Murder at Swann's Lake Read online

  “Perhaps I’ll go an’ see how Alex Conway’s getting on,” he said aloud. “Old Alex always appreciates a visit from me.”

  He laughed at his own private joke, and wished he could tell it to Annabel – just to prove that his sense of humour didn’t consist solely of stories about the things which dangled between men’s legs. But, of course, he couldn’t tell her. Even if she’d listen.

  The light bulb overhead began to flicker and then went out completely. Apart from the small amount of light which filtered in from the club, the office was plunged into darkness.

  “Shit!” Robbie said aloud.

  The replacement bulbs were in the house, and he didn’t feel like getting up to go and fetch one. Not at that moment, anyway. It had been a long day and the sight of Phil – the young man in the blue suit – had first made him nervous and now exhausted. He folded his arms on the desk, rested his head on them and went to sleep.

  Detective Sergeant Gower stood in the shadow of The Hideaway’s garage and looked longingly at Robbie Peterson’s office. It was in darkness, which meant that Robbie wasn’t there. But he could also clearly see that the door was open an inch or two. It wasn’t like Peterson to be so careless – to present him with such an unprecedented opportunity. He wished he had a search warrant, but he didn’t have enough evidence to obtain one – and anyway, he was not officially on duty.

  His colleagues called Gower ‘The Toad’, and though it might not have been a very kind title, it was certainly accurate enough. He was squat and only just met police height requirements. In addition, he was cursed with bulging eyes and a skin which could have been a ‘before’ advertisement for any of the well-known brands of acne cream. But there was nothing toad-like in his attitude to his work. There, he was more of a fox terrier – pursuing his investigations with dogged determination, and never, ever, letting go once he’d got his teeth into something. And he’d got his teeth into the Peterson family. True, Annabel was his main target for the moment, but Robbie had always been his ultimate objective, and the open door just might provide him with a short cut.

  Gower looked across the yard at the club. He wondered whether Robbie Peterson was inside The Hideaway at that very moment, and if he was, how long he was likely to stay there. It wouldn’t do for a policeman to be discovered – unauthorised – on private property, even if the property in question was well-known to belong to a notorious villain. No, getting caught would do his career no good at all. On the other hand, since fate had clearly given him his chance . . .

  It was two short strides to the window. Gower pressed his nose against it. He could see the workbench which was catching the small amount of light that shone from the club, but the rest of the office was in total darkness. Which meant that once he was inside – and as long as he stayed away from the bench – he would be completely invisible to anyone coming out of The Hideaway.

  He rapidly formulated a plan. He would go over to Robbie’s desk, from where he should get a good view of the yard, and when there was no one out there, he would quickly draw the heavy curtains. Once he had done that, he could switch on his torch with impunity and get down to some serious investigating.

  Gower pushed the door open, stepped inside and closed the door softly again behind him. Phase One completed entirely satisfactorily.

  The sergeant set off in the general direction of the desk. In the darkness, he should have walked slowly and cautiously, but caution had never been Gower’s way, especially when he had the scent of his quarry in his nostrils.

  It was his speed which was his downfall. If he hadn’t been going so fast, the collision between his right shin and the coffee table would not have hurt half so much as it did. If he hadn’t been going so fast, he might have stayed upright instead of lurching forward into the blackness.

  Gower put his hands out in front of him for protection. His knees hit the floor with a sickening crunch. His torso landed heavily against the edge of Robbie’s desk, knocking the wind out of him. But it was the thing his right hand made contact with which alarmed him most. He was touching a head – a brylcreamed head – which was lying on the desk.

  Fighting for breath, Gower struggled to his feet. There was a man asleep at the desk! But could he really be asleep? Could he have received that jolt from the sergeant’s hand without waking up?

  Still gasping, Gower reached into his jacket pocket for his torch and switched it on. The beam fell on the hammer first – a perfectly ordinary woodworking hammer which was lying there on the desk. He moved the beam a little higher and it settled on the head which his outstretched hand had touched, and which undoubtedly belonged to Robbie Peterson. If anything could actually be said to belong to a corpse. And a corpse was definitely what Robbie was – because nobody, not even a hard case like him, could have survived having a six-inch nail driven deep into his temple.

  Two

  The old lady was sitting on her usual bench by the Serpentine and was studying the people who passed by with the eye of a connoisseur. So far that day she had seen no one who really interested her, but the couple approaching, hand-in-hand, looked very promising.

