And Down She Lay by Jeffry Scott

In dour moments his face resembled a section of cliff with frozen water trapped in a couple of crannies, reflecting an unpromising sky — those were the eyes. Nobody had ever accused Detective-Sergeant Dick Flinders of being an impressionable man.

Yet he liked Mary Taylor a lot, from the instant of meeting her, and eventually — on his side, at least — it went far beyond that. Secretly, Flinders thought her beautiful, though Mrs. Taylor was no great beauty.

She had the face of a Renaissance madonna, twenty years on, more than a touch overweight, who had lived through some hard times. She was a no-nonsense woman who generally wore flat shoes, crumpled pants and sweater, and a camelcloth coat with a faintly mangy air because its raised seams showed threadbare places. At the same time, Mary Taylor managed to be intensely feminine.

Operation Nail ran for months, so Flinders and Detective-Sergeant Taylor spent a total of days together.

From time to time a criminal gets target status, to be watched around the clock, his life analyzed in finest detail, every human contact logged and checked out, so that a picture of his activities can be built up. The subject of Operation Nail presented extra problems because he had one or more bent coppers on his payroll for the sole purpose of warning him about such interest. The special force recruited for Nail, therefore, was gathered by stealth and assembled under subterfuge, from all over the Metropolitan Police area.

Dick Flinders, for instance, left Rosetta Street nick on extended sick leave. As usual, he said nothing about it, but somebody left a confidential letter on the wrong desk, and it soon became public knowledge that a patch had been discovered on his lung; he was going to stay with relatives at the seaside and wouldn’t be back for a long time. Mary Taylor was sent to a pilot course in social studies at a Midlands university, and so it went for the thirty or more members of the team.

You can do a lot of talking while watching. Dick Flinders, of course, was more of a listener. And that was a rainy summer, even for England. Afterwards, Flinders’ mental pictures of Mary were of sitting with her in a string of drab cars and anonymous pickups and light trucks, with worm and amoeba patterns of rain on the window behind her profile.

She was a great one for poetry, the older, unfashionable kind that rhymes and scans. She could recite more than Flinders had ever bothered to read, and Tennyson was her favorite. Mary reeled off even the longer poems with only occasional pauses, as if telling a story. He never minded when she repeated them, and the couplets, drawing extra potency from their speaker, sank into his subconscious, ripe for retrieval.

And she talked about her youth, the sky-wide fields of Wiltshire where tractors work in threes and fours and racehorses exercise on the emerald, frozen waves of downland hills. The recollections stopped around her twentieth birthday.

Flinders gathered or guessed that her marriage, while enduring — she wasn’t the kind to break a contract — wasn’t a success.

Naturally, they also talked shop by the hour. At the time of Operation Nail, a detective-constable had been murdered at Roth-erhithe. He was a man with a heavy caseload and an even heavier list of enemies, so there were many suspects.

“I’d always leave a clue,” said Mary Taylor.

“Chances are it would be a fine thing. Ted Perry had other things on his mind, poor sod. They ran him down with a five-ton truck, luv — there wasn’t time for a dying deposition.”

She shook her head. “There’s ways, Dick. I bet I’d find one.” Mary could be very certain about professional matters, or pigheaded, if you wanted to be unkind.

There was a big celebration when Operation Nail, having run like clockwork, delivered like a fruit machine. Detective-Sergeant Flinders, impassive as ever, was probably the only officer involved who felt sad.

He and Mary slipped away from the pub after the third hour of euphoria. Inspector Flaxman, who was that sort, was showing people an Operation Nail tie he had designed. Superintendent Jelliffe, primmest and stuffiest of coppers, was wearing a lampshade.

“I’ll run you home,” Flinders offered. Mary Taylor lived on the Kent side of London, not many miles beyond Rosetta Street and his lodgings.

She shook her head. “Not a good idea. Well, is it?”

