Mistress Murder Page 6

  Conrad scowled at the seedy electrician without enthusiasm.

  ‘What d’you lug him up here for?’

  Alfie looked uneasily from one to the other.

  ‘I heard that Irish was asking around about Golding … I wondered if a bit of info was worth any bunce to you. I was told to keep my trap shut, mind. I might get the sticky end if he finds out.’

  ‘Depends on what you got to tell me,’ grunted Draper.

  The radio dealer smiled weakly. ‘I thought it might be worth a pony,’ he said hopefully. His voice trailed off as he saw the expression on Draper’s face.

  ‘Twenty-five! Go and get stuffed, mate. Say your piece and I’ll see if I can squeeze you out a fiver.’

  ‘I don’t exactly know anything about him – personally – but I did a job for him … he said I was to keep quiet about it.’

  Conrad’s expression spurred him to carry on quickly.

  ‘He came to me a few months back and asked me to fit a tape recorder to the telephone in this dame’s flat – the one that copped it last weekend. It was a cagey job – I had to do it all inside a couple of hours when she was out of the place. He gave me a key and said he’d keep her out of the way long enough for me to fix it up.’

  Conrad felt a cold lump grow in the pit of his stomach. ‘What then?’ he said hollowly.

  ‘I had to make a false bottom in a cupboard for it, and connect the recorder to the telephone junction box in the bedroom.’

  Draper’s icy patch spread across his middle. He wasn’t sure what all this meant, but he felt that it wasn’t good for his health. ‘Go on!’ he said between his teeth.

  ‘Not much more to it,’ answered Alfie. ‘The motor was wired so that it started to run as soon as the receiver was lifted on the phone. It was transistorised, so it didn’t need to warm up – it was ready to go straight away – wouldn’t miss a word.’

  The betting shop magnate thought for a moment.

  ‘Was this a two-way gadget – could it pick up both callers’ voices?’

  Alfie nodded. ‘Oh, yes … there was an extra big spool fitted so that it would run for over an hour if needed. Golding said that he might have to leave it a couple of weeks at a time.’ He looked hopefully at Conrad. ‘That’s all.’

  The big man ignored his hint for a reward.

  ‘How did Golding get on to you? Did he know you before?’

  ‘No, Ray Silver in the Nineties Club recommended me – I’d just done some work on the microphones there.’

  ‘And you don’t know anything about this Golding? Did he say where he was from or anything else at all about himself?’

  The man in the awful suit shook his head vigorously.

  ‘Nah, he was as tight as a bleeding oyster. Didn’t say a dicky bird. He told me what to do, gave me the lolly afterwards and told me to screw my mouth down … I’m taking a risk grassing to you, mister, straight I am.’ He ended on a whine.

  Conrad stood up, peeled a couple of blue notes off his roll, and gave them to the electrician.

  ‘Right, shove off. You needn’t worry about Golding; it’s me you want to think about. If you drop a whisper of this to anybody, I’ll have your shop turned into a junkyard, right?’

  Alfie understood only too well and vanished in record time with his ten pounds clutched in his fist.

  When he had gone, Conrad seemed in a better humour.

  ‘Irish, we’re going to pay a call on Ray Silver tonight. That slanty-eyed swine has been in with Golding and I didn’t know it.’

  Chapter Six

  Though the rain had stopped late on the Friday night, Oldfield cemetery was little better than a quagmire in the early hours of the next morning.

  At six o’clock, it was still pitch dark when a plain blue van drove up to the ornate gates set in the stone wall. A man – a council gravedigger – got out and unlocked the gates in the beam of the van’s headlights.

  The vehicle passed through and made its way along narrow tarmac roads until it reached the newest graves in one comer. Nearby was a wooden hut. Two more men got down and fetched spades, poles, and canvas from it before trudging through the squelching turf to the most recent burial plot.

  Working with their gumboots already plastered in red earth, they erected a screen from the hessian and posts, before starting to remove the fresh soil from the grave. They laboured by the light of two paraffin lamps hung on the poles. The harsh shadows and silhouettes made an eerie pattern as the two undertaker’s men watched them from the cab of the van.

