More Work for the Undertaker (18 page)

‘Dear me.' Mr Campion spoke mildly. ‘As you say, how the old faces gather. Yes indeed.'

He returned to Luke, his eyes narrowed.

‘The Fuller gang was just before your time, I fancy,' he murmured. ‘Peter George Jelf was third in command until he went down for seven years on a robbery-with-violence charge. He was never a first-class mind, as they say in some circles, but he was very thorough and not without courage.'

‘'Ired malefactor,' put in Lugg with relish. ‘The judge said that, not me. This chap today 'ad 'is way of walking. It might not 'ave been 'im but I think it was.'

The D.D.I. made a note on the tattered packet he had drawn from his pocket.

‘That's another little question for the back room, if H.Q. is
answering any more questions for me. A poor view is going to be taken of this lot and I don't blame them. I'd sack myself . . . if I had a good man to take over.'

‘Have you got a mite of bicarb?'

The question, uttered from just inside the doorway, startled them both. Mr Congreve stood teetering on the mat, his lips wobbling and his wet eyes bright and shrewd.

Campion had closed the door after him when he had first come in but had not fastened the old-fashioned bolts. The man had edged in so softly that they had not heard him.

‘Where's the chemist?' The harsh yet hollow voice was unpleasant in the silent shop. He took a step forward inquisitively.

Charlie Luke thrust out a long arm and picked up a squat bottle of white tablets from the front of the counter. The only visible words at that distance were ‘Triple Strength'. He glanced at it absently and held it up.

‘There you are, Pa,' he said. ‘Cascara. Better for you. Pay next time.'

Mr Congreve made no attempt to take the offering. He had ceased to advance, but his thin neck was outstretched and his eyes were moving.

‘I'd like to see the chemist,' he said with a confiding leer. ‘He understands me.' The odour in the shop caught his attention and he sniffed deeply and with curiosity. ‘Where is he?'

‘Gone downstairs,' the D.D.I. spoke without ulterior thought. ‘Call later.' He strode across the room, placed the bottle firmly in the old man's hand, and turned him round. ‘Mind the step,' he said.

Mr Congreve reached the pavement just as a group of solid hurrying men bore down upon the doorway from a police car. The last they saw of him was his eyes glinting with excitement and his blob of a lower lip quivering as he mumbled to himself.

Mr Campion touched Lugg's sleeve and they stepped back out of the way of the newcomers and drifted quietly down the tunnel of cartons to a half-glass door in the gloom. Lugg kicked it gently open.

‘This is where 'e lived,' he said. ‘What a life, eh? Never got away from 'is work.' He waved a plump hand at a scene which resembled an alchemist's shop devised by some enthusiastic stock company. A small bed in one corner was the only sign of domesticity. The rest was an untidy mass of bottles, cooking pans and kettles, carelessly piled on some sticks of Victorian furniture.

‘No wonder the lady friends didn't stay,' Mr Lugg observed virtuously. ‘This lot must have bin something to cry over even for Bella. No need to go through there, that's the kitchen and it's the same story. There's only one spot of interest and that's on the next floor. I don't know 'ow long we've got before the busies come trampin' in.'

‘How true,' Mr Campion agreed and he turned across the tiny room to a doorway through which he had caught a glimpse of a dark staircase.

‘I've bin over the 'ole place and most of it 'asn't bin opened for years.' Lugg was panting, but cheerful. ‘The top floor 'asn't got a stick in it and the front room on this landin', which is furnished as a bedroom, is nothink but a moth-farm. The only place worth seein' is this little outfit 'ere.'

He led the way across a passage and threw open a door on the left. It was pitch-dark inside but he found a light switch and an unexpectedly vivid glare shone from the single bulb in the centre of the ceiling. Campion stepped into a narrow room whose only window had been boarded over very carefully. It was almost empty. The floor was uncarpeted and a long narrow table stood against the farther wall. By its side sprawled an old-fashioned basket-chair filled with shabby cushions, and there was nothing else at all save two wooden upright chairs. They were arranged in the centre of the floor, facing each other a few feet apart.

Mr Campion looked about him.

‘How very suggestive,' he said.

‘What is it? A board room?' Lugg was mildly sarcastic but he was puzzled. ‘Two gals sits playin' cats' cradles and a bloke sits watchin' them from the armchair?' he offered.

