Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Ivy and the Grass by Jeffry Scott

Much as I value his company and expertise, count yourself fortunate if none of your friends is like McKell.

I’m thinking of outspoken cronies with a taste for puncturing self-esteem and demolishing confidence. It’s the paradox of amity: enemies’ jibes may be dismissed as sheer malice, but a friend knows what he is talking about...

Tom McKell wrings boundless and tireless pleasure from teasing me about crime fiction. He loves a good whodunit, he assures me. Whether on the TV screen or in print, they raise his spirits —“However blue I’m feeling, never takes long for me to start chuckling.”

Crime writers are funnier than sitcom scribes, Inspector McKell maintains, cruelly. Less through getting police procedure wrong (though we do, constantly) than by doing grievous bodily harm to way-things-are likelihood, while recycling and perpetuating stereotypes.

Take informers, grasses. Never mind that few criminals talk about grasses and grassing unless their hobby happens to be botany or lawn care. Policemen, too, are less than keen on the slang, finding it passe. That is not the point, however: McKell is tickled by the fact that informers are generally presented as male and unprepossessing. Their shifty eyes have a treacherous gleam, they twitch a lot, they are apt to neglect personal hygiene, and the best-scrubbed grass lives in fear.

All of which is a caricature wrapped up in a cliche, according to the expert. Police informers are as unisex-diverse as the rest of society. They are in it for the money more often than not, but then which of us isn’t? All but a lucky few, the inspector points out dryly.

“That’s all very well,” I objected the last time he was mocking me, “but readers just aren’t going to believe in a gra — an informer who is respectable, attractive, and wears a dress. It’s unexpected and downright unconvincing.”

“A pity, then,” Inspector McKell observed, dryer yet, “because Tania Wark convinced me. And I’ve been accused of any amount of stuff in my time, but seldom gullibility.”

Having gone that far, he agreed to tell me the rest. In confidence, naturally, so I haven’t the slightest hesitation in sharing it, give or take changed names and altered biographies. Since I’ve dreamed up so many villains, they don’t scare me — whereas libel lawyers make my blood run cold.

Tom McKell used to be senior C.I.D. officer at Longdown, effectively the boss, since his supervisor, a detective-superintendent, was based elsewhere.

McKell, no sentimentalist, claims that Longdown had all the shortcomings of a country town (no live theater to speak of, bar Christmas pantomimes; positively no opera or ballet) plus many disadvantages of London. Before the Cold War thawed and peace of a kind broke out, Longdown was awash with money from three different defense factories on its outskirts, and affluence encouraged predators. The place even sheltered a few professional and quite formidable criminals.

“London in microcosm,” McKell comments, “without the fun and glamor, such as there is. Oh yes, and the one-way traffic system was a nightmare, parking unspeakable. Made it very difficult to go shopping in Longdown without getting a ticket.” (Since McKell tends to have reasons for the smallest of talk, I ought to have tucked parking problems away for reference — it would have saved me getting left behind, later on.)

“I suppose,” he muses, “the layout of the place displeased me. There was no there to Long-down, if you get my drift. Travelers tell me Los Angeles has the same quality. Everything is mixed up: the nick I worked out of, Central, was on Castle Hill. The main fire station was next door to us, with some posh department stores over the road.

“So you’d think that was the center of town or at least the administrative and snobby quarter. Except that the council offices were a mile the other side of town, alongside the glitziest boutiques. But most of the cinemas were in another spot, while clubs and discos were in six other directions.

“So it went, little islands with endless houses and workshops and so forth in between. Pig of a manor to get a handle on. Longdown was prosperous but only half awake. Yet as soon as you needed to go anywhere in a hurry, a traffic jam developed. Only good thing about it was that, in one respect, Longdown was exactly like the village where I started the Job. Those little islands made it far smaller than its physical size — everybody knew who I was and what I did. And some of them weren’t backward in coming forward...”

Inspector McKell had fallen into the habit of letting his wife drive him to work and take their car to her own workplace. He had the use of official vehicles while on duty, but lunch hours left him between the devil of Central’s dreary canteen and the deep blue sea of sinfully expensive restaurants where only the bill would be presented in English. Unless he patronized a midget sandwich bar — the premises, not the sandwiches — where no crowd-disliker could bear to linger during nourishment.

Being well organized, Tom McKell picked up a sandwich on the way to work and, weather permitting, lunched in Castle Hill Park. “I’m not antisocial, but you need a minute or two’s fresh air and peace and quiet. I do, leastways.”

One lunchtime he was absorbed in his paperback Pickwick Papers when a shadow fell across the page. “Fancy bumping into you,” Tania Wark trilled. “My, that bench looks inviting, so cosy and secluded.” She sat close enough for a shiny nylon knee to graze his thigh. “I hope Mrs. McKell doesn’t hear about this and get the wrong idea.” He was mildly surprised that his book’s pages stayed dormant while her false eyelashes fanned so vigorously.

McKell had been interested in Tania Wark for a month or more. Many men found her eminently fanciable. While bold-eyed blondes with good bodies never lack for admirers, the inspector’s interest was professional. He felt that Mrs. Wark had something on her mind, like a deal. Now he was sure of it.

