Mistress Murder (11 page)

He pulled out the pistol and began playing with it.

‘I'm going to kill him when I catch up with him.'

Ray looked with fascination at the Webley.

‘But the police … they said it was an accident.'

‘Yeah – so why are they nosing about asking questions today?'

‘You got no proof that Golding had anything to do with it!' objected Silver, getting bolder now that the brunt of Draper's anger had been deflected onto Golding.

Conrad tossed the gun carelessly from one hand to the other.

‘No, not yet. That's where you come in. I want to talk to Golding – by the time I've finished with him I'll know everything I want to know.'

He suddenly poked the gun right into the Eurasian's face.

Ray backed away hastily.

‘I think he's got some sort of legit business somewhere – probably outside London. Does he know you're on to him?'

Draper waved the automatic dangerously.

‘He knows somebody's on to him – but he doesn't know who – and you're not going to tell him, are you? You wouldn't want to come to a sticky end, Silver.'

The viciousness in the last words cut like a knife as Draper wheeled around and went to the door. He turned again in the opening for a last word, in true Bowery style.

‘Get me on the blower the minute you hear – and remember, chum, you're living on borrowed time until I get Golding.'

He strode away down the corridor, followed by Irish, who still grunted with pain every time he breathed.

Silver stared blankly at his writing pad, seeing nothing but trouble written there.

Inspector Turnbull came down from the laboratory on the top of the new building of Scotland Yard and crossed over into the dingy red-brick monstrosity that housed many of the senior officers. He found Archie Benbow's room and squeezed into it, clutching a sheaf of papers.

‘Good job you haven't got a cat, Archie, you couldn't swing the damn thing in here.'

Bray was toiling at a big filing cabinet that seemed to fill half the room and Benbow was staring out of the window. He swung round to greet the liaison officer.

‘Hi, George … you're damn right about this place.' He waved aggrievedly towards the window. ‘In all these TV plays, the detective has a lovely view of the river and the County Hall from his spacious apartment,' he complained. ‘All I've got is the blank wall of an alley leading to Cannon Row.'

Bray looked up and grinned. ‘Oh, I don't know, sir – if you lean out far enough, you can see the toilets on the comer quite plainly.'

Turnbull waved the papers he held.

‘Got some results on the Laskey woman,' he announced. Bray slammed his cabinet shut and came to stand at Benbow's elbow as the Admiral sank down behind his desk. Turnbull drew up a chair, which just about used up all the remaining space in the room. He was a tall thin, perpetually pipe-smoking man, never in a flap, but always intent on getting on with the job with the least possible fuss.

‘She had a load of alcohol in her, as we expected,' he began, ‘the blood level was three hundred and twenty milligrams per cent – getting on towards the coma level – if she wasn't absolutely dead to the world, she'd have been so groggy that she wouldn't have cared if she'd been coshed with forty starting handles!'

Benbow's beady eyes flashed. ‘Ah-hah! The handle … you got anything definite on that?'

‘Yes, Archie, we've come up trumps with it.'

Turnbull dived into a large envelope and came out with some glossy prints.

‘We've compared some of the fibres caught on the rusty part of the handle with samples from several samples of yellow household dusters and the sort they sell for cleaning cars. Several of them correspond exactly with the strands on the handle and with the fibres that the pathologist picked from the girl's head wound.'

‘That doesn't prove that she was hit with that particular handle,' objected Benbow.

‘No, I agree, but it all helps,' said Turnbull.

‘Can you narrow down the source of the particular fibres?' asked Bray.

‘No, the dusters are sold all over the place – Halfords and Woolworths, that kind of shop.'

‘So it doesn't help one damn bit,' snarled Benbow. Turnbull ground his teeth on the stem of his pipe.

‘Wait a bit, wait a bit – there's more to come yet … blood, glorious blood.'

