Hell Is Always Today (12 page)

It was quiet in the Interrogation Room. The constable at the door picked his nose impassively and thunder sounded again in the distance, a little nearer this time. Harold held the mug of tea in both hands and lifted it to his lips. It was almost cold, the surface covered by a kind of unpleasant scum that filled him with disgust. He shuddered and put the mug down on the table.

“How much longer?” he demanded and the door opened.

Mallory moved to the window and stood there staring out into the rain. Wade positioned himself at the other end of the table and waited, the trousers neatly folded over one arm.

Harold was aware of a strange, choking sensation in his throat. He wrenched at his collar and glanced appealingly at Brady who had closed the door after the constables had discreetly withdrawn. The big Irishman looked troubled. He held Harold’s glance for only a moment, then dropped his gaze.

“What did you do with the tenner?” Mallory asked without turning round.

“Tenner? What tenner?” Harold said.

Mallory turned to face him. “The ten-pound note the girl had in her stocking top—what did you do with it?”

“I’ve never handled a ten-pound note in my life.”

“If you’d had any sense you’d have destroyed it, but not you.” Mallory carried on as if there had been no interruption. “Where would you change it at that time of night—a pub? Or what about the station buffet—you said you were there.”

The flesh seemed to shrink visibly on Harold’s bones. “What the hell are you trying to prove?”

Mallory picked up the phone and rang through to the C.I.D. general office. “Mallory here,” he told the Duty Inspector. “I want you to get in touch with the manager of the buffet at the Central Station right away. Find out if anyone changed a ten-pound note last night. Yes, that’s right—a ten-pound note.”

Harold’s eyes burned in a face that was as white as paper. “You’re wasting your time.” He was suddenly belligerent again. “They could have had half a dozen ten-pound notes through their hands on a Saturday night for all you know, so what does it prove?”

“We’ll wait and see shall we?”

Harold seemed to pull himself together. He sat straighter in his chair and took a deep breath. “All right, I’ve had enough. If you’re charging me, I want a lawyer. If you’re not, then I’m not staying here another minute.”

“If you’ll extend that to five I’ll be more than satisfied,” Mallory said.

Harold stared at him blankly. “What do you mean?”

“I’m expecting a chap from the lab to arrive any second. We just want to give you a simple blood test.”

“Blood test? What for?”

Mallory nodded to Wade who laid the trousers on the table. “The tests the lab ran on these trousers proved you were with a woman last night.”

“All right—I admitted that.”

“And the post-mortem on Grace Packard indicated she’d had intercourse with someone just before she died.”

“It wasn’t with me, that’s all I know.”

“We can prove that one way or the other with the simplest of tests.” It was from that point on that Mallory started to bend the facts. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but it’s possible to test a man’s semen for his blood group factor.”

“So what?”

“During the post-mortem on Grace Packard a semen smear was obtained. It’s since been tested in the lab and indicates a certain blood group. When the technician gets here from the lab he’ll be able to take a small sample of your blood and tell us what your group is within a couple of minutes—or perhaps you know already?”

Harold stared wildly at him and the silence which enveloped them all was so heavy that suddenly it seemed almost impossible to breathe. His head moved slightly from side to side faster and faster. He tried to get up and then collapsed completely, falling across the table.

He hammered his fist up and down like a hysterical child. “The bitch, the rotten stinking bitch. She shouldn’t have laughed at me! She shouldn’t have laughed at me!”

He started to cry and Mallory stood there, hands braced against the table, staring down at him. There was a time when this particular moment would have meant something, but not now. In fact, not for some considerable time now.

Quite suddenly the whole thing seemed desperately unreal—a stupid charade that had no substance. It didn’t seem to be important any longer and that didn’t make sense. Too much in too short a time. Perhaps what he needed was a spot of leave.

He straightened and there was a knock at the door. Brady opened it and a constable handed him a slip of paper. He passed it to Mallory who read it, face impassive. He crumpled it up in one hand and tossed it into the waste bin.

“A message from Dr. Das. Mrs. Phillips died peacefully in her sleep fifteen minutes ago. Thank God for that anyway.”

“It would be easy to say I told you so, Miller, but there it is,” Mallory said.

Miller took a deep breath. “No possibility of error, sir?”

“None at all. He’s given us a full statement. It seems he waited outside Faulkner’s flat, saw Faulkner and the girl go in and followed her when she came out. He pulled her into Dob Court where they had some kind of reconciliation because she allowed him to have intercourse with her and she gave him the ten-pound note.”

“What went wrong?”