Tania Wark had not happened to encounter him during a lunch-hour stroll. Tall, she chose to look taller, and her backless, needle-heeled shoes were not made for the shaggy turf and gravel paths of Castle Hill Park. Someone had told her that he might well be found there, inspiring Mrs. Wark to drive a mile and a half in order to meet him by accident. Not just a pretty face, she was a qualified pharmacist and ran a chemist shop at Appleyard, one of the town’s better suburbs. McKell knew her from Long-down’s after-hours drinking clubs. Mr. Wark — he owned the chemist shop — was a homebody who permitted his wife to behave like a single. Possibly he welcomed her nights on the town as a respite.

Smiling politely, McKell closed his book and studied her. “Penny for your thoughts!” she cried, when silence grew long enough to embarrass her, though not him.

“I never think off duty,” McKell lied, still smiling.

Tania Wark shifted away, jawline firming. But along with that went an aura of new respect. Pretending to sunbathe, she spoke dreamily. “Being a copp — policeman, you must be a good judge of character. Me, people are always surprising me. I’m a t’riffic people-watcher, you see. Well, stuck behind a shop counter, it’s either that or go crazy from boredom.”

He was unmoved by her level gaze, lips slightly parted, eyebrows slightly raised in implicit cue for him to suggest other cures for boredom. He’d dealt with many a Tania Wark in his time, learning that flirtation was their reflex to male company.

Tom McKell made a vaguely impatient noise. Mrs. Wark continued, overtly rambling still, “I usually get them wrong, that’s the funny part. Executives turn out to be hooligans and vice versa. Angel-faced kids are the worst shoplifters. Even customers I know pretty well, or thought I did, are full of surprises.

“Case in point, Ivy Challis — I only mention her because you know Ivy, too. By sight, anyway, she’s often been in the Rocket Room or Captain Hook’s when you were there. Redhead, terribly attractive, could have been a model. She’s a great friend of Ivor Grange... rest his soul.”

Inspector McKell’s fisherman’s instinct tingled, but he made no comment on her mixing of tenses in referring to Grange. Two could play at sunbathing. Eyes slitted, he sensed Tania Wark’s stare. “Hope I’m not talking out of turn, saying that. Rest his soul, I mean. Ivor hasn’t been around for days and days, and there are horrible rumors he might... have had an accident?”

“I keep hearing that, too. Small world.”

Mrs. Wark laughed angrily, a breathy yelp. “You’d be a dead loss on a talk show, making me do all the work.”

“But,” he countered blandly, “I’m a grand listener.”

She contrived to keep her temper and started over. “Ivy is ever so elegant. I mean, you’d expect her to be into champagne and caviar, coming on so classy. But would you believe it, I’ve sold her, oh, pounds’ and pounds’ worth of baby food recently. The slop in those little jars?” After a longish wait, Tania Wark finished lamely, “It just goes to show, eh?”

“Maybe she’s pregnant. Don’t women get odd cravings then?”

“Ivy lumber herself with a baby? I don’t think so. Apart from anything else, she’s a teeny bit mature to get broody.” Mrs. Wark hesitated, and he picked up the sharp indrawal of breath before her next, hurried speech. “Actually, I’m a bit worried about Ivy. She seems a bit stressed. Wanted me to sell her painkillers, powerful stuff you can’t get without a prescription. I was unable to oblige, of course.” For an instant Tania sounded schoolgirl-virtuous, in comical contrast to her heavy perfume and strident makeup.

“Of course not,” Inspector McKell echoed solemnly.

“Good,” she said briskly, as if they had struck a bargain. Her smile was almost natural. “Nice to chat like this. Maybe we can do it again. When I think of anything to interest you. And I’m sure there will be.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He hoped that Tania perceived the silent subtext as, “There better had be.” He was sure that she had. Not an admirable woman; by the same token, not a stupid one. Tom McKell scribbled on a scrap of paper and passed it to her. “Home number, and the other is my direct line. Phones have ears, remember, so just fix up a meet whenever you feel like a nice chat.”

At this early stage of the narrative (balder and more factual in McKell’s mouth, but my version is accurate) I called time out, on grounds of bafflement. “This is supposed to be about a grass. The way you tell it, the Wark woman told you nothing in particular and no money changed hands.”

Tom McKell looked pained. “Then you didn’t listen right. She told me ever so much and, having told it, laid herself open to be squeezed for more. As for money, she expected money’s worth.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Look, for good and sufficient reasons we were very anxious to locate Ivor Grange. He had been involved in a major brawl and taken a first-rate beating some days before La Wark confided in me. Longdown’s jungle drums suggested that Grange had crawled away to die — unless he’d been helped. All the usual tales were circulating: his body was part of a motorway bridge foundation or floating around the English Channel in an oil drum.

“I didn’t let on to Tania, but we believed the rumors had substance. Ivor Grange was Ivy Challis’s fancy man, lived with her at Longdown inasmuch as he had any fixed abode. Her home was his foregone refuge after a fight. But she denied seeing him again after he went out for a drink on the night he disappeared. She invited me to see for myself that Grange wasn’t in her house, and I did. What’s more, Ivy was ringing Central every day, asking if we had news of him.

