The Allingham Casebook Read online

  “Robbery with violence and the RO boys,” he said with a wave of his hand and smiled contentedly as though he had made everything clear. “She was sixteen when he found her, and he’s given her hell ever since.”

  While he still held our interest, he mentioned Johnny Gilchick. Johnny Gilchick was the man who was dead.

  Oates, who was never more sentimental than was strictly reasonable in the circumstances, let himself go about Josephine and Johnny Gilchick. It was love, he said – love, sudden, painful and ludicrous; and he admitted that he liked to see it.

  “I had an aunt once who used to talk about the Real Thing,” he explained, “and embarrassingly silly the old lady sounded, but after seeing those two youngsters meet and flame and go on until they were a single fiery entity – youngsters who were pretty ordinary tawdry material without it – I find myself sympathizing with her if not condoning the phrase.”

  He hesitated, and his smooth grey face cracked into a deprecating smile.

  “Well, we were both wrong, anyway,” he murmured, “my aunt and I. Josephine let her Johnny down just as you’d expect her to and after he had got what was coming to him and was lying in the mortuary he was born to lie in she upped and perjured her immortal soul to swear his murderer an alibi. Not that her testimony is of much value as evidence. That’s beside the point. The fact remains that she’s certainly done her best. You may think me sentimental, but it depresses me. I thought that girl was genuine, and my judgement was out.”

  Mr Campion stirred.

  “Could we have the details?” he asked politely. “We’ve only seen the evening paper. It wasn’t very helpful.”

  Oates glared at him balefully.

  “Frankly, the facts are exasperating,” he said. “There’s a little catch in them somewhere. It must be something so simple that I missed it altogether. That’s really why I’ve come to look for you. I thought you might care to come along and take a glance at the place. What about it?”

  There was no general movement. It was too hot to stir. Finally, the Inspector took up a piece of chalk and sketched a rough diagram on the bare boards of the model’s throne.

  “This is Vacation Street,” he said, edging the chalk along a crack. “It’s the best part of a mile long. Up this end, here by the chair, it’s nearly all wholesale houses. This sand bin I’m sketching in now marks the boundary of two police divisions. Well, here, ten yards to the left, is the entrance to Coal Court, which is a cul-de-sac composed of two blank backs of warehouse buildings and a café at the far end. The café is open all night. It serves the printers from the two big presses farther down the road. That’s its legitimate trade. But it is also a sort of unofficial headquarters for Donovan’s mob. Josephine sits at the desk downstairs and keeps an eye on the door. God knows what hours she keeps. She always seems to be there.”

  He paused and there came into my mind a recollection of the breathless night through which we had all passed, and I could imagine the girl sitting there in the stuffy shop with her thin chest and her great black eyes.

  The Inspector was still speaking.

  “Now,” he said, “there’s an upstairs room in the café. It’s on the second floor. That’s where our friend Donovan spent most of his evening. I expect he had a good few friends with him and we shall locate them all in time.”

  He bent over the diagram.

  “Johnny Gilchick died here,” he said, drawing a circle about a foot beyond the square which indicated the sand bin. “Although the bobby was right down the road, he saw him pause under the lamp post, stagger and fall. He called the Constable from the other division and they got the ambulance. All that is plain sailing. There’s just one difficulty. Where was Donovan when he fired the shot? There were two policemen in the street at the time, remember. At the moment of the actual shooting one of them, the Never Street man, was making a round of a warehouse yard, but the other, the Phyllis Court chap, was there on the spot, not forty yards away, and it was he who actually saw Johnny Gilchick fall, although he heard no shot. Now I tell you, Campion, there’s not an ounce of cover in the whole of that street. How did Donovan get out of the café, where did he stand to shoot Johnny neatly through the back, and how did he get back again without being seen? The side walls of the cul-de-sac are solid concrete backs of warehouses, there is no way round from the back of the café, nor could he possibly have gone over the roofs. The warehouses tower over the café like liners over a tug. Had he come out down the road one or other of the bobbies must have been certain to have seen him. How did he do it?”

