An Alibi Too Soon Read online

  To indicate that it was he who had ended it, he said: ‘Then you’ll be here, Mr Patton? The hotel.’

  ‘Here, or around. I want to meet your Chief Inspector.’

  We watched him walk away. I hardly dared to look at Amelia, fearing her disapproval.

  ‘I might have guessed,’ she said.

  ‘Llew wanted my help. He’s written to me…he says. More than once. You can’t expect me to walk away from it.’ And he’d written: ‘Everybody deserts me now’.

  ‘Letters?’ she said. ‘What letters?’

  ‘I was looking through that envelope, and he mentions having written to me. I really must see what he wrote. Oh damn it, and I’m going to have to see this Grayson…’

  She tapped my knuckles with a teaspoon. ‘I can get your letters, Richard.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Why are you always so self-centred! What am I supposed to do, sit back and watch you get yourself into another mess? This Grayson won’t want to see me, will he?’

  ‘If he does, it can wait.’

  ‘There you are then. I’ll drive home to the cottage and fetch them for you.’

  ‘But it’s two hundred miles away.’

  She lifted her chin. ‘You’ll just have to be patient, Richard. I wasn’t proposing to do the double run in one day.’

  ‘Heavens no. Of course not.’

  ‘But I could if I wanted to.’

  ‘I’m sure you could.’

  ‘Then don’t say it in your doubtful voice, or I’ll have to prove it.’

  ‘I don’t doubt you for one moment, my dear. But you know you don’t like driving the Stag.’

  ‘You’ll be needing that,’ she told me, looking past me vaguely as she planned everything. ‘I’ll hire something. We shall be needing a change of clothes, if we’re going to be stuck here.’

  ‘Me, anyway.’

  ‘So while you take Cindy to the vet, I’ll see about a car.’

  ‘You can do that by phone.’

  ‘So I can,’ she agreed. ‘Clever Richard. So while I do that, you just trot along to the vet’s, and if that horrible-sounding Grayson turns up while you’re away, I’ll keep him talking.’ She nodded, satisfied she had everything covered.

  I couldn’t remember arranging any of this, or agreeing to it, but that’s how Amelia is. We could have used her in the force. She’d have had all our tough customers in tears inside five minutes.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Fine.’ I couldn’t decide whether to thank her or compliment her. ‘I’ll do that, then.’

  And that was how it was. I took tile new lead out to the car-park and rescued Cindy, and we walked along to the vet’s together. I wasn’t feeling quite so ridiculous. It was a lady vet, who said, ‘She’s from Ewr Felen, isn’t she?’ And was very sympathetic. We left with a pot of ointment and an assurance that Cindy would be just fine.

  Before I’d even crossed the lobby I could tell there was somebody special around. Cindy nearly vibrated her tail loose, and made yipping sounds. The voices were from Amelia and a tall, hefty man, who were sitting on one of the corner bench seats in the lounge.

  ‘Here he is now,’ she said.

  When I released the lead, Cindy was off and bounding into his lap. He ducked his head as she nibbled his ear, then he got to his feet, Cindy beneath his left arm, his right hand thrust out.

  ‘This is Chief Inspector Grayson,’ said Amelia. ‘My husband.’

  He was an inch taller than me, an inch or two wider at the shoulders, but slim at the hips, a solid, wind-hewn man with a low brow and a broad forehead and bushy eyebrows. He looked as though he’d be difficult to knock over. Half laughing at Cindy’s excitement, he took my hand and mangled it a little, then he put her down and said: ‘What’s that stuff on her ears?’

  ‘For the burns.’

  ‘It stinks.’

  ‘She doesn’t seem to mind.’

  And so we met, me completely wrong-footed because I’d been planning my approach to a stolid toughie, and had met a softie head-on.

  Amelia gave me time to recover, explaining that Reception had been a great help, that the red Fiesta out front was a hire car and that the keys in her hand fitted it, and that the overnight bag at her feet was in case anything happened. She generally covers all contingencies.