“God alone knows—I doubt if we’ll ever get a clear picture. Apparently there was some sort of argument to do with Faulkner and the money. I get the impression that after the way he had treated him, Phillips objected to the idea that Faulkner might have had his way with the girl. The money seemed to indicate that he had.”

“So he killed her?”

“Apparently she taunted him, there was an argument and he started to hit her. Lost his temper completely. Didn’t mean to kill her of course. They never do.”

“Do you think a jury might believe that?”

“With his background? Not in a month of Sundays.” The telephone rang. Mallory picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then put it down. “Another nail in the coffin. It seems the manager of the station buffet has turned up the assistant who changed that ten-pound note last night. Seems she can identify Phillips. He was a regular customer. She says he was in there about a quarter to eleven.”

“The bloody fool,” Miller said.

“They usually are, Miller, and a good thing for us, I might add.”

“But what on earth is Faulkner playing at? I don’t understand.”

“Let’s have him in and find out shall we?”

Mallory sat back and started to fill his pipe. Miller opened the door and called and Faulkner came in followed by Jack Morgan.

Faulkner looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He stood in front of the desk, trenchcoat draped from his shoulders like a cloak, hands pushed negligently into his pockets.

Mallory busied himself with his pipe. When it was going to his satisfaction, he blew out the match and looked up. “Mr. Faulkner, I have here a full and complete confession to the murder of Grace Packard signed by Harold Phillips. What have you got to say to that?”

“Only that it would appear that I must now add a gift for prophecy to the list of my virtues,” Faulkner said calmly.

Morgan came forward quickly. “Is this true, Superintendent?”

“It certainly is. We’ve even managed to turn up the ten-pound note your client gave the girl. Young Phillips changed it at the station buffet before going home.”

Morgan turned on Faulkner, his face white and strained. “What in the hell have you been playing at, for God’s sake? You told us that you killed Grace Packard.”

“Did I?” Faulkner shrugged. “The other way about as I remember it. You told me.” He turned to Mallory. “Mr. Morgan, like all lawyers, Superintendent, has a tendency to believe his own arguments. Once he’d made up his mind I was the nigger in the woodpile, he couldn’t help but find proof everywhere he looked.”

“Are you trying to say you’ve just been playing the bloody fool as usual?” Morgan pulled him round angrily. “Don’t you realise what you’ve done to Joanna?”

“She had a choice. She could have believed in me. She took your road.” Faulkner seemed completely unconcerned. “I’m sure you’ll be very happy together. Can I go now, Superintendent?”

“I think that might be advisable,” Mallory said.

Faulkner turned in the doorway, the old sneer lifting the corner of his mouth as he glanced at Miller. “Sorry about that promotion—better luck next time.”

After he had gone there was something of a silence. Morgan just stood there, staring wildly into space. Quite suddenly he turned and rushed out without a word.

Miller stood at the window for a long moment, staring down into the rain. He saw Faulkner come out of the main entrance and go down the steps. He paused at the bottom to button his trenchcoat, face lifted to the rain, then walked rapidly away. Morgan appeared a moment later. He watched Faulkner go then hailed a taxi from the rank across the street.

Miller took out his wallet, produced a pound note and laid it on Mallory’s desk. “I was wrong,” he said simply.

Mallory nodded. “You were, but I won’t hold that against you. In my opinion Faulkner’s probably just about as unbalanced as it’s possible to be and still walk free. He’d impair anyone’s judgement.”

“Nice of you to put it that way, but I was still wrong.”

“Never mind.” Mallory stood up and reached for his coat. “If you can think of anywhere decent that will still be open on a Sunday afternoon I’ll buy you a late lunch out of my ill-gotten gains.”

“Okay, sir. Just give me ten minutes to clear my desk and I’m your man.”

The rain was falling heavier than ever as they went down the steps of the Town Hall to the Mini-Cooper. Miller knew a restaurant that might fit the bill, an Italian place that had recently opened in one of the northern suburbs of the city and he drove past the infirmary and took the car through the maze of slum streets behind it towards the new Inner Ring Road.

The streets were deserted, washed clean by the heavy rain and the wipers had difficulty in keeping the screen clear. They didn’t speak and Miller drove on mechanically so stunned by what had happened that he was unable to think straight.

They turned a corner and Mallory gripped his arm. “For God’s sake, what’s that?”

Miller braked instinctively. About half-way along the street, two men struggled beside a parked motorcycle. One of them was a police patrolman in heavy belted stormcoat and black crash helmet. The other wore only shirt and pants and seemed to be barefooted.