  “Perhaps Donovan didn’t do it,” I ventured and received a pitying glance for my temerity.

  “That’s the one fact,” said the Inspector heavily. “That’s the one thing I do know. I know Donovan. He’s one of the few English mob boys who carry guns. He served five years with the gangs in New York and has the misfortune to take his liquor in bouts. After each bout he has a period of black depression, during which he may do anything. Johnny Gilchick used to be one of Donovan’s mob and when Johnny fell for the girl he turned in the gang, which was adding insult to injury where Donovan was concerned.”

  He paused and smiled.

  “Donovan was bound to get Johnny in the end,” he said. “It was never anything but a question of time. The whole mob expected it. The neighbourhood was waiting for it. Donovan had said openly that the next time Johnny dropped into the café would be his final appearance there. Johnny called last night, was ordered out of the place by the terrified girl, and finally walked out of the cul-de-sac. He turned the corner and strolled down the road. Then he was shot by Donovan. There’s no way round it, Campion. The doctors say that death was as near instantaneous as may be. Johnny Gilchick could not have walked three paces with the bullet in his back. As for the gun, that was pretty obviously Donovan’s too. We haven’t actually picked it up yet, but we know he had one of the type we are after. It’s a clear case, a straightforward case, if only we knew where Donovan stood when he fired the shot.”

  Mr Campion looked up. His eyes were thoughtful behind his spectacles.

  “The girl gave Donovan an alibi?” he inquired.

  Oates shrugged his shoulders. “Rather,” he said. “She was passionate about it. He was there the whole time, every minute of the time, never left the upper room once in the whole evening. I could kill her, and she would not alter her story; she’d take her dying oath on it and so on. It didn’t mean anything either way. Still, I was sorry to see her doing it, with her boyfriend barely cold. She was sucking up to the mob, of course; probably had excellent reasons for doing so. Yet, as I say, I was sorry to hear her volunteering the alibi before she was asked.”

  “Ah! She volunteered it, did she?” Campion was interested.

  Oates nodded, and his small eyes widened expressively.

  “Forced it on us. Came roaring round to the police station with it. Threw it off her chest as if she were doing something fine. I’m not usually squeamish about that sort of thing, but it gave me a distinct sense of distaste, I don’t mind telling you. Frankly, I gave her a piece of my mind. Told her to go and look at the body, for one thing.”

  “Not kind of you,” observed Mr Campion mildly. “And what did she do?”

  “Oh, blubbered herself sick, like the rest of ’em.” Oates was still disgruntled. “Still, that’s not of interest. What girls like Josephine do or don’t do doesn’t really matter. She was saving her own skin. If she hadn’t been so enthusiastic about it I’d have forgiven her. It’s Donovan who is important. Where was Donovan when he fired?”

  The shrill chatter of the telephone answered him, and he glanced at me apologetically.

  “I’m afraid that’s mine,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you? I left the number with the Sergeant.”

  He took off the receiver and as he bent his head to listen his face changed. We watched him with an interest it was far too hot to dissemble.

  “Oh,” he said flatly after a long pause. “Really? Well, it d
oesn’t matter either way, does it? … Still, what did she do it for? … What? … I suppose so … Yes? … Really?”

  He seemed suddenly astounded as his informant at the other end of the wire evidently came out with a second piece of information more important than the first.

  “You can’t be certain … You are? … What?”

  The faraway voice explained busily. We could hear its steady drone. Inspector Oates’s exasperation grew.

  “Oh, all right, all right,” he said at last. “I’m crackers… we’re all crackers… have it your own damned way.”

  With which vulgar outburst he rang off.

  “Alibi sustained?” inquired Mr Campion.

  “Yes.” The Inspector grunted out the word. “A couple of printers who were in the downstairs room swear he did not go through the shop all the evening. They’re sound fellows. Make good witnesses. Yet Donovan shot Johnny. I’m certain of it. He shot him clean through the concrete angle of a piano warehouse as far as I can see.” He turned to Campion almost angrily. “Explain that, can you?”

