The Skeleton in the Closet

∨ The Skeleton in the Closet ∧

Three

THEY slept a little. Maggie awoke, hearing Fell downstairs. She rose and dressed, hurriedly and without care.

Fell was sitting over a cup of coffee, staring into space.

“I don’t know what to do, Maggie,” he said bleakly.

Despite the fact that she was still terrified by the events of the night, Maggie knew in that moment that she had gained a reprieve. Fell would not throw her out, not immediately anyway.

“Do you think he’ll come back?” asked Maggie.

“Possibly. It’s a nightmare. Why did I never remember the robbery when I saw the money in the cash box? It was right after that Dad had his first heart attack. I was set to go to university, but I had to stay at the Palace instead. I’d been working at the hotel in my gap year and so I just stayed on.”

“Let’s go out somewhere in my car for breakfast,” said Maggie briskly, “and then we’ll go to the library and read up on everything we can about the robbery.”

“What should I do with that gun?”

“I’ll put it up in my room in the suitcase under the bed. Let’s go, Fell. If we sit here, I’ll get too frightened to move at all.”

“Right.” Fell went to the drawer, took out the gun and handed it to Maggie, who took it gingerly. She went back to her room and tucked it at the bottom of an old suitcase.

They went out to Maggie’s car, which was parked outside. The sun shone down on another perfect day.

“Mr. Dolphin!” quavered an old voice from the front garden on their right.

“Mrs. Moule,” said Fell. He raised his voice. “Good morning.”

Mrs. Moule appeared at her gate, leaning on a Zimmer frame. “You young people,” she chided. “I don’t know where you get the energy. Digging the garden in the middle of the night.”

“That’s us,” said Fell with a manufactured breeziness. “Working all hours to make the place nice.”

Mrs. Moule cackled with laughter. “Well, if you’ve any energy left over, my garden could do with weeding.”

Fell waved. He and Maggie got into the car. Maggie drove off and then stopped farther down the road. “Wait a bit,” she said. “My knees are shaking. Just think, Fell. What if we had been burying a body? How could she have seen us?”

“Probably heard us or saw us through the branches of that tree outside the upstairs window. It was getting light, remember?”

“I wonder whether we should go to the police,” said Maggie.

“It’s a bit late for that, Maggie. They’d wonder why we didn’t call them immediately. And what if they froze the money in the bank? We’d lose our first bit of freedom.”

Maggie privately though they had lost it already, but he had said our freedom, and that was enough for her.

She let in the clutch. “Where are we going?” asked Fell.

“I thought we’d go out to one of those motorway restaurants and eat junk food, comfort food, for once.”

“You’re a good sort, Maggie.”

Maggie felt the sunlight outside flooding her insides with yellow light. But she felt she had to say something about Melissa Harley.

“About Melissa,” said Maggie. “I feel now I behaved disgracefully. I wasn’t trying to isolate you from people, Fell.” Lie, screamed the voice of her conscience. “But I just didn’t want to see you tricked.”

Fell sighed. “I suppose you think a woman who looks like that would never be interested in me.”

“Not at all,” said Maggie quickly.

“I was hurt,” said Fell. “Badly hurt by your snooping. But the events of last night have made me pretty much forget about it.”

“Let’s not talk any more about it at the moment,” said Maggie, negotiating a roundabout and turning down onto the motorway.

“I’ve had about two driving lessons,” said Fell. “But I can’t imagine myself ever driving on a motorway. Look at them! The inside lane does seventy miles an hour. But the middle lane does eighty and the outside lane ninety or more.”

“You get used to it,” said Maggie. “When I first started driving, I would keep to the inside lane and just chug along behind the trucks.”

After several miles, she turned off at a motorway restaurant.

Soon they were seated over enormous breakfasts of toast, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, beans and sausages.

“So if we can stay awake after this lot,” said Maggie, “we’ll go back to town and start at the library. Are any of your father’s old workmates alive?”

“I’ll need to ask around. Dad was pretty old when he died. I hate this. I don’t know if I can live in my house again. I’ll always be waiting for a knock at the door, dreading that Andy will come back.”

“Let’s not think about that now. But perhaps we should get some sort of security, a burglar-alarm system, something like that, and a peephole on the front door so we can see who is calling. We can look up the business pages in the directory for a security firm.”

