A Man Condemned Read online

  He drove away from the public house—a blaze of light amongst darkened houses—and switched on the radio. ‘Hullo, Zulu Zulu Romeo. Breaking and entering at The Cat And The Fiddle handed over to DC Laurie. Back on patrol. Peter Tango one seven, over.’

  The call was acknowledged.

  He turned down Manton Lane. He liked night duty. During the day one was merely part of a frantic rush, but at night one was a solitary watcher and the safety of the darkened houses rested on one’s shoulders. The city lived because it was being guarded. The thought made a man feel ten feet tall.

  *

  Night turn ended at six a.m. The rule-book listed for drivers the full routine to be observed on the handover of cars, but in practice, the outgoing driver usually said, ‘She’s all yours, mate, and welcome,’ and hurried off. O’Connell was more conscientious than most and he did give a brief résumé of his tour of duty, whilst the relief driver yawned inbetween grumbles at having to start work at such an ungodly hour.

  O’Connell reported to the duty sergeant and then returned to the courtyard and his own car, an Escort. He backed, turned and followed a moped on to the road. As he passed the moped, the driver waved and he flashed the headlights in return. Poor old Andy, he thought. Two weeks ago, his wife had taken off, leaving him with a three-year-old child to look after. That was one disaster he would never be called upon to face. Vera was like he was, old-fashioned about so many things. When they’d been married in church they’d both meant their responses—not like some of the couples who had one eye on divorce even as they said, ‘I will.’

  Two roads on he saw the beat sergeant. The county force was reintroducing beats, having belatedly discovered that the public felt a greater contact with the man on the beat, and therefore a sense of greater security, than with the man in a panda car. With law and order under greater strain than ever before, the relationship between police and public had become absolutely vital.

  He thought a lot, rather hazily, about the public image of the police because he couldn’t understand how men in uniform who tried to do their best could sometimes be so reviled by people who presumably were in favour of law and order, or by demonstrators who demanded protection and then the right to abuse their protectors. In his own small way, he tried his damndest to behave in a manner that would help the image of truth. Few of the other blokes at the station ever really worried about such things . . .

  As he approached his house, he saw that there was a car parked immediately in front of his gate. Since he had left that space at nine-forty the previous night, he vaguely wondered who could have come there since then. There was a space outside number 33—the owner had built a garage in his front garden—and he drew into this. As he switched off the engine, a man, carrying what looked to be a cassette-player, climbed out of the car in front and walked quickly along the pavement towards his car. Trouble at the station? Yet he didn’t recognize the man: a chunky face, made coarser perhaps by the shadows of the street lighting.

  The man pulled open the near-side front door and slid in; as he did so, he pressed the button of a flickknife, until then not visible in his right hand, and the blade snapped out. O’Connell tensed.

  ‘My mate’s inside the house. Cause trouble and your wife’s in trouble.’

  Not Vera! he thought frantically.

  ‘Start driving.’

  ‘What d’you want . . .?’

  ‘Drive, if you don’t want her raped silly.’

  The picture of Vera, nightdress ripped from her body, under the vicious weight of a man who was violating her, prevented any thought of resistance. He engaged first gear and drove out from the pavement.

  ‘Leave town on the Risehurst road. And just in case you try to be smart and contact one of your pals . . .’ He pulled up an extendable aerial from what was now clearly a transceiver and not a cassette-player.

  Whatever happened, there could be no chance of help reaching her in time, he thought, with sick pain.

  The car which had been parked in front of his house drew out and followed them.

  To reach the Risehurst road he had to drive in a rough semi-circle which took them through Epsworth Common, forty acres of grass, trees and a couple of artificial lakes. Halfway across, they approached a stopped panda car. The driver—a PC whom O’Connell knew well—was standing on the pavement talking to two youths.

  ‘Just keep it cool,’ said the man by his side. ‘You don’t want to find the goods damaged when you get home.’

  They passed the panda car.