The policeman went down, the other man jumped for the motorcycle and kicked it into life. It roared away from the kerb as the patrolman scrambled to his feet, and came straight down the middle of the street. Miller swung the wheel, taking the Mini-Cooper across in an attempt to cut him off. The machine skidded wildly as the rider wrenched the wheel, and shaved the bonnet of the Mini-Cooper with a foot to spare, giving Miller a clear view of his wild, determined face.
Gunner Doyle
. Well this was something he
could
handle. He took the Mini-Cooper round in a full circle across the footpath, narrowly missing an old gas lamp, and went after him.

It was at that precise moment that Jack Morgan arrived back at Faulkner’s flat. He knocked on the door and it was opened almost at once by Joanna Hartmann. She was very pale, her eyes swollen from weeping, but seemed well in control of herself. She had a couple of dresses over one arm.

“Hello, Jack, I’m just getting a few of my things together.”

That she had lived with Faulkner on occasions was no surprise to him. She moved away and he said quickly, “He didn’t kill Grace Packard, Joanna.”

She turned slowly. “What did you say?”

“The police had already charged the girl’s boy friend when we got there. They have a full confession and corroborating evidence.”

“But Bruno said…”

Her voice trailed away and Morgan put a hand on her arm gently. “I know what he said, Joanna, but it wasn’t true. He was trying to teach us some sort of lesson. He seemed to find the whole thing rather funny.”

“He doesn’t change, does he?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Where is he now?”

“He went out ahead of me. Last I saw he was going for a walk in the rain.”

She nodded briefly. “Let’s get out of here then—just give me a moment to get the rest of my things.”

“You don’t want to see him?”

“Never again.”

There was a hard finality in her voice and she turned and went into the bedroom. Morgan followed and stood in the entrance watching. She laid her clothes across the bed and added one or two items which she took from a drawer in one of the dressing tables.

There was a fitted wardrobe against the wall, several suitcases piled on top. She went across and reached up in vain.

“Let me,” Morgan said.

He grabbed the handle of the case which was bottom of the pile and eased it out. He frowned suddenly. “Feels as if there’s something in it.”

He put the case on the bed, flicked the catches and opened the lid. Inside there was a black plastic handbag, a silk headscarf, a nylon stocking and a high-heeled shoe.

Joanna Hartmann started to scream.

Strange, but it was so narrowly avoiding Miller in the park which finally made the Gunner’s mind up for him, though not straight away. He waited until the detective had disappeared before emerging from the rhododendron bushes, damp and uncomfortable, his stomach hollow and empty.

He moved away in the opposite direction and finally came to another entrance to the park. Beyond the wrought-iron gate he noticed some cigarette machines. He found the necessary coins from the money Jenny had given him, extracted a packet of ten cigarettes and a book of matches and went back into the park.

He started to walk again, smoking continuously, one cigarette after the other, thinking about everything that had happened since his dash from the infirmary, but particularly about Jenny. He remembered the first time he had seen her from the loft, looking just about as good as a woman could. And the other things. Her ironic humour, her courage in a difficult situation, even the rough edge of her tongue. And when they had made love she had given every part of herself, holding nothing back—something he had never experienced in his life before.
And never likely to again
…

The thought pulled him up short and he stood there in the rain contemplating an eternity of being on his own for the first time in his life. Always to be running, always to be afraid because that was the cold fact of it. Scratching for a living, bedding with tarts, sinking fast all the time until someone turned him in for whatever it was worth.

The coppers never let go, never closed a case, that was the trouble. He thought of Miller. It was more than an hour since the detective had walked past the shelter and yet at the memory, the Gunner felt the same panic clutching at his guts, the same instinct to run and keep on running.
Well, to hell with that for a game of soldiers
. Better to face what there was to face and get it over than live like this. There was one cigarette left in the packet. He lit it, tossed the packet away and started to walk briskly towards the other side of the park.

A psychologist would have told him that making a definite decision, choosing a course of action, had resolved his conflict situation. The Gunner would have wondered what in the hell he was talking about. All he knew was that for some unaccountable reason he was cheerful again. One thing was certain—he’d give the bastards something to think about.

On the other side of the park he plunged into the maze of back streets in which he had been hunted during the previous night and worked his way towards the infirmary. It occurred to him that it might be fun to turn up in the very room from which he had disappeared. But there were certain precautions to take first, just to make certain that the police could never link him with Jenny and her grandmother.

A few streets away from the infirmary he stopped in a back alley at a spot where houses were being demolished as fast as the bulldozers could knock them down. On the other side of a low wall, a beck that was little more than a fast-flowing stream of filth rushed past and plunged into a dark tunnel that took it down into the darkness of the city’s sewage system.