Maggie regretted the idea of a greasy breakfast although she finished every bit of it. She felt tired and heavy.

She drove them back into Buss and they parked outside the public library. “When was the robbery?” asked Maggie.

“It was sometime in the seventies. Wait a bit. They talked of nothing else in the town. Let’s start with the local newspaper for 1978.”

An hour later, after ploughing through pages and pages of a bound volume of the Buss Courier, they could find no mention of any railway robbery. “We could ask one of the old people in the town,” said Maggie. “They’d remember.”

“I don’t want to draw attention to us.”

“I’ll ask the librarian. She won’t be interested. So many people ask her for things, she won’t remember us in particular.”

“I don’t know…,” began Fell doubtfully, but Maggie was already on her feet and moving to the desk. The librarian was a young girl in her twenties. She had real blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Maggie was glad it was she who had gone to ask and not Fell. Maggie’s world was becoming peopled, she felt, with women who might lure Fell away.

“I’m looking for something on a train robbery which took place here,” said Maggie.

“Oh, the Buss train robbery,” said the girl with a smile. Those blue eyes were intelligent. No one that pretty ought to be intelligent as well.

“There was a book written about that by a local man,” said the librarian, switching on the computer on her desk. “I’m sure it’s out of print, but we might still have a copy because it’s of local interest.”

She flicked expertly at the machine. “Ah, here it is. The Buss Train Robbery, by Geoffrey Hobson. You’ll find it actually in the section of local books. The number is P142.”

Maggie went back to Fell, her face glowing with triumph. “Someone wrote a book on it,” she told Fell. “Wait there and I’ll get it.”

She searched the shelves, and to her delight, located the book and brought it back to Fell.

“Can we borrow it?” she asked. “Do you have a library card?”

“Yes,” said Fell, thinking what a refuge this library had been in his dark, lonely days: a world full of books of romance and adventure. The very smell of the books meant comfort. The dome in the ceiling of green glass shed an underwater light down into the library where submarine humans like himself wandered along the shelves seeking escape.

They decided to take the book down to the river bank and study it. The robbery had actually taken place in 1977. “I’m getting old,” said Fell ruefully. “I should have remembered it was seventy-seven.”

Holding the book between them and sitting on the grass by the river, they read steadily.

At last Fell said, “To summarize, the robbery took place at ten o’clock in the morning. The bit where my father comes in seems to be that the train was not due to stop at Buss but the signal was against it and so the train stopped. As soon as it stopped, five masked men attacked the train. There were only six Post Office employees, a train driver and a guard on board. The Post Office employees were threatened at gunpoint and tied up. The guard tried to escape and was beaten to death. It was estimated the robbers got away with five million. Dad was pulled in for questioning. He said he received a phone call telling him to stop the train. The call was traced to a phone box. Dad had an excellent record. Joe Briggs, Tarry Joe, was suspected because it turned out he had a criminal record, but he fled to Spain, and there was no extradition agreement between Britain and Spain then. The others were pulled in for questioning, and the ones I remember meeting when I went to see my father in the signal box were Fred Flint and Johnny Tremp, maintenance workers.”

“So where do we go from here? Didn’t your parents discuss it?” asked Maggie.

“Not a word. In fact, I don’t remember them actually talking much about anything. We’ll start with the phone book and see if Fred Flint and Johnny Tremp are still alive.”

“You would think the police would have caught at least one of them.”

“It says in the book that the police said it was planned like a military operation. They were looking for some sort of criminal with an army background.”

“It’s going to be awfully hard to find out anything after all this time,” said Maggie sadly.

“What amazes me is why Andy Briggs was not picked up at the airport, or Dover or however he came back into the country.”

“They’d be looking for Joe Briggs. Briggs is a common name. They wouldn’t be looking for the son.”

“You’re right. Let’s go home and look at the phone book.”

Maggie hesitated. “I think we should take that book back to the library.”

“Why? I would like to go through it again.”

“It’s like this. If Andy comes back and we’re forced to call the police, they’re going to put two and two together and maybe search the house. If they find this book, it’ll start them thinking.”

“You’re right. Next time we want to check it, we’ll read it in the library.”