“Then up popped Tania Wark with two nasty bits of news, count ’em — Grange was still alive, and his girlfriend knew where he was. Wake up, chum... the baby food! Get your teeth broken, maybe a fractured jaw into the bargain, that’s the only slop you can handle. Especially if you daren’t go to a hospital or even a dentist in case that gets police on your tail.”

“And the painkillers,” I said, anxious to shine. “They weren’t for Ivy Challis, she wanted them for her missing lover.”

“Top of the class,” the inspector commended, insultingly insincere. “Of course, when Mrs. Wark went out of her way to tell me she hadn’t sold tablets to Ivy, it meant that she had. Probably charging well over the odds for the privilege, else why bother. That’s what I meant by Tania getting her money’s worth. She’d scratched my back, so... you know how the saying goes.

“Tania Wark was what you might call a sociable sort. Given the slightest encouragement, she’d have had my trousers off on that park bench, even if it was a business discussion. What a cheated wife would call our Tania is a husband-stealing bitch. Women like her have enemies. She reckoned that sooner or later one or more of them would tip us off about her dodgy dealings at the chemist’s. She wasn’t wrong, by the way; I’d already had a poison pen letter, and one of my sergeants was sniffing around on the same line. So she was just in time, applying for her insurance policy.”

“That’s corruption or conspiracy or something,” I said.

“No, it’s the way things work in the real world,” Tom McKell said. “Don’t start the po-faced and tut-tut routine. La Wark wasn’t operating a crack kitchen in her basement. Run a small retailing business these days, you cut corners or go under. For the price of a bus ticket, her suburban customers could get any item she sold twenty percent cheaper at the hypermarket outside Long-down or any of the big outlets in town. So why did they keep going to her shop? Partly for convenience, it was just round the corner.

“And because she did little favors, not just hand delivering medicine if a customer was housebound but bending the rules when she thought it was safe. Like selling painkillers, and probably the occasional uppers or downers, without benefit of prescription.”

Reading my dubious expression, he shrugged. “If it consoles you, I wasn’t giving Mrs. Wark a free license, and she knew it. But she could be fairly sure that if she kept her nose clean in the future and supplied me with tidbits — bear in mind that she mixed with a lot of fellers, was bound to hear things — then my investigation into previous misdeeds might be, let’s say, cursory.”

Grimacing, he reached for the scotch. “I love telling war stories to civilians. Dotting every i and crossing the t’s, holding their hand and leading them through the real world. You really are innocents. Look, d’you want to hear what happened, or concentrate on moral indignation, our police aren’t so wonderful, and all that good stuff?”

Ivor Grange was a Londoner who happened to spend a great deal of time in Long-down. It wasn’t that he’d made the capital too hot to hold him — more to do with being too lazy and arrogant to travel to Streatham in South London, where his main associate lived.

The payroll job wasn’t enormous, just under a hundred thousand pounds taken in an armed raid on an aircraft factory outside Longdown. But then it wasn’t a very big gang: Grange, an unidentified getaway driver, and a certain Tosh Fisher.

“We knew it was Grange and Fisher. From experience, and I’m only speaking of my county’s Force, I would say that in half the professional robberies we know who is responsible — sooner than their wives or girlfriends most often.

“Proving it, though... Grange was a prudent fellow, quite wily. Kept his head, didn’t spend like a drunken sailor the moment he scored. Didn’t run a flash car, own a big house. Fairly uncommon, for a bandit. Tosh Fisher was nearer your generic London toerag, but until then he’d done what Ivor Grange told him to. Not Fisher’s forte, playing second fiddle, but it had paid dividends for years, so he seemed to be solid.

“Grange and Fisher had alibis. Checkmate. Or rather it might have been if Tosh Fisher had been blessed with a grain of patience and self-discipline. Half share of a hundred K — near enough half, their driver would have been on a flat fee — got Fisher’s greed glands in an uproar. Easy money and sex, where would us poor coppers be without them? Fisher was courting a beautiful girl, and being homely and sixty years old to her twenty-three, he guessed that loads of money might work better than just changing his aftershave or buying her a bouquet.”

Here Inspector McKell made a brief detour to explain that he’d picked this case not to brag — for he rated himself slow and stupid — but to demonstrate how different real grasses are from any I had invented.

“For instance, we knew about Fisher from his ex-wife. She was a Longdown girl who moved back there after the divorce. But she stayed in close touch with Tosh Fisher’s dear old mum. Mrs. Fisher-as-was lived for the day he would come unstuck and wasn’t above urging it along as far as she was able. We never paid her a penny, mark you, but money was the motivation — she wasn’t getting as much as she wanted from him.

“Anyway, his ex-wife whispered to us that Tosh Fisher had promised his mama a nice holiday abroad, soon as his latest ship came home. He’d sussed out a caper involving a pay office — meaning Ivor Grange had set it up, but Tosh liked playing Napoleon of Crime, the ideas man. His mum, poisonous old bat, moaned to her former daughter-in-law that she’d be lucky to get a week in Brighton despite his big talk. Because he was obsessed with this young tart and meant to buy his way between the sheets.

