Despite the Evidence Read online

  The X-ray showed Kerr’s head still to be intact. A severe nurse gave him some tablets and said that if he took a couple he’d forget everything and sleep like a log: he told her he could never sleep through such intense pain and she replied that he was too old to make such a fuss about so little. A man in a frayed suit asked him to get a move on if he wanted to be driven home that night. ‘So sorry to trouble you all,’ he said, and became even more ill-tempered when it was obvious that they believed he really was apologising.

  When he reached his bedroom in the police hostel he sat down heavily on the bed. What a hell of an ending to his first night on the beer in weeks! He was so despondent, he even wondered if there were a moral to all this.

  *

  Fusil was late out of bed on Wednesday morning and when he sat down for breakfast in the kitchen he looked at the clock on the wall and said: ‘I’ll skip the eggs.’

  ‘You won’t,’ countered Josephine, his wife.

  ‘But I haven’t time——’

  ‘You’re not leaving here until you’ve had a proper breakfast, and that’s flat. Anyway, what’s it matter if you are ten minutes late? Who’s going to object? You do enough overtime for six and if anyone thinks——’

  ‘All right,’ he cut in hastily, ‘I’ll have the eggs.’

  Josephine turned back to the cooking. Her husband was a very stubborn man, but she had learned soon on in their marriage how to make certain he ate decent meals.

  Timothy, their son, came into the kitchen, sat down, and began to fidget with his knife. Fusil told him to stop and he did, but only for the few seconds before his father retired behind the newspaper. He’d far less respect for his father’s authority than did any of the members of C.I.D.

  Happily resigned to not being allowed to rush, Fusil ate a very good breakfast of two eggs and bacon, several pieces of toast, and coffee. He had a cigarette with his last cup of coffee before kissing Josephine good-bye, rumpling Timothy’s hair on his way to the door, and leaving.

  He drove to the station in his tatty black Vauxhall Victor and parked next to Superintendent Passmore’s very much newer car. He went up to his office, where his first act was to switch on the electric fire, although he did this without much hope that the room would ever really warm up. He checked through the crime reports before opening, and reading the mail. Last night seemed to have been relatively quiet, although there was time for many more reports to come in: a burglary, a small warehouse theft, a peeping Tom, two cars stolen and still missing, a third stolen and later found abandoned, three suspects brought in by the uniformed branch and questioned by Detective Sergeant Braddon, two of them being charged and one released. Finally, there was a note in Braddon’s handwriting to say that Traffic had brought in the C.I.D. Hillman. Annoyed, Fusil stared down at this note. When, if ever, would Braddon learn to make a report? Brought in from where? Why did it have to be brought in? He picked up the internal telephone and dialled Braddon’s room, but there was no answer.

  The mail increased his sense of irritation. Most of it was from other forces and meant laborious, unproductive work for the C.I.D. There were requests for witness statements, queries on the whereabouts of named villains, two extracts from suspected persons’ statements that must be checked, and photographs of two boys, aged fifteen, who were missing from home and possibly trying to run away to sea. Why not let ’em succeed? he thought cynically — nothing was better guaranteed permanently to cure them of that desire.

  He telephoned Braddon again and this time spoke to the detective sergeant, ordering him into his room. Braddon was a solidly built but ungainly man whose clothes never fitted him at all well. His face was heavily lined and his slow manner tended to suggest he found life too difficult to cope with: in fact, he made a very efficient detective sergeant, provided he was not called on to show too much imagination and initiative.

  Fusil picked up the handwritten note. ‘What the devil’s the use of this? You tell me Traffic’s brought in the Hillman. Why? Where from? Am I supposed to know all the facts by inspired guesswork?’

  Braddon spoke patiently. ‘It sounds as if you haven’t read my first report on the incident, sir.’

