The Twenty-Third Man Read online

  The typescripts, in themselves, were of no further help, but they did give the name of the doctor who had first examined the body. As she was a fellow-professional, she thought that there would be no difficulty in obtaining an interview with him. Neither was there. Doctor Brownlow knew of her reputation and replied, over the telephone, that he would be delighted to accept her invitation to lunch with her at her club and that his morning surgery finished, with luck, at noon at that time of year, when his patients were mostly on holiday.

  He presented himself at half past one, refused sherry or a cocktail and drank tomato juice. He was a lean, grey-haired man of fifty who acted as police doctor for his district and was honorary surgeon to the local football club.

  ‘I’m a physician by training,’ he said, shaking pepper over his soup, ‘but I know enough about bones and muscles to deal with footballers’ injuries. Now, what do you want to know about this young fellow found scuppered outside the Old Bull and Bush?’

  ‘Everything you can tell me. I’ve read the newspaper reports, but there are usually one or two details which don’t get into the Press.’

  ‘I can’t think of any in this particular connexion, though.’

  ‘The weapon?’

  ‘A thing like the knives they sell to Boy Scouts.’

  ‘Had only one blow been struck?’

  ‘No. But I formed the impression, when I performed the post-mortem, that the first blow had caused death and that the others had been inflicted after death had taken place. The blow which was the fatal one was in the centre back just below the shoulder-blades, and it had penetrated the heart. Copy-book stuff, in short.’

  ‘But there were other wounds?’

  ‘Yes. Several. You’d expect that, if he was attacked by a gang.’

  ‘Are not razor-blades more common than knives in these cases?’

  ‘Well, I expect it depends on the gang leader. If he decides that the trade-mark is a knife-wound. …’

  ‘Yes, I see. What about signs of a struggle?’

  ‘None. It would have been a quick job.’

  ‘But I understand there was a fight, and that the murdered man’s friend – his brother-in-law, incidentally – ran out of it.’

  ‘Oh, the chap who telephoned! Well, I dare say there was a scuffle, and then the first knife-thrust did the trick.’

  ‘What was the weather like?’

  ‘A fine night, but very dark.’

  ‘Were the public houses still open?’

  ‘It was after midnight when I was called.’

  ‘That is very interesting, but, of course, it is clear enough what must have happened. The man who ran away must have taken a long time to make certain that the gang had gone before he decided to go back. It would be quite in keeping with his character, as far as I have been able to judge it. Was the body, so to speak, hidden away?’

  ‘Well, I gather you’ve seen the public house. The body had been dragged some distance from where it had fallen. The clothes had that appearance. When I saw it first it was in that passage-way beside the men’s convenience, well out of the way of passers-by.’

  ‘It seems strange that Mr Telham found it. I suppose he had a torch and made a thorough search. I wonder how far from home the murdered man was? I don’t remember reading his address in the reports.’

  A further examination of the typescripts that afternoon did not produce the address, so she rang up her grand-nephew.

  ‘Same address as Telham,’ he replied. ‘That’s in the typescript, surely?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, it is. I didn’t realize that it was the same house. Then they were a long way from home.’

  ‘Well, you don’t usually pub-crawl in your own locality – not if you’re having a real night out, you know. What surprises me is that there were only the two of them. You usually go in a body, so to speak, and stand the rounds in turn. I once had to drink fourteen pints on a pub-crawl. Tell you the whole sordid story at some time.’

  Dame Beatrice replaced the receiver. She felt she had food for thought. The picture, as she had first conceived it, had changed. The fight had not been heard from inside the public house – that she could allow to pass as a strong probability – but that there might have been a roistering party engaged in getting drunk with Telham and the murdered Ian Lockerby she had not allowed for, any more than she had given consideration to the fact that the Lockerbys might have had Telham – who, after all, was unmarried and was devoted to his sister – as a member of their household. She wondered what had happened to the house, and whether the people in it, if it was still occupied, could give her any further information.