‘I should hardly think so. Is there any packing material anywhere in the house? Rock-wool and so on?'

‘There's a back place full o' shavings, just be'ind the kitchen, but there's none up 'ere, cock, not a trace.'

Campion said nothing. He wandered round the room eyeing the boards, which were comparatively clean. Lugg's face was glistening.

‘Tell you one thing,' he said. ‘Jas 'as bin 'ere, I'll lay to that.'

Campion turned to him eagerly. ‘How do you know?'

The vast white cheeks had the grace to colour. ‘It ain't evidence, exactly. At any rate it's not a finger-print. But you look at them cushions in the chair. That chemist feller was a little chap. Someone with a base of substance 'as sat there, my lad.'

‘It's a thought.' Campion's thin mouth widened. ‘You ought to do a monograph on it. As a science it's young. Needs a lot of data. Put it up to Yeo and see what he says. It would be informative to hear him, anyway. Any other ideas?'

‘'E's bin 'ere.' Lugg was obstinate. ‘'E smokes them little whiffs. I smelt them when I first come in. It's gorn orf now. Don't you think 'e's bin 'ere?'

Mr Campion paused, a tall figure between the two chairs so curiously placed.

‘Oh, yes, he's been here,' he said. ‘Quite a habit with him, I should think. The question is, what does he put in it.'

‘Put in what?'

‘In the box,' said Mr Campion, and he described the shape with his hand. It was long and narrow, and one end of it rested on either chair.

IT WAS A
very small ward. Mike Dunning was still very ill. Waves of nausea, followed by vivid terrors which he dimly recognized as unreasonable, overcame him every so often, so that he hesitated and smiled secretly as if he were drunk.

Sergeant Dice, who hovered in the doorway, and Luke and Mr Campion, who sat one on either side of the white iron bed, were little more than shapes in the gloom. But the young nurse, who in daylight looked like an advertisement for holidays in Devon, was tall and steady at his feet. Her white coif was comforting and sometimes he forgot and told his story to her.

‘Clytie,' he said again. ‘It's Clytie I've got to think about. She doesn't know a thing. It's the way they've brought her up. You wouldn't understand.' He would have shaken his head but the pain warned him just in time. ‘She's a kid. She's so sweet, but she didn't know a thing when I found her. She frightened me. She wasn't safe out. Why did you send her away?'

‘She'll come back,' said the nurse. ‘Tell these gentlemen how you came to get hurt.'

‘Don't hold out on a chap, ducks.' His dark eyes, fringed with coarse fair lashes, were anxious. ‘You don't know those Palinodes. They'll get hold of her again and shut her up until she grows like them. That's why I took her in hand. I had to.' He swayed a little and a secret smile, apologetic and foolish, passed over his soft boy's mouth. ‘I'm responsible for her,' he said, opening his eyes wide. ‘She hasn't got anybody but me.'

‘Who hit you?' repeated Charlie Luke for the fifth time.

Mike considered the question. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Funny thing, I don't know at all.'

‘After you left your landlady you decided to sleep with your bike,' Campion began softly.

‘That's right.' He seemed surprised. ‘The old bath-tap turned me out. I was jolly annoyed. It was after midnight.' He was silent for a while. ‘I must have walked,' he said.

‘From right out there?' murmured Luke in the dusk. ‘How long did it take you?'

‘I don't know. A couple of hours . . . no, not as much as that. I heard two strike when I was watching them.'

‘Watching who?' Luke's question was a little too eager, a little too loud. The patient closed his eyes.

‘I forget,' he said. ‘Where's Clytie now?'

‘On the third seat on the left of the corridor, just outside the door,' said Campion promptly. ‘She's all right. Was it still raining when you stood watching?'

His eyes, half hidden by the ugly lashes, became thoughtful again.

‘No, it had stopped by then. It was dark, you know. I thought I'd better get to the bike because there wasn't a lock on the door and I was worried about it. I hadn't anywhere else to go, either, nowhere I could afford.'

He paused, but this time there was no prompting, and presently his exhausted voice continued.

‘I turned into Apron street and pushed on to the mews. There was enough light from the sky to see one's way, but I went quietly because I didn't feel like explaining to any darned bobby.' He blinked. ‘I was right on top of the coffin shop when the door opened and they came out, old man Bowels and the son, who let me the shed. They were the last people I wanted to meet just then, so I side-stepped promptly. The only cover was the shop window itself, which juts out from the wall about a foot. I thought they were bound to see me, but it was pretty dark and I held my breath. They would not get on with it. There was a hell of a lot of mucking about in the porch, locking the door, I suppose. Presently they went over the road together. I could see them because the light was grey, like a neg, and old Bowels had a sheet over his arm.'

