The Key to the Case Read online

  ‘They’re inclined to be over-friendly,’ shouted Poppy, as three of them wrestled me to the straw layer and sat on me. Amelia laughed. So much for my neatly pressed evening suit! Frankly, I felt much easier. Dogs I understand. People are a little more difficult.

  ‘You don’t think...’ began Amelia, hauling me to my feet.

  ‘No, love. Poor Sheba would be terribly jealous.’

  She nodded. ‘I suppose so.’ But she was clearly disappointed.

  As it was, Sheba would smell them on my clothes when we got home, and I could envisage her frown. Only boxers can frown so expressively.

  We eventually managed to extricate ourselves. Poppy would of course need to return to her guests, none of whom had apparently expressed any interest in the dogs. The two women strolled away, but I lingered behind, attempting, by the poor light issuing from the meshes, to flap away the last traces of straw before returning with dignity to the party.

  ‘Be along in a sec,’ I called.

  It was no more than a movement in the shadows that told me I was no longer alone. A hand reached out and plucked something from my shoulder.

  ‘Allow me.’

  I glanced at him, a big and looming shadow. The hand had touched my shoulder delicately, but it had been an imposing shape in the corner of my eye. I finished the job before I gave him any detailed attention, straightening, adjusting my tie. The last few manoeuvres allowed me to position myself with my back to what light there was, and he seemed disinclined to move from there, his legs set wide as though prepared for attack. He was a man, perhaps, who had enemies, and who needed to maintain a defensive awareness.

  ‘They can be a bit frisky,’ he said, his voice one of those back-of-the-throat growls that politicians believe lends them sincerity.

  ‘They can.’ My eyes were now beginning to accommodate, and he was becoming more than a shape, his features light against the black bulk of the building behind him. ‘Shall we go inside?’ I suggested.

  ‘Here will do for me.’ There was authority there. He was doing the choosing, dictating the setting.

  ‘The dogs might overhear,’ I suggested.

  He gave a low, growling chuckle. His chest was deep, his shoulders wide, and there was plenty of room for rumbling chuckles inside there. Unless it was all muscle. The impression was of power, of a driving force, which would snarl its way through opposition. He was as tall as me, taller, an inch over six feet, and the bulk seemed to be present everywhere. Thick neck and heavy jowls, a wide brow with dark, probably black, hair in a tangle like a bird’s nest. He had a wide mouth and chin, and a moustache that extended beyond the corners of his mouth, beginning to curl at the ends. His dinner jacket was worn with casual ease, as though he might never wear anything else, and his white shirt front was frilled, even embroidered, I thought. I had a feeling that I knew him from somewhere.

  This I observed in the few seconds it took us to assess each other, then his right hand was thrust out, pudgy fingers with black hair along them and a gold ring catching the light, and grasped mine before I was prepared for it. His left hand clamped itself on my shoulder.

  It was overdone for a first meeting, too effusive, the suggestion being of an encounter between two friends. I resented that. I do not make friends easily. For him, I felt, it was in any event insincere.

  ‘Dettinger,’ he snapped. ‘Milo.’

  I managed to retrieve my hand. ‘Patton,’ I told him. ‘Richard.’ I had recalled his name, too. But where...when?

  ‘Then you’re the man I want to meet.’ Somehow he made it sound as though the luck was all on one side, mine. In fact, in spite of his bluff manner, I felt he was a trifle uncertain as to his approach and my reception of it, as he might well be, because he could quite as easily have waited until we’d returned to the house.

  I tested this out. ‘If you want to talk, we could go indoors and find a couple of drinks.’

  ‘But of course, of course.’ He was eager to comply. Then his voice changed to a tone of tentative uncertainty. ‘How d’you feel about a bit of a walk?’