  Grayson, his head inclined forward courteously and his eyes glowing, said he hoped to see her again, and took her hand in something closer to a caress than a shake. I kissed her, and she promised to phone.

  ‘The minute you get there,’ I said.

  She flicked me a smile, and then the door was swinging shut behind her.

  Grayson turned back to me. The change in his face was minimal, but the expression was completely altered. This was the Grayson about whom Davies had spoken, the inflexible Grayson, who would stand no nonsense. His eyes told me that, the set of his jaw.

  ‘And now, Mr Patton…’ he said, flicking those bushy eyebrows at me.

  3

  I had taken him up to our room and ordered a pot of tea. He’d commandeered the only easy chair, so that Cindy could go to sleep on his lap, and it was a matter of the upright chair or the bed for me. I sat on the edge of the bed and filled my pipe.

  ‘She was glad to see you,’ I said, pointing the pipe stem at Cindy.

  ‘We’re old friends.’

  ‘So you kept in touch—with Llew, I mean.’

  ‘Heavens yes. We worked together very closely, before he retired. Friends, you might say, he a widower and me a bachelor.’

  ‘You surprise me.’

  He looked at me through cigarette smoke. ‘That we were friends?’

  ‘That you’re not married.’

  He showed me a few teeth, all of them very white. ‘Not much in it for a woman, is there? I mean—wife of a chief inspector! All that overtime!’

  ‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Yes.’ I poured tea, and pushed it over to him. We had run through the preliminaries, and I had an idea he’d already embarked on something he wanted to pursue. I led him in. ‘And recently? You’ve kept in touch, you say.’

  He shrugged, his shoulders moving ponderously. ‘You know how it is with a lot of people. They make their job their whole life, and when they retire it’s as though something gets switched off. Llew was like that. Not having to flex his brains any more…well, it just seemed to flag. That was why he started on his memoirs. My suggestion, it was, to keep his brain active…’

  ‘Your suggestion?’ I interrupted. ‘But didn’t he take with him lots of copies and notes and things like that? He must have had it in mind.’

  He nodded. A concession. Good point, feller. ‘But I had to push him into starting. Once he’d begun, then it was fine. For a year or so, when he was writing about his earlier cases. I know a lot about you, Richard Patton.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like that.’

  ‘Mostly complimentary.’ But I’d meant it gave him an advantage.

  I smiled. ‘Then his memory was all right.’

  He didn’t see that as a joke, just grimaced. ‘Don’t you find it’s like that?’ he asked. ‘As people grow older, they remember things very clearly from the distant past, but not so well from recently.’

  I nodded. ‘It’s like a computer, I suppose. In the old days the cells were young and retained the memory. But the cells become older, and more recent stuff isn’t locked away so well.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Oh, we were doing fine, like two old chums chatting away, though one of us seemed to have forgotten that the subject of our conversation had died in a fire the night before.

  ‘But you encouraged him,’ I said, seeing that he wasn’t going to go on.

  ‘Well…you have to. He consulted me, you see.’

  ‘The Edwin Carter case?’

  ‘How did you guess that?’

  ‘Llew mentioned it. He was worried…

  ‘Exactly. On that one, he went completely overboard.’

  ‘We’re still talking about hi
s brain?’

  ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘I just didn’t know how to handle it. The damned case became a kind of obsession with him, this feeling he said he had that something was wrong.’ His voice had taken on a crisper tone. ‘And it was my case,’ he claimed firmly. ‘He hardly came into it at all. The facts were down there on paper, on his desk, and he’d hardly taken a good look at the scene of the crime. But all the same, he’s been worrying that something was wrong.’

  I pretended not to be watching him. His vehemence might not have been genuine.

  ‘Did he say what?’

  He relaxed, waving a hand and making smoke patterns. ‘Everything was vague. Damn it all…’ He laughed lightly. ‘D’you know what he wanted me to do? He wanted me to trace where Edwin Carter had got the booze. I ask you. After ten years! It could’ve been dozens of pubs.’

