Child's Play

Chapter 2

It was a week of that motley September weather, uncertain as April’s but much more troubling to the human spirit, when days swing between noons of high summer and frosty midnights, and the shades of municipal trees, heavy and still on sunlit pavements, start to shift and squirm beneath a fragmented moon.

Cliff Sharman appeared in court on Tuesday morning. He had spent three nights in police custody, as the only address he would give was his grandmother’s flat in East Dulwich, and he hadn’t lived there on any regular basis for at least three years. Questioned, he said he was hitchhiking round the country and had been living rough. Seymour didn’t believe him. He didn’t have the look or the smell of rough living. But it didn’t seem a point worth labouring with rubber truncheons.

Wield had moved into another stage of his long limbo, no longer waiting for something to happen, for it had happened, but now waiting for a voice — Cliff’s? Watmough’s? Even his own? — to speak the cue for the next scene in this black comedy. At last he felt he really understood this term. Black comedy was when a man stood naked and helpless under a spotlight and felt rather than heard the surrounding darkness crackle with malicious laughter.

He knew he should have spoken immediately when Seymour brought the boy in, but he had waited instead for the boy to speak. He knew now that he had always waited for others to speak. Waiting was his forte. There was nothing anyone could teach him about waiting.

Seymour, young, ambitious and not insensitive, was hurt by Wield’s lack of interest in his collar.

‘I know he’s probably just a one-offer. I mean, he was going at it so cack-handed, anyone could’ve spotted him …’

‘You didn’t,’ interrupted Bernadette.

‘I’ve not got eyes in the back of my head!’

‘Nor in the front, or is it some fancy step you’re after showing off by getting us out here among the tables?’

‘Sorry,’ said Seymour, steering her back towards the dance-floor proper. ‘What I mean is, OK, he’s probably not one of the gang we’re after, they’d not employ anyone so useless. All the same, he was a collar, my collar, something to show for a week’s work. And Wield didn’t even give him a second glance, left me to question him all by himself.’

‘Oh you poor boy,’ mocked Bernadette. ‘Reverse! Reverse! It’s dancing we’re at, not a route march!’

Standing in the witness-box giving evidence, Seymour observed that Wield had at least condescended to turn up in court, standing at the back, near the door, inscrutable as something carved on a totem pole with a tomahawk.

Sharman pleaded guilty, claiming a sudden impulse, wholly unprecedented, wholly regretted.

Seymour confirmed that nothing was known, the clerk muttered at the magistrate, the Bench conferred. Finally they delivered their judgement, which was that this first offence merited the leniency of a fine, and that, while they had no authority to ride the defendant out of town on a rail, they strongly recommended that he return to London as soon as possible.

When Seymour glanced to the back of the court, he saw that Wield had already left.

Sod him! he thought. It’s one to me on my record sheet, no matter what that miserable bugger thinks!

The Pontelli murder investigation was still very much in the information-collecting stage. Eden Thackeray’s identification had been firm and the body, having been taken to pieces for the benefit of pathology, was now reassembled for the benefit of whoever might appear to mourn and bury it. The fatal bullet had been definitely identified as a Luger Pistole 08 which, though it had clearly done damage enough, had not done as much damage as it might, leading the ballistics expert to surmise that the cartridge was perhaps rather ancient and had not been kept in prime condition.

‘Weapons like the P 08 were popular war souvenirs, from both wars in fact, and this might well be one of the original rounds some idiot brought back with it,’ he posited.

The pathologist’s report included the possibly helpful findings that the deceased had had sexual intercourse a few hours before death, that the shot had not been immediately fatal and the deceased lived for at least thirty minutes after the shooting, that he was a man of about sixty in good general health, that he had at some time, at least twenty-five years previously, received serious gunshot wounds in the chest and abdomen probably, by the line of puncture scars, from an automatic weapon, and that he had a small but distinctive birthmark on his left buttock, in shape not unlike a maple leaf.

To this, Superintendent Dalziel was able to add that Alessandro Pontelli had entered the country on a flight from Pisa on August 28th, that he was a resident of Florence, where he was well known in the tourist industry as a freelance courier and accommodation agent. The speed with which Dalziel produced this information was impressive to those who knew nothing of the unofficial inquiries he had put in train at Thackeray’s behest the previous Friday afternoon.

