A Spoonful of Luger Read online

  “I realize that.”

  “Leave a nice clear space around you, that was you. And you haven’t changed, George. I don’t want that sort of trouble around here. I know what you mean by asking questions.”

  “But you’ve got a list?”

  “I have a list,” he said with dignity. “Eight names and addresses.”

  “Let’s see it, then.”

  He rummaged around, found it, and held it up. “I can’t let you have it, of course. I’m sure you realize that.”

  I said never mind I’d manage without, and the phone rang. As he reached for it I stood up and bent over his desk, as his attention switched from me.

  Bycroft on the phone was always something special. He seemed to be trying to crawl down the wire, be there himself at the other end and see for himself. All he was saying was, “yes, yes,” but his eyes were bright. I could just hear a mention that somebody called Sprague had been contacted. Bycroft said he’d be right down. He put down the phone, exhaled, touched his moustache.

  “Well ... ” he said. “We seem to have a murder.”

  I had been looking down at his list, reading it upside-down. I looked up. His voice had been strange.

  He got up and marched towards his coat, and thumped his hat into shape.

  “You might as well come along,” he told me. His tone suggested he’d be happier if he could watch me.

  “Dulcie?” I said dully.

  He stared at me. “No. Not Dulcie. It’s a man called Cleave.”

  I followed him out of the door. The man called Dennis Cleave was the fourth name on his list — which I now had in my raincoat pocket.

  2

  FROST, I thought, there’d be a frost that night. It was already sparkling on the roof of Bycroft’s Cortina.

  He drove out through a part of the town I had not seen. It was dreary, a ghost town in the drifting mists, whole streets with mean-looking shop windows boarded or blankly vacant. Here and there the odd shopkeeper was hanging on miserably. They were in for a major reconstruction. An element of humanity had died.

  Bycroft was talking all the way. He was tense, keyed-up, his nerves talking for him. A murder would be rare in this town, and he was already primed for the discovery of Dulcie. I don’t think I said a word. The notes beneath the name of Dennis Cleave had read:

  Forty-two. Follows young women. No charges. Questioned re. Annabelle Lester. Alibi.

  I wondered who Annabelle Lester was, and wished her name hadn’t reminded me of Anne.

  We came to a large island and crossed the by-pass. Bycroft said they were going to stick an M road through there shortly, and seemed to think he was already on it because he was driving too fast for my liking. Then we dived down a side road. The streetlamps disappeared and were replaced by infrequent private lights on the forecourts of a line of new factories on the right. They squatted low in the mist. On our left there was six feet of chain-link fencing, beyond it, as far as I could see as the headlights shot across it, was an expanse of bleak, seared landscape.

  Abruptly he swung into a lane on the right. The surface was unmade, deep holes filled with water disguising their depth. Bycroft was trying to avoid the worst, and became silent. There was a sour smell in the air.

  “There it is,” he said.

  In the mist ahead there was a glow lifting up into the night. As we came nearer I saw that it was from four lamps high from the ground, giving the peculiar impression that we were diving into a pit. He drew up beside a corrugated-iron fence. The lamps were searchlights suspended twenty feet above each corner of an extensive yard, their beams angled inwards. Just beyond us there was a double gate, wide open, and beyond the gate was parked a white police patrol car. The lane seemed to end there.

  A uniformed officer came and opened Bycroft’s door.

  “He’s in his office, sir.”

  We got out. I was aware of the quietness, emphasized by the distant hum of traffic. Just inside the gate was waiting the other officer, and standing beside him either a long-haired youth or a slim girl, I couldn’t see which with the corner light angling into my eyes.

  It was a car breaker’s yard. The fence seemed to extend all around the four sides and the harsh white glare covered the whole area. Piled high each side of the entrance were the tangled remains of a thousand cars, rusting and unrecognizable as shapes. They made cavernous sides to a twenty foot drive-in of slashed mud, but further back they fell away, and the ground was littered with the shells of more recent discards, distinguishable at least as vehicles. Along the rear right-hand side was a row of sheds, which seemed to have been constructed from portions of wagon or lorry, and in the far left-hand corner there was a low building. A light shone from one of its windows.

