The Key to the Case Read online

  ‘That exactly fits the Milo Dettinger I know,’ I assured him.

  He looked down at his hands, up again, entwined his fingers and put them under his chin. He was frowning.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that,’ he muttered. ‘A solicitor might make guesses about a client’s honesty, and he can listen to confessions and then defend him in court. But we do expect to be told if there’s anything...I wouldn’t for instance like to believe that Mr Dettinger is known to the police in a capacity he’s kept from me.’

  ‘Oh, he’s known, believe me,’ I told him cheerfully. ‘But you’ll be glad to hear we never, in my time, actually proved anything. I’m sure that helps you, Hilary.’

  It did. He smiled thinly. Proof is the cornerstone of justice.

  ‘But I would say,’ I went on, ‘that my experience tells me he’d do anything—literally anything—for money.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Even murder, if it brought him in any cash.’ Here, I was flying a little high.

  ‘Now now, we must not exaggerate.’

  ‘We’re not, really. I’m not. If there was an insurance policy...’ I left it hanging there.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure there couldn’t have been,’ he assured me quickly. ‘If he’d looked around, he’d have found that these things take time. They’d have to find an underwriter. No—he wouldn’t have had time, and nobody would’ve touched it after the more recent incident.’

  ‘Incident?’ I asked quietly. He’d said it at his most casual, lulling me for his revelation.

  ‘On the 10th of October—I remember the date well—another young woman was raped. Two months ago. But this one was also killed. Do you think that with the lad’s record, and the coincidence that it came only six weeks after his release, his father would have been able to negotiate an insurance policy on his son’s life?’

  So now I had it, and quite a number of uncertainties and peculiarities became clear. This explained the complex sealing off of the house to intruders. It explained Milo’s frequent phone calls home, his panic when he got no reply at midnight, his frantic drive home, his violent assault on the front door. Even, to some extent, it explained his desire to enlist me in an attempt to prove it was murder. He would most certainly want any such murderer brought to justice.

  But it also provided a reason for Bryan’s possible suicide. In fact, in his position, assuming I could achieve the feat of imagining myself raping anybody, I could see very well that he would have little alternative. It could well be that he’d simply been scared into taking his own life. Milo, then, would not only feel shame for the actions of his son, but would also be considering the reflection on himself that the suicide would bring about. It could even be called a matter of gross neglect, leaving his son alone in a large, empty and secluded house when his mental condition had already been demonstrated as far from normal.

  Steadily, the facts I was obtaining were eroding the suggestion of murder, as well as the physical possibility.

  Yet there was something else. ‘There’s just one other point that’s occurred to me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ There was no enthusiasm in it.

  ‘If Milo was worried about his son’s safety, why didn’t he send him away to some small hotel, miles away—a residential hotel where he’d not be known? As long as the police knew his whereabouts, he’d be satisfying the conditions—’

  ‘I know the legal position on parole, Richard.’ He was smiling.

  ‘It sounds a logical thing to me.’

  He spread his hands. ‘But expensive.’

  ‘What! Milo with his big house and his fancy club! He must be rolling in it.’ But he was shaking his head. ‘He’s not?’

  It continued to shake. I grinned at him.

  ‘I should’ve guessed,’ I admitted. ‘You’re telling me that she’s the one with the money? Well, well!’

  ‘I’m telling you nothing, Richard. Please make no mistake about that. Everything I’ve said so far is public knowledge. Even his financial affairs would be available to an experienced investigator.’

  ‘Which I’m not. I don’t intend to spend hours digging into computers for something that’s only of casual interest.’

  ‘Then—casually—I’ll mention that you could discover Aces High, the house, is his wife’s property. It was her money that financed his club, the Ace Of Clubs. It’s not an undertaking I would have recommended, though. Not financially viable, I would say.’

  ‘A gaming club! Heavens, they make fortunes.’