Flinders found a kind of eloquence. “Probably be years before we get together again. I think the world of you, gel. Your circumstances may change; mine won’t, there aren’t any. So if you ever want to get in touch, you know where I am.”

“You’re a gentleman, Dick.”

“Oh-aye, one of nature’s,” he scoffed, glad to lighten the atmosphere.



Mary Taylor always said what she meant, and took mild exception when others fell short of that. “Just a gentleman.” Her stubby, worn, and capable hand, a moth in the darkness of the car park, came up and settled on his shoulder and squeezed hard for a moment. “You look after yourself.”

Then she turned up the collar of the disreputable coat, freeing her hair with an abrupt shake of the head that put him in mind of a pony, yanked the belt tighter, and trudged off to the bus stop.

It was the last he saw of her. But two years afterwards he heard about Detective-Sergeant Mary Taylor.


“What exactly is your interest?” Inspector Mockridge returned Flinders’ warrant card and leaned back behind his desk, a man with the deceptive, florid jollity of high blood pressure and a short temper.

“I worked with DS Taylor on a target thing, backalong. And being in the neighborhood anyway, sir, I wanted to know what happened. Maybe I can call on the family.”

“There isn’t one to speak of,” Mockridge countered promptly. “Just Mr. Taylor, and I’ve already seen him. There are procedures for an, um, unhappy matter like this, sergeant. All being taken care of. Mr. Taylor never liked his wife’s career, he’s upset, and he won’t take kindly to a stream of coppers banging at his door.”

The big man waited woodenly.

Inspector Mockridge, spying a corner of newspaper protruding from the trenchcoat pocket, smiled narrowly. “You ought to know better, taking any notice of the papers. Typical media distortion. There’s no mystery about Taylor’s death: she was spring cleaning and fell off a chair, broke her neck.”

Mockridge’s smile grew a fraction malicious. “Not the domesticated type, DS Taylor — didn’t like women’s work.”

“Thanks, sir. I’ll be on my way, then.” But Detective-Sergeant Flinders did not travel far.


“Oh, you’re in order, Dick.” Sergeant Rollason, bluff, sandy, matter-of-fact, nodded to himself. “One of our lot dies with their boots on, you start thinking the worst.”

Flinders had waited three hours in the Bull & Mouth, sipping light ale at an unvarying rate of a pint every sixty-five minutes, to encounter Rollason. The Bull wasn’t the nearest pub to Caldwell Green police station, just the best. And Dick Flinders had been around for a long time; it wasn’t such a long chance, having served with Cyril Rollason ten years earlier.

Rollason, a raincoat over his uniform, lit a cigarette. “Mary wasn’t that popular, she didn’t bow and scrape the way some people like. But she was a bloody good copper. I’ll miss her.”

Flinders felt a stab of jealousy at the other man’s easy use of her name, and told himself not to be daft.

Sergeant Rollason’s gaze was steady through the smoke. “What’s all this about, son?”

Flinders spoke to his clasped hands. “There was never any monkey business, Mary wasn’t the kind. But she’s the one I’ll measure all the others against, until I’m in my long box. Pick of the litter, was Mary.”

“Ah,” said Rollason. “Well, amen to that, she was a bit special. Even if everybody didn’t see it. What do you want to know, Dick?”

“Everything.”

Rollason took a measured gulp of whisky and ginger wine, smacked his lips, and nodded again. “Fair enough. You know her old man’s a right cupful of cold spit, no use to man nor beast?”

Curling his right hand around a phantom glass, Cyril Rollason agitated it violently. “Too much of that. He’d gone on the spree, Mary went home off late duty, that’d be around half past ten last night. Neighbor saw the lights still on this morning, knocked, peeped in the downstairs window, saw her laid out on the floor, and called us.”

“Mockridge said something about spring cleaning.”