He lit his pipe with infuriating slowness and spoke again through a barrage of blue smoke. ‘The knuckle of that handle looked clean enough – it had probably been wiped over with a wet rag – perhaps the same or a similar yellow duster. But the steel still gave a strong positive benzidine reaction for blood It's hellishly sensitive – will pick up about one part in three million. This handle crank gave a whacking strong positive. Then they used some fancy tests on the rust scrapings in case it was just the iron giving a false reaction, but it was still a bonanza.'

‘What then?' asked Benbow, always a little suspicious of the scientist's expertise.

‘The boys upstairs used the usual grouping techniques and this new mixed agglutination test to show that the ABO and MN groups were the same on the handle and the specimen from the post-mortem on Laskey. She was group A, not that it matters to you.'

Benbow digested this. ‘Does that mean she was definitely hit by that handle and no other?'

Turnbull shook his head. ‘No … have a heart, Archie; we're workers, not wizards. But it means that that handle was dipped in human group A blood at some time, and it's hardly likely to be anyone else, is it, considering she's got a hole in her head the exact shape of the said bit of metal.'

‘Got anything else?' grunted Benbow.

‘Soames has had another look at the fracture and agrees that the starting handle would do very nicely for the offending weapon. He says that she must have been hit from the left side, so that almost certainly means she was in the passenger seat when her killer took a swipe at her.'

‘Why?'

‘The pathologist says – and I agree with him – that if she was in the driving seat, the murderer couldn't get a good enough swing to fetch her such a smack as that … the roof of the car would be in the way, it would be too cramped altogether. Looks as if he got her stinking drunk, opened the door on the nearside, and whacked her from there. The yellow fibres were some from a car duster when he attempted to clean a bit of the blood up – or perhaps he put it over the head before he socked her. That would be more like it, it would explain why there were fibres deep in the wound and why there was so little blood matted on the hair.'

‘Charming … I bet you think up lovely bedtime stories for your kids, chum,' said Benbow dryly.

Turnbull grinned.

‘She couldn't have been driving anyway … I defy any slim young dame to control a car for a hundred yards with a blood alcohol of three twenty … she'd have been flat out, snoring her head off.'

Benbow beamed. ‘Ain't science bloody marvellous, Bray?'

The fresh-faced sergeant nodded obediently.

‘So there's no doubt about our having a murder on the books, sir … we can pull out all the stops to try to get some sense out of the yobs around the top end of Dean Street.'

Benbow's smile faded. ‘Huh – some hope. We can pound those streets till our feet show through the soles of our boots, and not get so much as the time of day.'

Turnbull puffed away calmly.

‘You still haven't heard it all: she had a load of drugs in her as well as the hooch.'

Benbow looked up sharply. ‘Hard stuff?'

‘Heroin.'

‘Those marks on her arms were the real thing, then,' said Bray.

Turnbull grinned. ‘Yes, lad – and she wasn't a diabetic having insulin injections, as you suggested at the time.'

He opened a folder and looked at a copy of Soames' post-mortem report.

‘The most recent injection mark was into the main vein in the left arm – had a little blob of clotted blood on it, so it probably was only a few hours old when she died – looks as if she had a mainliner soon before she was killed. All the others were just under the skin.'

Benbow nodded thoughtfully.

‘Filled up with grog, then drugged and finally beaten over the head … nice company she kept!'

He riffled through the documents that Turnbull had produced then slapped the desk with a dumpy fist.

‘We've got to find this bastard; he's in the professional class. He kills when it suits his book, not on impulse.'

‘Where's the motive?' asked Turnbull, calmly sucking his pipe.

Benbow threw up his arms dramatically.

‘God knows, but where there are drugs, there's crime … every one in the book. I'll lay an even fiver with you that the narcotics angle comes into this somewhere.'

Bray was looking as chirpy as a schoolboy.

‘What about the Drugs Squad? Shall I nip over and have a natter to them, sir?'

The department known loosely as the Drugs Squad was more accurately the Narcotics Office, a small group of detective sergeants whose main job was to regulate the proper usage of dangerous drugs and make spot checks on druggists' and manufacturers' records. But apart from this, they held a considerable interest in all forms of importation, both legal and otherwise and had a close link with the Customs people over the problem of smuggling.

