Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

Killer’s Brand by Jeffry Scott

Melanie Skeets arrived at the mini-mall minutes before the killing, in nice time to settle into a ringside seat and take a few sips of white wine.

The new shopping mall was a ring of sorts, albeit a broken one. It formed rather more than a half circle, two floors high, starting and ending at the main street opposite a London underground station. The sweep was punctured in the middle by a short passage to the minor street beyond.

To the left of the archway was a supermarket, the rest of the circle held a cafe and wine bar, a members-only gym, and a ticket agency, with more stores entered from the passageway. Outside the wine bar were scattered light metal chairs, and on a fine day there were few better spots for people-watching in comfort.

The arena held by the building’s outstretched arms wasn’t cluttered with the usual benches, litter bins, and concrete planters. The architect had decreed a textured surface with cobblestone stripes, colored brick swirls, and ribbed tile walkways, suggesting a giant pinwheel frozen as it whirled. Melanie Skeets often wondered why all that didn’t look a mess, but somehow it worked and was fun.

Mrs. Skeets looked at and appreciated the world rather than just seeing it. Often she thought it a shame that so few people using the mall noticed what passed beneath their feet, or understood that its patterns and materials weren’t random.

Ninety yards wide, the pinwheel seldom seemed crowded, although pedestrian traffic was constant. People hurried into the supermarket, others left less speedily, lugging plastic bags. Something about the newness of the half circle persuaded some to detour from the main street and stroll beside the arc before going on their way.

Busy, busy, Mrs. Skeets mused smugly. She’d retired recently and dawdling in the middle of the day still had a taste of playing truant. Where were they all going, and why?

Silly, she scolded herself immediately, use your eyes, half of them are shopping and most of the rest are on lunch break.

The talkers were good value. Right arms raised in permanent salute — unless they were left handed, of course — they sleepwalked hither and thither over the arena, chattering on mobile phones. Mrs. Skeet’s game was to guess what kind of conversation was in progress: business, romantic, or domestic. One had about twenty seconds to pick up messages of body language and facial expression, then the target was out of sight.

The pretty girl there, hair with a raven’s wing sheen — goodness, those heels, she was living dangerously, given the cobblestones and furrowed tiles — was fending off an unwanted date. No question about it, from her yeah yeah whatever toss of the head as she snapped the phone shut and passed on.

Such a minx, and good luck to her. Melanie Skeets nearly giggled aloud. Amusement gave way to a frown. She was trying to pin down a what-is-wrong-with-this-picture query at the back of her mind.

Then it came to her. More passersby were talking on mobile phones than walked in silence. The scene was not wrong, simply different. If we had seen that when I was a kid, and I’m not that old, we’d have assumed they were funny in the head, she mused. And the notion of phoning on the hoof without trailing miles of wires — science fiction.

Now it was so commonplace that if she mentioned her mild wonder she would be called silly or a perceiver of the obvious. All the same, animated conversation with one’s hand, as it looked like at a glance, was rather strange.

This time the giggle escaped Melanie. Any poor soul drawing suspicious glances by talking to himself in the street could achieve instant normality by pressing a matchbox, cigarette pack, or whatever to their ear.

Four minutes before the killing, Melanie Skeets smiled at her whimsy and returned to the game. Several talkers were easily pigeonholed, but a youngish man baffled her despite being in range for longer than average.

She could not see much of his face, though it left an impression. An El Greco face, she thought vaguely, dark pits for eyes and an aura of intensity as he prowled the same few square yards near the main street. The phone rode at his temple but his lips seldom moved. Melanie surmised that he was being passed from department to department with increasingly unwelcome results — no basis for her hunch, merely empathy. That morning had been spent trying to get sense out of her bank and cursing the robot voices shunting her around.

Melanie heard an automatic door sigh open behind her. The gym was next to the wine bar, and the man who’d just emerged was drenched in aftershave. Not the cheap stuff, either, but too much was too much, and she took against him on the spot. A large brute, hair damp from the shower, radiating arrogance and power. Moneyed, they usually were, with gold winking on a thick wrist and fingers. No class, hits first and asks afterwards, she accused.

Over there on the main street a stretch limo pulled up. Bet it has come for him. Just his style, the jerk. Avoiding eye contact while the object of disapproval paused at her elbow, Melanie caught a sidelong flash of designer-stubbled chin jerking at the limo. Doors opened and three men obeyed the summons, one waiting by the car, the others marching forward.

