Mistress Murder Read online

  ‘You think they went there to collect the stuff?’

  ‘I’m sure Golding did … don’t know about Draper. We’ve no evidence to say he ever dabbled in the business side of dope, only the pleasure aspect, if you can call it that.’

  Bray wandered restlessly around the room.

  ‘What do we do now? All this seems so disjointed. Bits and pieces of crimes with Golding’s name running through it all. What are we dealing with: a homicidal maniac or a dope smuggler?’

  Benbow shrugged magnificently. ‘Search me, comrade, but we’re going round to see this Eurasian creep. He may be able to throw some light on it – before we drag him off to a cell. He’ll be one less fly on the Soho dung heap. Give Sergeant Roberts a buzz, will you. I promised to let him know.’

  Again the club was visited at a discreetly early hour. This time it didn’t matter, as Benbow had authority to close the club as being undesirable premises pending Silver’s prosecution. He arrived with the two sergeants at about six thirty and barged past the astonished doorman, who was rigged out in a pullover instead of his Victorian outfit.

  The three detectives marched through the deserted club, past the chairs piled high on the tables and the empty bar. A single bare bulb burned in the ceiling and no one, not even the barman, was in sight.

  ‘Hope the bastard is here,’ muttered Benbow as they filed through the alleyway backstage to Silver’s office.

  They found him standing at his cupboard, counting bottles of spirits. He swung round in surprise and gave a crafty grin when he saw who had arrived.

  ‘What d’you want this time, coppers?’

  Benbow wasted no time or words but strode across the room and put a detaining hand on the surprised owner’s arm.

  ‘Ray Silver, I am arresting you and you will be duly charged with being in unlawful possession of narcotic drugs, namely heroin and morphine, in contravention of the Dangerous Drugs Act. Anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence. Now then, chum, what d’you say to that?’

  Silver’s face came up in red blotches that matched the red brocade waistcoat that stretched over his spherical stomach. He shook Benbow off and went to sit behind his desk, clawing his way like a blind man along the edge.

  ‘What are you trying to pull this time?’ he asked huskily. ‘I want my lawyer – you know damn well there’s nothing here, you looked the other day.’

  His voice was shaky and hardly more than a whisper.

  ‘We found enough in your safe to fix you, Silver,’ said Sergeant Roberts harshly. He had a hatred, amounting almost to an obsession, of drug traffickers. He had seen too much of the degrading results of their trade to show any sympathy when they were caught.

  Benbow was less emotional about it. He grinned at Silver’s deflation.

  ‘You want to use stronger boxes next time – the last ones leaked.’

  ‘I want my solicitor,’ blubbered Silver. He reached out a shaking hand to the telephone.

  Benbow calmly trod on the loop of flex that hung over the end of the desk and the instrument came crashing down to the floor before Silver could touch it.

  ‘Oops! Sorry, accidents will happen,’ grinned the Admiral, leaving the phone lying dismembered on the carpet.

  ‘Look, chum, you’re for the high jump but if you cooperate with us a bit, we might put a word in for you before the judge puts on the Black Cap.’

  Silver wavered then plumped for the chance to get his sentence reduced. He told them the whole story, ending with Golding’s trip to Munich.

  ‘He went out of here like a bat from hell – raving mad! ‘

  ‘And he took your gun with him?’

  ‘Yes – a .25 Webley – I had it legally too. Police permit, licence – the lot!’ countered Silver defensively.

  Bray took Silver away to the West End Central Station to be charged, while Roberts and Benbow stayed behind to have another look around the club. They went to the deserted bar and turned the lights on. Between them they went through the place with even more enthusiasm than the time before. All the shelves and cupboards were turned out, but nothing came to light. Benbow looked in a recess under the sink and saw a waste bin. Something odd struck him but it was a few seconds before he could pin it down.

  ‘Roberts – come and have a shufti at this.’

  The sergeant came over and looked.

  ‘Cellophane paper – looks like lots of cigarette wrappers.’

  Roberts looked at the packets under the big mirrors and nodded.

  ‘All wrapped as usual.’