Benbow bobbed his jowls in agreement. ‘May as well, lad. They've got their own contacts, something might turn up. We're never going to get any joy out of that bunch of yobs up the street.' He jerked a thumb in the general direction of Soho.

Turnbull hauled himself out of his chair.

‘Any good trying to trace where she got her dope?'

Benbow looked glum. ‘Just a few decks? There are a hundred places in the West End where she could have got them. Still, Bray can see what the narcotics boys can suggest.'

Turnbull turned to go back to his scientific wonderland upstairs.

‘The lads are going over the dust and other stuff from the car for contact traces – if anything comes of it I'll give you a shout.'

After he had gone, Bray went back to finish his filing and Benbow mournfully thumbed through the thin folder on Rita Laskey.

‘There's something about this one that gives me the creeps,' he muttered. ‘Too damn cold-blooded – the chap that did this has killed before, I'll bet – and he'll kill again as soon as it suits him.'

Paul Jacobs made a different entry into London on the following Friday afternoon. He came by train to Paddington as before, the typical provincial businessman. But this time there was none of the toilet and left-luggage routine. He intended to keep clear of Soho for the time being, so he openly took a taxi to his Ferber Street flat.

He got to his door without seeing a soul except the taxi driver. Once inside, he was as effectively insulated from London as he had been in Cardiff. There was no cleaning woman to pester him and he was delightfully alone.

The envelope on the mat told him that Snigger had been there; no one else knew of the place. He went into the kitchen and made some coffee while he read and digested the contents of the barman's message. They disturbed him considerably and he paced the room uneasily, trying to fit this new information into his plans for the coming weekend.

‘Conrad Draper, I – I've heard of him but never laid eyes on him as far as I know,' he muttered to himself. ‘I've got to know more about this.'

He went to the telephone in the lounge and rang the landlord of the Queen of Scots in Fulham.

Twenty minutes later, a taxi dropped the ex-jockey outside and he hurried up to Jacobs' flat.

‘I'm in a spot,' admitted Paul, after he had settled Snigger down with a glass and a bottle of whisky. ‘I've got to get the orders for this weekend; I'm off to Germany tomorrow.'

‘You've grown a moustache, then,' observed the barman.

During the ten days he had been away, Paul had allowed a fair military-style line of hair to grow on his upper lip. It was some help in altering his appearance.

‘That ain't going be half enough disguise if you're thinking of showing your face around Soho,' added Snigger.

‘Why – only this Draper is looking for me, isn't he?'

‘I hear tell that the police have been asking around a bit since last Saturday. Nothing much at first, but there's a steady bit of questioning going on. They took the cleaner from Newman Street in for questioning and a few of the tradespeople from around that part.'

Paul pondered this carefully. ‘Heard any reason why? Your grapevine usually knows everything.'

Snigger shook his head.

‘The dicks have been real canny about this one. They've had their hands full of other things this week. A tom got croaked and there were another two bank jobs pulled. But they haven't dropped a whisper yet about the Rita business.'

He looked up sharply at the other man, his bright Cockney eyes questioning.

‘Did you rub her out, Mr Golding?' he asked quietly. ‘I know she helped put the black on you with Draper, so she had it coming. You can tell me, you know, my mouth is tight enough.'

Paul looked down at him for a moment then nodded abruptly. He trusted Snigger more than anyone, and needed him as an ally more than ever, now things were going to be more difficult.

‘Yes, Snigger, I fixed her. I had to – she had got dangerous. It was nothing personal, but she had to go.'

He paused, stared absently into his glass then told the barman the whole story.

‘So you see, Paul Golding can't exist any more. I'm Paul Harrap from now on. I'm going to lay low for a bit, then work up a new front for myself when I get back from the next trip – take another flat, build up a whole new identity for myself.'

‘What about the club?' asked the ex-jockey. ‘Are you laying off there?'