“Now, Grange and Fisher had pulled all their previous jobs in London or Birmingham; it never occurred to me that this forthcoming robbery would be local. We alerted both cities, but Brum and London are full of pay offices so it wasn’t much of a warning. Then the Long-down factory was raided, and we felt pretty silly.”

Shortly after the robbery, Ivor Grange was invited to assist with Longdown C.I.D.’s inquiries. Grange claimed to have been at a golf driving range ten miles in the other direction at the time of the robbery. The range’s manager confirmed that.

Interviewed at Streatham, Benjamin “Tosh” Fisher stated that he had played snooker at a hall there while the robbery was in progress. Again, his presence was confirmed, for what little that was worth.

There matters stood until fingerprint evidence emerged. McKell had watched the scene-of-crime officer laboriously dusting the robbery site, and dismissed it as a ritual as meaningless as tossing a pinch of spilt salt over the left shoulder to avoid bad luck. A dozen people had been in and out of the pay office all day; the masked robbers had worn surgical gloves. But Inspector McKell, not for the first time in the case, was wrong.

“It was a million-to-one chance,” he says. “The pay office had a broad counter like a Western saloon. When the robbers burst in, one stayed by the door, and his partner vaulted over the counter. For a moment his weight was poised on his hand, splitting the thin rubber over the ball of his thumb. After he’d tossed the money into a bag and thrown it to the man at the door, he vaulted back over the counter, planting three-quarters of a perfect thumbprint through the gap in the rubber. Ivor Grange’s thumb: not just his loops and whorls, but a distinctive scar.”

Unfortunately, between incompetence and pressure of work, that finding was not confirmed until forty-eight hours later. By then Tom McKell had the distinct impression that Grange was dead.

The Waterman’s Arms was a genteel pub, not one of Longdown’s standard boozing booths. Most of the takings were generated by its restaurant, which was featured in several good food guides.

So the owners, a gay retired architect and his personable young chef, were horrified when the fight broke out. It might have passed unseen, a covert imposition of will and settling of scores out in the unlit car park, if Cyril Donahee hadn’t stepped outside for a breath of fresh air.

“Oi,” he shouted, “pack it in, three onto one’s not fair.” And by his own account, Donahee, six foot two and overweight for his height, “sort of pushed” one of the brutal attackers.

The man turned on him. Donahee, not too big to move quickly, jumped back just in time before retreating. He did not want to reason with a yard of motorbike drive chain used as a flail. Cyril Donahee, angry over bullying and even angrier at fleeing from it, counterattacked ninety seconds later with five fellow members of Longdown Rugby Football Club’s first team, who appreciated gourmet meals but liked mayhem even better.

When the police arrived, the rugger players were in possession of the field and the enemy had dispersed. Tosh Fisher was picked up a quarter-mile along the riverside path, unable to disperse far because his ankle was sprained.

The uniformed sergeant rang Inspector McKell as soon as Fisher was identified. The sergeant proposed to charge Tosh Fisher with making an affray; Cyril Donahee, who’d done his share of making it, was a magistrate’s son and a local hero besides, claiming to have intervened in a mugging and then conducted spirited self-defense, so he got off with a warning.

“I ought to get a medal,” Donahee asserted when Tom McKell quizzed him later that evening. “The fellow was in a terrible state. Trying to stay on his feet, but they were really laying into him, they’d broken his jaw, you could tell from the way it hung down. More blood than skin showing on his face. They were animals, using chains and I swear one of them had a razor—”

“Very likely, but what interests me is who this chap was.”

“Dunno, he was a terrible mess when I saw him. Must have dragged himself away when we started mixing it with the other three. I’m amazed he could move at all.”

Pressed for a description, Cyril Donahee scratched his head. “It was dark, just the light from the pub door, and you know how it is in a ruck... He had white hair, well, silvery. Struck me it wasn’t natural, maybe a dye job, bit poofy on a feller.”

“Ivor Grange,” Inspector McKell muttered. “I thought it would be.”

Tosh Fisher was in a cell at Central, waiting for his London solicitor to appear. “I think you were provoked,” McKell needled, with small hope of its working. “Grange cheated you out of your half of the payroll job, you were in order, taking it out on his hide.”

Mr. Fisher, broken, blood-plugged nose rendering him indistinct, retorted, “Dawk to buy ’awyer, leeb be alode.”

So Inspector McKell went in search of Ivor Grange, without success, then or on subsequent days. “Grange was cute,” he explained to me. “Insisted on holding all the money and paying fellow members of the firm in dribs and drabs afterwards. Enough to keep them going, too little to splash out with. Wouldn’t dole out the remainder until the dust settled.

“Tosh Fisher accepted that until he began thinking below the belt instead of above: needing to dazzle his popsy, he demanded his share right away. It didn’t take much working out that Grange had held firm, or that Tosh took a few pals along to beat a change of heart out of his partner.

