The Allingham Casebook Read online

  As in all the earlier crimes, there was absolutely no suspect. There were no visitors staying at Knole, Seaview Avenue, and so far, no one had come forward to report having seen the woman out with a stranger. I sent my story off and took a bus to the Kursaal. Half the town appeared to have the same idea, and I joined a stream of consciously casual strollers advancing purposefully up a threadbare path between ragged ill-used trees. The body had been found in a dusty glade where cartons and little scraps of paper grew instead of anemones. The spot needed no signpost. The police had got their screens up and I could see Inspector Tizer’s hunched shoulders appearing above one of them.

  The sightseers stood around at a police-prescribed distance, and here again nothing was new. In the last few months reams had been written about the avid, open-mouthed defectives who had come to stare at the last couch of each of the victims and here, as far as I could see, they all were once more. I felt certain I had seen the dreary man with the fascinated blue eyes and the watchchain full of darts’ medals at every road accident, case of illness in the street, or mere surface reconstruction at which I had had the misfortune to be present. The adolescent girl with the weeping baby brother was familiar, too, and as for the plump, middle-aged man with the broad smile, I was sure I had seen him, or someone like him, grinning at the scene of every catastrophe in my experience.

  I had a word with Tizer, who was not pleased to see me and had nothing to tell me. He is never sanguine and by this time his gloom was painful. I came away feeling nearly as sorry for him as I was for myself.

  The Press was there in force and I walked down the hill with Petersen. We came on Chippy at the turning where the path divides. He was busy, as usual, and he appeared to be taking a photograph of a holiday trio, two plump blondes in tight slacks and brassieres, with a flushed lout wriggling between them. There could be only one explanation of the performance and I was gratified, if surprised, to see he had the grace not to notice me.

  “Grafters and buskers on fairgrounds call it mug-faking, I believe,” observed Petersen as we turned into the White Lion. “What does he charge them? Half a dollar? It’s an interesting comment on the price of whisky.” He has an acid little voice.

  For the rest of the week the case dragged on. We had our hopes raised by several false alarms. Tizer thought he had a lead and went scampering to St Leonards with a trail of us behind him, but the chase led nowhere. From our point of view, it was all very dull. The weather turned cold, and three of the best hotels ran out of Scotch. I saw Chippy now and again, but he did not worry me. He was picking up plenty of work, I gathered, and, if his glazed eyes in the evening were any guide, appeared to find it profitable.

  He had a new friend, I was interested to see. So far, I have not mentioned Chippy’s friends. It is one of his major disadvantages that he always seems to discover a local drinking companion who matches, if not exceeds, the man himself in pure unpresentableness. On this occasion he had chummed up with the fat man I had seen grinning at the scene of the crime, or if it was not he it was someone very like him. I had nothing against the man save that if I had seen but the soles of his feet through a grating, or the top of his hat from a bus, I should have known unerringly that he was a fellow for whom I should never have the slightest possible use. He had crumbs in the creases of his blue serge waistcoat, his voice was hoarse and coarse and negligible, and the broad vacant grin never left his face.

  Chippy went about with him most of the time, and I was grateful for my release. I was agitating the office for my recall on the Saturday and should have left, I think, by Sunday had not I made a sudden startling discovery. Chippy was trying to avoid me, and not only me but every other newspaper man in the town.

  At first, I could not bring myself to believe it, but having ceased to hide from him I suddenly found I saw very little of him, and then that Sunday morning we met face to face on the steps of the Grand. In the normal way it would have been I who had become wooden faced and evasive and he who pursued me to insist on the morning snifter, but today he slunk from me, and for the first time in my life I thought I saw him discomposed. I even stood looking after him as he shuffled off, his harness clumping round his shanks; but it was not until I was drinking with Petersen and one or two others some fifteen minutes later that the truth occurred to me.

  Someone had asked if Chippy had gone, since he had not seen him lately, while somebody else observed that he too had noticed a singular freshness in the atmosphere.