  We moved towards the light. The building was one of those sectionalized bungalows you put up wherever you fancy, and Cleave had fancied the rear corner of his yard. But the white-painted railings around the front looked incongruous, and the side and back windows would not have opened because they rested against the far boundary of corrugated-iron. Dirty curtains trailed at the windows, and I noticed the back of a television set at one of them. The lighted room was the nearest end one, possibly one of the bedrooms, which Cleave had converted for use as an office. He had put a door in the outer wall. It was swinging open, light streaming out and catching a column of mist.

  “He’s inside,” said one of the men, and Bycroft went to stand in the doorway. I hung back. The slim youth turned out to be a boy when he spoke. Nineteen or so, I guessed.

  “Christ,” he said. “It’s Dennis.”

  We were standing beside a battered Ford pick-up with a towing winch, not very much better than the de-nuded wrecks. My hand was on the radiator. It was cold.

  “You found him, did you?”

  But he only nodded.

  “Where’s Sprague?” Bycroft demanded impatiently, and I moved in behind him to have a look. Bycroft seemed reluctant to proceed without his sergeant.

  Dennis Cleave lay on his face in his office. He was dressed in oil-stained jeans, suede shoes, and a green roll-top sweater, over which he had an imitation leather jerkin.

  “Stone cold,” said one of the patrol car men from my shoulder. “There’s a bullet hole in his back.”

  Which wasn’t strictly correct. There was certainly a hole in the back of his jerkin, but it was a plucked one. An exit wound. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked like a heart shot. There wasn’t too much blood. The sweater would have soaked it up inside.

  I was looking round casually for the cartridge case, because the penetration suggested an automatic pistol. But there was no point in guessing, and I wasn’t very interested in the death of Dennis Cleave, anyway. Whatever the gun might have been there was no sign of it.

  Then there was a noisy parking of vehicles out in the lane. I looked back. An ambulance nosed into the yard, and a group of men rushed past it.

  Sprague, as I’d guessed, turned out to be the detective sergeant. We weren’t introduced. He swept in with his squad and took over, so efficiently that I was almost sorry for Bycroft. Yes, Dr Forrester had been informed and was on his way. Dust everything, Charlie, and over here with that camera, Geoff, and a couple from over there. Sprague was good, and he knew it.

  He was two inches taller than I am, and slim with it, but his face was very full around the jaw. It was also rather battered, one cut along his forehead still being recent enough to have a strip of plaster on it. His left leg seemed stiff. He had an irritating habit of moving his jaw sideways as he spoke, chewing the words, and an even more irritating one of smiling gently as he listened, as though he’d heard it all before and hadn’t believed it the first time.

  They turned the body over. Cleave had a round face and a moustache, and a balding patch in his dark hair. The point of entry was obvious, and there was an extensive spread of blood into the sweater. The expression on his face was more of surprise than fear.

  “Went right through him,” said Sprague. “H
igh velocity pistol, must’ve been.” He bent close. “There don’t seem to be any powder burns. I think we can forget suicide.” He considered it, his head on one side. “Shot from about four feet,” he said with confidence.

  I was pleased he could be fallible. No burns or powder marks meant the range had been more than two feet or so. But beyond that you can only guess, because bullet velocity doesn’t fall off very much in the first twenty yards. It was just too early to be dogmatic.

  Bycroft glanced at me. I’d been HQ’s firearms expert in the old days. I shrugged and looked away, not wishing to become involved.

  My guess that it had been a bedroom seemed to be confirmed. There was a faded pink shade around the bulb, and a narrow fireplace packed with empty cigarette packets. The floor was vinyl tiles, and clean. There were no curtains at the window overlooking the yard. Cleave had used a scrubbed wood kitchen table as a desk, on its surface a black phone, a tray for correspondence, and a heavy metal deed box with a brass handle, painted chipped green. The lid was closed. Beside the table, in the corner, was a wooden three-drawer cabinet with a tea caddy and a milk bottle on it, and against the back wall the top half of a Welsh dresser served as a general book shelf. There was an old Royal typewriter perched on the top.

