The Inscrutable Charlie Muffin

19

Because of the time difference between Hong Kong and London, Superintendent Johnson had left his office late. He had been held up awaiting confirmation that a copy of the Peking statement would be despatched to him as soon as it arrived from China in the diplomatic bag. Just as he reached his apartment on the Middle Level, the first contact came from the station inspector.

When he learned it had been an anonymous telephone call to police headquarters, Johnson refused to over-respond. But he listed his instructions carefully, ordering that the forensic and photographic sections should be alerted, in case it were genuine. And that his official car should be sent back.

Then he sat, still in uniform. Waiting.

The second call came within thirty minutes. There was positive confirmation, the duty officer reported. Nothing was being done until his arrival, as he had insisted.

Johnson had been trained at Hendon. And sometimes even here he referred to the long-ago lectures and notes. Remembering them now, he sat in the back of the car as it made its way towards Stubbs Road and the Peak, eyes closed, consciously trying to clear his mind of any preconception and suspicion about the fire and the courtroom murders and the claims of a down-at-heel insurance investigator.

He’d need an open mind, he knew. It was going to be a difficult one; the most difficult ever. Particularly now the Foreign Office in London was involved. The sort of thing he tried so hard to avoid. He gripped and ungripped his hands, a frustrated gesture. It was all so damned vague, like imagined shapes in the fog. And the lectures had told him to ignore things that weren’t clear. He needed facts. Just plain, straightforward facts.

He stirred, moved by another thought: whatever he was driving towards, it certainly seemed that he had been wrong about the fire and the men who had admitted responsibility. Which was going to be bloody embarrassing. Yet the facts had been there, as obvious as the fingers on his hand. Too obvious. And he’d made a mistake. Superintendent Johnson, who was well aware that had he remained in England he would never have risen above the rank of ordinary inspector, didn’t like making mistakes. He worried that other people would realise his limitations and laugh at him.

He nodded with satisfaction at the road block established half a mile from Lu’s mansion on Shousan Hill, acknowledging the wave as his recognised car swept through. But it would be the only one allowed past, he was confident. He’d repeated the instruction during the second call. It was the sort of routine at which he was very good.

An inspector was waiting at the already opened gate to Lu’s home.

‘Well?’ demanded Johnson, getting from his car.

‘Everything as you asked, sir,’ said the man. ‘Nothing’s been touched. Servants and guards assembled in one spot, so they couldn’t interfere with anything.’

‘How many?’

‘Fifteen. John Lu is one of them.’

‘Yet they heard nothing.’

‘Lu apparently relied upon an extensive electrical system.’

‘So what happened to it?’

‘Here,’ the inspector invited him.

Johnson followed the man to a corner of the surrounding wall. It was topped all the way by thick wire mesh.

‘Normally enough electricity going through that to kill an elephant,’ said the inspector.

‘What stopped it working?’

With a nightstick, the inspector indicated an obscured corner, near brickwork which swept out to begin the imposing entrance through which one had to drive to reach the house.

‘There’s a conduit box there,’ he said. He waved an impatient hand and an officer in one of the waiting cars gave him a light operated from the vehicle’s battery. ‘It’s been bypassed, so that there was no current passing through this section here…’

In the light of the torch, Johnson could see avoidance leads clamped by their bulldog clips to the live wires, and beyond them the hole that had been carefully cut through the mesh.

‘On the other side,’ said the inspector, ‘there’s the main junction box for this side of the house. Every alarm system has been circuited in the same way.’

‘An expert?’ said Johnson.

‘Professional,’ agreed the officer.

‘What about the clips?’

‘Haven’t let the forensic people get to them until your arrival,’ said the man. He hesitated.

‘But I think you’ll find they’re of American origin,’ he said, wanting to prove himself.

‘American?’ demanded Johnson sharply.

The inspector partially retreated at his superior’s reaction.

‘That’s my guess,’ he said.

‘What about the house?’

‘It happened in what appears to be the main lounge. I’ve men guarding it. And an ambulance on the way.’

‘Ambulance?’

‘One of them is still alive.’

Johnson waved the inspector towards his car, entering from the other side and telling the driver to go on. Normally, he realised, the grounds would have been floodlit, but the interference with the power supply had created an odd, patchwork effect.

The scientific experts were grouped just inside the main entrance to the house. When they saw Johnson’s car arrive, they straightened expectantly.

‘Give me a moment,’ he said, moving past them.

He stopped just inside the door of the room the inspector indicated, to get an overall impression.

‘Holy Jesus,’ he said softly.

It had been a protracted, desperate fight. A glass-topped table in the middle of the room was splintered and crushed, presumably by the weight of a stumbling body. There were bloodstains, too, which continued to an overturned couch and then led to a wall near the fireplace.

Here all the ornaments and decorations had been swept aside in the struggle and more blood smeared the walls. A delicate Chinese brushworked painting that had concealed the wall safe hung lopsided, the hook almost torn from the wall. The safe gaped open and inside Johnson had the briefest impression of bundles of money banded together in tight blocks.