  It was clear that he didn’t want to talk face to face in circumstances where his own expression might be read. He would know I’d been a police officer, and perhaps he had experienced police interrogation, which is very much face to face. He might perhaps already have faced me...but of course. Milo Dettinger! Measly Milo they had called him. But he’d been considerably less bulky then. Fifteen years ago? Perhaps twenty. He’d been slimmer and lighter at that time, with no moustache and his hair blond. He’d dyed it, the moustache too. Image, that was it. He now exuded the casual drive of a businessman, a successful one, and let nobody make a mistake about that. In the old days he’d been a tricky shyster, originally, when I first knew him, a scrap-iron dealer, not all of it scrap and ready for throwing away and not all of it iron. The odd piece of silver might creep in here and there, or the half-ton spool of copper wire that had rolled itself out of a factory yard. Later he had opened an antiques shop in Wolverhampton and an art gallery in Birmingham. Nothing illegal—oh, certainly not. Stolen? Surely not—I thought it was a copy. That kind of thing.

  Milo Dettinger, whom I wouldn’t trust to borrow my comb, and he wanted to walk in the dark! And it was most thoroughly dark out at the front of the house, the clouds still heavy although it was not raining, and out there in the wilds there was not a light to be seen. We paced up and down just beyond the line of cars, so that we still had enough light for our feet from the open front door and the hall.

  ‘What is it then?’ I asked.

  ‘A puzzle,’ he offered. ‘I heard that you like mysteries, and I’ve got one for you.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  It’s one of those kind of locked-room things.’

  I groaned. ‘You’ve been reading old detective books, that’s what it is. Did they come in with a load of scrap, Milo?’

  There was a short silence, but he didn’t break step. I’d given him a tip that I had remembered him, and in a context that wasn’t appealing.

  ‘I’ve come a long way from there,’ he grumbled. ‘Now I’ve got myself a load of trouble.’

  ‘A locked room! Is that your trouble? Nobody bothers with things like that, these days. If they want to murder somebody, they do it, and with no frills. They don’t try to fake it as a suicide behind locked doors. It’s not worth the effort. Come off it, Milo, it’s just not on.’

  ‘It’s something...it’s crazy.’

  ‘I hope this is only theoretical,’ I said optimistically.

  There was a long pause as we walked to the end of the stretch of cobbles, turned, and walked back. I waited, surprised he had allowed me to express my lack of enthusiasm without protest, surprised he was silent so long. He’d always been a voluble man, eager to impress and persuade. Plausible is the word.

  It’s not theoretical,’ he said at last, his voice heavy. ‘It happened, and to me. Around a month ago, this was, and it’s not a room, it’s the whole bloody house.’ Then, with a sudden snap of anger, ‘Do you want to hear or not? Just say.’

  ‘I’m listening.’ A room was a tight entity to be locked away in, but a house left available a lot of possibilities. Or so I thought at the time. So I agreed to listen, if only to shake free of him.

  ‘It’s like this,’ he said, and suddenly he seemed very weary.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Milo Dettinger was now legitimate—or so he claimed—which in itself was strange. He ran a gaming club called the Ace Of Clubs, not a remarkably original name for such a club. It was along the Bridgnorth to Kidderminster road, set on a site well back from the main highway and overlooking the river. The gaming laws are very tight these days, and everything was very legal. He did protest this issue rather too vigorously, when it had no connection with his problem. But his main point, perhaps, was that this business undertaking required him to leave home at eight-thirty every evening, returning at around five in the morning. This meant that the house was empty, apart from the presen
ce of his son Bryan, aged twenty.

  This son apparently had reason to be afraid of intruders. Milo slid over this aspect in his concern for the continuity of his story. Whatever the reason—and perhaps he thought I already knew it—they had fallen into the routine of the son locking up as his father left in the evening, and opening up again only to a coded buzz of the front door bell. Milo, whenever he had the chance to drag himself away from the gaming tables, would phone his son to check that all was secure and undisturbed.

  This house of his was one of the grand and reclusive properties towards the top end of Hawksmoor Drive, which I knew well, my own home, when I worked that district, having been in the street that crossed its lower section.

  On the evening of Saturday, 16 November Milo left as usual, first having gone through the house checking that all the windows were latched. He had locked the back door, and after closing the front door, which had a cylinder lock and therefore snapped shut, he had waited outside until he heard Bryan throw over the bolts, top and bottom. Then he drove to the Ace Of Clubs, an eighteen-mile trip on quiet roads, which normally took him thirty minutes. He always tried to phone home at nine-thirty and again at eleven. This he did that evening. At midnight, because this was when his son normally retired to bed, he usually phoned again. This time there was no reply to the midnight call.