“It was a damned nuisance, especially when that fingerprint evidence turned up. But for Fisher’s greed, Ivor Grange would have been snugged up with Ivy Challis and a false sense of security, and we would have detained him easy as kiss-my-hand. But now he was on the run, not from us but Fisher and company... All very messy and unsatisfactory.”

When Grange had been missing for four days, Inspector McKell paid another visit on Ivy Challis. The house had a pretentiously pillared frontage; its interior evoked a furniture store display, expensive without being homelike.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she replied edgily when McKell said it was bad business and looking worse for her lover with every passing hour. Pampered, groomed, Ivy had a disciplined cloud of auburn hair, green eyes, spectacular legs, all set off by a redhead’s pale skin, creamed, lotioned, and toned to perfection. It was hard to believe that she was pushing forty.

“Search all over again if you like,” she offered. “I’d be delighted for Ivor to be here.” She twisted the diamond ring on a long finger, as if trying to saw through. “To be honest, if it hadn’t been for that fight... Usual run of things, you come asking, I would keep my trap shut. But he must be hurt. On my mother’s eyes, Mr. McKell, if he comes back or calls me, you’ll be the first to know. I don’t want him arrested, he’ll give me a bad time after — but at least you lot would get Ivor into hospital. He might even finish with me for giving him away. I don’t care, as long as he’s all right in the end.”

McKell had believed her. The clincher coming when, eyes wet, Ivy Challis faltered, “He is just... you know, only hurt, isn’t he?”

“I hope so, Ivy. From what I hear, he was in a bad way when last seen.”

“And that damned pub is by the river...”

“We’ve dragged it, dear. Your feller didn’t fall in.” He did not share the theory that Tosh Fisher’s heavies had taken Grange with them, aiming to dispose of the body. Having gone too far in trying to beat the stash’s location out of him, they might have treated human wreckage with a spark of life as evidence to be destroyed.

Ivy wasn’t listening. “He knew Tosh was after him, some row or other, I didn’t want to know. Safer for me, right? I begged him to stay home. But no, Ivor goes out on the booze. Reckoned he would be all right at The Waterman’s, Tosh wouldn’t look for him there.” Her face twisted. “All this is down to Fisher! Not just the fight, you’re after Ivor for that factory business, but he never had anything to do with it. Tosh gets up to strokes and always drags my Ivor in.”

“That’s as may be. All Fisher admits is fighting at the pub. Grange wasn’t involved, he says. Tosh had a drink on his ownsome and was getting into his car when an assailant, whom he’d never seen in his life, set on him. Two passing strangers just happened to join in on Tosh’s side, protecting him.”

Ivy laughed bitterly. But when McKell urged, “You know more than you’re letting on... be frank with me, and I can really ruin Fisher’s day,” she shook her head.

“All I know is you lot keep persecuting Ivor. Just find him and get him to a doctor — please.”

“She played me like an old violin,” Inspector McKell admits cheerfully. “I bought the whole act. Until my new friend Tania Wark marked my card about Ivy, that is. Then I caught on to how, um, parochial I had been. Ivor Grange wasn’t at his mistress’s house; therefore she was not sheltering him. But that was tunnel vision, blinkered to anything outside Longdown.

“Thanks to naughty Mrs. Wark, I cast my mental net a little wider. Ivy lived on my patch, but along with a third or more of the population, she commuted to work in London. Soon as I took that aboard, it was obvious where Grange had to be hiding. It was a pain, since another force was involved: you can’t just go barging around the Met’ Police’s back yard, it bends them out of shape, makes ’em shrill and spiteful. Cap-in-hand, humble pie time, otherwise known as liaison and professional courtesy... Our assistant chief constable spoke to his opposite number in The Smoke, and then we were off to the races...”

Ivy Challis’s reputation was spotless in Longdown. She explained, but only if asked, that she was housekeeper for a West End hotel group. Good salary, but it involved shift work, unsocial hours.

In reality, Ivy was a prostitute. She worked out of a ground floor studio apartment in an impersonal, incurious block two or three streets behind Hyde Park. The previous year, a Met’ Police colleague had asked Inspector McKell for background on a hooker calling herself Desire, whose car license number turned out to be identical with that of a Mrs. Ivy Challis. If a redheaded Mrs. Challis did live in Longdown and owned a car with that number, she could be eliminated from an investigation. There had been no need for him to question her, so she was unaware of his background knowledge.

In the West End next day, McKell and one of his sergeants met up with Inspector Pete Peters of the Met’, flanked by a brace of burly young men in leather jackets. Thin-faced, crewcut, crafty and slangy, Peters looked more of a villain than most villains. He and Tom McKell were by way of being friends after a couple of shared Home Office courses.

Inspector Peters crowed, “Bless my soul, if it isn’t the Kevlar Kid!” The day was warm, but wirily angular McKell wore a raincoat buttoned to the collar, turning him weirdly bulky for the size of his head, rather like a winter robin with its feathers fluffed out. The sergeant being well-fleshed in the first place, his bullet-resistant jacket was less evident under a tweed topcoat.