  ‘Do they? Then let me tell you that I had to investigate the financial viability of a gaming club, and it’s not a healthy proposition. There’s a fixed percentage profit on the roulette tables. The club owner is not a gambler. He’s not betting his own money—the club’s money—against the gamblers. The zero on the roulette table is the club’s. And on the baccarat table it’s a matter of hiring things out, which is a steady but fixed profit. And there are vast overheads. There’s no possibility of illegality.’ He raised his eyebrows at me, because I’d been chuckling away, highly amused. ‘Richard?’

  ‘It’s just...poor Milo! How can he possibly exist in a legal background? It would sound fine to him—a gaming club. He would imagine all the cheating and rigging he could get up to...he would persuade his wife to put up the capital...and then find himself trapped in a system so legal it would make his teeth ache! This really is splendid!’

  So it was all a front, the cigar, the evening suit with the fancy shirt, the Jaguar. And the house not even his! She would now probably be threatening to sell it over his head. With him as a sitting tenant? Yes, if she was angry enough. Sell it cheap, and let him fight the new owners to retain occupation. Have to pay a heavy rent, or find himself out on the street. Poor Milo. I could have died laughing. But...it wasn’t amusing, was it? No. It had a reverse side, one which Hilary had clearly not realized, and it wasn’t pleasant to contemplate.

  ‘So our Milo,’ I said, ‘is in a difficult situation...perhaps pushed for money. His wife’s got it all. If she’s made a will—half and half to son and husband—she might now, if she blames Milo for Bryan’s suicide, change it to exclude Milo altogether. All to charity. Oh yes, I know, he could appeal to a Probate Court, if she were to die in the near future, and he’d get something. But not the lot. Isn’t that correct, Hilary? Isn’t it?’

  I looked up at him quickly, having said that to the cold pipe in my fingers, and found myself staring into his blank face. I went on quickly, before he ordered me out of his office.

  ‘There could be some urgency here, Hilary. I’m sure you must see that. Milo asked me to prove it was murder, this death of his son. As a kind of teaser, you know, as a theory. True, but a problem to be reasoned out. I wondered why it mattered so much to him. Perhaps I’m getting an inkling. Do you get it too, Hilary? If I could show it was murder—by person or persons unknown—then it would at least indicate to his wife that he is in no way to blame for the death. In other words, that she doesn’t have to dash to her own solicitor and will all her worldly possessions to the RSPCA and leave him to worry about it. He’d get a certain amount of breathing space.’

  His bleak eyes met mine. There was none of the twinkle left now. He waited for me to round it off.

  I sighed. ‘And if I fail in that—if I can’t, against all the odds, prove murder—then he might feel he ought to take urgent action to prevent himself from being totally disinherited. Don’t you think?’

  He decided to treat it as a little side-play with words, not to be taken at all seriously. He even managed a thin smile.

  ‘You surprise me, Richard, really you do. I always thought of policemen as operating strictly on facts. Facts that they can prove. Surely you couldn’t have exercised this wild and uncontrolled imagination of yours when you were in the force? Reassure me, please.’

  ‘I’m not a policeman now.’

  ‘You frighten me, all the same. Assume this theory, if that’s the word for it, this fantastic idea of
yours, has any basis in fact...fact, Richard. Assume that—and do you then realize what you’re saying?’

  I waved the pipe. ‘I do.’

  ‘You’re saying Bryan’s death might not have been suicide after all.’

  ‘Milo’s saying that. I can’t see how, in a physical sense, it could have been murder, though.’

  ‘But Richard...please! If you can’t see how it could have been murder, why put forward a theory that almost demands it should be? And,’ he added in an injured voice, ‘implicating my client.’

  ‘Nicely phrased, Hilary, and the answer’s that I don’t know what it was. I’m just groping around.’

  He was worried. After all, it was he who’d been manoeuvred into arranging Milo’s meeting with me. Clearly, Hilary was now feeling he’d knocked over a beehive, and ought to retreat at speed. I decided to push him no further. He’d already gone way beyond his professional standards. He must, too, have realized that he’d done his client no good at all in bringing us together. He tutted to himself and shook his head.

  ‘You must see, Hilary,’ I said quietly, ‘that I’ll need to talk to his wife.’