  Three times more he tried it, in case he’d dialled a wrong number, then he told his floor manager that he would have to dash off home. He drove like a rally driver, pushing his Jaguar, and was home by twelve-thirty. The trip must have taken him only about twenty minutes, but the traffic would have been very light at that time. It sounded reasonable, until he mentioned the fog.

  The house was shrouded with it by the time he ran the car up his drive. As his club was close to the river it had probably been even worse for the first part of his journey, but he had bullied the car through it. There were no lights showing at Aces High, as he called it. First, he tried his coded signal with the door bell. It produced nothing. He then went round to the back—ran—hoping he’d maybe forgotten to lock the back door. But no, it was secure enough. Then he ran back to the front and began to pound on the door, shouting. This also got him nothing.

  Now in a complete panic, he hunted quickly in the car’s boot for the heaviest object he could find, which turned out to be the car jack, and attacked the front door with it. By this time he was very nearly out of control.

  ‘Why the front?’ I asked, rear doors generally being less imposing and therefore more frail.

  He hesitated in his stride. It was the first time I had interrupted. He jerked one fist angrily in the air, his mind still locked in to that cold and misty night.

  ‘It was dark, you damn fool. I could use the car’s lights out at the front.’

  I nodded. ‘And I suppose there was an obscured glass insert.’

  ‘Yes. Will you listen!’

  I listened, though his attitude wasn’t encouraging, allowed him to resume his pacing, and could feel that what he was relating—what he was completely involved in relating—was solid truth. Otherwise, this recall of it would not have affected his nerves so seriously.

  Two good smashes with the jack took the glass out of the front door. It was double-glazed, this being a security point rather than any consideration of heat preservation, so his attack must have been wild and furious. He could then reach inside and throw over the sneck of the cylinder lock to hold back the latch. It also allowed him to reach up in order to slide back the upper bolt. There was only the lower bolt left, and he couldn’t reach that. Nor could he see how he might be able to wriggle through the gap where the glass had been. In the narrating he squared his shoulders. The bulk of him had been in this way a disadvantage.

  But there had been recent storm damage, and the clearance of a felled tree had left several large chunks of wood lying around. He fetched one of these. A hundred pounds of solid pine with his weight and muscle behind it took out the lower bolt and smashed a corner from the door. He threw it down and ran shouting into the house.

  The hall was dark, apart from the car’s lights, and he stood there for a moment with his finger on the light switch, finding himself reluctant to use it. The house, he told me, was strangely quiet and seemed cold. Then he ran from room to room downstairs, using each light only as a brief, dazzling flash of confirmation that they were empty. He wasn’t able to say whether or not he was shouting. Later, he discovered he was hoarse. Up the stairs, still unlit, his feet pounded, and when he reached the top he knew. In a flash, like one of his winks with the lights, he knew, because there was a thin line of light round the bathroom door, and he felt the truth, like a blow, he said, even as he charged at it and crashed through.

  Inside, he found his son hanging by a length of rope from the water pipe of the old-fashioned high-level cistern, looped over it and with the end tied to the handle of the nearby airing cupboard. Bryan was slumped forward at an angle, with his toes just touching the floor.

  He was dead, though Milo could not at first accept it. Yet, if Bryan had not responded to the phone call at midnight, and it was now ten minutes to one, there could not have been any signs of life left.

  The boy was dressed in the tracksuit he used as pyjamas, head hanging forward, the rope indented into his neck. Milo reached for the rope above his head and jerked violently at it. I could guess at the force he would have used. The rope came away and so did the tank, so that both of them were soaked at once from the water in the tank and the exposed pipe, which began to flood the bathroom. Milo dragged him out on to the landing, and using his knife—the penknife he used for cutting his cigars—he cut the rope from around his son’s neck, weeping with fury and horror and distress.