  There was nothing to be gathered from it. I was feeling irritated and depressed. Things were going wrong. Unless I was misreading the indications, this case was going to interfere with the search for Dulcie Randall. Sprague seemed to have come rushing from there. And I knew Frank Bycroft very well. Puzzles fascinated him; they were a challenge to his intellect. He’d love this one. Most murders are straightforward, and you’re aware almost at once who’s responsible. This wasn’t like that. It had possibilities. Already I was sensing his eagerness. Not that he would deliberately relegate the Dulcie search to the background; he was far too professional for that. But he wouldn’t be able to help himself. He’d rationalize the situation, would even convince himself that it could be part of the same case. A child missing one Friday, and a week later a dead man who might have been a pervert. Damn it all, I realized, he’d have to link them. A murder would have the bigwigs from HQ hovering around like gnats. He’d be able to retain the murder case only if he could persuade himself, and perhaps others, that he was still on the Dulcie Randall search.

  There is a limit to what can be done before the doctor’s examined the body and they’ve got it cleared out of the way. Sprague reached that point. He straightened and looked around.

  “Gun?” he asked.

  “No sign of it,” said Bycroft.

  “Taken away?”

  “Not necessarily.” Bycroft looked out of the window into the floodlit yard. “There’s places to search. Plenty of scope.”

  Sprague looked appalled. “That lot?”

  “What’d be more natural? You run away, a hot gun in your hand, and toss it where it won’t be found — in all that rubbish. But it will be found.”

  Bycroft, though he’d spoken softly, had obviously decided. A little routine chaos was nothing to him.

  Then Sprague caught my eye. He took me in. I waited. Bycroft introduced me as a friend from way back.

  “Bill Sprague,” Bycroft told me. That he’d used the Christian name put it on a friendly rather than official footing, but Sprague merely nodded vaguely. Maybe he was still taking in what Bycroft had said.

  “We’ll need to know more,” said Sprague eventually. “Before we start tearing this yard apart. And I can’t take too many men off ... ”

  “We’ll know more,” Bycroft assured him. At that stage he was all confidence.

  Then the doctor arrived. Forrester was a GP whom the police called on from time to time. He was around fifty, a quiet and efficient man, not used to being hurried. There wasn’t much on which he would commit himself. Cleave had been dead anything from twelve to twenty-four hours. It was a clean heart shot, and Cleave must have died instantly. They took the body away on its long trip to the city pathologist’s, and the doctor left, with Sprague’s squad following him a couple of minutes later.

  “Now,” said Sprague, “we can get something done. There’s got to be a shell case somewhere and a spent bullet.”

  And he turned out to have been correct about the range. It would have been four or five feet, because the shell case had flipped into the fireplace and trickled down inside that pile of cigarette packets, which made it reasonably certain where the murderer had been standing. The sergeant lifted it out carefully on a pencil and produced a six inch steel rule from his pocket. He also had a neat little pocket magnifier. Dead efficient. Bycroft glanced at me, a bright light in his eye. Oh no, I thought, and turned away.

  “German,” Sprague said. “The firing pin’s slightly off-centre. It’s a 7.65 mm. A high-velocity cartridge. We guessed that much. This’d be a Mauser. Look at the length of the case. We’re looking for a Mauser automatic. Damn it all, they went out of production — “

  “How long is it?” I asked. I mean, you don’t want to interfere, but the record ought to be straight.

  For a moment he turned and looked at me, as though aware of my presence for the first time. Bycroft was silent, letting it mature.

  “Twenty-one millimetres.”

  That did it. The Mauser pistol ammunition had a twenty-five millimetre case.

  “Then it’s a Luger we’re looking for,” I told him. Then because he glared, “not a Mauser.”