As they walked back across the grass, Maggie said, “You could always say you were writing a book about Buss and want to do a chapter on the train robbery. That would give us an excuse to go around asking questions. We could even try to find that local inspector who was on the case, the one from Buss; what was his name?”

“Inspector Rudfern. I could do that, Maggie.”

They returned the book and headed home.

“Maybe I’d better buy a typewriter. Make it look as if I’m really writing,” said Fell.

“No one bothers with typewriters these days. Get a computer with a word processor program.”

“Wouldn’t it take me forever to learn how to use it?”

“I think some people just follow the instructions.”

Maggie parked outside the house. They both looked out at it uneasily as if expecting to see the burly figure of Andy waiting for them.

But when they walked in, there was only the smell of new paint to greet them.

“You know,” said Fell, sitting down with a sigh, “I feel like a criminal. Everything points to Dad taking money from the robbers. Spending money is no longer going to be any fun. Every penny I spend now is going to feel as if I’m spending money that doesn’t belong to me.”

“Your wages your father banked over the years are yours.”

“Yes, but the reason he was able to bank all of that money was maybe because of a robbery.”

“Never mind. We’ll find out what we can. Would you like me to get a job? That way you wouldn’t have to spend so much.”

“You’re a kind girl, Maggie,” said Fell, giving her a quick hug. “We’re in this together, so we may as well spend together.”

Maggie smiled shyly up at him. She no longer cared what mystery or mayhem they were involved in, just so long as they were together. The awful spectre that he might turn her out had gone.

The phone rang, a shrill and peremptory tone.

Fell jumped nervously. “Will I answer it?” asked Maggie.

“Please. My nerves are shot.”

Maggie picked up the receiver. It was Melissa Harley.

“For you,” she said bleakly and held out the receiver in answer to Melissa’s request to speak to Fell. She watched Fell’s face light up when he realized who it was. Then she heard him say, “I’d love to, but something’s come up. Could we possibly make it for next week?…Great. I’ll see you on Wednesday at eight.”

He turned to Maggie, his face radiant. “She’s invited me to her house for dinner. I’m to pick her up at the shop.”

“I heard you put it off until next week,” said Maggie. “Why?”

Fell ran his fingers through his hair. “I just want to be on top form when I see her. I’m still rattled after last night.”

“Would you like a cup of coffee before we start on the phone book?” asked Maggie.

“Thank you,” said Fell, his face bright with happiness.

Damn the conniving bitch, thought Maggie. She returned with two mugs of coffee and joined Fell on the sofa. “Who should we start with?” asked Fell.

“I think the inspector would be our best bet.”

Fell opened the local phone book. “Let’s see, Rudfern. What’s his first name?”

“Oh, I can’t remember.”

“There’s one here. Only one. J.J. Rudfern, 12, Glebe Close.”

“Let’s try him now,” said Maggie eagerly, anxious for any action which would take Fell’s mind off Melissa Harley.

“We’ll have our coffee and then go,” he said. “What were those other two names?”

“Fred Flint and Johnny Tremp.”

“Right.” He scanned the phone book again. “There’s a J. Tremp but – let me see – no Fred Flint, or F. Flint. There’s several Flints.”

“We’ll try them all later.” Maggie rose. “I’ll just wash my face. I’m still tired.”

“After we see this inspector – if he’s still alive – we can have a sleep.”

How wonderful it would be, thought Maggie, if having a sleep meant they could tumble into bed together. She went up to the bathroom, which had not yet been renovated. The hand-basin had a crack across it, and the old-fashioned bath was permanently stained with lime scale from a dripping tap.

The work on the house should go ahead. The new furniture in the living room looked too bright against the dingy walls. Keep Fell occupied, that was the plan. A fully occupied Fell would be less easy prey for rapacious women.

Maggie removed her heavy glasses and washed her face and then carefully applied fresh make-up. If only she could get contact lenses, but now, all this threat that the late Mr. Dolphin had actually been involved in crime made her too shy to ask Fell for the money.

♦

Glebe Close was a cul-de-sac at the prosperous end of the town. It consisted of a few large villas with spacious gardens.

“I don’t think we’re going to have that dandelion summer of yours after all,” said Maggie. “It’s clouding over and getting quite chilly.”

“Just a country story,” said Fell. “I suppose they say it every year and the one year they get it right is the year everyone remembers.”