  He was unable to say how long it was before he stumbled down the stairs to the phone in the hall. It was there, sitting on the bottom-but-one stair with the phone buzzing in his hand, that they found him. Police and ambulance. Still the hall was in darkness, apart from the car’s lights thrusting through the wide-open front door.

  At that point Milo stopped, both physically and verbally, and fumbled inside his jacket, producing a cigar case, offering it. ‘Cigar?’ His voice was gruff, forceful, probably from shame at the emotion he had revealed.

  I shook my head. We stood together, our feet full in the flow of light from the hall. ‘Pipe,’ I murmured, reaching for it.

  He cut the end of the cigar neatly and absent-mindedly, no doubt with the same knife he’d used on the rope. We were both silent as we lit up. I was thinking that the police would have been faced with quite a problem. By that time, the broken water pipe must have flooded water on to the landing and down the stairs, perhaps over the edge of the landing. They would have had to search for the stopcock. They would then have been faced by the difficulty of a water-soaked corpse in his sodden tracksuit, with consequent problems for the medical examiner. Ambient temperature would have had little relevance when it came to estimating the time of death. If it had been in question, that is. Milo’s story would have fixed it as some time between eleven p.m. and midnight, if he had been scrupulous with the truth on this point. On top of that was the fact that Milo’s actions in tearing down the rope, however natural they had been, had destroyed the basic evidence usually visible when a corpse is found in situ.

  ‘His feet,’ whispered Milo through a grey cloud of cigar smoke, ‘were touching the floor. How could he have died like that? How could he?’ He sounded bemused.

  ‘It’s possible,’ I told him quietly. ‘I’ve seen it. It doesn’t take much to...to hang yourself.’ I went on with it flatly, being cool and pragmatic, as this was possibly more kind than sympathy. ‘Once initiated, it’s so difficult to withdraw.’

  ‘It was not suicide.’ He turned on me, almost spitting it.

  ‘Inquest?’

  ‘They brought in suicide,’ he said. ‘Suicide! That idiot—’

  ‘It’s the obvious answer,’ I interrupted.

  ‘A lot of use you are!’ H
e was furiously dismissive.

  I was silent, not having made claims as to my worth.

  ‘Can’t you think of anything?’ he demanded, after a few moments.

  ‘One small point...’ Heavens, I had to offer him something, if only as proof that I’d been listening.

  ‘Say it, then. Say it.’

  ‘You said, when you spoke about locking up before you left home, that you locked the back door, and waited outside until you heard your son bolt the front. Don’t you have any bolts at the back?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And?’ I thought that question would be understood, but apparently not. He lifted his shoulders, a gesture indicating he’d lost all faith in me. ‘Was it bolted?’ I enlarged. ‘When you got home, when the police arrived, was the back door locked and bolted?’

  ‘Christ—I don’t know! Why waste time—’

  ‘Was it usually bolted?’ I cut in.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. Yes...Bryan would’ve bolted the back.’

  ‘Would have? But did he? That night—was the back door bolted?’ As he hesitated, I said angrily, ‘Think! This is for you, not me.’

  He turned in order to stare at me. ‘It was bolted. I remember something...two coppers talking...one saying it was bolted. What the hell does it matter?’

  ‘It matters because it answers something entirely different. Now you’ve told me. You just didn’t know what your son did, Milo, once you’d left him alone. Did he bolt it every night, Milo? You just don’t know, do you?’

  He was impatient, and seemed interested now in doing no more than getting free of me. He’d expected me to wave a magic wand, something complex being conjured up, something under his nose that released him from the painful realization that his son had committed suicide. His gradual movement now was towards the Jaguar saloon parked askew, away from the rest.

  ‘What the hell does it matter? Locked. Bolted. Either way, nobody was going to get in.’ Yet he had insisted it couldn’t have been suicide!

  He made to shoulder past me, but I put a restraining hand on his arm. He glanced down, then up to my face. Nobody laid a hand on his arm with impunity. I kept it there, tightening the grip. I was speaking very quietly now, because I had to keep control of my temper. There had not been one sign of any understanding in his narrative, no hint of compassion.