  Benbow stared at the cellophane in his fingers.

  ‘I’ve seen a gag like this with gaspers before,’ he mused. ‘Are there any more in the cupboards?’

  Roberts went back to another shelf behind a glass door, in the comer of the bar.

  They found what they wanted here. A couple of dozen uncrushable packs had had their outer wrappers stripped off. Between the cardboard and the silver paper inside was a thin polythene envelope, filled with white powder. Benbow rubbed his hands delightedly.

  ‘Lovely – just what the magistrate ordered, eh, Roberts?’

  They carefully wrapped up the rest of the cigarette packets and went down to the police station.

  Bray had just finished taking a statement from Ray Silver. The Eurasian was sitting dejectedly behind a cup of cold police station tea in an interview room.

  ‘Silver, we’ve found enough heroin in cigarette packets in your dump to send you down for years. What have you got to say about that?’

  Silver had plenty to say, most of it unprintable, but the gist of his words was to the effect that it must belong to someone else. ‘Where did you find it?’ he demanded.

  Benbow told him and he poured out another torrent of foul language.

  ‘That effing Snigger, that’s who you want,’ he squealed. ‘The cunning bastard. Look, I take back all that statement. It was Gigal that was behind this … done it all behind my back and got the blame put on to me.’

  He gladly gave them Snigger’s address in South London. Now that he suspected Snigger of splitting on him, Silver was all for dropping his employee as deeply into the mire as possible. By eight o’clock, Silver was locked in a cell, and the Nineties Club had been padlocked by the police.

  The detectives went back to the Yard and Benbow and Bray tramped up to their box-like office to turn to the next problem, the tracing of ‘Snigger’ Gigal.

  ‘Shall I get the Division to pick him up in Fulham?’ asked Bray, his serious sixth-form face anxiously reflecting his eagerness to get on with the chase.

  Benbow picked up an appetising new pencil and eyed it thoughtfully.

  ‘I wonder?’ he mused. ‘Will he run now that he knows we’re on to the drugs angle? He might lead us to Golding if we’re lucky. Let’s give him a bit of rope.’

  He lumbered to his feet and pushed his hat to the back of his head.

  ‘Take Sutcliffe with you … watch Gigal for the next few hours and see if he goes anywhere that might be a lead to Golding. If he hasn’t tried to communicate before midnight, you’d better knock him off and we’ll try to get something out of him.’

  Benbow’s hunch came off. Half an hour later, Bray was sitting in a coffee bar almost opposite the Nineties Club. He had a clear view of Gerrard Street and of Detective Constable Sutcliffe, who was leaning against the wall of the pin-table saloon next to the club. Sutcliffe looked eminently in character, with sideboards, a thin moustache, and pointed shoes.

  At twenty to nine, a small man walked briskly up to the club door then stopped and looked in puzzlement at the new padlock. The spiv-like character levered himself off the wall and came over to him. ‘No good trying to get in, mate – they closed it up just now.’

  ‘Who did it?’ he said, pointing uneasily at the padlock.

  ‘The rozzers, mate – they hawked the boss man off in irons too.’

  Sutcliffe was a devoted amateur actor and he warmed to his role now.

  ‘Ar
e you a member?’ he hissed dramatically, ‘because if you are, I’d chuck my card away and buzz off before the bobbies come back.’

  Snigger muttered under his breath, looked furtively up and down the street, and hurried away to the pub on the comer in search of more details.

  Sutcliffe gave a discreet thumbs-up sign to Bray, who left the cafe and followed Snigger into the public house.

  Across the crowded smoke-filled bar, he saw Gigal talking earnestly with the landlord and being told with expressive pantomime what had happened at the Nineties Club that evening. Snigger downed a double whisky then hurried out to hail a taxi.

  By this time, Sutcliffe had brought the police car from further down the street and had parked it near the public house. It was an unobtrusive blue Morris Oxford, a borrowed ‘Q’ car, instead of the usual black Wolseley which would have given the game away. They were able to follow the taxi through the slow traffic without any trouble.

