ben and not think of you that way.’