  ‘Hopeless,’ I agreed. ‘Did you try?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘So it was all in the timing, this murder of yours?’

  ‘Not even that. You can see why I couldn’t take Llew seriously.’

  We weren’t talking about Llew’s death, so maybe he wasn’t taking that seriously, either. I wondered whether he was working round to an oblique apology, that he hadn’t kept a sufficiently close eye on his friend. Testing that out, I reached behind me for the manila envelope and tossed it on to his lap.

  ‘That was in his hand when I got him out. The case was certainly an obsession with him.’

  He raised his eyebrows at me, and for one moment there was anger in his eyes. But after all, I’d been suppressing evidence, though only overnight. Yet his anger could have been because I’d rescued it at all.

  I watched him as he went through it, his eyes moving fast over what must have been familiar to him, even though ten years old. I saw that his knuckles were white. He thrust each successive sheet or photograph beneath the sheaf of paper with decisive rejection. He would not have liked the fact that the cases in Llew’s memoirs which had involved Richard Patton had been kind to him, whereas this one—this specific one that Grayson claimed as his own—stood a chance of being admitted as an error, a miscarriage.

  In fact (and the thought clicked in the back of my mind almost as a physical blow), Grayson would hate the thought. One of his cases shot down in flames! Heavens, it could well affect his career, if it went as far as producing a pardon for the man who’d been sentenced.

  I did not want to consider the possibility that Grayson might have found it necessary to prevent Llew Hughes from continuing with it. Not in that way—his friend, and the dog he now cradled in his lap whilst his free hand played in her fur.

  He slid it all back into the envelope and tossed it on to the carpet. ‘Well…that gives you a rough idea,’ he said in dismissal.

  ‘You mean, he’d reached the stage where he was incompetent? You think the fire was an accident?’

  He was playing with an unlit cigarette between his fingers. ‘I’m not sure what I mean…yet.’

  ‘There was a smell of petrol.’

  ‘Means nothing. The idiot kept a spare can of petrol in the outhouse attached to the building.’ The word ‘idiot’ had been said with affection.

  I pushed him a little, wondering whether he would resist me. ‘But he writes—in there—about doing some re-investigation on the case. Do you know anything about that?’

  ‘He’d been trying to contact the people involved at the time.’

  ‘With success?’

  He flexed his lips. The teeth showed again. ‘Success in so far as he did contact some of them, I understand. But he got no new information.’

  ‘Did he go to the prison and see the chap you arrested? Duncan Carter, wasn’t it?’

  He gave me a wry look. ‘Duncan Carter came out on parole a few months ago. Yes, he saw him. I can’t say I approved. He could’ve been raising false hopes, to suggest there might’ve been something in doubt about the original case.’

  ‘Yes. But if he raised false hopes in Duncan Carter, he might have raised a little apprehension in somebody else.’

  ‘What somebody else, for God’s sake?’ he demanded, so violently that I knew it wasn’t a new idea to him.

  ‘If Duncan Carter didn’t do it, then somebody else did.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not having that. Carter did it. The thing was open-and-shut.’

  ‘All the same…not long after Llew Hughes started feeling around, there were attempts on his life.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Llew said that—wrote it.’

  ‘Haven’t I been trying to tell you, his brain was going.’

  ‘You don’t have to persuade me,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s Llew’s death you’re investigating.’

  He seemed to shake himself internally, and take a grip on his anger. To hide it all from me he got to his feet, turning to place Cindy on the warm chair, easing his shoulders. I thought for a moment that he intended to leave, but no, it was only a refresher.

  ‘The fire could have been an accident,’ he said with calm decision. ‘Or he could’ve got on the wrong side of somebody local. I’m not even going to consider that his death could relate to the Carter case.’

  He wouldn’t want to, of course. ‘Then you won’t mind if I think along the same lines as Llew?’

  ‘I bloody well would, you know. In fact, I’d put a stop to it.’

  I grinned at him. ‘I’m not going to ask you how. There’s nothing illegal in asking people questions. I was just wondering whether I could expect any co-operation.’