  Startled realization flashed in his eyes. He licked his lips. ‘I think we have her address. If you’ll ask my secretary...’ He reached for his phone.

  I was dismissed, and got to my feet. He was muttering to his phone with his head down.

  ‘Thank you, Hilary, for your time,’ I said, but he didn’t even hear me.

  His secretary kept me only a couple of minutes, whipped quickly through a file, wrote on a piece of paper, and handed it to me. She seemed abrupt, dismissive. Perhaps she’d had her intercom on all the time. I nodded and left. The address shown was at Beaudesert Park, wherever that was.

  I walked back to my car slowly, because I had some thinking to do. It was true that I’d left Hilary with a bunch of worries to sort through, but he couldn’t know he’d given me some much more critically important ones to worry over. Now there was rape involved, there was rape and murder. And how was I to keep that from Amelia?

  I had hoped that eventually she would be able to put the terrible memories behind her. Not forgotten, certainly. They would never be completely erased. But dormant. Yet still, at intervals, when silence rested gently between us, I could glance at her and detect the sadness in her eyes and the distress in the slump of her shoulders. No, it would never go away, so I allowed it to lie deep down there, and did not disturb it, did not stir the subconscious and bring it to the surface.

  Amelia had lost her young daughter, Coral, in just such a way as I was now involved with, perhaps the worst possible variation of those circumstances. The original vicious rape of her child had put her in hospital. The rapist had traced her there, and silenced her completely and for ever.

  It was during the investigation of that case that we’d met, and I’d fallen in love with her. In the ensuing years we had grown even more closely locked together in mutual understanding. And the closer we had drawn together, the more impossible it had become not to share with her every experience. It would now be unthinkable that I should undertake any investigation without her presence at my elbow and her critical voice urging me on.

  All right, Richard, drop it right now! Go home and say it was a nothing case, and with no interest. And yet...the three rapes and the rape/murder had taken place on my former patch. They had thus, undoubtedly, involved Detective Chief Inspector Ken Latchett, whose wife Cath had been unusually remote at the hairdresser’s, and whom Amelia had planned to meet the following day. If that strangeness was connected with Ken and the rapes, was I to leave Cath to introduce it to Amelia and to outline the gruesome details of the case? I could duck out and hope she didn’t, and in that event discard the whole business...but no, blast it, I couldn’t. One speck of deceit could blind our relationship, like an alien mote in the eye. First, cast it out.

  So when I got home I was determined to spread it all out in front of her, and leave her to decide what I should do. And my nerve failed. She chose that time to be at her most vivacious, bright and cheerful, and full of excitement with what she had as a greeting.

  ‘Your friend phoned, Richard.’

  ‘Friend?’ I wasn’t sure how many I had left.

  ‘Mr Dettinger. We’re invited as guests to his club tonight. About ten, he suggested, when it’s warming up.’

  So he hadn’t given up. Milo wasn’t a man to be rejected; he bounced back. And if he’d phoned in the morning, when he’d told me he normally arrived home at about five, then he’d missed out on his sleep in order to do so. It therefore meant something to him, important enough for him to introduce a softening-up procedure. Perhaps my guesses to Hilary hadn’t been very far wrong.

  ‘You said we would come?’

  ‘Of course. I knew you’d want to see him again.’

  A bit of a wild guess, that was. ‘I hope this isn’t black tie again?’ I was suspicious.

  ‘A lounge suit will do,’ she assured me.

  ‘Thank heaven for that.’ I glanced at her in speculation. ‘It could be a late night for us, you know. We’ll both be whacked. Don’t you think you ought to cancel the meeting with Cath in the morning?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ She looked at me with suspicion. ‘Why should I?’

  I shrugged. It was not the time. It would never be the time. ‘Just that we’ll be tired.’ I’m rotten at lying.

  ‘We needn’t stay long at the club.’

  ‘No.’ But gambling might seep insidiously into her blood.

  I insisted on starting off early. This time we took the Stag, as I thought I might need its speed. ‘Why this early, Richard?’ was her obvious query.