  She summarized her knowledge again, adopting a different view-point. First, there was nothing in the medical evidence to suggest that the murder necessarily had taken place after the public houses closed. Secondly, the body had been dragged from the place where the fatal injury had been inflicted into a passage-way where it might have remained unnoticed until the morning. A man lying apparently dead-drunk near the entrance to a public house privy was not likely to have been the recipient of help or the object of concern. Even a possible Good Samaritan would have done no more than give the prone figure a shake and advise it to get up and go home.

  So far, so good, thought Dame Beatrice; but other thoughts obtruded themselves. Telham, already connected, in a sense, with the death of Lockerby (which he might or might not have been able to prevent), had arrived at the Hotel Sombrero in a state of nervous tension. His behaviour with regard to Clun showed the state of his mind. Right, thought Dame Beatrice, and natural enough, if he blamed his own cowardice for Ian Lockerby’s death. There followed the so-far-unexplained and sudden exit from the hotel of the philandering but otherwise seemingly harmless Emden. There was no obvious connexion between the arrival of the ship’s party and the flight of Lothario, but it remained a curious and interesting feature, the more so as Emden himself, soon after his disappearance, had been murdered. There was also the coincidence that the murdered Lockerby and the manslaughtering Clun had been acquainted with one another before Clun’s conviction.

  Then, Telham was not the only person to exhibit nervous strain. Still unexplained were Caroline’s outbursts on the occasion of her first visit to the Cave of Dead Men. She might have had guilty knowledge of the death of Emden; she might have had a recurrence of the feeling of horror her husband’s murder had engendered; she might even be clairvoyante. Dame Beatrice shrugged her aside, but only temporarily. Caroline’s reactions would bear further examination.

  She considered afresh her grandnephew’s theory that Lockerby and Telham had been not a duo but a froth-blowers’ chorus. She shook her head. It was an untenable theory. Interested, like other psychiatrists, in the phenomenon of the post-war street gangs, she realized that the gangs only went into battle where they were certain of success. The nearest analogies, she thought, were the Mohawk or Mohock gangs of unruly, cruel, and cowardly youths (of good family, too!) who were the terror of the old and the unarmed in eighteenth-century London. No. Whatever else was uncertain, it did not seem possible that Lockerby and Telham had been members of a party large enough to engage the street youths on anything like equal terms.

  There remained the interesting but possibly unrelated facts that the deaths of Lockerby and Emden had both been obtained by knife-thrusts, and that, in both cases, the knife had been left in the wound. Exhaustive inquiries by the police had failed to produce evidence against the hand which had struck down Lockerby, and the Yard’s fingerprint experts had found no traces on the hilt of the knife. That produced another interesting speculation. Did knife and razor gangs habitually go about gloved? Dame Beatrice went to the telephone and rang up Detective Chief-Inspector Robert Gavin. He was not, he announced, an expert on gang-warfare, but he thought that, in summer, the gangs were unlikely to wear gloves. In any case, he added, the majority of the gangsters were ‘unknown’ to the police.

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘And I am no
t referring to the gangs and their glovelessness. How is Laura?’

  ‘Into mischief, I strongly suspect, in spite of the restraining influence of my son and heir. Come and have dinner with me somewhere. I’m pining away. You’ve robbed me of the wife of my bosom and sent her gallivanting to Hombres Muertos, so the least you can do is to help relieve my lonely estate of grass widower.’

  ‘No. You come and have dinner here with me, and I’ll despatch George to Hampshire forthwith to bring back Henri to cook our meal. Left to his own devices and without the incubus of a back-seat driver, he can be there and back in under four hours. You had better have a good substantial tea and we’ll dine at nine.’

  During Laura’s holiday, Gavin was sharing a bachelor flat with a friend, but the friend, another policeman, had been called to a case which was proving too hard a nut for the county police to crack unaided, so Gavin was glad enough of a change from a lonely dinner. He turned up in Kensington at eight and announced that he had come early to gossip, in case he was called away.