Villains, Mrs. Skeets diagnosed with weary distaste. Running an East End pub had taught her to pick out professional criminals and most varieties of policemen on sight.

Refusing to take any more notice of the crew, she saw that Bad News Man was making for the archway. The phone was still at his ear; evidently he had got through at last because he was talking hard and his free hand was chopping the air for emphasis.

The noise was sharp and a freak of acoustics in the arena brought out its special quality — not particularly loud, but indefinably out of place. It was an ugly rip in the everyday fabric of traffic sounds, voices, and occasional snatches of trills and tunes from those pervasive phones.

Pigeons erupted from the gym’s roof. Mrs. Skeets started violently and spilled wine on her dress. People halted or missed a stride, staring around for the source. The large man reeking of cologne was halfway to the limo, and Melanie had the confused impression that he’d flinched an instant before anybody else reacted, which made no sense.

Suddenly he was falling like a tree, the bodyguards, one kneeling beside the casualty, were shouting and pointing wildly.

Only the unhappy young phonetalker whom Melanie Skeets had pitied was immune to the disturbance. By the set of dark-suited shoulders, misery made him oblivious to anything short of a crack of thunder.

His head turned toward the limo, where his cronies were dancing in indecision, the kneeling thug shouted, “They shot him!” That started a panicked rush for cover.

Melanie Skeets stayed right where she was. Courage didn’t come into it; she was stunned by a revelation. She understood that she had not observed events but interpreted what she was seeing. Conned myself, me and my empathy. What a daft article I can be.

She hoped the police would show up soon. There was urgent need to speak to them. More to the point, she hoped that one of them would listen to her.

The dead man was Ernest “Tasty Ernie” Balch, an abrasive and highly successful dealer in drugs, pornography, and prostitutes. He hadn’t set out to diversify, but one thing had led to another.

Success, as ever, brought personal and professional enemies, both groups noted for vengefulness and contempt for law and human life alike. Two years before working out and then using too much aftershave, Tasty Ernie survived an assassination attempt, but chance favored him. No way should he have got out alive, but the gunman’s revolver snagged on its journey from the shoulder holster, and his target’s reflexes were excellent. Balch ducked the bullet, and ran for his life, literally — those gym sessions had not been in vain.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. The fiasco (in the hit man’s jaundiced view) spurred Mr. Balch to review and tighten up security. In vain, admittedly, but at least he’d tried.

Meanwhile, the police reacted with unusual rapidity and verve. The chief investigating officer took the shotgun option and hauled in dozens of Tasty Ernie Balch’s rivals, associates, and even a few ambiguous friends.

Among them was Nigel Crane — a name generating cruel mirth, but that was much later. Crane’s detention was striking proof of police unfairness and the truth of the Cockney adage, “All coppers are bastards.” He was arrested in a departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, exactly forty minutes after Mrs. Skeets and many, many others heard the fatal shot.

“You are joking. What is this? Can’t I even go on holiday anymore?”

“Sorry, Nige.” The detective constable was an old acquaintance and courtesy costs nothing. Crane was dodgy but always good for a drink. “Can’t be helped, orders from God Almighty. We both know it’s stupid but try telling them that, eh?” The killing had gone down at the far side of London hardly half an hour ago. Unless Crane owned one of those James Bond jet packs, he couldn’t have reached the airport so quickly. Well, slight exaggeration... if Crane had a motorbike waiting behind the new mall he might just have managed it.

Leafing through a girlie magazine in the departure lounge, Nigel Crane had looked serene and a trifle bored, not like a windswept, nearly-bought-it-twice-and-that-was-just-the-first-mile rider or pillion passenger. If he had covered over twenty traffic-heavy miles from the crime scene in just about as many minutes, then he deserved a vacation for nerve.

But he hadn’t done anything like that, the detective was positive. It was Give a Dog a Bad Name syndrome. There were persistent rumors that Crane was a hit man. Informers alleged it, although they couldn’t provide a scrap of proof. “My own silly fault,” he had conceded on one occasion, while admitting petty fraud. “I used to tell birds fairy tales to impress ’em. There’s a certain type that is right morbid, blood on your hands really turns them on. Some day, I’ll grow up and learn sense.”