  Petersen defended him at once with all that charity of his which is far more lethal than straight attack, and I stood quite still looking at the big calendar over the bar.

  Of course. I could not think why I had not realised it before. For Chippy, time was growing pretty short.

  I was so anxious that Petersen, whom I love like a brother and who knows me nearly as well, should not cotton on to my idea that I wasted several valuable minutes in which, I hope, was misleading casualness before I drifted off. From that moment I hunted Chippy as he had never hunted me, and it was not too easy an undertaking, since, as I have said, the place was stiff with pressmen and I was more than anxious not to raise any general hue and cry.

  I hunted carefully and systematically, and for the best part of the day I was fighting a conviction that he had vanished into air. But just before six, when I was growing desperate, I suddenly saw him, still festooned with cameras, stepping ashore from a so-called pleasure steamer which had been chugging a party round the bay for the best part of three hours. The other people looked to me like the same crowd who had tramped up to the wood behind the Kursaal the day after the body was found. The adolescent girl with the baby brother was certainly there, and so was Chippy’s buddy of the moment, the fat man with the smile.

  From that moment, I do not think I lost sight of him, or them either. Shadowing them was comparatively simple. The whole party moved, it seemed by instinct, to the nearest hostelry, and from there, in due course, they moved to the next. So, it went on throughout the whole evening, when the lights first came out yellow in the autumn haze, and too, when they shone white against the quickening dark.

  I do not know when Chippy first became aware that I was behind him. I think it was on the second trip up the Marine Boulevard, where the bars are so thick that no serious drinking time is lost in transit. I met his eyes once and he hesitated but did not nod. He had a dreadful group round him. The man with the smile was still there, and so was a little seedy man with a cap and a watchchain, and two plump blondes in slacks. I recognised them all, and none of them, if I make myself clear.

  I could feel Chippy trying to shake me off, and after a while I realised that he was going somewhere in particular, heading somewhere definitely, if obliquely, like a wasp to its nest. His red eyes wandered to the clock more and more often, I noticed, and his moves from pub to pub seemed quicker and more frequent.

  Then I lost him. The party must have split. At any rate I found myself following one of the blondes and a sailor who I felt was new to me, unless, of course, it was not the same blonde, but another just like her. I was in the older and dirtier part of the town, and closing time, I felt with dismay, could not possibly be far off. For some time, I searched in a positive panic, diving into every lighted doorway and pushing every swinging door. As far as I remember, I neglected even to drink, and it may be it was that which saved me.

  At any rate, I came finally to a big, ugly, old-fashioned drinking-house on a corner. It was as large and drab and inviting as a barn, and in the four-ale bar, into which I first put my head, there was no one at all but a little blue-eyed seedy man wearing a flat cap and a watchchain weighted with medals.

  He was sitting on a bench close to the counter, drinking a pint with the quiet absorption of one who has been doing just that for the last two hours. I glanced at him sharply, but there was no way of telling if he had been the same seedy little man with medals who had been with Chippy’s party. It was not that I am unobservant, but such men exist not in hundreds bu
t in thousands in every town in or off the coast, and there was nothing distinctive about this one. Also, he was alone.

  I turned away and would have passed on down the street, when I noticed that there was a second frontage to the building. I put my head in the first door I came to and saw Chippy’s back. He was leaning on the bar, which was small and temporarily unattended, the landlord having moved farther along it to the adjoining room. At first, I thought he was alone, but on coming into the room I saw his smiling friend reclining on a narrow bench which ran along the inner wall.

  He was still beaming, but the vacancy of his broad face intensified, if one can say such a thing, and I knew he must have ceased to hear anything Chippy was telling him long ago. Chippy was talking. He always talks when he is drunk, not wanderingly or thickly, but with a low intensity some people find unnerving. He was in full flight now. Soft incisive words, illustrated by the sharp gestures of one hand, flowed from him in a steady forceful stream. I had to go very close up behind him to hear what he was saying.