  The top layers were hard going but, by the time the first flush of grey light appeared in the sky, they had got down to the drier soil and the going was easier.

  After this, there was only room for one man at a time in the hole and they took it in turns. The two undertakers ambled over to watch the last stages, and by seven o'clock they saw the spade thumping on the top of the coffin.

  A few moments later, the diggers were able to rub the mud from the brass plate and confirm that the box held the last remains of Rita Laskey.

  They came up for a quick smoke, then went back to clear the soil from the sides sufficiently to pass two ropes around the coffin. The ends were brought up to the graveside and after a few experimental pulls to make sure that enough earth had been taken out, the workers relaxed.

  At exactly seven thirty, the yellow beam of headlights swept through the gates and a black Wolseley drew up behind the van. Sergeant Burrell and a thin man in a raincoat came over to the little group.

  The gravediggers touched their caps to the man in plain clothes.

  ‘Morning, Mr Phelps, we’ve got ’er ready.’

  Their boss, the council surveyor, had come to identify the grave to the police sergeant. He took a rolled plan from his coat and studied it by the light of a pressure lamp.

  ‘Laskey … number nine-two-six. That’s the eighteenth in the second row beyond the north roadway.’

  He walked down the path with a torch wavering in his hand, counting the headstones and the pathetic heaps of earth.

  ‘That’s it, sergeant – that’s nine-two-six all right.’

  Burrell grunted. He was no great one for getting up in the morning and to be dragged out at six o’clock to take the borough surveyor to a sodden cemetery was no great stimulus to his conversation.

  ‘Get her up, then,’ he said shortly to the workman.

  They and the two undertakers tailed onto the ropes and with some grunting and squelching, the coffin came free from the grave’s muddy bottom. They hauled it up level with the surface and swung its end onto a plank which had been laid across the head of the pit. One of the men slid another plank under the other end and, with the weight taken, they removed the ropes and stood back.

  ‘Better check the plate yourself, sarge,’ suggested one of the diggers. He leant over and rubbed the metal with a rag.

  Burrell held his torch close and peered at the brass oblong. ‘Rita Maria Laskey … At rest … eighteenth of November, nineteen-sixty-four,’ he read aloud. ‘OK lads, take it away – up to the hospital.’

  After cleaning as much of the mud off as they could, they carried the box to the van and took it to the mortuary of Oldfield Hospital.

  Sergeant Burrell took the surveyor home and then went back to the station to wait for the Yard men and the pathologist. They arrived at eight o’clock, together with a liaison officer from the Yard Forensic Laboratory and, by half past eight, Dr Eustace Soames was starting his examination.

  The little mortuary of the district hospital was packed out with the detectives, doctor, mortuary assistant, and the police photographers who lurked in the background with their apparatus.

  Again the coffin plaque was checked for continuity of evidence. Then the lid was unscrewed.

  Benbow, from experience of previous exhumations, stepped back as the seal was broken, but in this case there was no semi-explosive escape of foul gas. The body had only been down a couple of days and the weather was cold.

&nbs
p; The body was photographed before being disturbed, then Burrell, who had seen it before burial, formally identified it to the pathologist. Soames, in rubber boots, long gown, and rubber apron, waited impatiently while the shroud was removed and the body placed on the porcelain slab.

  ‘Come on, come on, I’m playing golf at twelve,’ he fretted.

  The tubby mortuary attendant, on double time for a Saturday morning and with the prospect of a good tip as well, fussed about arranging instruments.

  When Soames was ready to start, the police arranged themselves as close to the white-tiled walls as possible, to be out of range of the splashes for which Soames was notorious.

  The bare remains of the girl from Newman Street lay on the dish-shaped slab. The pathologist stood with his gloved hands on his hips, staring intently at every part of it.

  There was a pregnant silence.

  ‘Don’t expect any miracles from me, Benbow,’ he warned. ‘She’s been washed, her clothes have gone, and she’s been dead for nearly a week. The undertakers have pulled her about, buried her, and now dug her up! So I hope you’ll appreciate that I’m starting at a disadvantage.’