“The subject’s an armed robber, possibly badly hurt and therefore erratic, certainly in fear for his life,” Inspector McKell said stiffly. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Providing he doesn’t pop you between the jolly old horns,” Pete Peters retorted, unabashed. “Lady at her place of business, is she? My boys have been keeping obbo since nine this morning, didn’t clock her going in. On the other hand, those flats are a right rabbit warren... corner site with an alley behind, loads of street doors. Hooker heaven, best part of a hundred apartments, and at least thirty of the tenants are brasses. We couldn’t afford a drum there, and don’t forget Les Girls pay a whacking great rent for cribs they’re using maybe eight hours a day, not every day of the week. Goes to prove what the wages of sin is — money, as if we didn’t know.”

His minions sniggered dutifully.

Wishing that Pete Peters was less fond of talking, Inspector McKell said, “Ivy Challis left her house at eight this morning, took the London road. She must be in there by now.” They were in a huddle opposite the apartment block; he spoke while staring across the street. He had wanted to raid the flat in the early hours: Ivor Grange would be at his lowest ebb then and, presumably, alone. But arranging a joint operation and getting the search warrant had eaten time.

“You can’t see her drum from here,” said Peters. “Her window’s round the back, looks out on a courtyard, air well with ideas above its station, really. I borrowed the plans from the letting agent.”

Inspector Peters spread the sheet on the roof of his low-slung car. “Turn left off the reception area and Ivy Challis’s is the third door along this corridor.” Reversing the paper, he disclosed another schematic. “Layout of the flat: tiny little lobby, lounge with an alcove off it, just room for cooker and sink. Open stairs at the right of the lounge, seven steps to the bedroom, meaning a bed on a balcony affair, a big ledge. Bathroom and lav en suite, it says in the brochure, which comes out as a tacky concertina door, fabric on steel ribs, over here at the end of the sleeping area, that ledge. Shower stall and lavatory behind the concertina door.”

Folding the blueprint, Peters led Tom McKell clear of the group. “We have a lot more experience, and this is our patch. Let me and my hounds have a bit of fun, you come in straight afterwards.” Squinting in concentration, voice lowered, Inspector Peters was wholly serious. “I’ve drawn” (signifying that he was armed and had sanction for the weapon) “and I’m not married with two kids.”

McKell grinned, praying that his churning stomach wouldn’t betray him by growling. “Pushy blokes like you need taking down a peg — wait your turn like a little gent.”

“Well, I tried.” Peters expected nothing else, though the offer had been genuine. He slapped his breast pocket. “Got the search warrant, in case you wondered. Might as well do it...”

Returning to the car, he ordered, “Off you go, kids. This guy has been known to carry, he may come steaming out through the window, so heads up. I want a trouble-free shift and us all getting off early, I have this date with Julia Roberts.”

“Dream on,” floated back as the twosome loped away.

Pete Peters looked down his nose at McKell. “City style, please: forget the bell, ‘I am a police officer,’ and all that lark. Let’s have the door bust sharpish, and get right to it.”

“Suits me.” Yet McKell hesitated, appalled by his oversight. “I should have tried phoning the flat, see if she’s there.”

“Been done. She’s got cards in phone boxes from here to Piccadilly. No more Desire, she’s Fire these days. ‘Fire is hot for you...’ and the phone number of that flat. I’ve been calling it since you spoke to me yesterday, tried again just now. Sexy-voiced answering machine every time —‘I’m not available, but Princess Paprika will give you just as good a time, I’m hot but she’s molten,’ and punters get another number to try.”

McKell cheered up. “Then Grange is there. She’s turning trade away, but Ivy’s still been coming to London regularly since he vanished. Nursing him, and she can’t hide Grange from clients in a one room apartment.”

“Seems reasonable.” Peters winked at McKell’s sergeant, who was carrying a cricket bag. From the strain on its leather handles, something weightier than bat and pads was within. “Brought your key, then. Good lad.”

Outside the apartment door, Inspector Peters prostrated himself like an Arab at prayer, sniffing at the crack between the door and carpet. “Somebody’s home,” he whispered. “Radio going full blast, and I smell cigarettes. Funny ones, unless it’s joss sticks. Maybe your guy’s using grass for anesthetics.” He straightened lithely. Then, breath warm in Tom McKell’s ear: “Two locks, both rubbish. Your guy know his stuff?”

McKell, who’d had just about enough of his colleague, said, “Now’s the time to find out.” He undid the top buttons of the raincoat, sliding his hand within the belt holster, confirming by touch that the safety catch was on. Pete Peters, nodding, moved to the other side of the door.

“All yours, Tim,” McKell mouthed. His sergeant, lips pursed thoughtfully, pressed spread fingers between the two locks. Removing the sledgehammer from the bag, he stepped back and swung expertly, once, twice... Changed his grip to drive the hammer’s head at waist height, battering ram fashion.

The door flew open.

Revolver out, McKell crossed the minuscule lobby in a long stride. “Armed police! Stay still!”

Broad daylight outdoors, but the apartment’s lined curtains were closed and a single baby spot in the array of track lights was the sole illumination. The space, reeking of incense, was shadowy except for that pillar of radiance in the middle of the room, where it was mercilessly bright.