  Beyond the common there was a mile of low-income housing and then, it was the end of the town and the fields began. To the east, the sky was beginning to lighten, but as they were heading north the headlights carved a way through darkness. A rabbit scuttled into the road, became bewildered and escaped death by a whisker; the barn of a farm was lit up for milking; a red post van, going in the opposite direction, passed them; a dog came out into the road, causing him to brake sharply, and bounded across and through the base of a thorn hedge, intent only on finding a bitch; above the noise of the engine came the shrill, seemingly tormented scream of a vixen . . . The normal sights and sounds of the countryside. Yet for him, nothing was normal.

  ‘Turn off for the Cleeton Hills.’

  ‘What d’you want?’ O’Connell spoke with quiet bravery. ‘I’ll do whatever you say to save my wife, but unless I know what’s happening I might do the wrong thing by mistake.’

  ‘First a short drive up into the hills and then a bit of a wait.’

  As he turned right onto the road which led to the hills, he desperately tried to work out what the men were after. His uniform? In the past, robberies had been carried out in stolen uniforms . . . If he did exactly as demanded, would the man watching Vera leave her unharmed? Some men experienced not compassion but a perverted passion when facing helpless fear. Suppose . . . He forced himself to stop supposing.

  The road had become a lane and then this narrowed still further as the banks on either side, topped by thorn hedges, steepened: it began to rise and the corners came frequently and tightly until they finally reached the crest of the hill and a T-junction.

  ‘Turn right.’

  Now, he knew, they were heading east and the next town of any size was Keighley-on-Sea, nine miles away, but all along the coast there were houses which offered rich pickings. Yet, if the men were planning to break into one or more of those, why come up into the hills? Why choose early morning rather than the middle of the night?

  ‘Pull in on the right.’

  He turned into the large car-park from which there was a magnificent view over a large area of the countryside, Fortrow and the Channel.

  ‘Stop the engine and turn off the lights.’

  The second car drew alongside and both engine and lights were switched off. The driver, using a torch, came round the bonnet.

  ‘Lower your window,’ said the man by his side.

  He wound it down.

  ‘Drink.’ The driver of the other car held out a bottle in his gloved hand.

  The order seemed so absurd that he didn’t immediately take the bottle.

  ‘Hurry it up.’

  He brought the bottle into the car. It contained whisky, a drink he disliked. He raised the neck to his lips and made a lot of noise as he drank very little.

  The bottle was taken from him and examined in torchlight.

  ‘You do like to make life bloody difficult for yourself, don’t you?’ said the man by his side. ‘Now, do you drink at least half of it down or do I get on the blower and tell my mate to go ahead and enjoy himself with your wife?’

  O’Connell drank heavily. He coughed, choked and thought he was going to be sick, but eventually managed to keep his stomach under control.

  ‘Hold the bottle up.’

  The torch was shone on the bottle and in the reflected light he caught a quick glimpse of the driver of the second car: young, quite handsome in a slick manner, a touch of viciousness about his features. />
  ‘All right, screw the top back on and put the bottle on the back seat.’

  He did this, turned back and waited, expecting a fresh order, but nothing was said. He stared through the windscreen and as he noticed how the eastern sky was now really quite light, he became aware of the fact that the whisky was distorting his judgement and distancing him from the present.

  The silence was eventually broken by the man at his side.

  ‘You can clear off home, then.’

  ‘Do . . . do what?’ he mumbled, suddenly finding that his tongue was no longer fully under his control, confusedly certain he must have misheard because they wouldn’t have brought him up here merely to drink whisky.

  The man said sneeringly: ‘It won’t be the first time the missus has seen you pissed . . . Now listen. When you drive off, you turn right out of here and right again at the first road. Got it? We’ll be behind you to see you don’t get it wrong.’ He opened the door, stepped out and slammed the door shut.