He took off the raincoat, sweater, boots and socks and dropped them in. They disappeared into the tunnel and he emptied his pockets. Three pound notes and a handful of change. The notes went fluttering down followed by the coins—all but a sixpenny piece. There was a telephone box at the end of the street…

He stood in the box and waited as the bell rang at the other end, shivering slightly as the cold struck into his bare feet and rain dripped down across his face. When she answered he could hardly get the coin into the slot for excitement.

“Jenny? It’s the Gunner. Is anyone there?”

“Thank God,” she said, relief in her voice. “Where are you?”

“A few hundred yards from the infirmary. I’m turning myself in, Jenny. I thought you might like to know that.”

“Oh, Gunner.” He could have sworn she was crying, but that was impossible. She wasn’t the type.

“What about the police?” he asked.

“No one turned up.”

“No one turned up?” he said blankly.

A sudden coldness touched his heart, something elemental, but before he could add anything Jenny said, “Just a minute, Gunner, there’s someone outside in the yard now.”

A moment later the line went dead.

“You fool,” the Gunner said aloud. “You stupid bloody fool.”

Why on earth hadn’t he seen it before?
Only one person could possibly have known he was at the house and it certainly wasn’t Ogden who hadn’t even seen his face. But the other man had, the one who had attacked Jenny outside the door in the yard.

The Gunner left the phone box like a greyhound erupting from the trap and went down the street on the run. He turned the corner and was already some yards along the pavement when he saw the motorcycle parked at the kerb half-way along. The policeman who was standing beside it was making an entry in his book.

The policeman glanced up just before the Gunner arrived and they met breast-to-breast. There was the briefest of struggles before the policeman went down and the Gunner swung a leg over the motorcycle and kicked the starter.

He let out the throttle too fast so that the machine skidded away from the kerb, front wheel lifting. It was only then that he became aware of the Mini-Cooper at the other end of the street. As he roared towards it, the little car swung broadside on to block his exit. The Gunner threw the bike over so far that the footrest brought sparks from the cobbles, and shaved the bonnet of the Mini-Cooper. For a brief, timeless moment he looked into Miller’s face, then he was away.

In the grey afternoon and the heavy rain it was impossible to distinguish the features of the man in the yard at any distance and at first Jenny thought it must be Ogden. Even when the telephone went dead she felt no panic. It was only when she pressed her face to the window and saw Faulkner turn from the wall no more than a yard away, a piece of the telephone line still in his right hand that fear seized her by the throat. She recognised him instantly as her attacker of the previous night and in that moment everything fell neatly into place. The mysterious telephone call, the threat of the police who had never come—all to get rid of the only man who could have protected her.

“Oh, Gunner, God help me now.” The words rose in her throat, almost choking her as she turned and stumbled into the hall.

The outside door was still locked and bolted. The handle turned slowly and there was a soft, discreet knocking. For a moment her own fear left her as she remembered the old woman who still lay in bed, her Sunday habit. Whatever happened she must be protected.

Ma Crowther lay propped against the pillows, a shawl around her shoulders as she read one of her regular half-dozen Sunday newspapers. She glanced up in surprise as the door opened and Jenny appeared.

“You all right, Gran?”

“Yes, love, what is it?”

“Nothing to worry about. I just want you to stay in here for a while, that’s all.”

There was a thunderous knocking from below. Jenny quickly extracted the key on the inside of her grandmother’s door, slammed it shut and locked it as the old woman called out to her in alarm.

The knocking on the front door had ceased, but as she went down the stairs, there was the sound of breaking glass from the living-room. When she looked in he was smashing the window methodically with an old wooden clothes prop from the yard. She closed the door of the room, locked it on the outside and went up to the landing.

Her intention was quite clear. When he broke through the flimsy interior door, which wouldn’t take long, she would give him a sight of her and then run for the roof. If she could climb across to the metalworks and get down the fire escape there might still be a chance. In any case, she would have led him away from her grandmother.

The door suddenly burst outwards with a great splintering crash and Bruno Faulkner came through with it, fetching up against the opposite wall. He looked up at her for a long moment, his face grave, and started to unbutton his raincoat. He tossed it to one side and put his foot on the bottom step. There was an old wooden chair on the landing. Jenny picked it up and hurled it down at him. He ducked and it missed him, bouncing from the wall.

He looked up at her still calm and then howled like an animal, smashing the edge of his left hand hard against the wooden banister rail. The rail snapped in half, a sight so incredible that she screamed for the first time in her life.

She turned and ran along the landing to the second staircase and Faulkner went after her. At the top of the stairs she was delayed for a moment as she wrestled with the bolt on the door that led to the roof. As she got it open, he appeared at the bottom.