  Benbow looked at the battered corpse lying so still on the white table. He kept telling himself how lucky he was to have such a strong stomach, but his self-persuasion kept slipping. He forced himself to speak.

  ‘The main thing is, doctor, can you find anything to confirm our suspicions that she was deliberately crashed in that Sunbeam? If not, we can all go home and forget it.’

  The burly pathologist wagged his florid face.

  ‘If she was, she must have been drunk, dead or unconscious. She wouldn’t have sat there otherwise, would she?’

  He bent over the body and began examining the outside in minute detail. Bray had been deputed to write down any dictated notes, and this helped to keep the young man’s mind off the feelings of nausea which kept coming in waves from somewhere beneath his belt.

  ‘Rigor mortis absent from all limbs … lividity well marked on the back.’

  Soames droned on as his fingers probed the pale flesh. The other police officers from the County looked on silently, each busy with their own thoughts or fighting their own particular brand of revulsion.

  Every now and then Soames would ask for a photograph and the policemen from the photographic department would trundle up their tripod and scarify the mortuary with electronic flashes.

  The doctor from London spent a long time probing around the head of the woman. He shaved off a wide area of the black hair and stepped back to let the camera team do their stuff again.

  ‘Any joy, doctor?’ asked Benbow cautiously. He had a lot of respect for the man’s opinion, but knew from experience that he couldn’t be stampeded into an opinion.

  Eustace Soames rubbed his itching nose on his shoulder, his gloves already being fouled up.

  ‘I don’t like the look of it, Mr Benbow … I’d like to have a look at the car afterwards.’ He paused and pointed to the shaved area of the girl’s head. ‘There’s a skin wound and a depressed fracture there. I can’t tell much until I look under the skin, but it’s most unlike a motor injury unless there’s some unusual projection inside the car that would cause a deep narrow wound like that.’

  Benbow’s eyes glistened in his lumpy face. He forgot his stomach.

  ‘It could be a blow from a weapon, you mean?’

  Soames pursed his lips. ‘Or a door handle or a window winder … no, it’s the wrong shape for those, too long.’ As he spoke, he bent down so close to the week-old corpse that his big nose almost touched its left ear. Then he took fine-pointed forceps and carefully picked something from the edge of the head wound.

  ‘Better have this, Inspector Hooper … bit of fibre, may be a contact trace, unless it’s something the undertakers left behind.’

  The Yard laboratory officer stepped forward with a plastic envelope and delicately took the little yellow thread.

  Soames turned his attention to the rest of the body and looked at the fractures of the right arm and both legs. Then he began studying the inside of the forearms with greater care.

  ‘See those marks there,’ he said to Benbow, pointing to the insides of the elbows and arms. ‘Needle marks. That one in the crook of the left elbow is direct into the vein. Looks much more recent than the others too.’

  Archie Benbow had been too long in London’s West End not to realise at once, the significance of the marks. ‘So she was on the hook?’ he said.

  Soames nodded. ‘Could explain why she was unconscious, I suppose, especially as that last one is intravenous instead of just under the skin like the others. Still, we’re trying to run before we crawl, eh?’

  The photographers moved away again and the bloody part of the business began.

  For forty minutes the pathologist went through the organs, one by one. They were beginning to decay, but still good enough to show any abnormalities. He put several of them into big glass jars supplied by the laboratory officer and also took specimens of blood, urine, and stomach contents into bottles.

  ‘Want some hair and fingernail clippings?’ he asked the liaison officer.

  ‘Aye, better have them, just for the record,’ said Hooper. ‘If she was put out forcibly by somebody, she may just have had the chance to run her nails down the skin of his face. God knows they’re long enough!’

  He collected the tips of Rita’s scarlet nails into another bottle in the faint hope that enough flesh might be trapped under them to provide blood group identification.

  Benbow noticed the doctor sniffed like a beagle when he came to slit open the stomach.

  ‘Anything definite?’

