‘Two dozen cigarette ends of every kind from Craven “A” to gold-banded special orders. A half-sucked, spat-out, barley sugar sweet. The left leg from a china doll. A stray bullet from Cassandra’s gun. A certain amount of disturbance of the turf.’
Joe read out his list. ‘Just what you’d expect and all meticulously recorded by Superintendent Hopkirk who had the good sense to wait for daylight before he got his fine-tooth comb out.’ He consulted his notes and pointed here and there as they walked the grassed area across the street immediately opposite the admiral’s front door. ‘Something bothering you, Wentworth?’
‘Yes, sir. There is something … We’ve speculated that they must have been waiting here for quite some time … several hours … in a state of considerable tension. I’ve looked and I see no trace of the essential bodily functions one associates with males under pressure in a confined space, sir.’
He gave her an amused look. His men would have reported ‘No sign of anyone pissing under a tree, sir’. If they’d noticed. This girl took the trouble to phrase her suggestions delicately for a male superior. The least he could do was respond in kind. ‘Good Lord! Bladder control! Evidence of lack of it? No sign. You’re right.’
He ran each tree and shrub in review again and grinned. ‘As you say. Nothing of larger capacity than a pug dog has passed this way. No human had a pee in the night. This was their second staging point. They weren’t laid up here for any length of time.’
‘Sir, may I?’ Lily was already running south towards the next clump of shrubs.
Joe had caught up and was peering over her shoulder when she exclaimed and pointed. ‘There — under the large laurel. It didn’t rain in the night so the traces are still evident.’
They scanned the murder scene from this new angle. ‘Timing, Wentworth! It all depends on split-second timing. Let’s test it out, shall we? You’ll have to be the two gunmen and do the running about for me. Most of the curtains on the other side of the road are twitching, d’you see? They’ve probably set their butlers at the windows to watch. If they catch sight of a large man in a black slouch hat racing about in a suspicious manner, they’ll call the police. A woman in uniform won’t raise an eyebrow … You know the script. Ready? Go!’
He watched as his assistant choreographed the incident as she ran, imaginary gun clutched to her side. Bending low, she sought second cover from the trampled patch they had just examined, but only briefly, just allowing time for Lady Dedham to make her way from taxi to front door, then a few more seconds for Lord Dedham to speak to the cabby. Closing in. She counted out a further thirty seconds for distraction time afforded by the appearance of Miss Harriet Hampshire. And how lucky for the assassins that lady’s appearance had been! Under cover of this, Lily ran across the road and sidled down the path to take up position in the forward cover of the bushes near the door.
Joe called her back in his precise soldier’s voice, breaking the spell. ‘That all fits in very well. And I’ll tell you something else. I think that girl — Hampshire — could have been lurking about here as well. You have to look hard to see it but there’s an indentation here in a bit of earth. It’s too narrow to have come from a man’s shoe. It’s quite distinct and very fresh. What do you make of it?’
Lily knelt and peered. ‘The heel of a high-heeled shoe, sir. Evening wear? And why would a girl dressed for a night out be skulking in the shrubbery in this area? Sort of behaviour you expect to come across in Hyde Park after dark but not hereabouts.’ She looked at the faint outline again. ‘There’s a trail.’ Lily squinted and pointed. ‘She arrived from that direction. The house with the closed shutters on the first floor. Someone giving her shelter?’
‘Number thirty-nine.’ Sandilands referred to his notes. ‘Yes. Here we are. Hopkirk took a statement from the butler, a Mr Jonas Warminster. The owner is a gentleman who goes by the even more fanciful name of Ingleby Mountfitchet. Hardly fits the description of a Sinn Fein sympathizer … Mr Mountfitchet, who is a bachelor, ex-army, had retired to bed with his cocoa when he was disturbed by the rumpus that broke out in the street below. The butler assured him that the noise was a car backfiring and his master went back to bed. Where, judging by the tightly closed shutters, he still remains … sleeping something off? Avoiding speaking to us? Yes, Wentworth. I agree. Further and better particulars required, I believe. We should run a check on Mr Mountfitchet. I’ll give instructions to that effect.’ Joe looked up from his notes and said with emphasis: ‘Don’t worry, by the way — basic slog-about police work goes on while we’re here, dancing about in the shrubbery.’
‘Glad to hear it, sir.’ Her response was automatic, her mind elsewhere. ‘Look, sir — no woman would risk ruining her evening shoes and clothes in this wilderness in normal circumstances. She’d walk around on the path.’
‘Meeting someone? Hiding from someone? Lying in wait?’ Sandilands suggested.