“Cobblers,” Rollason retorted. “Mocky’s got a thing about working women copping out from their rightful destiny of being unpaid bloody servants, that’s all.” Dick Flinders remembered that Rollason’s wife, to her husband’s ungrudging pride, was a doctor.

“No, she was tired,” the uniformed man said harshly. “Probably steaming mad as well, with her old man off drinking and whoring as per usual. The light bulb had burnt out, in the front room. A chair was lying on its side — the linoleum floor’s pretty slippery.

“Poor Mary got up on a chair, people will do it, to change the bulb, and over she went. If you stop to think how dangerous a house is, you’d take to living in tents.”

“He was off drinking and whoring?”

“Yeah,” Rollason grimaced. “Mocky Mockridge found our Mr. Taylor at a house three streets away, later this morning. In bed with a bird who’d mislaid her own husband. Her mother says Taylor and the woman rolled in, legless with drink, about half past nine, and never stirred from the bed where Mocky found ’em. Ain’t romance wonderful?”

“Just an accident, then,” Flinders observed stonily.

“Looks that way. What am I saying? It was.”

“Maybe. What was Mary working on?”

Rollason, about to finish his drink, replaced the tumbler with finicky care. “Hold very hard now, son.”

Flinders shook his head. “Just for talking’s sake, what was she up to in the last couple of weeks?”

Sergeant Rollason started to say something, changed his mind, drummed his fingers on the table. “How would I know? Wooden-tops, the CID calls us, Noddy-cops, figures of fun. They don’t confide is what I’m saying.”

Then he did have the drink. “All right, I could find out.” Eerily, Sergeant Rollason echoed Mary Taylor: “Not a good idea, though. You’re way off your patch, in every sense of the word. And Mocky’s a stickler for the book, he’ll have your courting-tackle for a paperweight if he catches you trying to interfere.”

Flinders nodded. “I’ll ring you at home, first thing tomorrow. Best time to snoop around a nick, when the shifts have just changed.”

Rollason sighed heavily. “Anything else?”

“Of course. Give my best to Helen. And tell me who’s the pathologist.”

“Professor Craigie, remember him?”

“You’re joking. What’s more, he’ll remember me. I got his car back for him once, on the quiet. It’d been nicked outside the wrong block of flats, if you get my drift.”


Liam Craigie, called out from a bridge session at his West End club, didn’t ask what Flinders’ interest was. A man with a long memory for favors, he simply passed on information.

“If it’s any consolation, Richard, your friend didn’t suffer long, if at all. She did not die at once, but she would have been unconscious or feeling no pain, throughout. The crucial event occurred and was over in a split second.”

“Good. Least she deserved. And it was an accident?”

Some Scots speak the purest English in the British Isles, as measured as their minds. Professor Craigie sounded old-maidish. “I’m a... technician who, by the very nature of my calling, must eschew certainties. Accidental death? Very probably; there’s hardly any reason to think otherwise.”

Dick Flinders pounced on the qualification. “Where does ‘hardly any’ come in, prof?”

Craigie, seeing friends arriving, drew the policeman into a corner of the draughtboard-tiled foyer where a telephone box carpentered in the early 1900’s cast a pool of gloom for confidential talk.

“There were no injuries inconsistent with a fall — just the one massive injury, in fact. But there was one worrying little abrasion.”

The pathologist clenched his right hand and tapped the edge of it with a bony left forefinger. “Just there, below the fourth, smallest finger. A cut inflicted immediately prior to death.”

“Defense wound?”

Craigie pursed his lips. “No, no. Just the one minor nick. Some domestic mishap. Rather supporting the presumption of a woman who was tired and careless, accident prone, to use jargon. Except that it was in an odd position: as if she used the side of her hand like a hammer. Not on bone or tissue, and not in a conventional punch, else the knuckles would have been the affected area. D’you follow?”

Dick Flinders tried to visualize that small, cryptic cut. “A karate chop, edge of her hand?”