Shock froze him for a heartbeat. Bald, faceless, gleamingly naked, a creature was confronting him: a beast disturbed while savaging fallen prey. Inspector McKell’s mind shut down in much the manner of a camera shutter snapping; a refusal to acknowledge the nature of mutilated quarry being guarded by this apparition.

He might, Tom McKell confessed to me years later, have stayed frozen for a second or an hour. But Pete Peters, jammed with the sergeant back in the lobby, had shouted desperately.

McKell understood, in a strangely detached manner, that the creature wasn’t an animal after all. Humanoid, it had risen on two legs, it was advancing, and it brandished a kitchen knife, a narrow triangle of honed steel some seven inches long from tip to grip, and the silver was sweeping up, up—

Belatedly the spell broke. His brain snicked back into gear, and he perceived what he was dealing with. Being right-handed, with no time to switch the revolver to his left, Inspector McKell took his finger off the trigger, ducked under the descending blade, and clubbed his weighted fist against the side of the alien creature’s muzzle.

He even had enough presence of mind to catch Ivy Challis as she collapsed. While he was laying her down, a detached observer in his head noted that the floor wasn’t glistening from water, it was just that most of the carpet was covered by a sheet of clear plastic.

A cracked voice announced, “Panic over, chaps.” Holstering the revolver, he was disturbed to discover that he had been the speaker.

Pete Peters, Adam’s apple abruptly prominent, choked out, “Sweet Jesus, what is all this?” Shaken but professional, he bolted back to the corridor before throwing up; crime scenes must not be compromised.

“You had to be there,” McKell said, either shrugging or shivering. “Ivy didn’t want her clothes stained by the messy task she had taken on, so she stripped, put on a shower cap and a skintight, see-through PVC catsuit, part of her working wardrobe. With just that one light, and no makeup on, she scared seven kinds of spit out of me. And there were scores of those joss sticks you get at Chinese stores, smoldering away to cover the smell, so the flat was sort of foggy.

“She swore she hadn’t been trying to knife me, just making for the door in a panic to escape. Small consolation if she had skewered me, but I didn’t press charges. The lady was in enough trouble without my two-pennyworth.”

Seeing the question on my face, he said patiently, “Ivy had killed Ivor Grange about an hour before we turned up. She needed to smuggle the body out — dismemberment struck her as the best means. ‘I could have carried it a bit at a time,’ she told me, might have been talking about handling materials for a garden bonfire, ‘and Ivor was too big to get into the boot of my car. I had to make him fit.’ ”

He mimed another shudder. “Ice for a heart, that one. Then again, having been used and abused by men all her adult life, maybe she saw it as getting her own back. All the same, I’m afraid Ivy was defective when she came off the assembly line. Glamorous but not fully human.

“Try this: I asked how she could have done such a thing, meaning killing and mutilation — her late boyfriend was minus arms and legs when we broke in, she’d been taking a breather before tackling decapitation. Ivy being such a looker made it even more bizarre, that’s what I was driving at.

“But she got the wrong end of the stick, thought I was being sexist, surprised that all women aren’t squeamish. The, um, moral dimension was invisible to Ivy. ‘Oh,’ she said, quite proud of herself, ‘Dad was a butcher, I knew how to go about it. And I work out a lot, I’m stronger than I look.’ ”

“God, how awful.”

“I don’t believe God was anywhere near Apartment 3A, Rougemont Court, that particular day.” But his smile, sardonic, hardly perceptible, soon vanished. “You can drive yourself dotty over maybes and might-have-beens, so I try not to wonder exactly what part I played in Grange’s death.

“Until Tania Wark’s tipoff, I accepted that Ivy Challis had no idea where Grange might be. After my second visit, she could tell she was in the clear as far as I was concerned. I’ve a nasty feeling that was the green light. The law was ready to believe that Grange had been knocked off in a dispute with another crook; if his corpse was found, Tosh Fisher had to be the prime suspect. Granted, we picked Fisher up immediately after the fracas at The Waterman’s Arms, but he was granted bail the following day. For all we knew, he could have caught up with Grange and finished what had begun outside the pub.

“During the brawl, Ivor Grange escaped. If he’d gone to Ivy’s house, Fisher might trace him. Lord knows how, but Grange managed to get himself to her London flat. Likeliest explanation is that anonymous wheelman I mentioned, the getaway driver we never caught up with.

“In hindsight, I believe Grange went to that secluded pub to pay off the driver. No doubt the guy bottled out when Fisher turned up with his lynch mob but hung around at a safe distance, rescued Grange when he had the chance, and drove him to London. Grange had a key to Ivy’s crib there — which interested me because he wasn’t her pimp and it was a lousy potential hideout, considering Ivy’s trade. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

“He was in a bad way, front teeth splinters and pulp, broken jaw, but he was a tough nut, confident he’d recover providing he kept away from Tosh Fisher. Grange knew a dodgy doctor who would fix him up on the quiet, but the quack was out of town for a while. Grange phoned Ivy, told her the score, demanded her help, and settled down to wait for the doc.