Lily stood up again, an object clasped carefully between finger and thumb. ‘Long enough to smoke a cigarette, anyway. There’s lipstick on this. That suggests waiting about. Ambushing? Setting up a diversion?’
Joe produced a paper evidence bag from his pocket and held it open to receive the stub. ‘Not an enthusiastic smoker, evidently. Only a few puffs taken before she threw it away. Interrupted by the arrival of the taxi?’
‘Who do you know who smokes Balkan Sobranie, Holmes?’ Lily asked, laughing at him. She seemed to have been suddenly ambushed by their ridiculous situation.
He answered the question with a grimace: ‘Ah! If only it were so simple in real life. Balkan Sobranie, eh? You’re right. That would reduce our smoker to a select club of about ten thousand émigré Russians and as many Londoners who think it the smart thing to do. Anyone from a grand duchess who screws one into a six-inch-long Fabergé holder to the girlfriend of a Soho waiter who’s decided to have a flirt with the bohemian style.’ He sighed. ‘Still — worth recording and preserving. Perhaps Miss Hampshire will be able to throw a little light? I must check the plans Hopkirk has for re-interviewing that lady.’
‘We’re thinking the same thing, sir? On the same lines as Lady Dedham herself? She was convinced it was a third gun that fired the finishing shot from across the road. And we’re looking at evidence of a third party present at the scene.’
Joe nodded. ‘Yes. Interesting that in all the noise and horror Cassandra picked out a third gun. A killer still at large? I’ll tell you — while you two were upstairs, Hopkirk read out to me over the telephone the initial report from the autopsy. Dr Spilsbury had interesting things to say …’ He took out a notebook and found his place. ‘I give you the salient bits … Hit, in the first instance, by two bullets fired one from the left and one from the right at a distance of no more than six feet. One narrowly missed the lung and crossed the body to lodge in the muscle under his left arm, the other shot penetrated a lung and would, ultimately, have caused death. The coup de grâce was delivered from farther afield and from a higher-calibre gun. Something in the order of a Browning. In the hands of a marksman, I’m inferring from the doc’s comments. Clean shot through the heart. He was dead in seconds.
‘The first two shots came from guns identified as Webleys. As issued by the British army. Thousands of those about on the quiet in London. Old soldiers sometimes fail to turn their weapons in. Conveniently “lose” them. They get used to having protection to hand and can’t bear to give them up. Who am I to blame them — I have an illicit Luger at home myself.’
‘Have you any idea of the distance?’ Lily asked. ‘Of the lethal shot?’
‘Spilsbury’s estimate from an examination of the wound would place the gunman at the edge of the road, right where the taxi was parked.’
‘By someone standing behind and using the motor for cover? Inside it and firing from a window? Or someone at the wheel?’
‘As you say. I think we’ve finished here for the time being, Wentworth. Right — what do you fancy next? Shall I take you to view the wounded at the hospital? I can offer you the butler or the driver, though he was still unconscious when last I heard.’
‘No, sir. I’d really like to have a word with the prisoners, if you can arrange it.’
Joe was taken aback by the request. He looked up and down the street to gain time and his gaze returned to hover inches over her head as he replied doubtfully: ‘I don’t think I can sanction that. No. Not sure it’s a good idea. We’ll leave the interrogation to those who have the skills. Hard nuts these two boyos, according to Hopkirk. All they would offer at Gerard Street was false names. Sean O’Brian and Sean O’Hara if you can believe!’
‘John Smith and John Jones, in other words?’
‘Exactly. No address or comment can be wrung out of them. In view of their intransigence, Hopkirk had them carted off to the Vine Street nick where the officers are more used to dealing with such cases.’
He didn’t think he could make it clearer. Lily, according to her file, was attached to the Vine Street nick. She could hardly be unaware of their reputation. She appeared to select her next remark carefully, her voice controlled. ‘Didn’t you say one of them had a bullet — a.22 from Lady Dedham’s gun — lodged in his back? Wouldn’t one expect him to have been conveyed to hospital for treatment?’
‘A doctor was called in to attend, of course,’ Joe replied briefly, uneasy with the conversation. ‘Anyway, whatever their condition, these are not types a young thing like yourself would want to engage with at any level. I’ve seen them. Brutal killers. Products of the gutter. You’d hardly understand what they were saying anyhow. They’re refusing to speak in English. Leave these things to the experts, Wentworth.’