They climbed out of the car. Fell pushed open one of the tall double iron gates and he and Maggie walked up a well-kept drive between laurel bushes, flowering black currant and rhododendrons.

After they had rung a brass bell set into the stone at the side of the door, a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman opened the door. She was wearing a tailored trouser suit in biscuit-coloured linen, high-heeled sandals, and a quantity of gold chains around her neck. Her eyes in her well-preserved face were hard and assessing. “Yes?”

“I am Fell Dolphin,” said Fell, who never used his first name in full if he could help it, “and this is Miss Maggie Part-lett.”

“And?” The woman stood before them, one hip jutting out, one thin beringed hand splayed against it.

“I am writing a book on the Buss train robbery which took place in nineteen seventy-seven. I believe Inspector Rudfern was on that case. I just wanted to ask him about it.”

She hesitated. Then she said, “I’ll see if Father is up to talking.” She turned back indoors and left them standing on the step. A rising wind rustled through the bushes behind them. The hum of traffic on the main road came faintly to their ears.

Then they heard the clack of returning high heels. “Come in,” she said, “but don’t stay too long.”

They followed her into the gloomy hush of the large house. There seemed to be Venetian blinds on all the windows, cutting out much of the light.

“Father’s in the study,” she said, pushing open the door.

A old man was sitting in an armchair by the window, a tartan travelling rug over his knees. He had a shock of grey hair, and a grey lined and wrinkled face from which faded blue eyes surveyed them curiously.

“Sit down,” he said in a surprisingly strong voice. “Dolphin, my daughter said. That name rings a bell.”

“Charles Dolphin, my father, was a signalman at the time of the robbery.”

“Ah, so he was. Pulled in for questioning. Bring over two chairs and sit in front of me where I can see you.”

With an effort Fell lifted over two carved high-backed chairs of the mock Tudor kind.

When he and Maggie were seated, Fell asked, “Why was he taken in for questioning?”

“Because that train with the Post Office money was not supposed to stop at Buss,” said Mr. Rudfern. “He was the one who stopped it. Besides, it was his day off, but he volunteered to work it. The other signalman, Terry Weal, said he was feeling poorly and Dolphin had offered to do his shift.”

“And what explanation did my father give for stopping the train?”

“He said he had received a phone call half an hour before the train was due to pass through Buss Station, which he had no reason to disbelieve, telling him the train must be stopped because a cracked wheel was suspected. We traced the call to the signal box. There was only the one and it came from a phone box outside Buss. Dolphin stuck to his story that he had been tricked. Then he was asked, as he had a phone in the signal box, why he didn’t immediately call the police when the robbery started. He said that one of the men had a rifle pointed up at the signal box. He couldn’t phone until they had gone.”

“Why couldn’t the man in the ticket office call?” asked Fell.

“There were no trains expected until later in the day, so the ticket office was closed. We decided to keep an eye on all the suspects, see if they started spending more money than they should have had. Dolphin didn’t seem to have anything other than his wages, and then yours. Yes, we kept an eye on people for as long as that. The only one who splurged out was Briggs. We were moving in to pick him up when he disappeared to Spain. No extradition agreement, and by the time there was, the old sod was dead.”

“No idea who did it?”

“None. But someone with a clever brain masterminded it.”

“Is there any way my father could have known what was on the train?”

“On the face of it – no. But back up in Glasgow where they loaded up the train, some of the workers must have known what was on it, and the Post Office workers on the train certainly knew. Easy to leak the news.”

“I read a book about it by a local author,” said Fell. “He says it was as if some sort of ghost squad had performed the robbery and just melted away. No one saw any cars racing away from the station.”

“No one much around there except at train times,” said Rud-fern. “Not like in the cities, you know. In country places, the station’s often well outside the town, like in Buss. I read that book. Silly piece of reporting. Great gaps in it. We hauled in all known criminals from miles around. We have our snouts – informers – so we waited, sure that some whisper would come out of the underworld. Nothing. You know what I think?”

Maggie and Fell leaned forward. Mr. Rudfern’s daughter came in. “Are you finished yet?” she demanded. “Father needs his rest.”

“Go away,” said Mr. Rudfern. “Now!”

She went out, slamming the door behind her. “It’s terrible to be old and be at the mercy of your children,” said the ex-inspector, half to himself. “Where was I?”