But this initial momentum was not maintained and by the end of Tuesday, they were no further forward in discovering where Pontelli had been, or what he had been up to, during his sojourn in England. The car, which proved to be beyond all reach of an MOT test certificate, was traced to its last official owner, a Huddersfield schoolteacher, who had traded it in as a deposit on a secondhand Cortina eighteen months before. No doubt a long pursuit through trade-ins, scrap merchants and car-auctions would eventually lead to Pontelli coughing up a hundred quid, but meanwhile the CID cast around for closer, warmer trails.

Help when it came sprang from uniformed branch, which was not all that unusual. But the shape it took was far from common.

Police Constable Hector was hard to miss but easy to mistake. Shambling splay-footed along the pavement, his eighty inches reduced to a nearer seventy by curvature of the spine and a fifty per cent retraction of the head between the spiky shoulder-blades, he looked not so much like the law in motion as a reluctant party-goer cheated by a fancy-dress costumier.

Tonight, however, there was a jauntiness in his step and a light in his eyes which might easily have passed for intelligence. His features too were deceptive, being set in that expression of painful devotion seen on the saints of the Florentine masters, while his lips moved constantly as though in silent prayer. He was in fact counting the numbers of a terrace of once proud but long shabby Victorian houses, a task requiring all his concentration as some had fallen off and he was walking down the odd side, going from big to little.

Finally he reached No.23, climbed the four steps with scarcely a stumble, entered a long narrow hallway which smelt of Eastern spices and Western detritus, and started up the stairs.

On the second landing he paused, got his bearings and knocked on one of the three doors. When no one answered, he opened it cautiously and found himself looking at a lavatory. Selecting one of the other doors, he knocked again. It was opened immediately by a woman in a dressing-gown.

‘Is it Tuesday already?’ she said without enthusiasm.

She turned back into the room. He followed, closing the door carefully behind him and sliding home the bolts. By the time he had finished, the woman had removed her dressing-gown and was lying on top of the rumpled bed, stark naked, her legs splayed. Hector undressed as rapidly as fumbling fingers and a reluctance to take his eyes off the unmoving form on the bed would allow. Ready at last, he advanced eagerly.

‘Are you not taking your hat off?’ asked the woman.

‘What? Oh aye.’

Removing his helmet, he fell upon her recumbent body like a starving man upon a steaming platter. Two minutes later he rolled off, replete.

‘You don’t muck about much, do you?’ said the woman.

‘Don’t I?’ said Hector, who couldn’t imagine what ‘mucking about’ would entail.

‘Not much,’ said the woman, beginning to get dressed.

It was three months since Hector had appeared at her door, introducing himself as the new community policeman. She had thought he was a funny-looking bugger then, but had offered him the same arrangement she’d had with his predecessor, and it had worked out well enough, no hassle for her and a weekly bang for him.

There were, however, threats more perilous than officialdom and she reckoned she was earning protection there too. Mind you, as in this case the threat seemed to have been quite literally destroyed, she might do better to keep quiet. But whoever had done the destroying was still out there somewhere, and she’d come to the conclusion that the sooner she shared what little she knew with the law, the less chance there was of anyone wanting to make sure she kept it to herself.

She picked up a copy of Monday’s Post.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘This picture of that chap they found dead outside the cop-shop at the weekend.’

The location of the body had caused much simple mirth locally.

‘Oh aye,’ said Hector, struggling to master the mechanism of his zip. ‘Foreigner.’

This, uttered as if in total explanation of the killing, was the sum total of what Hector had picked up about the case from station gossip.

‘Foreigner, were he? Well, foreign or not, I reckon he were here on Friday night.’

‘Here?’ said Hector incredulously.

‘Aye, that’s what I said,’ replied the woman, offended at this implied doubt of her veracity. ‘He left his bag.’

Hector paused in the contorted position of one who found it difficult to think and fasten his fly at the same time.

‘But what were he doing here?’ he asked finally.

‘Doing? What do you think he were doing?’ said the woman impatiently. ‘Same as you, you daft bugger.’

‘Same as me?’ he said, amazed. ‘You mean you let someone else do it too?’

And the two of them regarded each other from twin but unbridgeable peaks of incomprehension, their faces lit by a wild surmise.