  ‘You must be crazy.’

  ‘Never mind then. But I did think you’d prefer me to start off on the right foot…or perhaps, if you could satisfy my curiosity, not start off at all.’

  He eyed me cautiously. I took a few seconds to light my pipe, then went on: ‘As you say, it’d be a bad thing to suggest to Duncan Carter that there could be a chance of a pardon anywhere.’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’

  ‘Particularly as I’m not too keen on this idea of raking over past cases. There’s too much…’

  ‘You’re not?’ he pounced in.

  ‘Are you?’ I pointed the stem at him. ‘Impersonally, mind you. As a general principle.’

  That got him. He’d been staring out of the window, but now he returned to his chair, scooping up Cindy and replacing her on his lap with one smooth movement. He leaned forward eagerly, his face glowing.

  ‘What I think…it’s easy to go back and get somebody talking their heads off—investigative journalism they call it. The idea’s to produce something—anything—that’s in favour of the sentenced person. You know how it is. The thing goes through, up and up, to the Home Secretary, who has to think if there might’ve been a miscarriage of justice. But by that time there’s been so much publicity that he hasn’t got much choice. Play safe, and hand out a pardon.’

  His cheeks were flushed with emphasis. There was anger in the bite of his words. This was a man who hated the thought of his own decisions being questioned.

  ‘Not as simple as that, surely.’ I watched as he shook his head stubbornly. ‘And in any event, didn’t somebody once say, better a hundred guilty persons on the streets than one innocent in prison?’

  ‘Innocent!’ he said in disgust. ‘Does it make ‘em innocent because there’s a doubt? Some past witness pressured by a reporter…’

  ‘Facts that might have produced a verdict of not guilty, if they’d been heard at the trial.’

  ‘Fib!’ I’d said what he’d been waiting for. ‘But this isn’t the trial we’re talking about. This is the present, looking back at it. This is a re-trial, only now there’s only one judge, who’s the jury and the prosecution and the defence. Something is put before him in favour of the accused—but where’s the prosecution, who might well have shot it to shreds if they only had the chance? That would be a miscarriage of justice, freeing a person just because there’s a doubt.’

  I looked away from him, this man who
never had doubts and refused to accept their validity in any context. ‘The law states that the accused must have the benefit of any doubt. Surely it’s better, even at a later date—this later date—to investigate the possibility of any doubt in the Carter case.’

  ‘There is no doubt.’

  ‘Then suppose you tell me.’ I suggested quietly. ‘Tell me your case, about which you have no doubt.’

  I watched the light die from his eyes, the muscles round his jaw relax, and slowly a smile gathered round his mouth.

  ‘Got me going there, didn’t you!’

  ‘Got yourself going. The snag is that I know nothing about the Carter case. You’re the expert. So…what d’you say? Hmm?’

  His was a forceful personality. He could have told me to go to hell, and left me to fumble along with it. But he also possessed supreme confidence in himself and his abilities. He would display his accomplishments without shame, as a challenge. Nevertheless, he eyed me for a few moments critically. He might well decide he dared not trust me, and with reason. But would he dare to allow me to wonder whether his lack of trust might cover a secret doubt within himself? I thought not. I was right.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘Assume nothing, and give me the lot.’

  ‘Right. Now…this was north of here, but still in the county of Powys, and ten or more miles from the border with England. That matters, as you’ll see. A large house. It’d been bought a few years earlier by this Edwin Carter, who was around fifty-five at the time, as a weekend retreat. He had the money at that time, when he bought it. You’ll know the name, perhaps. Edwin Carter. Playwright. Started on the television and graduated to the stage, the West End, and made a great success of it.’

  ‘Can’t say it means anything,’ I told him, ‘but I was never one for the stage.’

  ‘Take my word for it, then, he’d made a lot of money. These were social-comment comedies, and he’d got a bit too big for his own good. He decided to do his own directing. You know the type, big-headed and think they can do the lot. Anyway, he failed as a director, and the last two plays he did were flops. He was broke.’