  “Trapped,” he whispered to his friend’s oblivion. “Trapped for life by a woman with a sniff and a soul so mean – so mean – so MEAN…” He turned and looked at me. “Hullo,” he said.

  I remember I had some idea that in that condition of his I could fool him that I’d been there all the time, or was not there at all, I forget which. Anyway, I certainly stood looking at him in surprise, without speaking. The thing that surprised me was that he had his old Rolleiflex, the thing he used for close inside work, hanging round his neck with the sight-screens, or whatever they call them, up ready for action.

  He returned my stare with friendliness at first, but I saw caution creep across his eyes, tom-cat fashion, and presently he made an effort.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  The barman saved me answering him by bustling back, wiping the wood and thrusting a tankard at me all in one motion. He rattled the money I gave him in the till and waddled off again, after nodding to Chippy in a secret important way I entirely misunderstood.

  “She was mean, was she?” I ventured, mumbling into my beer.

  “As hell,” Chippy agreed, and his red eyes wandered up to look over my shoulder towards the door. “Come in, son,” he said softly.

  A pallid youth was hesitating in the doorway and he came forward at once, a long cardboard roll held out before him like a weapon. He was white with excitement, I thought, and I did not suppose it was at the sight of us.

  “Dad said you were to have these and he’d see you tomorrow.”

  I could see by the way Chippy took the parcel that it was important, but he was so casual, or so drunk, that he almost dropped it, and did scatter some of the coins that he gave the boy. He carried them in handfuls in his jacket pocket, apparently.

  As soon as the kid had gone, Chippy tore the paper off the roll and I could see it consisted of four or five huge blown-up photographic prints, but he did not open them out, contenting himself with little squints at each corner, and I could see nothing.

  The smiling man on the bench moved but did not rise. His eyes were tightly shut but he continued to grin. Chippy looked at him for some time before he suddenly turned to me.

  “He’s canned,” he said. “Canned as a toot. I’ve been carting him round the whole week to have someone safe to talk to, and now look at him. Never mind. Listen to me. Got imagination?”

  “Yes,” I assured him flatly.

  “You’ll need it,” he said. “Listen. He was young, a simple ordinary friendly kid like you or I were, and he came to the seaside on his holiday. Years ago, I’m talking about. Only one week’s holiday in the year.” He paused for the horror to sink in. “One week and she caught him. God, think of it!”

  I looked at the smiling man on the bench and I must have been a little whistled myself for I saw no incongruity in the tale.

  “He was ordinary!” shouted Chippy suddenly. “So ordinary that he might be you or me.”

  I did not care for that and I spoke sharply.

  “His wife caught him, you say?”

  “No.” He lowered his voice to the intense stage again. “Her mother. The landlady. She worked it. Twisted him.” He made a peculiar bending movement with his two hands. “You know, said things. Made suggestions. Forced it. He had to marry the girl. Then he had hell. Couldn’t afford it. Got nagged night and day, day and night. Got him down.”

  He leaned towards me and I was aware of every one of his squat uneven teeth.

  “He grew old,” he said. “He lost his job. Got another, buying old gold. Used to go round buying old gold for a little firm in the Ditch who kept him skint. It went on for years and years. Years and years. A long time. Then it happened. He began to see her.”

  “Who?” I demanded. “His wife?”

  “No, no.” Chippy was irritated. “She’d left him, taken all he had, sold the furniture and scarpered with another poor mug. That was years ago. No, he began to see the mother.”

  “Good God,” I said, “and she was red-haired, I suppose?”

  “And mean,” he told me solemnly. “Mean as hell.”

  I was trembling so much I had to put my beer down.

  “Look here, Chippy,” I began, “why wasn’t he spotted? Why didn’t she spot him?”

  He took me by the coat collar.