  “Damn it, you’re only guessing,” he grumbled. And Bycroft smiled. I knew, then, why he hadn’t thrown me out long before.

  “I’m not guessing. The Mauser cartridge is longer. Look it up if you don’t believe me.” It was a mistake. Nobody likes to be told to look up things. “That’s a Parabellum 7.65, and you know bloody well the gun’s got to be a semi-automatic with a fully-locked breech. It doesn’t leave much choice. Even the Walther P38 uses Auto Pistol ammunition in their 7.65 model, and that’s a short case. There’s only the Luger ever used that case size, their own ammunition in their own gun.”

  “He’s right,” said Bycroft placidly, and I thought Sprague would explode.

  Bycroft obviously spent a lot of his time struggling to keep on top of Sprague, whose fierce efficiency and drive were apt to be overpowering. Any ploy was legitimate in his attempts to emphasize his authority. But he knew when to conserve an advantage.

  “The bullet,” he said, slipping in a diversion. “It must be somewhere in here.”

  Sprague found it in the woodwork in a corner of the window, chest high, which cheered him up no end. I lent him my penknife. The wood was fairly rotten and fell away easily, so that he was able to get the bullet out without adding any scratches. He cradled it in his palm. You could almost hear him thinking: now we’ll know.

  “Nickel-jacketted,” he said, peering at it through the magnifier. The bullet had gone right through Cleave, which meant that it had not encountered bone on the way, and the wood had been rotten, so there was almost no distortion. “Beautifully marked,” he murmured. “Eight rifling grooves. Four grooves for Mauser, six for Walther ... ” He glanced up, beating Bycroft to it. “You’re right it’s a Luger we’re after.”

  Bycroft said nothing. Just at that moment a silence was more telling than a sarcastic comment. I simply nodded in agreement. Sprague’s jaw was moving ominously as he put the cartridge case and the bullet into a plastic bag for the ballistics experts.

  Bycroft slapped his palms together and looked round him. Everything was coming along fine — so far.

  “Let’s have him in,” he said.

  Sprague looked at him, his eyes wide. “Him?”

  “The lad who found all this.”

  The sergeant could not have known about him, but Bycroft managed, simply by glancing at me, to suggest delicate surprise at Sprague’s ignorance. But I’d forgotten all about the poor young devil, and my obviously blank reaction somewhat spoiled the effect.

  Bycroft, however, had got it all organized. It turned out that the patrol car me
n had kept him inside their vehicle while they waited, and a brisk shout brought them all across.

  “Tony Finch,” said the officer, as he backed out.

  Finch stood blinking just inside the office. He was wearing wide-bottomed jeans, hiding his shoes. There was a broad, chased belt around his middle, a flowered shirt, open at the neck, with a red cravat, and over it all an imitation suede jacket with dangling fringes around the chest and the hem. He had a square chin and delicate features, no hair on his face, but the sideboards came down to his ear-lobes. His face was drained. The shock was growing in his eyes, and he didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  Bycroft hunted in his pockets for cigarettes. “So it was you found him, son?”

  Finch nodded, then shook his head at the offered cigarette.

  “How did that come about?”

  “I work here.” The eyes never left Bycroft’s face, and the voice was even and soft.

  “Saturday nights?”

  “Not Saturdays. He don’t open Saturdays.”

  “So you saw him last — when?”

  “Yesterday. When I packed in. Around six.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Connaught Street. Number eleven.”

  “That’s a fair way from here. How d’you get to work?”

  “Bike.” He nodded sideways. “It’s out there.”

  “You came here tonight on your bike?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why?”

  He did not reply for a moment. Then he gave an exaggerated shrug. “Just came.”

  “Saturday night?”

  “See if anything was doing, like.”

  “Any work?” Another nod. “In that outfit?”

  “There’s overalls in the shed.” There was a hint of sullenness in Finch’s voice.

  “A bit of overtime?”

  “Something could’ve come in. Something interesting. A crash job.”

  Bycroft glanced at me instead of at Sprague. It was not convincing, but he let it drop for the moment.