  ‘He’s going in the opposite direction to his home,’ observed Sutcliffe. ‘He lives down in Fulham.’

  They were now heading up the Tottenham Court Road.

  ‘Are we to tail him wherever he goes?’ asked Sutcliffe, with visions of all North London and the country beyond in front of him.

  Bray shrugged. ‘Let’s see what happens – he’s turning right here anyway.’

  The taxi stopped near the University Union and the barman got out.

  ‘Drive straight past and stop around the next comer,’ snapped Bray. Before the constable had brought the Morris to a stop, Bray was out and walking back to the comer. He sauntered after Snigger and followed him a short distance to the block of flats in Ferber Street.

  He hung about when the ex-jockey went inside. As soon as he heard the slam of lift gates, he dodged into the open entrance hall. The automatic lift had a row of lights above the door and he waited until the red flicker stopped at the fourth floor. A moment later, Sutcliffe joined him and they both stood concealed in the stairwell.

  Before long, the lift motors whined again and as Snigger stepped unsuspectingly into the hall, they moved forward and hustled him off to the Yard for questioning.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Paul Jacobs might have found it difficult to explain why he walked past the block of flats and carried on without a pause to the end of the square. Something intangible triggered off his outsize sense of caution. He crossed the road and walked past his hideout without so much as giving the building a second glance.

  It was three days after Snigger’s visit and the square was in its mid-afternoon peaceful period. The slight young man with long side-whiskers who leant against the railings around the dusty patch of grass looked nothing like a policeman, even to Jacobs. Probably there were fifty such loungers at that moment in London, all reading their newspapers and minding their own business.

  But a second after seeing him, Paul looked up at the fourth-floor windows and saw that his bathroom curtains were not hanging exactly true. He may have left them like that, he thought, but it was unlikely. He was a man of obsessive tidiness, both in his business and criminal ventures and in his personal ways. He suddenly felt convinced that someone had been into the flat since he was last there – and he had no caretaker or cleaning woman.

  He crossed the road and walked within a few inches of the waiting man, who took not the slightest notice of him. Reaching the corner of the square, Jacobs doubled back along the lane behind Byng Place and approached the flats from the rear.

  As he passed the opening of a mews, he saw a police car concealed in a garage entrance. At the back of the flats, where the boiler house was placed, he saw a young and athletic-looking street cleaner leaning on a brush in the centre of an already perfectly swept lane.

  Paul’s razor-edge sense of self-preservation reared on its hind legs and he went rapidly back to Goodge Street Tube station and found a telephone box. He dialled the number of his flat and waited. There was a long pause and, for a time, he thought that there would be no answer. Then the ringing tone clicked off and a voice said gruffly, ‘Hello, who’s that?’

  He made no reply but put his receiver down and quickly made his way down to the platform to catch a train to Paddington and the safe obscurity of South Wales.

  In the flat, Benbow stood rattling the button of the telephone. Then he dialled the operator and got through to a supervisor.

  ‘Chief Inspector Benbow here, miss, any luck with that call?’

  ‘Sorry, sir … it was far too short. All we can tell you is that it came from a public callbox in this exchange area.’

  He grunted his thanks and dropped the telephone back into its cradle.

  ‘Three bleeding days, and then when we do get a call they can’t trace it,’ he complained to Bray, who was busy slitting open cushions with a penknife.

  ‘Don’t suppose it matters – if he’s as cunning as he has been up till now we wouldn’t catch him with a hoary old gag like that.’

  Benbow nodded gloomily. ‘That’s if it was him – he didn’t say a word.’

  They had paid three previous visits to the flat since Bray had found it and had a man in there ever since, hoping to catch Golding when he returned.

  On entering the place on the Monday evening, they had found a note from Gigal pushed under the door. It was addressed to ‘Mr G.’ and read:

  ‘ALL UP THIS END. SOMEBODY HAS SQUEALED. MAYBE SILVER, THOUGH HE’S BEEN NICKED AND THE CLUB CLOSED. BE VERY CAREFUL. THE BUSIES ARE ON TO YOU. I AM SHOVING OFF TONIGHT BEFORE THEY PICK ME UP. USE THE STEPNEY ADDRESS IF YOU WANT TO GET IN TOUCH BUT I’M KEEPING LOW FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS.’