Professor Craigie was definite. “No, the abrasion’s trifling but it extends from the edge of the palm onto the side of the little finger. Ergo, that finger was curled — with the rest, most likely. Extend three fingers stiffly while curling the smallest and you’ll understand: it’s a strain, not natural.”


John Taylor had the indefinably sodden looking, drowned-strawberry nose of the dedicated toper, and spectacularly bloodshot eyes. They squeezed shut and he groaned at the assault of light at seven thirty A M. “What’s your game?” he croaked belatedly, for Dick Flinders was across the threshold by then.

“Hide and seek. Listen, sunshine, I’m in a hurry and I don’t want trouble — neither do you. This won’t take long.”

Flinders opened the door to the right of the pinched hall. “This where it happened?” It had to be: dark linoleum, straight-backed chairs, a central hanging light with the bulb showing blackened and dead.

“What if it is? You one of them reporters?”

“Maybe.” Flinders turned slowly, like a gun turret on a battleship, examining everything. A seldom-used room in a loveless house. Framed photographs over the fireplace — wedding group, an elderly couple outside a farmhouse, a far younger John Taylor smirking and in uniform as a National Service private in the Catering Corps.

Flinders’ arm came up in one piece, like a railway signal. A large oval of unfaded wallpaper.

“Who took the picture down?”

“Mirror, not picture, Mr. Know-all,” Taylor replied sulkily. “She broke it. She might have been a woman copper, ordering folk around and stirring up trouble, but she was a dead loss around the house.

“Rotten temper, too. Lash out, she would, when she was in the mood. Between being clumsy, and wanton bloody destruction...”

Dick Flinders counted back from ten, silently. “She broke it... the night it happened?”

Puzzled by the big fellow’s interest, Taylor closed his eyes and lounged against the door frame. “Yes, it was all right in the afternoon, I used it to straighten my tie. First thing I spotted; well, the main thing was Mary snuffing it, goes without saying.” The grieving widower sniggered and wagged his head.

Flinders went out through a kitchen already smelly, sink piled with dirty crocks, to the back doorstep. The mirror was propped beside the dustbin, its heavy chain starting to rust from drizzle and dew.

Its wooden backing had stopped its breaking outright, but the egg-shaped glass was cracked down the middle. Flinders curled his fingers and swung his hand against the silvery surface, gingerly. He felt the dangerous kiss of the razor edge where one half of the glass was higher at the fracture line.

Mary Taylor had used her hand like a hammer, Professor Craigie believed.

“Seven years bad luck,” Taylor jeered from the back doorstep. “Who are you, anyway?”

Flinders brushed past him without answering. Taylor was shouting by the time he was in the hall, but the slammed front door cut it off.


“Two weeks’ leave, just like that.” Inspector Tuckey wagged his head wonderingly. “And here’s me boosting you up all these years as the steadiest bloke between Rosetta Street and the North Pole.”

Detective-Sergeant Flinders rubbed his nose. “Male menopause,” he suggested helpfully.

“Don’t get saucy as well as awkward. All right then, seeing as it’s you. And watch your step.”

Flinders blinked at him. Either Cyril Rollason had been indiscreet and set the grapevine quivering, or Tuckey, a master of the art, was firing shots at random.

“I always do, Skip. And thanks.”


Flinders put the scribbled notes away as Miss Angel came to the public library counter. He’d been studying them all morning.

Roger James Endaby, age 37, general dealer. Suspected receiver of stolen goods. Mary Taylor had been keeping observation on his scrapyard.

Gladys Manley Gray, age 23, prostitute. Had jumped bail at the beginning of the month after being sent for trial, accused of robbing a client. Mary knew her well and had traced her on a previous, similar occasion. She’d been expected to do so again, given time.

George Philip Trench, age 56, suspected of Value-Added Tax evasion on a large scale. Mary Taylor was working, gently and as a long-term project, on persuading his bookkeeper to turn Queen’s Evidence and escape punishment as a result.