  ‘What first report — there’s nothing amongst this lot?’ Fusil brushed his hand across the papers and immediately turned up one he had somehow missed before. He swore, then read it. A motorist, Gervaise Tarbard, had been driving home in his Jensen when the car skidded on the very wet road and crashed into a tree. He’d been knocked out. When he’d regained consciousness he’d found a man lying by the side of the car, knocked out by the heavy branch of a tree which had been brought down by the wind. Tarbard had gone to the nearest house, less than a quarter of a mile away, and had telephoned for an ambulance. The hospital had later rung the station to say the patient, identified by his warrant card, was Detective Constable Kerr and that he was all right.

  Fusil looked up. ‘How is Kerr, in fact?’

  ‘He escaped any broken bones and the hospital sent him back last night. I’ve just telephoned the hostel and the caretaker says he’s still in bed.’

  ‘You’d better go and see him and find out how he is.’

  ‘Yes, sir. By the way, it means we’ll have to get the Frayton case put back.’

  ‘See to it.’ Fusil leaned back in his chair. ‘And if Kerr isn’t actually dying, ask him what he was doing out in the Hillman.’

  Braddon nodded, then left.

  Fusil checked his diary for any definite appointments and found none. He pulled across a pile of forms and began work on them. The first was a blank search warrant. He crossed out the alternatives, including the request to use force, since it shouldn’t be necessary and without it the warrant would be more readily granted, then put it in the ‘Out’ tray for taking down to the magistrates’ court later in the morning for the chief clerk’s and a magistrate’s signature. He recorded the issue of this warrant in the Warrants Book. He had just closed this when the telephone rang.

  ‘It’s Kywood, Bob. How’s tricks?’

  Fusil settled back in his chair. Some sort of complaint was coming because the detective chief inspector was speaking in his hearty man-to-man voice. ‘Not too bad, sir,’ he answered.

  ‘I thought I’d have a quick word with you about those thefts from the Glazebrook factory. There have been rather a lot of them, haven’t there?’

  ‘Four to date have been reported, but they’re too small to be of any consequence.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, Bob.’

  Fusil pictured the quick shake of Kywood’s heavily built head that would have accompanied those words. ‘So far, a fiver’s the most that’s been nicked.’

  ‘It’s not always the amount that really matters in a theft, Bob, it’s often the surrounding circumstances. I’ve told you that before.’

  A thousand times, thought Fusil.

  ‘The owner of the factory happens to be a close friend of Roberts, who’s on the watch committee. The owner says there’s a militant trade-union member in the factory who’s using the thefts to create unrest. If the matter isn’t cleared up very quickly, there’s going to be real trouble.’

  ‘That’s a matter for their labour relations, not for us.’

  ‘Essentially it’s a police matter, Bob, since the thefts are causing the trouble. What I want to know is, why haven’t we nailed the thief?’

  ‘It’s always hell’s difficult to pin down the culprit with sneak thieving.’

  ‘But have you really tried? I’m told that a detective did call at the factory yesterday, but he’s the first one they’ve seen and only the uniform branch have bothered with the matter before.’

  ‘I can’t tie up the whole C.I.D. with trying to solve a few penny thefts.’

  ‘That’s not the right attitude. Every crime has to be studied not only as a crime but also as an exercise in public relations. . . .’

  Fusil ceased to listen. Kywood was a man who trimmed his sails to every puff of wind. He knew it was totall
y impractical to ask an understaffed C.I.D. to bother much about sneak-thieving when there were dozens of far more serious crimes which could not be given full attention, but because the owner of the factory was a friend of a member of the watch committee and was having a moan, Kywood was determined to cover himself. Fusil rested the telephone in the crook of his shoulder in order to know when Kywood stopped speaking and then brought out his pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket and began to fill the bowl. Local politics bedevilled every small, independent police force — mayors had even been known to talk about ‘my police’.

  ‘. . . so I want you to nail the thief, now, and stop this matter going any further. I’ve assured Roberts we’ll do that.’

  ‘Did you also tell him how?’

  ‘You have the wrong attitude,’ snapped Kywood, and he rang off.

  Fusil replaced the receiver. He lit his pipe.