That had the ring of truth, the detective constable considered. “Somebody will look at the times and do their sums, and you will be on your way, no danger.”

“I’m having a pants year all round, mate. Beyond pants, I can’t win for losing. Been saving for ages to go to Rio — see Carnival and die, isn’t that the saying?”

“Naples is see it and die. Rio, I been there and it’s overrated. Hot and cold running pickpockets and the Sugarloaf, what is that about? It’s a hill, be still my heart.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better about missing the trip.” Nigel Crane smiled wanly. “Appreciate it.”

“Melanie Skeets,” says the detective inspector whom she had cornered that day, “was a very good witness and a bloody awful one.

“She couldn’t describe the man she guessed had been the shooter. She kept on about El Greco, whoever he was — the shooter didn’t look like him, he just put her in mind of some bygone oil painter. ‘I will recognize him if I see him,’ she went. Which she did, no hesitation. Dead fair ID parade too — all were the same general type, and several could have doubled for Nigel Crane if you only knew him by sight.”

Our Inspector, a helpful label given the number of officers involved, admits that Melanie Skeets’s outlandish theory attracted him because it accounted for the unaccountable. He was all for that.

“Three guys were watching Balch on his way from the gym to the car, right? Him, and everybody around him. All three minders insisted the shot came out of thin air. The killer had to have used a long gun, a rifle, from the gym roof or one of the tower blocks on the street behind.

“They were wrong. Balch was killed by a .38 round fired at just about point-blank range. Impossible, the muscle reckoned. Nobody close to their boss had a gun out, or pulled a gun. They’d have seen that, it was exactly what they were alert for, right? They weren’t lying or covering up, either. They loved the guy — no accounting for taste — they’d wanted to keep him alive and they had been heads-up all the while.

“These weren’t standard witnesses, the kind of civilians who walk round in a daze and will tell you rubbish. Like I said, they’d had their eyes peeled, and they were adamant that nobody at ground level could have shot Big Eddie.

“Then up pops our Mel and what she proposes is this: The shooter had the piece out ready, all along. Little .38 snubnosed held vertically by the side of his head. A guy has a small, dark object up to his lughole, deeply suspicious, what can he be up to? Calling a bookie, telling lies to his wife, asking for train times is what. Nothing suspicious, is the short answer; he’s on the phone, what else?

“Nigel Crane walks past Tasty Eddie, shoots him just above the ear, whips the revolver back into phone mode and walks on, talking to the piece. ‘That has to be it,’ Melanie Skeets said. ‘It didn’t sink in till he’d gone through that archway. He never looked round when there was that bang. He was the only one expecting it. The only one who knew what it was.’ ”

The inspector was less impressed than Mrs. Skeets had expected him to be. He believed that she had produced a viable explanation. Sadly, ‘That has to be it,’ falls short of the standard demanded by the Crown Prosecution Service. Mrs. Skeets was honest: at no stage of the incident had she seen a weapon rather than a mobile phone.

Belatedly she recognized that El Greco’s gesturing left hand had been a conjuror’s ploy to divert attention from what his other hand cradled as he left the corpse behind. An ingenious theory, and it might even be valid. The not-looking-round thing was persuasive — but it wasn’t evidence.

Melanie Skeets was positive that she knew better, although as she had feared, nobody took her seriously. Not at first, that is. Assertive in her quiet way, she got a hearing in the end.

That might have been the end of it; the inspector took her name and address without troubling her for a formal statement. If a prime suspect emerged, then she would be asked to attend an identification parade.

As for the rest — cute idea, the woman had a vivid imagination, don’t call us...

Sadly for Nigel Crane, his bad luck persisted.

There was, as has been stated, a platoon of reluctant visitors to police stations across Southeast London. Most demanded legal representation before uttering so much as “No comment.” Not any old first-cab-off-the-rank brief neither, but ‘their’ Mr. So-and-so, who took time to respond.

Our Inspector was dealing with the potential witnesses at the crime scene. He was ready to clock off when Inspector B drew him aside to beg a massive favor.

Inspector B had investigated the violent removal of a costly watch from the wrist of a minor yet delectable Hollywood actress in London for an awards ceremony. She had agreed to have dinner with him that evening. “There’s only a couple of faces left at Harvest Green. It’s just round the corner, you’ll be home in an hour. These are Couldn’t-Possibles, just give ’em a spin and kick ’em out the door...”