  Through an ever increasing alcoholic haze, O’Connell concentrated on what he’d been told to do. He started the engine, engaged first gear and accelerated. The engine died. A fumbling check showed him he’d been trying to leave in fourth. He started the engine again and managed to find first, but let the clutch out too quickly and the car kangarooed forward. By luck, not judgement, he kept the car going. He switched on the lights and turned in a wide circle. Ahead, two exits disconcertingly overlapped each other; he managed to concentrate sufficiently to reduce them to one and then drive through that on to the road.

  He turned right and found himself on the wrong side of the road. Very carefully, he pulled over to the left. Was it going to be a bit of a job to persuade Vera that really he hadn’t been having a whale of a time, swigging down the booze, while she’d been terrified . . . A turning off to the right. Hadn’t the man said to go down that? . . . Christ! he could have taken that a bit more carefully. Especially as the road went really steeply downhill . . . Into second and take it dead quietly . . .

  In a skilfully executed manoeuvre, the following Datsun drew out, came abreast of the Escort and the side-swiped it. The Escort lurched into the post-and-rail fencing and broke through it.

  There was an almost sheer fall of forty feet, an outcrop of rock and finally a slightly longer, if less steep, fall. The Escort slammed bonnet first into the outcrop, sommersaulted and continued to the bottom to end up on its roof.

  Chapter Seven

  With a feeling of relief, Fusil leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. His desk. Menton had been forced to return to HQ because of the pressure of other work and so now he was back in his own room.

  He lit his pipe. At least, he thought with satisfaction, they could now proceed along less orthodox lines, starting with increasing the pressure on the local villains because sooner or later if any of them knew anything he would start shouting in order to make life easier for himself . . .

  There was a brief, courtesy knock on the door and Superintendent Passmore entered. ‘Sorry to bother you, Bob, but I need a word.’

  Fusil stood, as much out of respect for the man as for the rank. Passmore picked up one of the chairs and set this in front of the desk, then sat. His heavy, round face was looking unusually grave. ‘Something’s cropped up that needs very careful checking out because it could make for one hell of a stink. You know PC O’Connell, don’t you?’

  Fusil nodded as he resumed sitting. ‘He did six months with us as aide, not so long back. A good worker, but too nice for the job.’

  Passmore grunted: he didn’t accept Fusil’s typically abrupt judgement that a man could be too nice to be any good in CID. ‘He was on night turn, in pandas; finished at six, as usual, handed over to his relief and drove off in his own car. So far as anyone here knew, he was going straight home. Then his wife rang through just before eight to find out what had happened to him and said he hadn’t arrived back at around six-thirty as she’d expected. Not that she was awake then—she slept through until just after seven. At first she tried not to flap . . . You know how it goes with wives.’

  Neither of them knew how badly his own wife worried when he was late.

  ‘The worry became too great and she telephoned. The duty sergeant said he couldn’t help immediately but he’d try and find out where her husband was. Almost at once, a report came through of a car-crash up in Cleeton Hills, giving the number. That number was put through the computer, which came up with O’Connell’s name. Seems that the car had started to come down the Otley road—that’s the one which is so hellishly steep—but went off and through the rails. By the time the car ended up at the bottom it was flattened. O’Connell didn’t have a chance.’

  ‘Poor devil.’

  ‘Traffic called in a recovery vehicle and they were able to reach the wreck from the bottom of the hill. They cut it open and got O’Connell’s body out. One of the PCs checked inside the car and found a bottle of whisky, miraculously intact despite the crash, a little over half full.’

  Fusil said, speaking slowly: ‘The obvious inference has to be that he was drunk. But I take it that there’s more to it than that or you wouldn’t be here now?’

  ‘During his night turn, O’Connell was called to a pub called The Cat And The Fiddle, in Ascrey Cross, where there’d been a break-in and a load of booze and cigarettes taken. We have to face the possibility that O’Connell stole a bottle of whisky, drove up into the hills and drank so much that he crashed when he tried to return home.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ snapped Fusil.

