Bloodhounds

Chapter Fifteen

Next morning in the briefing room at Manvers Street, Diamond assembled the Murder Squad. It didn't matter that half of them were officially seconded to Operation Bumblebee; Wigfull's people were ordered to attend. Murder took precedence over everything. Even so, the stamp's recovery had given the Bumblebees some encouragement.

Diamond soon put a stopper on that. "You lot may be feeling chipper this morning, but I got sod-all sleep last night. If there's anything to be pleased about, I'd like to know what."

A young inspector recently transferred from Radstock rashly told him what.

"That's the good news, is it?" said Diamond.

"Well, it sounds like good news to me, sir."

"Good news, my arse. You don't know who nicked it yet. Can't take any credit. It was handed in. Jack the lad made us look like the plods we are. What kind of good news is that?"

"It's bad news, sir," the inspector said in a sharp about-turn.

"Wrong again, squire. That isn't the bad news. The bad news is that somebody was killed last night. And there seems to be a link between the murder and the theft." He addressed the entire room. "The victim was a man of forty-six called Sid Towers, a night watchman. Towers was last seen alive in the center of Bath at eight forty-five last night. The body was discovered by Mr. Wigfull, here, and the man who handed in the stamp, name of Milo Motion. Got that? Milo Motion. Time: about one A.M. this morning. Location: on a narrowboat moored at the Dundas boatyard, across the road from the Viaduct pub. Victim was cracked over the head with some heavy object like a spanner. It hasn't been found yet. The divers are already at the scene in case it was thrown into the water, but I doubt it. This killer is smart-and that is an understatement. Milo Motion, who lives aboard the boat, locked up at a quarter to seven to attend a meeting in Bath, and when he got back with John Wigfull at his side the padlock was still in place."

"With the victim inside the cabin," Wigfull himself put in.

"I'd better tell you about the Bloodhounds. Wipe the smile off your face, Keith. These are crucial facts I'm giving you. Milo Motion belongs to a club-a literary society, he calls it-known as the Bloodhounds. They meet in the crypt of St. Michael's-that big church by the Podium-every Monday to discuss detective stories."

He broke off the narrative to point at someone making a sly aside to his neighbor. "Will you shut up and listen to this? Sid Towers, the murdered man, was a member of this Bloodhound club and was present at the meeting. And a strange thing happened. Milo Motion, the owner of the boat, had agreed to read a chapter from a book he'd brought with him. A book of his own, right? This chapter was on the subject of locked room mysteries, which I gather have a devoted following among people who read whodunits. He opened the book at the place he wanted and-what do you know? — there was the missing Penny Black lying between the pages like a bookmark. Everyone was shocked, not least Mr. Motion. The meeting ended early, and Motion came straight to us and spent the rest of the evening being put through the grinder.

"All told, it wasn't Milo Motion's day, getting lumbered with a stolen stamp and a murdered corpse. He insists that his boat was locked all evening, and he was the only person in possession of a key. Yet when he unlocked, the body was found there. So do we charge Motion with murder? Do we, heck! He has a better alibi than the Pope. I told you Towers was alive at eight forty-five. At five to nine, Motion was meeting the desk sergeant downstairs. He couldn't have traveled to the boatyard and back in ten minutes. And the rest of the time he was with John Wigfull. What we have, my friends, is a locked boat mystery."

One of Wigfull's team said, "He could have hired someone."

"Motion could?"

"Couldn't he?"

"To do a killing on his own boat?" said Diamond on a shrill note of disbelief.

"You said we're dealing with someone smart, or better than smart. Maybe this is the ultimate in bluffing."

"I don't see it, but I'm willing to listen if there's more to this theory."

There was not. Julie Hargreaves filled the silence that followed by saying, "Shall we discuss the stamp theft first?" She had worked with Diamond often enough not to be cowed by his black moods.

John Wigfull said, "Actually, I was about to propose the same thing."

"Do you want to take over?" Diamond offered. He spoke mildly, and it might have been sincerely meant. It was impossible to tell.

Wigfull didn't answer.

"This is your baby," Diamond pointed out.

Wigfull was practically squirming in his chair. The stamp theft was his baby, only there was no way he could dandle it on his knee with any pride.