Reading the paperwork at the Harvest Green police station, Our Inspector decided that Inspector B hadn’t been kidding. Somebody seemed to be using Tasty Eddie Balch’s demise as pretext for hassling the opposition.

Nigel Crane was a glaring example. A scrawled note from the copper who had picked him up at the airport confirmed that the man’s ticket to Brazil had been booked months in advance. Somebody had spotted the wretch checking in, asked if there was any interest, and bang went Nigel Crane’s vacation.

His reputation as hit man had been enough for the chief investigating officer. The CIO wasn’t riding off in all directions, but he was pulling in bad citizens from as many compass points.

Noting that Crane had waived legal representation, Our Inspector started with him to get the dross out of the way. Nigel Crane told his sad story of Paradise Lost, Copacabana Beach anyway, and Our Inspector, heartless fellow, sniggered, “You shouldn’t tell lies to the girlies if you can’t take a joke, killer.”

“Very droll,” Nigel Crane groaned. Restless in the hard chair, he smoothed his hair. Wincing, he pulled his hand away and switched to tapping his feet. “What?”

Our Inspector was studying him raptly. “Nasty place on your face, you need some ointment on that, my son.”

“S’nothing, razor burn.”

“But first,” Our Inspector continued as if Crane had not spoken, “we’ll get that injury photographed, have the doc take a look. Doesn’t look like razor burn to me.”

Nigel Crane swallowed once. “I want my brief.”

“No sooner asked than granted.” Yet Our Inspector kept inspecting Crane’s face. “I know you slotted Balch, and now that that’s established, the rest is routine. The only way you got to the airport that quick is on a motorbike, and something tells me you aren’t into them. You paid somebody for the ride, probably a courier who knows all the shortcuts. And probably a mate of yours, so he’d ask no questions. That cuts the candidate list down.”

“I want my brief.”

“When your mate is looking at joining you on a murder charge it will loosen his tongue a treat. Tell me I’m wrong...”

Nigel Crane remained unhappily mute.

“We’ll find your ride, depend on it. What with traffic control, speed cameras, cameras monitoring the buses-only lanes, and a load more watching for terrorists, you’ll have been a right little film star. We’ll run all the tapes, look for a bike with two aboard, one in a dark suit — nowhere to change near the mall and you were in a hurry anyway, so you changed at the airport before checking in.

“The rider will get out from under at the speed of light, swear he didn’t know what was going on, all he did was give you a lift from the mall maybe ninety seconds after the shooting. And there’s a corker of an eyewitness can place you there, right next to Balch when he went down.”

Nigel Crane couldn’t resist venting his feelings. “That many cameras, you reckon? I said it in the car coming here and I say it again, this year has been pants for me.” Then he folded his arms and fell glumly silent again.

“Melanie Skeets worked it out perfectly,” Our Inspector gloats. “Crane walked past Eddie Balch, slotted him and kept going, ‘on the phone’ again. What he didn’t reckon on was this: The passage of a bullet heats up a revolver barrel something cruel. Even a short barrel. Nigel has skin a girl would envy — ultra sensitive. When I saw the nasty new burn near his earlobe, from putting the gun up against it again and talking away, it was Game Over.

“None of the traffic or security camera coverage had caught him en route to Heathrow, by the way. We had enough, though. He wore transparent gloves for the hit but a dark suit and white shirt were recovered from a washroom bin at the airport, and there was gunshot residue on the shirt and jacket sleeves. Nothing to connect Crane to the clothing bar his DNA traces, pardon my sarcasm...

“His defending brief could tell they were on a hiding to nothing, didn’t contest the evidence, and went all-out on the mitigation speech: ‘A tragedy for the defendant as much as the victim, both casualties of society.’ It sounded good but the jury didn’t quite agree. They conferred for, oh, all of forty minutes. Not quite as fast as his trip to the airport, but close. Guilty as charged.”

At which point — in hindsight one understands that he had been working up to it, chortling inwardly for minutes — Our Inspector produces his treasured and excruciating pun, polished by frequent use.

“It was enough to make a man religious, clocking that redness on his skin. You could say our Nigel bore the mark of Crane.”