The Weight of Evidence Read online

  THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE

  Roger Ormerod

  © Roger Ormerod 1978

  Roger Ormerod has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1978 by Hale.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For my mother, who likes them straightforward

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Extract from Time to Kill by Roger Ormerod

  One

  They welcomed us with a ball — ten tons of it on a long chain that they had swinging from the high jib of a crane.

  There were only a couple of buildings left on the fence-enclosed site, and it was these they were supposed to be demolishing. Not us. George heaved in the passenger’s seat and yelped: “Oy!” But I’d seen it too. The ball was on its return pendulum swing and the Porsche was on its route. I did things with the wheel and the throttle, and fortunately the surface was pocked with holes here and there. I found one that just fitted the Porsche, and thumped it into the two-foot drop. The ball missed the roof by an inch or two. We heard it hiss when I cut the engine.

  George made a remark about the crane operator and began to struggle with the door. It looked as though somebody was going to get hurt. I had the same idea, and looked back to the crane. It was one of those huge crawlers with a latticed boom, and a chap with a ginger beard was climbing down from the cab.

  “I think we’ll walk from here,” I said, being diplomatic.

  The man at the gate had said that our objective was the shed in the far corner. He hadn’t said anything about iron balls. George and I got out and shook ourselves. George lowered his chin.

  “I’ll kill him Dave — so help me.”

  The ginger beard jutted at us as the little man ran towards us, stumbling over the brick rubble. He was wearing a dented tin hat, from under which his hair sprouted like a wheat sheaf at sunset. There was no indication in his attitude that he was aware of approaching two large and very shaken men. His blue eyes, I saw as he closed in on us, were blazing with violence. He looked up at me.

  “You bloody stupid goon,” he shouted. “What the hell you doing, drivin’ across here?”

  I had been wondering the same thing myself. The situation just didn’t fit the case. A missing person — one of the most basic cases encountered by enquiry agents — that was what we’d come about. So far I hadn’t put any objections. It was George who had accepted the commission, our first as a partnership. Perhaps he had been over-eager to get the thing rolling, and failed to notice the peculiarities. There was the urgency for one thing. Could we get there right away, this client had asked. Urgency, you understand, yet most missing person jobs do not reach a private enquiry agency until months after the disappearance, by which time the original panic has died away to a nagging worry. But we had urgency, and a request to meet him, this Emmett Cash, at the site foreman’s shed on the acre or two he was demolishing. No cosy interviews with parents or wives for us. A shed on an area that looked as though a hurricane had hit it, that was what welcomed us, and a bristling little man in his late thirties, who looked as though he was going to have a go at me.

  George growled. I said: “We were asked to come here by a Mr. Cash.”

  “All the same, you must be stupid to...” He took a breath. “That’s the shed, over there. You better walk from here, mate.”

  I put a hand on George’s arm, and looked at the Porsche. No harm had come to it. “We’ll walk,” I agreed. “And when we come back for the car, I’ll expect you to have lifted it out. And not one scratch. Is that clear?” He opened his mouth. I smiled, and patted him on the tin hat. “I’m sure it’s clear. Come on, George.”

  We walked. It was quite a trek, piles of old bricks having to be circled, and fallen-in cellars to be avoided. When they demolish decrepit buildings, there’s not much finesse involved. Only one vehicle had managed to get further than we had, a Ford van, quite small and dark blue, which had reached a halfway mark before being abandoned. It was layered with brick dust.

  A small group of men stood beside the site shed in the far corner. They looked cold. It was November, a Tuesday, and there were heavy clouds around. I wondered why they had not waited in the shed itself. One of them was eating a sandwich, which reminded me that it was getting towards lunch time. The other four simply looked miserable, hunched up in anoraks, their jeans tight. One of the four wore a suit, a tweedy thing, rather ragged. He was gaunt and animated and waved a cigarette. All the time I knew him he carried a cigarette, but I never saw him light it. He was wearing a woolly scarf around his neck and a peaked cap, square-on, as though lidding a bald head. He came forward, walking in a strange, jerky way, as though affected by nerves.

  “I’m Emmett Cash,” he said. “You took your time.”

  “David Mallin,” I introduced myself. “And this is my partner, George Coe.” I didn’t mention that the forty miles, through traffic, had taken less than an hour. “What’s the rush?”

  “Come’n have a look.” As though that explained it.

  When we looked at the shed, though, it certainly explained why the group had been waiting outside. They could not have got in. The damned thing was backwards.

  This site was in the middle of an area obviously being systematically torn down. There was an impression of loneliness, the chain-link fence surrounding it only serving to reveal that the other side of the street had already been flattened. The traffic seemed to be avoiding the depression of the area, because very little went past while I was there. The nearest new and solid building was a fourteen-storey block of flats a quarter of a mile away. The nearest old one, and the only one still standing, was a solid Georgian heap of squalor just the other side of the fence at that far end. Apart from an upstairs window, it presented a blank wall only a foot from the fence.