Detective-Sergeant Mary Taylor had been involved in many other matters, of course. Police work, as the instructors din into recruits and probationers, is teamwork. It had taken Sergeant Rollason more than ten minutes just to dictate the relevant names and add thumbnail dossiers.

But those three, said Rollason — and Flinders agreed — were “the live ones.” Endaby, the fence, had a violent record and an understandable aversion, after much experience, to prison. Gladys Gray was on speed and might have reacted strongly to attempted arrest. Trench was the least likely, on the face of it, but with so much money and ruin involved could not be counted out.

“Hang on,” Rollason sighed, his roster completed. “Helen wants a word. Words, more like.”

Helen Rollason said in a rush, “I don’t care if you do hang up on me, Dickie Flinders! Mary was an exceptional person. Her death didn’t have to be, though. You’d better be very sure you do have a hunch, not just the instinct to make this thing dramatic because you’re emotionally involved.

“I’m not an insensitive fool, I know what I’m saying. Bereavement has messed up the heads of far more stoical and brainy guys than you, luv.”

An anxious silence at Helen’s end of the line. Then Flinders said: “I wouldn’t hang up on you. You’re in order, dear, but I know what I’m talking about, too. Not to worry, we’ll all meet up and have one of our curry festivals when this thing’s sorted.”

Walking to the library, Flinders had wondered at himself. He didn’t hold with ghosts, ESP, premonitions, and the like. Sentimentality irked him like silver foil on an exposed dental nerve.

Yet the night Mary Taylor died, he had been swept by a sense of desolation and worry that shook him. Depression can be a clinical condition as well as a passing fit of the blues, and Flinders had feared he was experiencing its onset.

The news about Mary had explained that feeling. Somehow, he could discount any idea of the supernatural and still be sure, without the least factual foundation, that she had been killed and he had to do something about it.

Miss Angel’s tart speech hauled him back to the present. “Escaping from the rain, or looking for an ethnic minority member to oppress?” She had suspiciously emphatic black hair, snapping blue eyes, and an abiding disapproval of the police, who, she had often explained to Detective-Sergeant Flinders, were minions of the boss class and mercenaries of anti-life, neocolonial interests. Despite this, they were firm friends.

Flinders said humbly, “I need help. There’s a poem about a broken mirror, and that’s all I know.”

Miss Angel scratched her head, like a very poor actress signaling puzzlement to an audience seated perhaps a hundred yards away. “Goodness! Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is your best bet, fat blue joker, bottom shelf, third stack along, in Reference.”

“I don’t know the title.”

She curled her upper lip. “What a moron. That’s the idea of the book, dear boy. The index has key words. Listed alphabetically, that means M-for-mirror will be a long way past A-for-apple.”

He was turning away when she made his scalp tingle. “The mirror crack’d from side to side,” Miss Angel announced. Startled by his blazing glance, she added lamely, “Well, it’s only an Agatha Christie whodunit. I never read them; too class-conscious, and I detest violence.”

“That wasn’t it. This was a poem.”

He found what he wanted in the seventh item on page 354 of the dictionary, one of a score or more devoted to extracts from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892).

Reading “The Lady of Shalott,” Flinders found his eyes blurring and he had to stop, blowing his nose and clearing his throat sternly. Mary Taylor’s chanting with its warm Wessex drawl resurfacing as she slipped back towards childhood days in something remembered from them was so clear in his head that the ache of her passing was all the harder to take.

Soon the grief was backed by disappointment. The dictionary gave large sections, but he hunted up a battered, stale-smelling Complete Works to read the whole poem and make sure. The lady in her tower, the water meadows, the handsome knight, the shattering of mirror and spell, Sir Lancelot’s epitaph while gazing on the stricken maiden...

None of it made any sense. Flinders slammed the book shut, making several readers jump at the pistol shot.

To hell with Camelot, he decided savagely. Mary Taylor had died at far-from-idyllic Caldwell Green, and that was where he must search.