“You were about to tell us what you thought,” said Maggie eagerly.

“Yes. Well, no one would listen to me. But it’s this. I think it was masterminded by someone with military training and brains. I think the men who committed the robbery or helped with the robbery were all amateurs. Take Tarry Joe – Joe Briggs – for instance. Reputation as being a hard worker. Previous conviction didn’t come to light until we started checking up on everyone. I was willing to bet that the rest, whoever they were, had never committed any crime before. I think, apart from Briggs, that they all went off to their homes and lived blameless lives until they felt it was safe. No one wanted to know what I thought, though. They all said that amateurs would have betrayed themselves by now.

I even went out to Spain, to Benidorm, to talk to Briggs. But his criminal associates must have tipped him off, because he had disappeared. He surfaced again, from all reports, after I had left. You’re not going to play amateur detective, are you?”

“I was just interested in getting all the facts for my book,” said Fell.

“I don’t want to depress you,” said Mr. Rudfern, “but that first book never sold much and who’s going to be interested in a second book?”

“I can try,” said Fell stubbornly.

“Let me give you a bit of advice. It’s no use raking over the past. Facts don’t come to the surface, but mud does. You could inadvertently hurt a lot of people. There were a lot of wild accusations flying around at the time.”

“I’ll let you know how we’re getting on,” said Fell.

“Don’t. I’m an old man now and don’t want to be bothered.” Mr. Rudfern picked up a small brass bell from the table beside him and rang it. The door opened promptly and his daughter appeared immediately, as if she had been waiting outside. “See them out,” said Mr. Rudfern.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The interview was over.

♦

“What did you make of that?” exclaimed Maggie. “He was warning you off, wasn’t he?”

“He probably doesn’t want anyone finding out who did it when he couldn’t,” said Fell. “You know, I’ve been thinking. What about going round to the offices of the local paper? Maybe someone there can put us in touch with a reporter or someone who’s still alive who reported on the case?”

“Good idea.” Maggie started the car and they set off for the High Street, where the offices of the Buss Courier were situated.

After explaining what they wanted to a power-dressed receptionist with mandarin-long fingernails who looked as if she believed she was meant for better things, they were told to wait. Grey light shone into the reception area through a large plate-glass window. A newspaper performed an erratic ballet down the street outside and then, after a final entrechat, sailed up over the roofs and disappeared. They were seated side by side on a tweed sofa. In front of them was a low black coffee table, chipped and scarred. A cheese plant was slowly dying in one corner. There were framed front pages of the Buss Courier on the lemon-painted walls.

“Excuse me,” said the receptionist, making them jump, so absorbed had both of them been in their own thoughts – Fell’s in worries about the money and Maggie’s in worries about Fell.

“The editor will see you now. Jessie will show you the way.” A shy thin girl had emerged from a side door and stood waiting.

They followed Jessie up a narrow flight of stairs, across the reporters’ room, to a frosted glass door which bore the legend. “T. J. Whittaker, Editor.”

Jessie opened the door and ushered them in. The editor rose to meet them. He was a red-faced, fleshy man with a beer gut hanging over baggy trousers. His striped shirt was open at the neck. He had beetling eyebrows under which his heavy face sagged down.

“Sit down,” he said. “So you’re writing a book on our train robbery. I was a reporter on that case. Dolphin, hey? That was the name of the signalman.”

“My father,” said Fell. “I only just discovered he was a suspect.”

“Why? I thought you would have grown up on stories of it.”

“No, he never mentioned it.”

“So what do you want to write a book about it for?”

Fell decided to take the plunge. “I am really trying to prove my father’s innocence. He was pulled in for questioning.”

“But he wasn’t charged,” said Mr. Whittaker.

“Still…I’ve been to see Inspector Rudfern.”

“Oh, really? I never found him much help at any time. Anyway, I’d better tell you what I know, seeing as it’s a quiet day. I was a reporter then and – ”

The door to his office burst unceremoniously open and a young reporter said, “We’ve got a murder, Mr. Whittaker.”

The editor stood up and lifted his jacket from the back of his chair.

“Where? Who?” he demanded.

“Down at the Railway Tavern. A knifing. Landlord says the chap was called Andy Briggs.”