  ‘Pooh! Booze, plus-plus!’ answered Eustace Soames, wrinkling his long nose. ‘I don’t know about drugs, but she’s got enough alcohol in her belly to lay out an elephant!’

  The examination finished about ten thirty, much to Bray’s relief. Soames took the top of the skull away in a plastic bag, in case it was needed as an exhibit in the event of a court case. As he sat in the anteroom of the mortuary, he gave Benbow and Bray a summary of his findings.

  ‘I think you’ve got a case, Mr Benbow. She’s got gross injuries consistent with a motor crash: open fractures of both thighs, busted arm, her chest crushed from the steering wheel and a dislocated neck … but I think she was dead before they occurred.’

  The detective chief inspector bobbed his head gravely. Soames went on as he washed his hands and arms.

  ‘She has a deep localised fracture on the left side of the skull … most unlike a normal traffic injury, especially as the steering wheel has pinned her back so that her head couldn’t ram the windscreen. Unless there’s some odd projection inside the car to cause it, I don’t see how the crash can be responsible.’

  ‘You think it’s a deliberate blow, then?’

  Soames back-pedalled slightly.

  ‘Ah well, the first thing a pathologist learns is never to say anything is impossible. But my opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it’s a blow. In court, any defence counsel worth his fee would tear me to shreds if I said that without any corroborating evidence.’

  ‘Have we got any?’ asked Benbow.

  ‘Those leg injuries are very bad indeed – both main arteries torn across. Yet the sergeant here tells me that there wasn’t much blood at the scene of the crash and certainly her kidneys and heart show not the slightest sign of severe haemorrhage. So I wouldn’t be surprised if her circulation wasn’t going when she hit the bridge – dead already, in fact.’

  He made a final run-through with his comb in front of the tiny mirror. ‘And the last things, of course, are the alcohol and suspicion of drugs.’

  Soames picked up his black instrument bag and made for the door.

  ‘Let’s have a look at this car then, shall we?’

  The whole posse drove the mile to the police station and went round the back to where the wrecked Sunbeam was garaged.

  As they walked across the yard, Benb
ow raised the question of the yellow thread. ‘What’s the significance of that?’

  The forensic expert shrugged. ‘Maybe nothing at all, but it was driven down from the surface into the scalp wound. It may be a contact trace for the thing that hit her, unless we find lots more of it in the car – upholstery fibre or some such thing.’

  They reached the Sunbeam and clustered around it. Soames squinted inside and looked around the windscreen area.

  ‘Nothing there – no fancy mirrors or spotlights sticking out. Anyway, it was too heavy a smack for anything flimsy like that to have caused the wound.’

  ‘Any idea what it could have been?’ hazarded Bray.

  ‘Almost anything heavy – up to about an inch wide. Seems to have been a regular shape, but I can’t say any more than that. There’s more bullshine talked about the shape of blunt instruments than anything else in this game!’

  Bray had wandered around to the back of the Alpine and was peering into the open boot. The crash had so distorted the bodywork that the lid was jammed wide open.

  ‘What about this?’ he called.

  The others joined him and he pointed to a wheel brace lying loose in the back.

  Soames shook his head. ‘Too big and too round … it would have punched a bigger hole than we’ve got … but that might do.’

  He indicated the long, slim starting handle clipped into supports near the spare wheel.

  Hooper bent down to look more closely at it.

  ‘Nothing to see but you never know … I’ll take it and the brace, just for the laughs.’ He slid the two metal tools into large plastic bags, taking care not to disturb any prints or foreign material on the shafts.

  The party soon broke up, Eustace Soames to his Saturday golf and the police to their homes.

  On the way back to London, the keen young Bray challenged his boss. ‘Well, sir, have we or have we not got a murder on our hands?’

  Soames sat regally back in the police Wolseley, his podgy hands folded in his lap. ‘I think so, lad, I feel it in me bones. But a lot will depend on you, Jimmy.’ He turned his head to Hooper, sitting alongside him. ‘If you find blood on those tools, or if you find enough booze or drugs in her blood to make it obvious that she was too far gone to have been able to drive, then we’re away.’