Dick Flinders, leaning against a lamppost, told himself that Mary must have stood at this spot, trod this same sidewalk, only a few days ago.

Suddenly he yearned for her to come walking around the corner, head down, cuffs of the shabby blue pants swirling. Just so that he could tell her... what? Nothing to do with his feelings, or not directly. Just to be careful.

Detective-Sergeant Taylor had been ambitious, and believed — rightly, as it happened — that a common police trick of borrowing lower colleagues’ brainwork and passing it off as your own was sharpened in her case by sexual discrimination. So she tended to hoard insights and discoveries until an ironclad conclusion could be presented, firmly attributable to herself and delivered in front of several senior figures. Preferably ones who disliked each other and would be ruthless over demolishing a rival’s false claims.

Flinders had seen minor instances of her technique during Operation Nail. She hadn’t changed, and very likely it had been the death of her.

Shaking off the sterile reverie, Flinders stared across the road. Roger Endaby’s yard was rather well camouflaged, shoehorned into an unexpected gap in a row of small, Edwardian-era row houses. The policeman guessed that one of them had been demolished by bombing in the 1940’s blitz, and never rebuilt. London is pitted with such tiny and generally squalid sites in places where they shouldn’t be.

There was no sign on the blistered door set in an extra-tall, uninformative fence. Walking to the end of the row, turning right and immediately right again, Flinders made his way to the rear of Endaby’s secretive little property. Again the fence, with two strands of barbed wire topping it for good measure.

Over the way was a small block of concrete garages in a sawtooth formation offering good cover after dark. Wandering along them, Flinders came across a niche strewn with toffee papers and the trodden-out corpses of Gauloise cigarettes smoked for only the initial inch or so.

Mary had waited and watched from here, and not just the once.

Dick Flinders turned away abruptly, returning to the Consort Street side of Endaby’s yard. Peering through the crack between the gate and fence, he saw tea chests apparently full of scraps of copper and lead piping, cartons of empty jars, several old pedal-bikes. A garden shed at the far end must be where Roger Endaby made his deals and kept his accounts, if any.

There was a white car off to one side, only partly visible. Covered in a plastic sheet, but not completely. He could see the number plate of a vehicle registered new, in the past two months, and was able to identify a Mercedes costing enough to pay the yard’s annual rent several times over.

“There’s a funny motor for a poor but honest rag-and-bone man,” Flinders mumbled. He moved to the other side of the solid gate, in case the crack was wider at the hinges.

“He’s not around.”

Flinders looked about, without reward until the voice came again. “The one above sees all.” The young man in dark pants and white shirt with rolled sleeves was perched in the bay window of the row house next to Endaby’s yard. He had a snub nose, a friendly grin, and was eating toast and butter and honey. Pop music floated out from behind him.

“Rog went off to Derby last night,” the youngster explained. “Anyway that’s what he told me — so he’s probably in Cornwall. He’s a terrible old crook, is Rog.”

Flinders spread his hands and returned the grin. “That’s what I heard. But I need him pretty urgently,” he lied.

“Come on up a minute, the door’s open, I’m in the top flat.” The young man pulled his head inside.

“Quite a place you’ve got here,” said Flinders, having shaken hands with the tenant, Dennis Webb. He wasn’t flattering a probable source of information; the flat was surprisingly luxurious compared to the modest exterior of the street. Waxed boards with good rugs, some expensive paintings — expensive looking anyway, though they must be reproductions — and half a wall of stereo equipment.

Dennis Webb made the usual English incoherent noise for acknowledging a compliment. “Well, these places are dirt cheap, no parking space with ’em. Doesn’t matter because I’m not here long enough to need a car, and when I do, I can always hire one.”

He jerked a thumb at a cluster of dolls on the mantelpiece, mostly in outlandish costumes. “I’m with Allworld Airlines, I bring one of those back for every new country we get to. As for the rest, my family’s motto is, ‘I can get it for you wholesale...’ and I hold them to it.”