  “Imagination,” he whispered at me. “Use it. Think. He married the girl thirty years ago, but this year he began to see the mother as she used to be.”

  Our heads were very close together over the bar and his soft urgent voice poured the story at me.

  “He’s been travelling round the coast for years buying old gold. Everybody knows him, and nobody notices him. Millions of women recognise him when he taps at their doors, and very often they sell him little things. But he was ill last winter, had pleurisy, had to go into hospital. Since he’s been out he’s been different. The past has come back to him. He’s been remembering the tragedy of his life.” He wiped his mouth and started again.

  “In May, he saw her. At first, she looked like a woman he knew called Wild, but as they were talking her face changed and he recognised her. He knew just what to do. He told her he’d had a bargain he didn’t feel like passing on to his firm. Said he’d got a ring cheap and if she’d meet him he’d show it to her and maybe sell it to her for the same money he paid for it. She went, because she’d known him for two or three years coming round to the door, and she didn’t tell anybody because she thought she was doing something shady, see?”

  “And when he got her alone he killed her?” I whispered.

  “Yes.” Chippy’s voice held an echoed satisfaction. “Paid her out at last. He went off happy as an old king and felt freed and content and satisfied, until June, when he went to Turnhill Bay and knocked all unsuspecting at a door in a back street and – saw her again.”

  I wiped my forehead and stood back from him.

  “And at Southwharf, and at Prinny’s Plage?” I began huskily.

  “That’s right. And now St Piers,” said Chippy. “Whenever there’s a new moon.”

  It was at this precise moment that the smiling drunk on the bench opened his eyes and sat straight up abruptly, as drunks do, and then with a spurt set out at a shambling trot for the door. He hit the opening with a couple of inches to spare and was sucked up by the night. I yelled at Chippy and started after him, pausing on the threshold to glance back.

  Chippy leant there against the bar, looking at me with fishlike unintelligence. I could see he was hopeless and the job was mine. I plunged out and saw the smiling man about fifty yards down the street. He was conspicuous because he kept to the middle of the road and was advancing at a perfectly extraordinary trot which had a skip or a gallop in it every two or three yards, as if he were jet-propelled. I was not in sprinting form myself, but I should certainly have caught him and broken my heart if I had not tripped over a grating thirty feet from the pub door.

  It was as I was getting up that I looked over my shoulder and sa
w Chief Inspector Tizer and the local super, together with a couple of satellites, slipping quietly into the bar I had left. It was just enough to make me stone-cold sober and realise I might have got the story wrong. I slid into the pub behind the police.

  Chippy was standing at the bar with Tizer on one side of him and the local man on the other. The five enlarged prints were spread out on the wood, and everyone was so engrossed in them that I came quietly up behind and saw everything over Chippy’s own head.

  They were five three-quarter-length portraits of the same man. Each man had been taken out of doors in a gaping crowd, and on each print a mid-section was heavily circled with process-white. In each case, within the circle, was a watchchain hung with darts’ medals and other small decorations, which might easily have been overlooked had not attention thus been called to them. In the first portrait the watchchain carried two medals and a cheap silver ear-ring. In the second, a gold clasp from a chain bracelet had been added. In the third, a small locket. In the fourth, a silver button. And in the fifth, there hung beside the rest, an ugly little tassel from an old-fashioned brooch.

  Tizer, who is one of those men who look as if they have been designed by someone who was used to doing bison, put a fist as big as a ham on Chippy’s little shoulder.

  “You’re trying to tell me you only noticed this yesterday and you had the outstanding luck to find the earlier photographs in your file?” His tone was pretty ugly, I thought, but Chippy shrugged himself free. Like myself, he was sober enough now.

  “I am lucky,” he said coldly, “and observant.” He glanced at the barman, who was fidgeting in the archway where the counter ran through into the other room. “Ready, George?”

  “Yes, he’s still there, Mr Wager. I’ve slipped round and shut the doors on him. He’s sitting very quiet, just drinking his beer.”