Julie cut the tension by saying, "Sir, can we establish first that Milo Motion is a fall guy and not a thief? Whoever did the Postal Museum job-which was cleverly carried out, remember- he took some risks courting publicity with those verses-whoever did it was unlikely to hand the stamp in meekly, as this man Motion did. It would be a surrender, and a pathetic one at that."

"Go on."

"Is that a fair point?" said Julie, unwilling to be hustled. "I'd like to know if anyone disagrees."

Diamond looked to his left. "John?"

"It sounds reasonable to me," Wigfull was forced to commit himself. "After several hours with Motion, I can't see him as a master thief. He's bright, certainly. A loner. Eccentric, shall we say?"

"If you mean homosexual," murmured Diamond, "why don't you say so?"

"Because I don't know," Wigfull snapped back. "I didn't ask. His sexual preferences don't come into it. If you're asking me to make a guess, I'd say he probably is gay, but that's a superficial impression."

"Say it, John," said Halliwell. "The man's a jam duff."

"What does that make you?" said Diamond. "A paper-weight?"

Wigfull was striving to make a serious point. "I don't think Motion has the bottle to carry out a theft, let alone bluff his way out of it."

"Are you sure there isn't a partner?" Diamond pressed him.

"He doesn't live with anyone, if that's what you mean. I just said he's a loner. To come back to your question, Julie, yes, he's been set up, in my opinion. We're looking for someone else."

Julie said, "Then we ought to look at motives. Why steal the stamp if you intend to give it back? The other day we were expecting a ransom demand. It didn't come."

Keith Halliwell said, "The stamp was just a pawn in a far more serious game."

"You're linking it to the murder?" said Julie.

"Of course. You sacrifice a pawn to achieve a better position."

"What better position?" asked Diamond.

"It ensured that Motion would go to the police and be questioned for some hours. His boat was unoccupied. Time enough for the killer to murder Towers and get away."

"Except that we don't know how he got into a locked boat or what brought Towers there."

"The locked room mystery," said one of Wigfull's team. "Isn't it remarkable that the Bloodhounds meet to discuss locked room mysteries and now we have one of our own?"

"Two," said Diamond, and now he began to function more constructively. "There's the mystery of the stamp and the mystery of the murder. It may be that Keith is right, and the stamp theft was a tactical move in a more serious game. We'd better keep an open mind. Since the stamp came up first, let's confine ourselves to that for a moment. Milo Motion can't explain how the Penny Black got between the pages of his book, which incidentally was The Hollow Man, by John Dickson Carr-if that means anything at all to a crowd of bozos who never read anything except the Sun. He kept it on a shelf on his boat with his other books. He had no visitors during the past week. On the evening of the meeting, he removed the book from the shelf and took it to the Bloodhounds. It didn't leave his possession at all. He's very clear about that. So what are we left with? The stamp was already between the pages when he took The Hollow Man from the bookshelf. John and I have seen the boat. It isn't very long. About sixty-five feet. Motion says he bolts it from the inside whenever he's aboard and padlocks it from the outside when he isn't. If the thief planted the stamp, he found a way to beat the locks and bolts. The cabin area of that boat is a perfect locked room. No hatches. No way in by the windows, which just have a narrow vent at the top. There's a door at either end. One end is bolted from the inside. Chubb security bolts at top and bottom. We've seen them. The other is locked from outside with this strong, close shackle padlock, and there's only one key-on a ring in Motion's pocket."

Keith Halliwell suggested, "Could the thief have unscrewed the fittings on the door?"

"The padbar and staple, you mean?" said Diamond. "Nice try. We looked at it ourselves. The screws are rusty, so any recent interference would show. There isn't a scratch."

"The hinges?" someone else put in.

"They aren't accessible from7 outside-and they haven't been tampered with."

Halliwell said, "Someone must have a duplicate key, whatever Mr. Motion says."

"We've checked with the locksmith. It isn't possible. It's a feature of these locks, which are German-made, that each one is unique. There were two keys, but he dropped his spare one in the canal over a year ago. I simply don't believe that some passing bandit could have fished it out and knew which padlock it fitted."

Halliwell was a stubborn cuss. "If he put his keys down somewhere, someone could have done the old Plasticine trick and got an impression."

"If," said Diamond. "But he insists that they are always in the pocket of the trousers he is wearing."