  Snigger had been denied the chance to shove off, but had steadfastly refused to say anything at all about Golding. In spite of all Benbow’s efforts, he refused to say anything except to repeat that he was innocent of any charge that was brought against him.

  He showed considerable sense in doing this, thought Benbow with ungracious admiration. The clever crooks who say nothing usually get off better than those who unburden themselves with the mental purge of a long confession.

  After Gigal had been remanded, the detectives, including Turnbull from the laboratory, came back to the flat. They turned it inside out in the hope of finding something that would help to trace the elusive drug smuggler and murderer. There were a few clothes in the wardrobe but all were good ready-mades from London stores. There were fingerprints in plenty that matched those in the Newman Street flat, but this put them no further forward.

  ‘Not even confirmation that he killed Draper,’ moaned Bray. The butt of the Webley that had been sent back from Munich showed a confused mixture of prints. Although it had been under the waters of the Isar, it still carried some blurred dabs, but these matched Ray Silver and Conrad Draper only.

  ‘Not surprising,’ commented Bray. ‘Everyone, especially murderers, would be wearing damn great gloves in December’

  The only hope that the laboratory people had been able to offer was that of identifying contact traces from the clothing. Using a miniature vacuum cleaner, which sucked air on to a minute disk of filter material, they collected a quantity of reddish-grey dust from the turn-ups of one of the pairs of trousers that Golding had left behind.

  ‘What’s this – some other exotic drug?’ asked Benbow when Turnbull showed him the filter pad.

  ‘No. I haven’t a clue … some of it seems a bit metallic. The boys will let you know as soon as they’ve done a micro and spectography on it.’

  True to his word, the liaison officer brought him a report on the Friday morning, the same day that Golding shied away from the flat in Bloomsbury.

  ‘The dust turned out to be a very finely divided mixture of silver, copper, and nickel,’ said Turnbull.

  Benbow stared blankly at him. ‘Why the reddish colour?’

  ‘That was iron oxide dust … better known as jeweller’s rouge, Archie.’

  The Admiral grabbed the form and waved it over his head in mock exultation.

  ‘Oh jo
y! And what the hell does all that add up to? Is he a chemist or a metallurgist or something?’

  Turnbull waited patiently for Benbow’s bout of exhibitionism to pass off.

  ‘Looks as if friend Golding has some connection with a place where metal plate is polished – you know, dishes and cutlery. The dust is all either silver itself or copper or nickel, both used as a base for silver plating. Copper was the base for expensive Sheffield plate, but nickel is used now for the cheaper stuff.’

  Benbow whistled through his false teeth. ‘He might be in the jewellery or antique trade, you think?’

  Turnbull shrugged. ‘That’s up to you – but he’s certainly been standing somewhere where a lot of metal polishing has been carried out – what conclusions you draw from it is your affair.’

  ‘Was it a lot of dust?’

  ‘I’d say it was certainly more that would come from a few casual cleanings of the household trophies … of course, he might collect the stuff for a hobby, but even so, the amount we got from his turn-ups was more than a gram – suggests work on almost a commercial scale.’

  Bray, hovering in the background, threw in one of his customary wet blankets. ‘An uncle of mine always has the stuff over his trousers – he’s dotty on old silver, but that’s only a hobby – he’s a bank manager.’

  Benbow scowled at him.

  ‘Got any better ideas, sonny? – cause if not, we’ll get down the flat again and see if there’s anything we missed the first twice.’

  In the afternoon, they went back to Ferber Street again and went up to Golding’s flat, where a plainclothes man had been on duty ever since they had tracked Snigger to the place. The chief inspector sent the watcher down to keep an eye on the entrance while he and Bray set about searching the rooms for the third time. With the help of Sutcliffe, they went through all the drawers again, examined the furniture for hidden spaces and pulled up all the fitted carpets once more.