Webb shrugged meaninglessly and bounded out to the kitchen. “Coffee?” he said.

Flinders wondered what had brought on the hospitality. Young Dennis might be gay, of course, but Flinders didn’t believe so; even less did he believe in his own power as a charmer.

Returning with two steaming mugs, Dennis Webb explained the trivial riddle. “You mustn’t take it seriously, what I was saying about Rog. Just my fun. He’s a good bloke.” Webb giggled helplessly. “Except, of course, for being a miserable sod with the devil of a temper. So if you’re a mate of his, forget anything I blurted out to the contrary.”

Drifting to the bay window, Flinders said, “I’ve never clapped eyes on him. Matter of fact, he owes me money, through a third party.” As he had hoped, there was a much better view of the yard.

“Don’t hold your breath waiting for it,” Webb advised cheerfully. Slurping coffee, he chattered on. “I’m not a pilot or anything, mind. Except when I’m trying to pull birds. Steward, what the Yanks call a flight attendant. Bit of a come-down, really.”

Obviously he was referring to a medley of photographs encased in a transparent plastic block at Flinders’ elbow. Also obviously, Dennis Webb was fond of and impressed by Dennis Webb. All the pictures were of him, variously dressed in swimming trunks, football kit, a white pajama-like outfit, track suit, or Air Training Corps uniform, and invariably flourishing a trophy cup or shield.

“Interesting job,” Flinders commented abstractedly. He was trying to make out what kind of lock secured Roger Endaby’s office-shack.

Young Webb was a shade patronizing. “It’s all right until I get rid of the flying and travel bug at Allworld’s expense. But the prospects aren’t good if you’re like me and flunked pilot training.”

Neatly he snared the policeman’s empty mug — the coffee had been excellent — and took it with the other to the kitchen. “Like I said, I’m only here off and on... but d’you want me to give Rog a message if I see him?” he called.

Evidently Dennis Webb’s hospitable impulse was withering rapidly, now that he’d offset his blunder in slandering Endaby. Flinders took the hint.

“Ta for the coffee, Dennis. Yes, say Bill Tilden of Dagenham is after him. Tilden Plant Hire, that’ll ring a bell.” Which was unlikely, since he’d invented name, home town, and business on the spur of the moment.


Dick Flinders woke up in the middle of the night. His temple ached slightly, but he wasn’t sure whether that had roused him. Gladys Gray’s pimp had taken violent exception to even discreet inquiries about the missing prostitute’s location; Flinders had slipped the punch without quite escaping it, and had nearly broken his left hand returning the blow with interest.

He switched on the light, opening the Tennyson anthology he’d found in a secondhand bookshop.

Reading and marveling over “The Lady of Shalott,” abruptly he knew that Mary Taylor had been clever and brave and in the oddest way, lucky. Or perhaps providence had decreed that the message she needed to have matched the words of a poet dead for nearly a century. Brave above all though, he thought, eyelids stinging. For she must have made the connection within moments of death darting at her, lethal hand cocked for that single blow...

The odds against anyone’s understanding her symbol were enormous, but Mary wouldn’t have cared. She had said she would leave a clue and had kept her promise.


There was no hurry now, and his man was out of town, anyway. Flinders spent a scholarly day checking records of births and deaths. He took a long train journey, returning with a revolver and six rounds of ammunition, bought from a man who’d spent years under the illusion that Flinders didn’t know about him.

Eventually it was time, and he drove out to Heathrow. The quarry he picked up there took a taxi for the first few miles before alighting, strolling down a side street where parking was not restricted, and getting into a shiny new Mercedes. He drove straight to Roger Endaby’s place of business, unlocked the gate, and maneuvered the Merc through.

Flinders, having passed him at Chiswick, sprinted across Consort Street and was inside the yard almost as soon as the driver got out.