"There's the flaw. Can we believe him?"

"I'd say yes."

"There's got to be some explanation."

"You might be interested in what Dickson Carr had to say on the subject." Diamond felt into his jacket pocket and with a flourish produced a paperback of The Hollow Man. "Chapter seventeen is 'The Locked-Room Lecture,' the one Milo Motion planned to read to the Bloodhounds. The author states among other things that the explanation of a locked room problem is invariably disappointing."

" 'So simple when it is explained,'" murmured Wigfull.

"What?"

"A quote from a Sherlock Holmes story."

"This is John Dickson Carr," Diamond said brusquely. "I was going on to say that in this lecture he classifies most of the methods used in locked room mysteries. I won't bore you with them all. He dismisses secret panels, secret passages, and so on as trick stuff, beneath contempt. He's pretty scathing about murders that are committed without the murderer actually entering the room, by gases, mechanical devices, and so on. And about suicide, when the gun disappears up the chimney on the end of a piece of elastic."

The gun on elastic earned some chuckles.

"As a variation it can be whisked out of a window. Then there are bullets made of ice that melt without a trace. There are poisonous snakes, impersonations, disguises, tricks with time. But the section of most interest to us is the one on ways of tampering with door locks. As Dickson Carr sums it up, there are three categories. First, the murderer can use bits of string and metal to turn a key which is still in a lock, but on the wrong side of the door. This doesn't apply to our problem. Secondly, he can remove the door hinges, as someone suggested, but in our case it didn't happen. Thirdly, he tampers with the bolt, using string or metal. One of our sets of doors, you'll recollect, was bolted from inside. However, the bolts aren't the primitive things Dickson Carr was describing in 1935. They're finger-bolts, set into the wood, invisible from the outside, and I defy anyone to open them with string, plastic, or anything else. If the killer isn't Milo Motion-and it can't be, for reasons I've stated-then he or she must have found a way of unfastening the padlock."

"Which is impossible," said Wigfull. "This is a sophisticated padlock with only one key, which remained in Mr. Motion's possession throughout the time I was questioning him."

"Are you certain it was locked when you arrived at the boat with Mr. Motion?" Julie Hargreaves asked.

Wigfull nodded. "I watched him closely. I had my torchbeam pointed at the lock. I saw him take the key from his pocket and use it. There was a click as he turned the key, and the shackle of the padlock sprang open. I haven't the slightest doubt that I saw the padlock being unlocked."

"Do we have a time for the murder?" Fred Baker, one of Diamond's more senior detectives, asked.

"You know what pathologists are like about times of death," said Diamond. "All he would say-if I can call the phrase to mind-was that the external symptoms were not inconsistent with a time of death up to four hours prior to when he examined the body. We know the poor sod was alive four hours before."

"And what was the cause?"

"Give me a break, Fred. We haven't had the postmortem yet. It was pretty obvious that he'd received a heavy blow on the head, but if I tell you he died of brain damage you can be damned sure the postmortem will show he choked on a fishbone."

After a short pause, Keith Halliwell asked, "What do we know about the victim? Was there any bad blood between him and Motion?"

"Apparently not. Motion claims they were on cordial terms. He says Towers was an introvert, excessively shy. Hardly ever joined in the discussions at the Bloodhounds. Wouldn't even look you in the eye unless he was forced to. He worked as a night watchman in a furniture warehouse. Monday was his night off."

"Any family?"

"No. He lived alone in a top-floor flat in Oak Street, off the Lower Bristol Road, under the railway viaduct."

"Did he drive?"

"Good point. How did he get to the boatyard? He owned an old Skoda. And before anyone asks, yes, it was one of the cars parked near the entrance. We can safely assume that Sid Towers drove there after the Bloodhounds' meeting broke up. On the passenger seat we found a plastic bag containing a secondhand copy of-you guessed-a John Dickson Carr novel."

"The Hollow Man?"

"No. The Three Coffins. I haven't read it yet."

"You'll be lucky to get the time, sir," Baker was bold enough to comment.