  Mr Campion coughed. He seemed a little embarrassed.

  “I say, you know,” he ventured, “there are just two things that occur to me.”

  “Then out with them, son.” The Inspector lit a cigarette and wiped his face. “Out with them. I’m not proud.”

  Mr Campion coughed again. “Well, the – er – heat, for one thing, don’t you know,” he said with profound uneasiness. “The heat, and one of your concrete walls.”

  The Inspector swore a little and apologised.

  “If anyone could forget this heat he’s welcome,” he said. “What’s the matter with the wall, too?”

  Mr Campion bent over the diagram on the boards of the throne. He was very apologetic.

  “Here is the angle of the warehouse,” he said, “and here is the sand bin. Here to the left is the lamp post where Johnny Gilchick was found. Farther on to the left is the PC from Never Street examining a courtyard and temporarily off the scene, while to the right, on the other side of the entrance to Coal Court, is another constable, PC someone-or-other, of Phyllis Court. One is apt to – er – think of the problem as though it were contained in four solid walls, two concrete walls, two policemen.”

  He hesitated and glanced timidly at the Inspector.

  “When is a policeman not a concrete wall, Oates? In – er – well, in just such heat… do you think, or don’t you?”

  Oates was staring at him, his eyes narrowed.

  “Damn it!” he said explosively. “Damn it, Campion, I believe you’re right. I knew it was something so simple that it was staring me in the face.”

  They stood together looking down at the diagram. Oates stooped to put a chalk cross at the entrance to the cul-de-sac.

  “It was that lamp post,” he said. “Give me that telephone. Wait till I get hold of that fellow.”

  While he was carrying on an excited conversation we demanded an explanation from Mr Campion and he gave it to us at last, mild and apologetic as usual.

  “Well, you see,” he said, “there’s the sand bin. The sand bin marks the boundary of two police divisions. Policeman A, very hot and tired, sees a man collapse from the heat under a lamp post on his territory. The man is a little fellow and it occurs to Policeman A that it would be a simple matter to move him to the next lamp post on the other side of the sand bin, where he would automatically become the responsibility of Policeman B, who is even now approaching. Policeman A achieves the change and is bending over the prostrate figure when his colleague comes up. Since he knows nothing of the bullet wound, the entrance to the cul-de-sac, with its clear view to the café, second floor room, has no significance in his mind. Today, when its full importance must have dawned upon him, he evidently thinks it best to hold his tongue.”

  Oates came back from the phone triumphant.

  “The first bobby went on leave this morning,” he said. “He was an old hand. He must have spotted the chap was dead, took it for granted it was the heat, and didn’t want to be held up here by the inquest. Funny I didn’t see that in the beginning.”

  We were all silent for some moments.

  “Then – the girl?” I began at last.

  The Inspector frowned and made a little grimace of regret.

  “A pity about the girl,” he said. “Of course, it was probably an accident. Our man who saw it happen said he couldn’t be sure.

  I stared at him and he explained, albeit a little hurriedly.

  “Didn’t I tell you? When my sergeant phoned about the alibi he told me. As Josephine crossed the road after visiting the mortuary this morning she stepped under a bus… Oh yes, instantly.”

  He shook his head. He seemed uncomfortable.

  “She thought she was making a gesture when she came down to the station, don’t you see? The mob must have told her to swear that no one had been in the upstairs room; that must have been their first story until they saw how the luck lay. So, when she came beetling down to us she must have thought she was risking her life to give her Johnny’s murderer away, while instead of that she was simply giving the fellow an alibi… Funny the way things happen, isn’t it?”

  He glanced at Campion affectionately.

  “It’s because you don’t get your mind cluttered up with the human element that you see these things so quickly,” he said. “You see everything in terms of A and B. It makes all the difference.”

  Mr Campion, the most gentle of men, made no comment at all.