  Somebody had decided it was a good situation for a site-foreman’s shed, ready for when they began building again. They had put it with its back against the fence, a foot or so from the blank side of the house, its side window twenty feet from the corner of the site. Or at least, that was the way it had been intended. They had laid an eleven by nine concrete slab, and on it was the ten by eight shed. But some way or other it had got itself backwards. The door was facing the back fence and the house next door, and its window looked out, not towards the side fence, but across the site.

  “Interesting,” said George in that dry voice of his. He glanced at me and shrugged. “Who’s disappeared, and what’s it got to do with this?”

  Straight to the heart of it, that’s George.

  Emmett Cash jerked the cigarette towards his mouth, then changed his mind. “Well... there’s a story to it. You got time?”

  “It’s your time,” I reminded him. “You’re paying us.”

  In view of this, he kept the story short. There was going to be a supermarket, a row of shops and a parking area built on this site, he said, and a certain amount of emergency had arisen.

  “Went mad,” said the thin one with the sandwich, and Cash grimaced at him.

  “The point was,” he went on, “that they wanted the shed erected for today. Don’t ask me why. That’s how it was, so there had to be special work done. It was decided...”

  “You decided,” put in the sandwich man, and the others grunted in assent.

  “All right!” Cash threw down his cigarette and stamped on it, and mag
ically there was another in his fingers. “What they wanted was the base laid and the shed on it, and this miserable lot here said it couldn’t be done.”

  “No more it could,” grumbled the fat one. “I said, didn’t I! And look what happened.”

  “What happened?” demanded George.

  “These three here,” said Cash. “Reaman, Potter and Lane, they laid the concrete. That was yesterday morning. Quick-setting stuff, so’s it’d be hard by knocking off time, and Ron Taylor...” The thin one grinned behind his sandwich. “... Ron and Fred Wallach put the shed together. One of those sectional things, you understand. It was goin’ to be bolted down, y’ see. Six one inch bolts, each corner and half way down the sides, set in the concrete and sticking up through the bottom braces inside the shed. Only... the point being... if they’d waited for the concrete to set, and then put the shed together, they couldn’t have done it in one day. Get me? So Ron and Fred put the shed together — bolted it all up, Ron even glazed it — with it standing to one side of the concrete base. A lot of measuring for the bolts, there was, you can bet, ‘cause once they were set in the concrete there’d be no moving ‘em. Then, last thing, they were going to lift the shed with Ginger’s crane and lower it onto the base, and all that’d need doing was to put on the washers and fasten up the nuts.”

  “Clever,” said George, and we both took a look at the lifting arrangements.

  There had been bolted to the tops of the four corner uprights of the shed four hefty-looking hooks, and still looped in them were the four chains, meeting at a single ring, the whole cluster now resting on the roof. It did certainly look to be a very solid shed. Even the side window was metal-framed, with a small, opening window in the top of it.

  “Clever!” said a disgusted voice at my shoulder, and I turned to see our ginger friend from the crane. “Would’ve been if that idiot Fred hadn’t been working on it.”

  I glanced towards the Porsche and he grinned. “No sweat, friend. Came up as sweet as a nut.”

  “Who’s this Fred?” I asked. “You’re all talking about Fred.”

  Cash looked annoyed at having lost the initiative, but Ginger’s loathing shone in his eyes and anger gave his words impetus.

  “Calls himself a foreman. Not mine... oh no. I’m with the crane hirers. But it didn’t stop him shooting off his mouth.” The others nodded in sympathy, but he flashed them a quick, angry glance. “Not ‘at I took much notice, mind you. But he’d go on and on. Sneerin’, smarmy with it...”

  “The point,” George put in. “Keep to it.”

  Ginger shrugged. “Him... big-head... he had to do the shed. Fussin’ with it, strengthenin’ it ‘cause it’d gotta be lifted. Oh, he did a smashing job, only everybody could see he was putting it together facing the fence.”

  “And nobody said?” I asked.

  “Why should they? It was a laugh. Take him down a peg.”

  “Not even you, Mr. Cash?”

  Cash jerked. “Oh no. Get me right. I wasn’t involved. It’s my land and my property... my house there, next door... but it’s all sub-contract. Not my business, you understand, if the chaps like to get back at him.”

  “He was disliked?” I asked, feeling for the mood and trying to probe the peculiarly restless atmosphere surrounding them. I realised we were all thinking of him in the past. “I take it we’re talking about the chap who’s gone missing? This Fred.”

  “Fred Wallach,” said Cash, eagerly stepping back in. “Yes. He was certainly disliked. I couldn’t stand him myself. But I didn’t have to. It’s just acceptable they’d watch him put the shed up backwards and giggle away amongst themselves, and let him get on with it.”

  “Better than that,” said Ron Taylor, wiping his fingers down his denims. “When it came to it — ten to five we were all set to lift it on.”

  “I was,” cut in Ginger possessively. He nodded towards his crane.

  “You was, then. All set, hook in the ring to the four chains, and Fred just had to supervise it all himself. You’d have died laughin’. Stood in the centre of that patch of concrete, waving his bloody great spanner in one hand and his little calico bag of nuts and washers in the other, and still he didn’t notice the door was going to come down six inches from the back fence.”