She ran out into the heavy rain, kicked off her shoes and started up the sloping roof, her stocking feet slipping on the wet tiles. She was almost at the top when she slipped back to the bottom. Again she tried, clawing desperately towards the ridge riles as Faulkner appeared from the stairway.

She stuck half-way and stayed here, spread-eagled, caught like a fly on paper. And he knew it, that terrible man below. He came forward slowly and stood there looking up at her. And then he laughed and it was the coldest laugh she had ever heard in her life.

He started forward and the Gunner came through the door like a thunderbolt. Faulkner turned, swerved like a ballet dancer and sent him on his way with a back-handed blow that caught him across the shoulders. The Gunner lost his balance, went sprawling, rolled beneath the rail at the far end and went down the roof that sloped to the yard below.

The Gunner skidded to a halt outside Crowther’s yard and dropped the motorcycle on its side no more than four or five minutes after leaving the phone box. He went for the main gate on the run and disappeared through the judas as the Mini-Cooper turned the corner.

It was Mallory who went after him first, mainly because he already had his door open when Miller was still braking, but there was more to it than that. For some reason he felt alive again in a way he hadn’t done for years. It was just like it used to be in the old days as a young probationer in Tower Bridge Division working the docks and the Pool of London. A punch-up most nights and on a Saturday anything could happen and usually did.

The years slipped away from him as he went through the judas on the run in time to see the Gunner scrambling through the front window. Mallory went after him, stumbling over the wreckage of the door on his way into the hall.

He paused for a brief moment, aware of the Gunner’s progress above him and went up the stairs quickly. By the time he reached the first landing, his chest was heaving and his mouth had gone bone dry as he struggled for air, but nothing on earth was going to stop him now.

As he reached the bottom of the second flight of stairs, the Gunner went through the open door at the top. A moment later there was a sudden sharp cry. Mallory was perhaps half-way up the stairs when the girl started to scream.

Faulkner had her by the left ankle and was dragging her down the sloping roof when Mallory appeared. In that single moment the whole thing took on every aspect of some privileged nightmare. His recognition of Faulkner was instantaneous, and at the same moment, a great many facts he had refused to face previously, surfaced. As the girl screamed again, he charged.

In his day George Mallory had been a better than average rugby forward and for one year Metropolitan Police light–heavyweight boxing champion. He grabbed Faulkner by the shoulder, pulled him around and swung the same right cross that had earned him his title twenty-seven years earlier. It never even landed. Faulkner blocked the punch, delivered a forward elbow strike that almost paralysed Mallory’s breathing system and snapped his left arm like a rotten branch with one devastating blow with the edge of his right hand. Mallory groaned and went down. Faulkner grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and started to drag him along the roof towards the railing.

For Miller it was as if somehow all this had happened before. As he came through the door and paused, thunder split the sky apart overhead and the rain increased into a solid grey curtain that filled the air with a strange, sibilant rushing sound and reduced visibility to a few yards.

He took in everything in a single moment. The girl with her dress half-ripped from her body, crouched at the foot of the sloping roof crying hysterically, and Faulkner who had now turned to look towards the door, still clutching Mallory’s coat collar in his right hand.

Faulkner
. A strange fierce exhilaration swept through Miller, a kind of release of every tension that had knotted up inside him during the past twenty-four hours. A release that came from knowing that he had been right all along.

He moved in on the run, jumped high in the air and delivered a flying front kick, the devastating mae-tobigeri, full into Faulkner’s face, one of the most crushing of all karate blows. Faulkner staggered back, releasing his hold on Mallory, blood spurting from his mouth and Miller landed awkwardly, slipping in the rain and falling across Mallory.

Before he could scramble to his feet, Faulkner had him by the throat. Miller summoned every effort of will-power and spat full in the other man’s face. Faulkner recoiled in a kind of reflex action and Miller stabbed at his exposed throat with stiffened fingers.

Faulkner went back and Miller took his time over getting up, struggling for air. It was a fatal mistake for a blow which would have demolished any ordinary man had only succeeded in shaking Faulkner’s massive strength. As Miller straightened, Faulkner moved in like the wind and delivered a fore-fist punch, knuckles extended, that fractured two ribs like matchwood and sent Miller down on one knee with a cry of agony.

Faulkner drew back his foot and kicked him in the stomach. Miller went down flat on his face. Faulkner lifted his foot to crush the skull and Jenny Crowther staggered forward and clutched at his arm. He brushed her away as one might a fly on a summer’s day and turned back to Miller. It was at that precise moment that the Gunner reappeared.