  ‘I want to make a diversion first. You’ll see.’

  As she did, and she realized sooner than I had expected.

  ‘But why are we coming in this direction?’ she demanded. ‘We’re heading this way tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to have a look at Milo’s house when I know he’s elsewhere.’

  ‘You’re too crafty for words.’

  Then she was silent, until we were very close. ‘That’s where you used to live, Richard,’ she pointed out. ‘Just along there.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, turning into Hawksmoor Drive.

  The hill was steady but not steep, tunnelling upwards beneath a double row of mature oaks and beeches, now leafless but nevertheless gloomy. The headlights stabbed ahead, the streetlights being sparse and with their operative globes in most cases hidden within tangles of branches. There were pavements each side but I saw no pedestrians. No vehicles, either, though a small car was parked just beyond Milo’s house on the opposite side of the street.

  ‘No need for you to come,’ I said, slipping my torch from beneath the dash. ‘I’ll just walk round and back.’

  It was very much as I’d envisaged it. The drive was straight, slightly rising and facing directly a wide garage. There was perhaps an extensive view from the rear. This was one of the cold and draughty but impressive houses the Victorians fancied, as satisfying their sense of morose dignity. The windows were new, though, as a quick sweep of the torch indicated, and seemed bizarre against the old brick and stone. The porch was wide but shallow. I examined the front door closely. It was a new one. The obscured glass was double-glazed, set in an aluminium frame—as were all the windows. Surely some effort might have been made to preserve the aura of respectable majesty. It had been the wife’s house. It couldn’t have been a woman with sufficient lack of taste to have allowed that. No, it was Milo’s work. Double-glazing offers more security.

  I set off on a tour around the property, not a very easy task as Milo had been quite correct about the storm damage to his trees. I had to step and fumble over the debris, hugging the wall to get through. There could be no access in this direction for tradesmen. Along the side and the rear I kept checking windows. They were all solidly double-glazed and firmly latched. The rear door, as I’d thought, was a much flimsier one than the front, but neverthele
ss seemed solid. It had a single key-hole to a standard deadlock. A quick flash of the torch revealed the shaft of the key still in it.

  Beyond the door, I discovered, there was cleared access for tradesmen. There was paving, and eventually, having checked all the other windows, I found my way back to the front by way of a narrow gap between the concrete garage and the house. The gap was guarded by a metalwork gate which was open. I tried shutting it, but it was wedged solid with years of rust.

  I emerged on the drive. A voice beyond my left elbow asked, ‘Satisfied, sir?’

  ‘Completely, thank you.’

  He was a uniformed officer from the patrol car I’d spotted. I hadn’t been caught completely unprepared.

  ‘I think we’d better have a little chat, sir, in my car. Or down at the station, if you’d prefer that?’

  ‘I’ve been asked by the owner of the property to investigate the possibility of a break-in. I was just checking.’

  ‘I’m sure you were.’

  ‘But if you want to speak to me at the station, I’ll be there in the morning, visiting Chief Inspector Latchett. Heavens, man, would I leave my wife sitting in the car...’

  He flicked his torch at my face. ‘It’s Mr Patton, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is. And you’re...oh Lord, my memory. Charles, Charlie...’

  ‘Charlie Green, sir. I’m pleased to meet you again. But if you’d oblige me by clearing off I’d be much happier.’

  I grinned at him, but I doubt he saw it. He watched me reverse the Stag into the drive, turn, and drive away. He’d probably taken the car number.

  ‘You’d make a rotten burglar, Richard,’ said Amelia, laughing.

  ‘I wasn’t really trying.’

  Then I headed in the straightest possible line for the Ace Of Clubs. Milo could do it in half an hour. I did it in twenty-eight minutes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The road from Bridgnorth to Kidderminster follows the River Severn, to the east of it. The river flows through Lower Town at Bridgnorth but misses Kidderminster by a mile or so. In the fifteen-mile stretch of this road there is no suitable crossing of the Severn, but if I’d cared to try it the old ford just below our house would no doubt have offered a short cut, though this only when the river was at its lowest.