  ‘Not that I expect to be,’ he added, tucking Dame Beatrice’s arm in his and leading her to the settee. ‘Now, then, you put your feet up. You’ve been gadding and are tired. I can always tell.’

  Dame Beatrice, who was never in the least tired, gave an amiable cackle and let him fuss. He had long since been treated like a favourite son and relished this position in the household.

  ‘Now,’ she said, when he had settled her with cushions and a foot-wrap, ‘sit where I can see you. Listen carefully. I want you to pick all the holes you can in my argument.’

  ‘Police holes?’

  ‘And defending counsel holes. And any other holes you can think of. I don’t want to be right, so I shall be most grateful for any proof that I’m wrong.’

  ‘You’re never wrong, Dame B. But fire away, and I’ll whack in the dynamite and blow you sky-high. It’s the island business, I suppose? Made up your mind who did it?’

  ‘Not entirely. But I don’t like what I know.’

  ‘Something fishy you’ve discovered?’

  ‘Plural. Some things, and odd rather than fishy, if I interpret that word aright.’

  Gavin grunted in Gaelic.

  ‘We – I say we, meaning the police – questioned that chap Telham pretty closely, you know,’ he said. ‘There was a theory, at one point in the inquiry, that he’d done the job himself and that his story of being attacked by a Teddy gang was just so much boloney.’

  ‘Really? But that is just what I myself have been wondering. Theoretically it would fit rather well. What made the police suspect Telham?’

  ‘They thought his story was pretty thin. It was obvious that his sister’s marriage wasn’t altogether a happy one, and it was known that Telham was very fond of Caroline. Tell you what. If you like to come along to the Yard at some time I’ll manage for you to have a look at the police records of the case. You can’t take them off the building, of course, but you can sit in my office and study them to your heart’s content. They’ll tell you a lot that never got into the newspapers. How about it?’

  ‘I should be most grateful. And now you would like something to drink.’

  ‘Lots and lots of beer, please. Shall I ring the bell? What are you having? Sherry?’

  ‘No. You shall mix me a White Lady and we will drink Laura’s health.’

  ‘If I know Laura, she’s as brown as an Indian by now, with the sea and the sun. I suppose Hombres Muertos is a bit of the Garden of Eden, isn’t it?’

  ‘Complete with more than one serpent.’ She regaled him, as he drank his beer, with the rich and vivid histories of the people she had met in the Hotel Sombrero de Miguel Cervantes, rounding off the tale with Pilar’s account of the illegal and horrid enterprises of the bird-loving Mrs Angel. It was doubtless regrettable of him, but Gavin choked with laughter.

  ‘I’d like to meet the old girl,’ he said. ‘By heck, though, you know, Dame B., what with her cynical activities and old Peterhouse’s sinister orchids and the Ruiz boy in South America, Hombres Muertos sounds like one of civilization’s hot spots, doesn’t it? And that chap Clun – you say you’ve found a slight connexion between his case and the one you’re on? Well to me, he sounds just the lad.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. He wouldn’t put a knife in a man’s back. That’s one of the things I don’t much like about these murders. They’re rather nasty ones.’

  ‘Dirty, yes, that’s true. Still, the fifteenth-century Italians had a word for it, and who are we to criticize the fellow-countrymen of Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi?’

  ‘It is all too obvious, I suppose,’ said Dame Beatrice, following her own line of thought. ‘It all ties up far too neatly. The jealous brother, the stabbing, the stupid story about the street gang, not one member of which has ever been found, the flight from England, the unbalanced outbreaks of anger, the second stabbing, the otherwise inexplicable behaviour of Caroline in the cave of the dead men …’

  ‘Ah, yes, but what would be the motive for the second stabbing?’

  ‘That’s just the point. There doesn’t seem to be one unless Lockerby’s murderer suddenly realized that, in coming to Hombres Muertos, he had come to the place where lived the one man who was in a position to give the game away – in other words, the one and only witness of his crime.’