  The man was perhaps twenty-five years old, and nearly six feet tall. His brown hair was neatly cut and his clothes showed that he took pride in his appearance. His features were perhaps a little too regular to earn him the title of handsome, the old lady thought, but by any standards he was certainly attractive. The woman was smaller and a little younger – probably no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. She had jet black hair, flashing dark eyes, a wide, passionate mouth and an oval chin. She looked foreign – possibly southern European.

  The old lady allowed herself to indulge in her favourite game of imagining their histories. The man, she decided, had probably gone to a good school and was now something in the City. The woman was more difficult, but it was possible to believe that she was some kind of exiled aristocrat.

  The couple had almost drawn level with her. The exiled aristocrat gave the old lady a warm smile. “Isn’t a beautiful day?” she said with a slight accent.

  “Very nice indeed for the time of year,” the old lady agreed.

  The couple walked on, and the old lady watched them with a sigh of regret. Separately, each of them would have been enough to gain her approval, she thought. Together, they looked like a fairytale come true.

  “You made that old dear’s day,” Bob Rutter said, as he and Maria passed the boathouses.

  “You think so?” Maria replied. “I only smiled at her.”

  Rutter squeezed her hand. “A smile from you is enough to make anybody’s day.”

  He meant it. He thought her smile lit up a room, and he was sure he’d still have considered that true even if he hadn’t been totally, helplessly in love with her.

  A uniformed constable was on duty near the edge of the park. He recognised Rutter, and saluted.

  Maria giggled. “You really are an important man, aren’t you?” she said mischievously.

  “No, I’m not,” Rutter contradicted her. “But I’m going to be.”

  Maria’s hand tensed. “In Spain, that policeman would not have saluted,” she said.

  “Because I’m only a detective sergeant?”

  “Because we have no chaperone with us, and are holding hands in a public place. He would not have saluted because he would have been too scandalised even to raise his arm.”

  “Then it’s a good job we’re here, and not in Spain.”

  “Perhaps,” Maria said wistfully.

  Rutter felt instantly ashamed of being so insensitive. “You really miss your homeland, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Maria admitted. “I know it’s foolish – I was only a tiny child when my parents became refugees, and I haven’t been able to go back since – but I feel Spanish, and until the Dictatorship is finally toppled, I’ll never really be whole. That’s why I will be going to the demonstration tomorrow.”

  Ah yes, the demonstration. Rutter had been trying to force h
is worries about it to the back of his mind, but they simply wouldn’t stay there. “Do you really have to go?” he asked. “It’s not as if General Franco himself was coming to London.”

  “No, but the man who is coming is one of his closest advisors.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “Someone has to make the protest,” Maria said passionately. “Someone has to show him that the barbarities of Franco’s regime are not forgotten in the rest of Europe.”

  “There’ll be police on duty outside the embassy,” Rutter warned her. “Probably a large number of them.”

  Maria shrugged. “Of course there’ll be police. Now that your government is on good terms with the Dictatorship, it feels obliged to do its utmost to protect Franco’s lackeys.”

  “Things may get out of hand.”

  “You mean your British bobbies, of whom you are all so proud, might suddenly become as vicious as the General’s guardia civil?”

  “Of course not,” Rutter said. “But we’re not used to protests in London. We’re not trained to handle them.”

  “There was the march by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament a few months ago,” Maria replied.

  “The CND march was entirely different,” Rutter pointed out.

  “Because all the marchers were British?” Maria asked, an edge of anger in her voice.

  Rutter sighed. “No, not because they were British,” he said. “Because they held their meeting in Trafalgar Square, which is a public space. Because they didn’t threaten private property.”

  “We will not be threatening private property. It will be a peaceful demonstration.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Rutter agreed. “But put anybody – including policemen – in a difficult situation they’re not used to handling, and there’s always a chance there’ll be trouble.”

  “Then that’s a risk I’ll have to run,” Maria told him. “Listen, Bob, my parents and I have a good life here. My father is a professor and when I get my doctorate, I will probably teach at the university too. Very nice for us. But there are other members of my family back in Spain who are not having such an easy time of it. I have an uncle who lives in poverty because all his property was confiscated. I have a cousin who is in gaol for no other crime than calling for democracy. I will be marching for them.”

  “If you must go, then I’m coming with you,” Rutter said.

  Maria laughed, alleviating the tension which had been building up inside her. “If you did march with us, you wouldn’t be working at Scotland Yard very much longer.”