Dennis Webb gasped as the muzzle of the .38 found a snug home against his neck. But staring at Flinders, he didn’t ask what this was all about.

She left the web, she left the loom...

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side.

All there in the poem, and whether you spelt it with one or two b’s, it sounded the same. The Webb whom Mary Taylor had indicted even flew wide, floating in DC-10’s round the world.

It was fanciful and outrageous, too great a leap and too fragile a bridge of reasoning — Dick Flinders considered — only if one was willing to believe that Mary Taylor had smashed the mirror for no reason at all.

And there was more, as soon as the poem meshed with his mind. Dennis Webb, so full of himself, yet anxious to play down his possessions. He had no family who got things at wholesale rates; he was an only child and his parents, never well off, were long since dead.

Then there was the flat with no parking space, and the Merc kept next door. Not Roger Endaby’s, for he had been away on business, in his own, far more modest, personal transport. The vehicle registry computer at Swansea in Wales had identified Dennis Webb as the Mercedes’ owner.

Webb, so eager to learn more about anyone snooping near the yard next door — and his car — guilt would persuade him. Dennis Webb, the all-around athlete who had won a prize for judo...

A fairly low-paid, professional traveler with too high a lifestyle had to have a racket. Smuggling, no doubt. Put the same person near a suddenly-dead detective, and you were looking at a viable suspect.

“How’d she rumble you, Dennis?”

Webb laughed shakily and planted his palms on the side of the car. “She never did. It was me shooting my mouth off, stupid bastard.”

He sniffed childishly. “Oh, I can make money but my luck’s always been bloody rotten.”

Flinders came close to killing him then. The self pity was enraging.

Webb’s hands squeaked faintly on the metal. He pulled himself together. “She was hanging around too often. I did this long haul, stopover in Sydney, Australia, and she was still here when I got back.

“So I chatted her, like I did you. We even had a drink at that pub on the corner. She slung me a load of bull about her daughter being pregnant; reckoned she was trying to trace the bloke and he worked round here.

“Well, I followed her, she went to Caldwell Green nick. It was killing me. Anyway, I followed her back home that night, went in. Trying to talk a deal, cut her in if it wasn’t too late, if she kept her trap shut.”

His expression turned bitter. “She let me hang myself, then she said she’d been after Rog Endaby all the time, but I’d do for a bonus.

“I went for her, she ran, must’ve been crazy with fear. Broke the mirror on the wall for no reason. I clobbered her, made it look like an accident.”

Flinders exhaled slowly. “What’ve you been running in on those flights of yours?”

“Coke. Not much, not often, but you don’t have to and you still make a bomb. None this time — once bitten, twice shy.” Webb shivered again and added, with little hope, “Listen, we could go partners.”

“Maybe. Who d’you sell to?”

“Two or three blokes. I told you, I don’t bring that much. If you want the main man, there isn’t one.” Webb’s truthfulness was plain. “I just go round the clubs, two or three times a year.”

Flinders stepped back a pace. “That’s it, then.” The pistol came up. Just as he realized that he wasn’t going to squeeze the trigger, Dennis Webb screamed and flung himself sideways and dashed out of the yard.

Brakes yowled in agony, there was a hideous sound of impact and dragging. Dick Flinders put the revolver in his pocket and walked to the gate without showing himself. A truck was slewed across Consort Street at an angle, fender and grille damaged, windshield milky and collapsing onto the hood in countless grains. Dennis Webb’s body was in the gutter nearby. He wasn’t bleeding much. His head was against the curb at an impossible angle, suggesting that the neck was snapped.

“God in his mercy lend her grace,

The Lady of Shalott.”

“Was it worth it?” Inspector Tuckey asked sourly when Detective Sergeant Flinders returned to duty, some days later. “The leave, was it all right?”

Flinders was expressionless. “I suppose I’ve had worse,” he said.

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