But he wasn’t interested so much in the safe.

At its foot, his body wedged in a strange awkwardness against the skirting board, lay Harvey Jones. The man’s leg was twisted beneath him: he’d broken it when he fell, thought Johnson, his mind registering the details with a clinical, later-to-be-produced-in-court accuracy.

Near the man’s outstretched left hand was a tall pedestal ornament, its heavy base messily blood-stained. There was a matching ornament on the other side of the fireplace, Johnson saw, cracked where it had fallen to the ground.

He knelt, to get closer to the body. Jones’s eyes were still open, in a shocked expression of death, and the police chief could just see the bullet entries. One, high in the left shoulder, was little more than a flesh wound, but there was another, lower in the chest. And from the amount of blood it was clear there was a third that he couldn’t immediately see.

Johnson had begun to straighten before he noticed the document. He crouched again, trying to read it without displacing it before the photographs were taken. There was a slight splash of blood on one corner. And the man’s arm obscured the beginning. But it was quite easy for Johnson to read at least a third and identify the signature of Geoffrey Hodgson alongside the seal of the British embassy in Peking.

He stood, slowly. So he wouldn’t have to await the arrival of the diplomatic bag.

‘Here,’ called the inspector.

The Chinese millionaire lay so that his crumpled body was almost completely concealed by the desk. From it came the snorted breathing of someone deeply unconscious and by moving around behind him Johnson could see the deep triangular gash at the side of Lu’s head.

The police chief looked across at the ornament by Jones’s outstretched hand. The base could have created just such a wound.

Facts, he recognised contentedly. Presentable, unarguable facts. Soon it would be time to bring the photographers and scientists in, to commence the simple, logical routine.

‘Quite a fight,’ suggested the inspector.

Drawers had been jerked from their runners and in two places Johnson could see where the locks had been forced, crudely jemmied open by some strong leverage. The contents were strewn haphazardly over the desk, as if someone had been looking for something particular and discarded what he didn’t want without caring where it landed.

Again Johnson crouched, grunting with the difficulty of getting his large body beneath the narrow leg-space of the desk. About six inches from Lu’s right hand lay a pistol. Johnson lowered himself to it, sniffing, immediately twitching his nose at the smell of cordite.

‘Czech,’ commented the inspector. ‘M-27.’

‘Rough-looking weapon,’ said Johnson, rising.

‘But could be fitted with a silencer,’ said the inspector, indicating the attachment.

There was movement at the door and Johnson turned.

‘The ambulance is here,’ reported the guarding policeman.

‘Let them come in,’ said Johnson. ‘And forensic and photographic, too.’

The experts entered in a bunch.

‘Photographs first,’ stipulated Johnson, sure of his case and therefore sure of himself.

The white-coated ambulance men entered with their stretcher.

‘The man’s here,’ said Johnson. ‘But before he’s moved I want a paraffin test on his hands, to establish that he’s recently fired a gun.’

Immediately one of the plain-clothes men opened a bag and began walking towards the desk.

‘Superintendent Johnson.’

The police chief turned at the inspector’s summons.

‘This would seem to be the point of entry,’ said the officer.

A neat semi-circle had been cut from the glass near the interior catch of the ceiling-to-floor window.

‘That’s it,’ agreed Johnson.

‘Not difficult to see what happened.’

‘Quite obvious,’ agreed Johnson. ‘Intruder surprised by the householder in the middle of a robbery, is shot but manages to bludgeon the man to the ground, then dies of his injuries as he tries to retrieve from the safe what he’s looking for.’

‘Looking for?’

‘Something I thought was going to create the most difficult case I’d ever been called upon to handle,’ admitted the police chief. ‘But now it looks like one of the easiest.’

The inspector pointed towards the dead man at the far side of the room.

‘Quite an expert, wasn’t he?’

‘Oh, he was an expert right enough,’ said Johnson.

The inspector turned at the confidence in his superior’s voice.

‘Did you know him?’

Johnson smiled.

‘He worked for the American government,’ he disclosed. ‘The Central Intelligence Agency.’

‘Oh,’ said the inspector doubtfully. ‘That could cause some problems, couldn’t it?’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Johnson.

The facts were there after all. No one could argue with them. Plain as the fingers on his hand.

Charlie Muffin was finally sick. He stood sweating over the lavatory bowl, agonised by the head pain that came with each stomach-stretching retch. When he could finally leave the bathroom it was difficult to see and for a moment he thought he was suffering from the double vision with which he’d awakened in hospital.

He sat quietly on the edge of the bed, blinking the wetness from his eyes. He was limp with perspiration. And smelt. Like the confused old man in the Peking interview room.

Charlie reached out for the pills the doctor had given him, concerned at how few remained in the bottle. It would be sensible to go back to hospital. Sensible. But impossible.

He undressed carelessly, leaving his clothes puddled on the floor. He didn’t bother to get beneath the bed covering, because he knew he wouldn’t sleep.

It was going to be a long time until the morning, he thought.