  Passmore was unsurprised by Fusil’s immediate reaction. A hard taskmaster, the detective was also an intensely loyal one. He would suffer no criticism from outsiders of the men who worked under him, no matter how hard he criticised them himself, and to question their honesty was to question his. ‘Bob, it doesn’t matter what our opinion is, it’s the inference that’s bound to be drawn by some.’

  Fusil contemptuously shrugged his shoulders.

  A touch of authority, and perhaps of impatience also, entered Passmore’s voice. ‘I know you’re working flat out over the bank job, but I’d be grateful if you’d personally look into this. I don’t want there to be the slightest chance of anyone claiming we’ve tried a cover-up.’

  Fusil tamped down the tobacco in his pipe with forceful jabs of his forefinger. ‘Where’s the bottle of whisky?’

  ‘In my office.’

  ‘Is it one of the brands the pub was stocking; can the pub identify it; could O’Connell have nicked it whilst he was there?’

  ‘I can’t answer any of those questions. I know no more than I’ve told you.’

  ‘Then you’ve been in a hell of a hurry to believe the worst,’ Fusil said bluntly.

  ‘It’s one of my jobs to make certain the name of the division stays clean.’ Passmore stood. ‘You’ll make quite certain, one way or the other, won’t you?’ He left.

  Another, Fusil knew, would have taken sharp umbrage at his last remark; but Passmore was a big man in all senses of the word and he understood that Fusil’s anger had been quite impersonal.

  Fusil phoned Detective Sergeant Walsh and told him to report down at Fortrow immediately, hanging up in time to cut short Walsh’s moan that he’d so much work in hand . . . They all had twice as much work as they could properly cope with, but when a policeman’s name was in jeopardy his case became top priority. Walsh whose lugubrious features had earned him the nickname of Sunny, stood the brown-tinted bottle of Haig on Fusil’s desk and used a camel’s-hair brush to paint aluminium powder over its surface. ‘There are dabs by the million,’ he said mournfully.

  ‘Right, then, we’re off.’

  ‘Off where?’ he asked, beginning to understand that there was less and less chance of his returning home in time for lunch.

  ‘Ascrey Cross.’

  Walsh carefully laid the bottle of whisky in a cardboard box and wedged it in position with plastic foam. They went downstairs and out to the courtya
rd and Fusil’s car.

  There was little conversation during the drive. Fusil was a sharp, discourteous driver and Walsh was the kind of nervous passenger who saw an accident happening long before the possibility arose.

  The Cat And The Fiddle was not yet open to the public and they went round to the side door. A youngish man, one of the assistant barmen, took them through to the sitting-room, warm from an open fire. Fusil introduced himself to Tompkins and explained the reason for their visit.

  ‘You’ve found a bottle of whisky what’s maybe come from here? That’s smart work and no mistake. How d’you do it? Nab someone with a load of booze trying to sell it at cut rates?’

  ‘Something like that,’ replied Fusil vaguely. ‘We’ve had a look at the label and there aren’t any serial numbers on that, but on the base of the bottle are three sets of numbers and a couple of letters. I’ve made a note of ’em here.’ He handed over a sheet of paper. ‘Would you check through what bottles of Haig you have on the premises and see if you’ve any with matching numbers?’

  ‘Sure. But, before that, how about a swallow of something to warm you up, seeing it’s a cold and windy day? The bar’s opening any minute so it’ll soon be nice and legal.’

  Fusil said thanks, but neither of them wanted anything; Walsh looked, if that were possible, a shade more lugubrious.

  ‘If you won’t go for anything stronger, you’ll surely take a coffee. The missus’ll knock up a really good cuppa in next to no time.’

  ‘That would go down a treat.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell her, before checking those numbers for you.’ He left.

  Ada Tompkins brought the coffee, sugar, milk and some biscuits on a tray and spent several minutes describing the terror of being woken up in the middle of the night by intruders. Fusil, knowing that any breaking and entering especially disturbed a woman because she experienced it as an invasion of her privacy, patiently listened and complimented her on her courage. People who had been on the receiving end of his sharp, impatient tongue would have been surprised to hear him.