  “Wasn’t too late,” said Ginger. “I’d got the shed up off the deck, and it could still’ve been turned right way round. It’d only have been a matter of twisting the cables a bit. But why should I tell him? He stood there, waving it down on top of him... a bit this way, a bit that... you’d think I didn’t know my job. Anyway, down came the shed, smack onto the bolts. And there he was, inside, and not a peep from him. So we reckon he just went on bolting it down.”

  “Then what happened?” George was beginning to sound interested.

  “The five o’clock hooter went. You can just hear it from Jellyman’s when the wind’s right. So we packed it in.”

  “You left him stuck inside?” I asked.

  “Give him a cheerful night,” said Ginger, with relish, I thought.

  “And I take it he’s not there now,” I went on. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. So it was a joke. I suppose it’s gone on being a joke.”

  “I don’t get your point, Mr... er... er...” said Cash.

  “Oh, come on!” I was feeling a bit impatient. “This lot here, they’re overdoing the dislike bit. To impress us. Somebody must have thought enough of him to come back to his rescue. And as it was a crane job, then I’d say our ginger friend here.”

  “Not Ginge,” decided Ron Taylor. “Ginger hates his guts.”

  “Somebody else then. And obviously this Fred chap didn’t bolt-down the shed, as he’d intended, because it must’ve been lifted — say sometime in the night.”

  “But it was bolted,” cried Cash, jumping up and down. “It is right now. And Fred Wallach’s gone.”

  “He’s some sort of magician, is that it?” I asked disparagingly, and was surprised at the sudden, almost fearful, stiffening. “You don’t think that, surely.”

  “Let’s take it steady,” said George.

  “No. No George, they’re having us on. Or having somebody on — probably Mr. Cash. Wallach couldn’t have got out of that shed, even un-bolted, without help.”

  George blinked. He was dead serious, taking it all, weighing it. George loves a puzzle. “Maybe he’s still there.”

  “No,” said Cash, batting his eyes.

  “Corners,” George pointed out. “Corners you can’t see from the window,” he explained to Cash.

  “Ron Taylor’s a streak of nothing. He squeezed along the other side of the fence, against my house wall, and he pushed the door open with a stick, and he could see the other two corners. He could see it’s bolted down, too.”

  “Yeah,” said Ginger. “It’s bolted down right enough. When I come this morning, we tried to lift it, but as soon as I felt the load go on I knew it was bolted to the slab. So I eased off. That’s why Ron squeezed past to have a look.”

  “Then what’re we coming to?” I demanded.

  George’s eyes were shining. “Something very interesting. Suppose we take a look, Dave.”

  To tell the truth, I didn’t wish to take any looks. We were being asked to see through an illusionist’s trick. Not my line at all. It wasn’t even a missing person case, if you come to consider it.

  If Fred Wallach had managed, by some subtle trick, to get out, then he was missing on purpose. Maybe it was his end of the joke, to stay disappeared for a while, and leave behind him this aura of supernatural power that I felt. That, for me, was the only interesting aspect of it, the personality of this strange person, Fred Wallach, who had some sort of power that the others held in awe. Wallach? I wondered. Anything to do with Warlocks?

  It seemed to have become colder. I said: “A quick look, then. I expect he got out of the window.”

  Ron Taylor laughed in derision. “Not him, not that great, heavy ugly bastard. Seen the size of that quarter-light?”
>
  The quarter-light was the opening portion I had noted. True, it was a mere fifteen inches by ten. I shrugged. “Some way, damn it. A man doesn’t just evaporate.”

  “We’ve got to get inside,” George said impatiently. “How do we do that?”

  “Could smash it apart,” Ginger suggested. “With me little steel ball.”

  George glared at him. “Keep that thing away from here. Nobody lays a finger on that shed.”

  “You’re taking it too seriously,” I told him, “It’s just a trick.”

  “Then let’s see how he worked it.”

  “He’s probably sitting at home right now. Having his dinner and laughing his head off.” I turned to Cash. “This Fred Wallach — is he married?”

  “I suppose... yes, I believe so.”

  “Then why hasn’t his wife been after him?”

  “Reckon she’d be glad if he did disappear,” Ginger put in sourly.

  I turned on him. “Do you know that?”

  “I know him.”

  “So how do we get in?” George shouted.

  I had to leave Ginger for the moment, when I’d have preferred to probe his suggestion. All the same, there was a wife, and there had, apparently, been no enquiry from her.

  I was peering along the back of the shed. I call it the back because it was against the rear fence, but of course, having the door in it, this was really its front. There was, as they had said, barely six inches between the door and the very strong chain-link fence. But the other side of the fence there was the blank wall of Cash’s house, and the gap there seemed a little more than a foot.

  “Take down a length of fence, and we can get at the door,” I decided. “It’d give us nearly two feet.”

  “Heh!” George protested.

  “It’s all right. Not to worry. Who put the fence up?”

  It was apparently the two who hadn’t so far spoken, two morose men in their fifties, who didn’t look as though they ever laughed, even at Wallach fastening himself in. One was dumpy — Potter — the other a slim, wiry individual with a permanent sneer — Lane.