  They Never Get Caught

  “Millie dear, this does explain itself, doesn’t it? — Henry,” Mr Henry Brownrigg signed his name on the back of the little blue bill with a flourish. Then he set the scrap of paper carefully in the exact centre of the imperfectly scoured developing bath, and, leaving the offending utensil on the kitchen table for his wife to find when she came in, he stalked back to the shop, feeling that he had administered the rebuke surely and at the same time gracefully.

  In fifteen years Mr Brownrigg felt that he had mastered the art of teaching his wife her job. Not that he had taught her. That, Mr Brownrigg felt, with a woman of Millie’s staggering obtuseness, was past praying for. But how, after long practice, he could deliver the snub or administer the punishing word in a way which would penetrate her placid dullness.

  Within half an hour she had returned from shopping and before lunch was set upon the table, he knew the bath would be back in the dark-room, bright and pristine as when it was new, and nothing more would be said about it. Millie would be a little more ineffectually anxious to please at lunch, perhaps, but that was all.

  Mr Brownrigg passed behind the counter and flicked a speck of dust off the dummy cartons of face-creams. It was twelve-five-and-a-half. In four-and-a-half minutes Phyllis Bell would leave her office farther down the High Street, and in seven-and-a-half minutes she would come in through that narrow, sunlit doorway to the cool, drug-scented shop.

  On that patch of floor where the sunlight lay blue and yellow, since it had found its way in through the enormous glass vases in the window which were the emblem of his trade, she would stand and look at him, her eyes limpid and her small mouth pursed and adorable.

  The chemist took up one of the ebony-backed hand-mirrors exposed on the counter for sale and glanced at himself in it. He was not altogether a prepossessing person. Never a tall man, at forty-two his wide, stocky figure showed a definite tendency to become fleshy, but there was strength and virility in his thick shoulders, while his clean-shaven face and broad neck were short and bull-like and his lips were full.

  Phyllis liked his eyes. They held her, she said, and most of the other young women who bought their cosmetics at the corner shop and chatted with Mr Brownrigg across the counter might have been inclined to agree with her.

  Over-dark, round, hot eyes had Mr Brownrigg; not at all the sort of eyes for a little, plump, middle-aged chemist with a placid wife like Millie.

  But Mr Brownrigg did not contemplate his own eyes. He
smoothed his hair, wiped his lips, and then, realizing that Phyllis was almost due, he disappeared behind the dispensing desk. It was as well, he always thought, not to appear too eager.

  He was watching the door, though, when she came in. He saw the flicker of her green skirt as she hesitated on the step and saw her half-eager, half-apprehensive expression as she glanced towards the counter.

  He was glad she had not come in when a customer was there. Phyllis was different from any of the others whose little histories stretched back through the past fourteen years. When Phyllis was in the shop Mr Brownrigg found he was liable to make mistakes, liable to drop things and fluff the change.

  He came out from his obscurity eager, in spite of himself, and drew the little golden-haired girl sharply towards him over that part of the counter which was lowest and which he purposely kept uncluttered.

  He kissed her, and the sudden force of the movement betrayed him utterly. He heard her quick intake of breath before she released herself and stepped back.

  “You – you shouldn’t,” she said, nervously tugging her hat back into position.

  She was barely twenty, small and young looking for her years, with yellow hair and a pleasant, quiet style. Her blue eyes were frightened and a little disgusted now, as though she found herself caught up in an emotion which her instincts considered not quite nice.

  Henry Brownrigg recognised the expression. He had seen it before in other eyes, but whereas on past occasions he had been able to be tolerantly amused and therefore comforting and glibly reassuring, in Phyllis it irritated and almost frightened him.

  “Why not?” he demanded sharply, too sharply he knew immediately, and blood rushed into his face.

  Phyllis took a deep breath.

  “I came to tell you,” she said jerkily, like a child saying its piece, “I’ve been thinking things over. I can’t go on with all this. You’re married. I want to be married someday. I – I shan’t come in again.”

  “You haven’t been talking to someone?” he demanded, suddenly cold.