"I will, if you lot get your fingers out. The first thing is to find out about what happened last night at the Bloodhounds. Apart from Motion and the victim, there were five others in attendance: four women and one man. I'll give you the names presently. I want them interviewed this morning before the news of the murder breaks. If you're assigned to one of them, play it cautiously. You're on the case of the Penny Black as far as they're concerned. They know they witnessed something bloody unusual. They'll be expecting you, so get them to talk about the moment when Motion opened his book and found the stamp. Try and get a picture of what else happened at the meeting-whether anything was said by the victim or anyone else that could have provoked violence later. See if Sid Towers confided in anyone before he drove to the boatyard. I'm damned sure this murder has its origin in the Bloodhounds, so I want to know what drives these people, their hang-ups, their ambitions, the tensions between them, what they eat for breakfast, and what keeps them awake at night." He turned to Wigfull. "John, have I left anything out?"

Wigfull cleared his throat. "I don't want anyone forgetting that we're also investigating the stamp theft," he said huffily. "This is more than just a pretext for getting the facts about the murder. It's a serious crime that may or may not be connected with what happened to Towers. Be alert. Insist that you get a full account of the events leading up to the discovery of the Penny Black cover, and what happened after."

"Got that? The Penny Black is Mr. Wigfull's baby, and the murder is mine. And if one of you messes up, you answer to me," said Diamond. "Now Inspector Hargreaves will read out the teams."

He was content to let others carry out the interviews. An act of mercy to the witnesses, given the mood he was in. Instead, he decided to walk the short distance across Churchill Bridge and up the Lower Bristol Road as far as Oak Street to look at Sid Towers s flat. He asked Julie to come with him. On the way he thanked her for her contribution to the briefing. "I was too heavy, even by my standards," he admitted. "You got the thing back to what it should be. I don't know what came over me. Lack of sleep, I suppose."

"You're not at your best conducting meetings," she was bold enough to tell him.

"Was I an ogre, Julie?"

"Can I be frank?"

"You generally are."

"You were appalling."

"That bad?"

"The way you jumped on that new man. He was only trying to answer one of your questions. He didn't know that the form is to stay quiet until you've had your say."

"He will in future, won't he?"

"And I know there's a history between you and John Wigfull, but you didn't have to hammer him in front of his team. They know what he's like without you pointing it out."

"I'm not running the Women's Institute."

"A pity. They'd sort you out in no time."

He laughed. "You're probably right, Julie. My wife was a Brown Owl, and she keeps me in order."

She said, "Since I've gone out on a limb already, I might as well say it. You'd get more input from the team if you weren't so domineering. They don't like to speak out."

"Are they scared of me?" he asked, genuinely surprised.

"I don't think you have any idea how stroppy you sound."

He stared over the bridge along the gray ribbon of water. "If you want the truth, Julie, none of them is as scared as I am. Remember, I've been off for a couple of years. I don't know everybody anymore. I call a meeting, and it's a minefield. I can give instructions. I can interview a suspect. Put me in front of a crowd of faces wanting to see how I function as top dog, and I won't say I panic, but my insides don't like it."

"Well, it didn't show this morning."

The traffic halted conversation as they stepped toward the mills and warehouses, long since converted into the engineering and construction businesses that line this stretch of the Lower Bristol Road. Diamond knew the area from the days when he lived on Wellsway. On a fine day, or when his car was giving trouble, he would come this way into the city, down the steps from Wells Road and under the railway viaduct, passing the arches where the winos and derelicts spent the night. It amused him to think that some of these same arches once housed a police station. There was also once a mortuary for the storage of corpses dragged from the Avon.

Most of the Lower Bristol Road was an eyesore that some city planner would want to flatten before long, but there was still a dignity to the mills with their wooden hoist-covers projecting above the street, just clear of the container lorries that rumbled past. This was Bath's oldest surviving industrial landscape, and it was pleasing that the buildings were in use, even if the quays behind them no longer functioned.

To their right was the Bayer Building, a tall red-brick structure more ornate than the others, with arched windows and Bath stone trimmings. Seeing an opportunity to strike a lighter mood, Diamond said, "Bet you can't tell me what this was built for."

Julie gave it a look. "Something to do with engineering?"

"In a sense, yes."

"Plumbing?"

"Stays."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Corsets. Charles Bayer was the corset king. Our great-grandmothers had a lot to thank him for."

"Questionable," said Julie. "Some of them suffered agonies."

"Ah, but he also invented a little item that no woman should be without."

"What's that?"