  ‘But why should the murderer have gone to Hombres Muertos? Never mind. You come along tomorrow for the dossier, and see what you think when you have read it.’

  CHAPTER 12

  The Case Against a Brother-in-Law

  DAME BEATRICE SPENT an interesting and instructive day in Gavin’s office. Supplied with police notes and the signed statements of everybody who could possibly have been in a position to give any evidence whatever concerning the cause of Lockerby’s death, she read and scribbled, read and scribbled all day except for a short break for lunch in a restaurant where they knew her and would serve her quickly.

  The police certainly had pushed Telham as hard as the law allowed. Time and again he had been interrogated. His signed statement, however, bore out the verbal answer he had given at the very first interview, when he had telephoned the police and they had come to inspect the body. It was obvious that, if Telham had committed the murder, he not only had planned it exceptionally carefully but had had the intelligence to anticipate the line the police would take with him and had prepared answers to their questions. Moreover, his statement had the merit of simplicity. He had attempted no embroidery and had dug no pit for his own feet.

  In addition to the statement, written in the formal if stilted language of the police, there was also that other, far more illuminating statement given in Telham’s own words and taken down in shorthand. Dame Beatrice studied the two side by side, but the signed statement was a fair enough précis of the other. She put it aside, and concentrated on the shorthand version.

  ‘We had been out for the evening and both had too much to drink. Lockerby had taken much more than I had, and I was worried about getting him home. We had started out by visiting big, respectable pubs, but at the fourth one they would not serve us and advised us to get out. I wanted to call it a day, but Lockerby got mad at being refused a drink. He blasted the place to hell and said he knew somewhere where they would serve us. I suggested we went home. I was thinking of my sister and how she would blame me if I took him back completely plastered. He said that I could do what I liked, but that he was not going home until he had had another drink.

  ‘I did not like to leave him, seeing the state he was in. I thought he would get himself in trouble. He was fighting drunk, but not helpless. I mean, he could walk all right and his speech was all right – a bit thick, but not really slurred – in other words, he had reached the dangerous stage. He was always a quick-tempered chap and I felt he might go too far if I was not there to look after things.

  ‘We tried a little pub in a back street and there was a b armaid. She served us all right. I do not know whether she spotted that Lockerby was
canned. I do not know the name of the pub. It is the one in Kidling Street. Lockerby had a double whisky and asked for another. He was served. He drank up and banged his glass down on the counter for another. The chap who was with the girl behind the bar told him they had run out of whisky. Lockerby swore at him but I managed to haul him out before anything happened.

  ‘On the way to the bus stop we came to another small pub and Lockerby said he was going in to have a last drink, but the pub was shut. It was then we ran into the Teddies. There were a dozen or more. They were a bit noisy but I did not believe they meant any mischief at first. As we passed, one of them charged against another and sent him sprawling into Lockerby, who was taken off balance and fell into the gutter. The Teddies laughed, and one of them pushed him in the side with his shoe. I do not call it a kick. It was more a bit of cheek, I should say.

  ‘Lockerby got up and charged at them like a mad bull. He was a tough, heavy chap and I think his punches and open-handed slaps across their faces really hurt. Some of them attended to me, and some to him. I could hear him grunting and they were cursing. I soon had enough of it. I shouted to him to run, and made a dash for it, believing he would follow. I thought they would not chase us into the main road, and none of them did, but Lockerby did not come. I looked out for a policeman, but there was not one about. I made for the bus stop, but then I thought I probably looked a bit of a mess.

  ‘I decided to try for a taxi, but there was no taxi-rank along there and I did not see a roving cab. Then I thought I had been a heel to leave Lockerby scrapping with the bunch of Teddies, and I ought to go back. I went back and the street was quite deserted and the pub was shut, as I said. There was no sign of Lockerby and I felt he was bound to have got the worst of it, one against a mob. I thought he might have concussion and be wandering about, not knowing what he was doing, or he might have been kicked unconscious.