‘A what?' Charlie Luke forgot his caution as the macabre highlight slid into the boy's dark picture.

‘A sheet,' the patient persisted. ‘It must have been. Nothing else looks like a sheet, does it, except a tablecloth? He had it neatly folded over his arm. It gave me the willies. They went over to the chemist's and stood there for a bit and I thought they must have rung the bell because I heard a window open upstairs, and somebody spoke, although I couldn't hear what was said. And then after a while I couldn't see the gleam of the sheet any more, so I took it they'd gone in.'

‘Sure it was the chemist's?'

‘Quite. I know Apron Street pretty well now by any light.'

Any ungracious comment from the D.D.I. was forestalled by Mr Campion.

‘That was when you heard the clock strike two, was it?' he inquired, reflecting that his own interview with the undertakers, from the window of Renee's drawing-room, must have taken place some time after three.

Mike Dunning hesitated. The scene was returning to him slowly and it surprised him all over again.

‘No,' he said finally. ‘No. That was when I saw the Captain and Lawrence.'

‘Were they there too?'

‘Not at the chemist's. After the bone-snatchers had gone, I went over the road to the Palinode house.'

‘What for?' Charlie Luke demanded.

‘To look at it.' He was so tired that he spoke without even truculence, yet nobody in the room, not even Sergeant Dice, pretended that the reason was unapparent. ‘There was no light in Clytie's window – her room's in the front, you know – and I don't think I should have risked chucking a stone at it if there had been one. I just made sure she was asleep. I was turning away when I saw Lawrence Palinode – that's her uncle and the worst of the lot of them – come sneaking out of the front door and down the steps.' His smile grew mischievous, like an urchin's. ‘I thought he was after me,' he said. ‘X-ray eyes and all that. But then I realized I wasn't in it. There is one street lamp on that corner which is kept alight all night and
it happened to shine on him as he stepped off the path. I heard him shoving quietly through the bushes until he came up against that row of stucco urns they call a wall. I wasn't very far from him, as it happened, but I was in complete shadow from the house. I could just see about half his face when he leaned over out of the laurels.'

‘Where was the Captain? With him?'

‘No. He was across Barrow Avenue on the corner of the terrace, by the postbox. Lawrence was watching him and I was watching Lawrence. It was all damned silly but I daren't move. I couldn't think what everybody was doing beetling about in the dark. That was when I heard the clock on the R.C. church in Barrow Road strike two.'

‘How could you see Captain Seton at that distance?'

‘Oh, I couldn't.' Mr Dunning's naturally cheerful disposition was reasserting itself. ‘I couldn't see him at all for a long time. Old Lawrence was watching something over there and I watched too. Then I saw someone step out of a doorway, pass in front of the pillarbox, and look up the Avenue towards the Barrow Road. He was only there a minute and then nipped back again. Presently the whole thing happened again, and something about the shape of the chap – the way his hat went, I think – struck me as familiar.'

‘Was there enough light for you to see all this?' The D.D.I. was fascinated.

‘Yes, I told you it was like a neg. Black shadows and everything else a sort of chilly grey. I kept getting different silhouettes of the chap every time he appeared, and every time I got more certain it was the old boy. He's all right; Clytie likes him. Then the woman turned up.'

Campion saw the whites of Charlie Luke's eyes, or thought he did. The D.D.I. was splendidly silent.

‘She came wruffling up the pavement,' the husky voice continued, ‘and I never saw her face, of course, but I guessed she was oldish from the way she walked, and I could see she was fat although she was all bundled up. The Captain stepped out and spoke to her as if he knew her, and they stood there talking for about ten minutes. I thought they were arguing. The old
boy was wagging his hands about. Lawrence was half over the wall. That neck of his stuck out like a stalk. He was trying to hear what they were saying, I think, which was absurd even if they'd shouted. At last the woman turned away and came straight for us, or I thought she was going to. Actually she crossed to the other side of Apron Street and went into the mews. The Captain came into the house and Lawrence went in himself. I know, because I had to stay where I was until he'd gone.'