  *

  Kerr was dressed, but sitting in the tatty chair in his bedroom at the hostel when Braddon knocked on the door and entered.

  ‘How’s it going, then?’ asked Braddon. He crossed to the bed and sat down.

  ‘I suppose I’m getting better, Sarge, but I can still feel as if my skull may fly apart at any moment.’ Kerr gingerly touched the back of his head where his hair had been shaved, the wound stitched, and a small plaster applied.

  ‘They say it was quite a belt you copped?’

  ‘Yeah. And now what I want is to meet the bloke who did it and have a little chat. There was I, trying to open the car door and see if the bloke inside was dead, and some bastard comes up behind and wallops me fit to split me down the middle.’

  ‘Nobody walloped you,’ said Braddon quietly.

  Kerr spoke with angry perplexity. ‘What d’you mean, nobody? This bump on my head didn’t just grow.’

  ‘A branch fell on you.’

  ‘A what?’ Kerr stared at Braddon.

  ‘When the driver of the car came round, he discovered he wasn’t the only casualty. There were you, by the side of the car with a very solid branch half on top.’

  ‘The driver of that car never did anything more, I’m telling you. He was a goner, if ever I saw one.’

  Braddon smiled briefly. ‘Wrong again. It was him that reported your accident and called the ambulance.’

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  Braddon’s heavy features expressed his uncertainty. He ran the palm of his hand over the top of his head at the point where he was fast balding, then took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘Are you smoking?’

  ‘It would finish me,’ muttered Kerr.

  Braddon lit a cigarette. ‘Let’s hear where you’d been last night?’

  ‘We had a beer at a pub,’ answered Kerr carelessly, his mind still occupied with what Braddon had said.

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Templeton and me. He’s over at Farnleigh station — did his training with me.’

  ‘So you and he went on the beer?’

  Kerr belatedly realised the direction in which the questioning was angled. ‘Look, Sarge, it’s no good you thinking I was too tight to know what happened. I wasn’t.’

  ‘But you’d had a few jars by the time you drove away from the pub . . . in the C.I.D. car?’

  Kerr had forgotten all about the Hillman until now. He desperately tried to give an adequate reason for being out in it. ‘If you’re wondering about the car, Sarge, I used it to go to this pub to meet a grasser.’

  ‘But you’ve just told me you went boozing with Templeton.’

  He cursed his thumping head which seemed to be scrambling his brains. ‘We were both going to see the grasser.’

  Braddon’s features screwed up into a broad grin. ‘If I was you, I’d think up a better story than that when trying to explain things to the D.I.’

  ‘Maybe he won’t bother to ask.’

  ‘You must be joking! He’s already asked.’

  And all this because he’d tried to go to someone else’s help!

  Braddon searched for an ash-try and found one on the small, rickety chest of drawers. He stood up, reached across and picked it up. ‘Let’s have it straight, just between you and me,’ he said, as he sat down again. ‘Were you tight?’

  ‘I’d had a few, but I was fit. If I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have driven,’ answered Kerr virtuously.

  ‘All right, then. You tell me what you reckon happened.’

  Kerr related how he’d driven along the lane, seen the crashed Jensen, walked over to it and tried to get to the man inside, had thought he’d heard someone behind him and had begun to turn when he suddenly was knocked unconscious.

  Braddon stubbed out his cigarette. ‘What you heard must have been the branch breaking off the tree.’

  ‘Never. It wasn’t that kind of noise.’

  ‘There was a pretty good wind. Noises get all twisted up in wind.’

  Kerr tried to recall the quality of the noise, but apart from the normal difficulty of doing this, he discovered that his memory of events was fuzzy. He wondered whether the beer had affected him to a far greater extent than he’d imagined?

  Braddon waited, but when Kerr said nothing more he stood up. ‘When d’you reckon on returning to work?’

  ‘I may be fit by Christmas.’

  ‘Good. See you tomorrow, eight-thirty sharp.’ Braddon left.