"The safety pin."

Directly opposite the Bayer Building was the street where Sid Towers, had lived until so recently. Presumably it had once housed the corset workers. Directly below the viaduct-it actually ran under one of the arches-and so close to the main artery to Bristol, Oak Street was not a place many would have chosen to reside in, except from necessity.

The houses were on one side only; a scrap merchant had the other side, with his business concentrated in the arches. The sound of metal-cutting shrilled above the noise of jugger-nauts from the end of the street. Several houses appeared to be empty. One or two presented a trim front, but the majority had surrendered. They were two-story terraced dwellings in local stone stained black at the top by coal dust. Remarkably, considering how small they were, several had been converted into flats.

They had to go under the arch to find Sid's flat, past some children throwing sticks for a dog that looked as if it should have been muzzled.

"This is the number I was given," Diamond said. There was nothing so helpful as a set of marked bell pushes.

"You did bring the key?" Julie queried.

He produced it from his pocket and opened the front door. "He lived upstairs, I gather."

The house they had let themselves into smelled of cat, and the probable offender bolted out of sight behind some rolls of lino at the far end of the hall. The stairs were bare and speckled with pink paint. But when they opened the door at the top, Towers's home turned out to be a barrack room ready for inspection. A narrow passage carpeted in red had four doors leading off. The first, the bedroom, was in immaculate order, the clothes put away, the duvet squared at each corner. The furniture may have been cheap and functional, but everything was dusted.

"The sort of place that depresses me the minute I enter it," grumbled Diamond. "No photographs, no pictures on the wall. Where's the evidence of the man who lived here? It could be a bloody hotel." He opened a wardrobe door and looked at the jackets hanging there and the shirts folded and stacked as if in a shop.

Julie said, "Almost as if he knew he was about to die."

"Not even a copy of yesterday's paper by the bed."

"If he buys one, you can bet it was tidied away before he left the house," said Julie.

"I get a sense of a stunted life when I see a place like this."

"An organized life doesn't have to be stunted," Julie commented. "He put things away, that's all."

"No use to us."

They looked into the kitchen across the passage and still found nothing out of place. The contents of the fridge were meager, but neatly positioned. There was a microwave oven and an electric hob, each spotless.

"Is this obsessive, would you say?" Diamond asked.

The living room was slightly more promising. It had one wall lined to the ceiling with white bookshelves, the books mostly without wrappers, though some had transparent covers and evidently came from libraries. There was a small television set and an armchair facing it. A Victorian writing desk interested Diamond. He opened the front and was gratified to find various things stacked in the pigeonholes: a checkbook, some payslips, electricity invoices, an address book, a writing pad and envelopes, and some second-class postage stamps.

"He liked his John Dickson Carr," said Julie, standing in front of the books. "He's got at least forty here. The other writer he collected has a similar name in a way-Carter Dickson. I wonder if there's a connection."

"Does it matter?" said Diamond, leafing through the address book. It was full of blank pages. The man seemed to have no friends or family worth listing.

Julie removed a Carter Dickson from the shelf. "The Reader Is Warned. Good title." She opened it. "Written in 1939-before the war. So were the Dickson Carrs, weren't they? When was The Hollow Man published?"

"Years ago. In the thirties."

"Are these books valuable, do you think? Was he a collector?"

"What are you thinking-that some valuable first edition provided the motive? Hey, that's an idea."

Julie picked a couple more books at random and opened them. "One of these says 'Withdrawn from stock. Warminster Public Library.' The other was bought for seventy-five pence. I don't think a serious collector would give them shelf room. He bought these to read."

"At least we know something about the man," said Diamond.

"I was right," said Julie, having opened another book. "Listen to this from the introduction: 'Carr was so prolific that he kept a second publisher provided with a steady supply of crime novels under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson.'"

Diamond's thoughts had moved on. "It could be army training that makes a man so tidy. Or his schooling. Or prison. I wonder if he had any form. We'll run a check."

"He wouldn't have been taken on as a night watchman if he had a prison record."

"He wouldn't tell them, would he?"

"Don't they make inquiries?"

"Yes, but it wasn't MI5 he was joining. He was only guarding office furniture."

"Who did he work for?" Julie asked.

Diamond picked up the sheaf of payslips. "Our old friends Impregnable."