“Fair play, Ivy Challis did her best at first. But she wasn’t much of a nurse, and he was a rotten patient, half crazy from pain. He whacked her a couple of times for clumsiness, and fairly soon — her version, this — he stopped talking and sulked on the bed, day and night.

“Ivy didn’t like being knocked about. After all, she was turning business away to give Grange a safe house, losing a fortune for his sake. Then rumors started about Tosh Fisher’s being mixed up in Grange’s disappearance, and the poison began working. The idea hit her that there’s no risk in murdering a man who is assumed to be dead already. Grange was weak but bound to get stronger as time passed, she’d never have a better chance.”

Digesting that, I could deduce no sane motive. “If she wanted revenge,” I objected, “she could have had it simply by telling you where to find him.”

Tom McKell was pitying. “Ivy wasn’t after revenge, no money in that. You haven’t listened, old son. Grange was canny, didn’t sling his gelt around. He stashed it away.

“We went over that flat — which is to say the Met’ did, they’re great at searching. Sure enough, a steel box was hidden under the lounge floor. It held most of the hundred thousand from the payroll job, still in the delivery bags, and other cash besides. He had the best part of a quarter-million quid on deposit at his mistress’s London address.

“She denied it, but Ivy must have known his stash was there. Whatever pretext Ivor Grange used to get time alone in her flat, keeping a spare key for further access, she’d spotted something, maybe sawdust on a rug or a certain section of floor not quite the same as before. Women in her trade don’t need many clues; what blood in the water is to sharks, the smell of money is to them.

“Right up to the trial, Ivy denied all knowledge of the money because it was such a damning motive. She tried to sell us and her QC the tale that Grange was killed in self-defense. He’d lost his temper and tried to throttle her, she grabbed up a knife and stabbed him. Then she panicked, fearing that nobody would believe her version, and started covering up...

“Didn’t work. The pathologist agreed there was a lot of damage to the body — how could he not? But Grange was smothered, not stabbed. Fibers from a pillowslip were caught on a broken tooth, and it was an exact match with the pillow on the bed. Forget lashing out, she crept up on him and put that pillow over his face and kept pressing.

“As if that wasn’t enough, the knives and a cleaver she was using on the corpse had been brought from the kitchen of her house at Longdown, that day, which exploded her spur-of-the-moment story.”

I was glad not to be Tom McKell. If he hadn’t unknowingly encouraged the woman, if he had been that much more diligent in setting up the raid on the flat...

Once more he wrong-footed me, though. “The ironic part is, Ivy didn’t need to knock him off. That’s another thing the pathologist found out. Grange’s scars and bruises were spectacular, but the worst damage was internal; he wasn’t sulking, he was dying. Dr. Summerson said that even if we had raided the flat in time to stop Ivy, Grange’s chances of recovery were nil by then. When she smothered him, he was already on the way out.”

“Bit of a let-off for you,” I sniffed. Some of McKell’s previous remarks had stung.

“If you choose to regard it in that light.” No good at being stuffy, Tom McKell spread his hands. “I got there in the end. With some help from Tania Wark.”

And a reflective moment later he muttered, “Idleness was what destroyed her.”

“Tania Wark? What had she done?”

Inspector McKell blinked. “Nothing. I was talking about Ivy, she was the lazy one.

“They are lazy, more often than not, professional criminals. Unless lazy is the wrong label and it’s a matter of having a short attention span, same as those monkeys in The Jungle Book, if you’re familiar with Kipling. The apes made great plans — and forgot ’em next moment. Crooks are like that: know the need for security, hence all the slang and thieves’ argot invented so they can chatter in code. But time and again they spoil themselves. Take a cab right to the front door, too idle to walk a block and leave the cabbie ignorant about their destination. Or rather than destroying all clues at a hideout, they pay somebody to do the donkey work, only it never gets done — that was the Great Train Robbers. It all comes down to laziness.

“Ivy was just the same. There was reason to try for painkillers at Mrs. Wark’s shop, admittedly. But she could have picked up the baby food somewhere else, either in Longdown or, better still, London. Then she might well have got away with it. Instead, painkillers plus baby food made Tania Wark put two and two together, guaranteeing that Ivy was doomed even before she killed the man.

“I asked her why she hadn’t done that, bought his special food from a big outlet. Didn’t say Tania had split on her, naturally; I led Ivy to believe a customer overheard the order, sneaked to us about it.

“And,” McKell challenged, “you’ll never guess her reply, not in a hundred years. Ivy looks at me as if I’m a simpleton, and goes, ‘Easy for you to say, use a bigger shop. But I was already in a chemist’s for the pills, so Ivor’s bloody baby food was right under my nose. Anyway, have you ever tried finding a parking space in Longdown shopping center on a weekday?’

“Though I don’t believe in gloating over clients,” said Inspector McKell, “Ivy tempts me sorely. So clever, discovering where her fancy man kept his loot, taking advantage of thieves falling out... and stupid as they come. She’s still in prison, and richly deserves it. But at least she never walked a step more than she had to, or risked a parking ticket — that must be a great consolation.”