  Kerr crossed to the bed and lay down. How was he going to explain the use of the C.I.D. Hillman to the satisfaction of Fusil — a man who’d treat the Archangel Gabriel with suspicion? And how in the hell had the driver of the Jensen gone anywhere but to the nearest morgue? And how could a branch breaking off above him make a noise immediately behind him? . . . Or were all his memories distorted by beer fumes?

  Chapter Three

  By Thursday, the wind had dropped to little more than force 2. The storm cones were down and the sea gradually died away so that the waves no longer broke right over the old breakwater to send spray slashing up into the air. But the rain remained as a fine drizzle and the dirty grey clouds which covered the sky invested the land with their own greyness.

  Kerr left the hostel at twenty-five past eight and stood at the end of the small queue by the bus stop. He turned up the collar of his mackintosh and stared dejectedly at the cars as they passed, sometimes close enough to send up a small shower of dirty water from the gutter. How was he going to persuade Fusil that the Hillman had been out on Tuesday night on work, not pleasure?

  A bus arrived. Half a dozen people boarded it, whilst the remainder patiently waited for the other service. Kerr paid the conductor — sitting in his small booth under the stairs — the new fare of sixpence and went upstairs. A month ago the fare had been fourpence. When would the police’s pay be raised fifty per cent?

  He stared out of the window as the bus drove off. At least the day would have one bright side to it — Helen was due back that evening and he was invited to supper. Mrs. Barley was a really good cook — surely she’d lay on a special meal to welcome home her only daughter? Would it be steak-and-kidney pudding with that thick gravy that was almost a meal in itself, or perhaps her Cornish pasties which bore no resemblance to the kind one bought in a shop? Even though he had only just eaten a very solid breakfast, the thought of such delicious food made him feel hungry.

  He arrived at the station. Welland was in the C.I.D. general room and his greeting was typical. ‘Here come the walking wounded.’ He grinned. ‘You ought to look where you’re going next time and not walk into trees.’ He was a large man, with a boisterous nature: if he sometimes gave offence, because he seldom thought about the effect his words might have, his patent good humour prevented this offence from being too great. No one could really dislike him.

  Kerr sat down behind his table.

  ‘So how are you feeling?’ asked Welland.

  ‘I wasn’t too bad before I came in here.’

  Welland laughed. ‘What you need now is a sharp run round the block. Shake the old liver up.’


  ‘To hell with my liver. I need a month’s rest in the south of France.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get any rest down there, boy, not with all those bikinis walking around.’

  ‘Give over. You don’t think I’d worry about them?’

  ‘Unless you were dead, you would.’

  Kerr slumped back in his chair. To a happily engaged man, a whole beachful of scantily clad maidens was of little interest. . . . The sea was azure blue, the sand was golden, the sun was burning hot. He walked towards the sea. A blonde, lying on her front and with the top of her bikini undone to gain a tan unmarked by any strap, looked up at him, careless that she’d raised herself up slightly. She was svelte, excitingly beautiful, and her eyes told him that from the moment she’d seen him she no longer knew any willpower. . . . Kerr sighed. In Fortrow it was drizzling and almost certainly the nearest female to him was Miss Wagner: not even his imagination could conjure her up in a bikini.

  The internal telephone rang, and it was Fusil, demanding to know if Kerr had yet arrived.

  As Kerr replaced the receiver, Welland said: ‘Keep your powder dry.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ muttered Kerr, as he crossed to the door.

  ‘That’s what they used to say to troops going into battle.’

  Kerr certainly felt as if there was a battle ahead of him as he walked along the corridor to the D.I.’s room. Fusil had forgotten that once upon a time he’d been young and almost certainly not always done exactly as he should. He’d also forgotten that the object of living was to enjoy oneself. All in all, Kerr decided as he knocked on the door and went in, it would have been very much better for all concerned if he’d spent Tuesday evening at the hostel, reading Newbold’s Treatise on Living the Good Life.

  Fusil was checking through a number of typewritten reports that had to be sent to Kywood at borough H.Q. in west division. He looked up. ‘I’m glad to see you’re better.’