The constable glowered at him in a silence that rather smacked of contempt. He leaned slightly sideways to look under the brim of her hat. He straightened, snorting and sighing theatrically. ‘I had a cat once that could pull exactly the same face. It got its own way once too often and now features at third on the left in my mother’s pets’ cemetery. Come on then! But on your own head …’
As soon as they’d settled into the back of the squad car Joe began to murmur entertaining nonsense about Vine Street: the West End police station located in a side road off Piccadilly. Notorious to some members of the public, celebrated to others, the view of those receiving attention here was coloured by the seriousness of the charges brought. And by the class and attitude of the miscreant. Drunk and disorderly aristocrats hauled in on Boat Race night would relive their adventures for years to come. The carousing in the cells in the company of like-minded toffs, all caught at a hazardous moment in their wild night out in the capital, led to the formation of new friendships. Over fifty years a certain camaraderie had developed among those who could boast they had survived a night in custody at Vine Street. Over the port, moustached old warriors recounted with a glee equal to that with which they told the stories of their conquests the tale of their night in clink … ‘So there I was, pissed as a newt, caught making mating calls to Landseer’s south-easterly lion in Trafalgar Square … as one does … Thought I was being jolly smart giving my name as the Duke of Wellington, Number One, London, when they chucked me into a cell with — would you believe it? — Field Marshal Haig, Kaiser Bill, Alfred the Great and Jack the Ripper! Of course, next morning Justice Peabody showed his decent side. Let us all off for a fiver each. Except for Kaiser Bill who got charged a tenner for “demonstrating unpatriotic sympathies in his choice of nomenclature”.’
And, however deep the hangover, the wise and drily humorous reprimands of the Justice were always remembered and boringly trotted out verbatim after a passage of decades. One of Joe’s own uncles, he confided, had worked up a hilarious party piece concerning his own incarceration and release, one Ascot week.
The patient professionalism of the arresting officers as well as the understanding of the magistrate presented a comforting image of an England sadly passing and surely to be admired in these dark days, Joe was suggesting. He wondered at his emphasis. A bleaker version of the Vine Street ethos had reached his ears, though much detail was deliberately filtered out before reports were presented to the upper ranks. Unsure what awaited them, he thought it wise to draw a blind of good-hearted humour and irreverence over it for the moment.
The softening up continued as they sped down Piccadilly. Lily nodded and smiled and maintained a polite silence. Her own judgement of the station and its officers had been coloured by a closer experience and from the inside. She had admitted to no one that, on more than one occasion in her year on patrol, she’d held back from calling her colleague to arrest a suspect, out of pity and concern for the latter’s safety in what Sandilands seemed to want to present as a jolly gentlemen’s club. The young, the elderly, the feeble, the first time offenders, Lily reckoned had no place in that brutal environment. No one had caught her pulling her punches and releasing suspects with no more than a flea in their ear and now, she realized with a surge of elation, it was too late for her lapses to be discovered. She was resigning after all. At the end of the day.
‘Prattle on, Sandilands. Who do you think you’re kidding?’ Lily said, but she said it to herself.
Their car dropped them on Piccadilly and Lily set off to the station a few steps ahead of Joe, who paused to give instructions to his driver. She was greeted by the constable on duty at the door. PC Hewitt recognized her and hailed her from a distance with the joviality of a man looking forward to relieving his boredom with an exchange of police banter. Lily was known at the station for giving as good as she got and bearing no grudges. She didn’t look down on the men the way some of those toffee-nosed women did. She could take a joke.
‘Wotcher, Lil! On yer tod today, then? No scrapings from the park to offer us? Just as well. We’re a bit busy — it’s standing room only in there. Bedlam!’
‘Hello, Harry. No, I’m not alone.’ She waved a hand to indicate the presence of Sandilands, who was striding up the side road after her. ‘Not Halliday — he’s gone north. Instead, I bring you the commander. Or he brings me. Not quite sure. But we seem to be together.’
‘Gawd! That’s all we needed!’ PC Hewitt gritted out of the corner of his mouth. ‘What’s Young Lochinvar doing riding up again? Can’t they give him a desk to sit at? And what the ’ell’s ’e want with you?’ Hewitt gave her a look both salacious and speculative.
‘Oh, the usual,’ Lily said lightly. ‘I’m here to provide a little female insight.’
‘Lucky devil! I wonder what you can show him that we can’t?’
Smiling affably, Lily squared up to him. ‘Watch it. How’d you like to greet the boss hopping on one leg? These boots aren’t good for much but they’re damned good kneecappers.’
Hewitt grinned and, playing the game, jumped back, clutching his crotch. The girl had form. There was a sergeant in C division who had the limp to prove it, and gossip had it that the target zone had been some degrees north of kneecaps. He went into a smart salute as Sandilands approached and with a wink for Lily made a play of opening the heavy door with the panache of a hotel commissionaire.
But before they reached the charge room, the oppressive atmosphere of rage, pain, anger and despair had stopped even Sandilands in his tracks.