  “I don’t care about the Yard. I just want to know that you’ll be safe.”

  “You do care,” Maria said, turning serious again. “You know you do. Your work is desperately important to you, just as my protest is to me. We both have to do what we have to do, Bob.”

  She was right, he thought. However depressing her insight might be, it was undoubtedly completely on target.

  They had reached Hyde Park Corner where a newspaper vendor, wearing a muffler despite the warm weather, was bawling at the top of his voice about an ‘’orrible murder’ in Cheshire. Rutter reached in his pocket for some small change.

  “You’re off-duty, Bob,” Maria said. “Leave it.”

  “I can’t,” Rutter told her, handing the vendor the coins. “If it’s important enough to make the London papers, then it’ll be important enough to make the Chief Constable call in the Yard.”

  “You see what I mean about your job?” Maria asked accusing, though she was secretly glad of anything which steered them away from another fractious discussion about the demonstration. “There has been a murder and you automatically assume that you will be involved in solving it.”

  “I will,” Rutter told her. “In case you’ve forgotten, I work for Chief Inspector ‘Cloggin’ it Charlie’ Woodend, who—”

  “Who you worship,” Maria said, with a smile playing on her lips.

  “Who can be both bloody brilliant and bloody impossible – often at the same time – and is the best bobby I’ve met,” Rutter answered. “But that wasn’t what I was going to say.”

  Maria forced her face into an expression of mock humility. “I’m sorry I interrupted,” she said.

  “What I was going to say is as far as the top brass are concerned, ‘Cloggin’ it Charlie’ is the Yard’s expert on ‘Up North’.” Rutter permitted himself a grin. “Besides, if the truth be told, I think they’ll jump on the excuse to get him out of London. He can be a real thorn in their sides when he wants to be.”

  Rutter opened the paper and scanned the story. Social-club boss with criminal past found murdered in his office. Nail driven into his skull. It sounded interesting. But it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The murder meant that when Maria was demonstrating outside the Spanish Embassy, he would already be in Cheshire. And he couldn’t banish from his mind the thought that without him in London, something terrible was going to happen to her.

  Detective Sergeant Gower stood to attention in front of his chief superintendent’s desk. It was not a position his toad-like body felt comfortable with, but given the trouble he was in, he thought it the best stance to take.

  “You were off-duty last night, weren’t you, Gower?” the Chief Superintendent asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So why did you go to the social club?”

  “Because I wanted a drink?” Gower suggested hopefully.

  The Chief Superintendent frowned. “Are you a member of the club, Mr Gower?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know any members of the club who might have been willing to sign you in?”

  “I know a few of them,” Gower admitted, though he doubted whether any of the petty criminals who were members of the club would ever willingly have done a favour for him.

  “Did you go into the club to see if they’d serve you, even though you were not a member?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But you did go into the office, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “An office which was in total darkness?”

  Well, of course it was, Gower thought. I wouldn’t have gone in if there’d been bloody lights on, now would I? “That’s correct,” he said.

  “And what made you do that?”

  “I thought something was wrong.”

  The Chief Superintendent shook his head almost despairingly. “Based on what?” he asked.

  Gower shrugged. “Professional instinct.”

  “And once inside, you discovered the body of Robbie Peterson.”

  That’s when I made my mistake, Gower told himself. I should never have reported it. I should just have got the hell out of there and left it to some other daft bugger to find the stiff. But aloud he said, “Yes, sir. That’s correct.”

  The Chief Superintendent frowned again, and looked down at the folder which was spread in front of him. “You’ve had a very chequered career, Sergeant Gower,” he said. “You can be a very good detective. You’ve managed to solve some cases the rest of us had all but given up on. But that’s only one side of the story, isn’t it?” He pointed his index finger squarely at Gower’s chest. “The other side is that you’ve been disciplined several times for breaking with official procedure.”

  “The villains I deal with don’t follow official procedure,” Gower said, almost to himself.

  “No, but we do,” the Chief Superintendent retorted sharply. “Shall I tell you what I think? I think that you were down at the club looking for just such an opportunity as the one you found. Isn’t that the case?”

  “I did not go to the club with any thought of entering the office,” Gower said. And for once he was telling one of his superiors the truth – it had been Annabel Peterson, not Robbie, who’d been the focus of his interest the night before.

  “Was Mr Peterson the subject of any official investigation?” the Chief Superintendent asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Yet you were investigating him? Un
officially?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gower lied, considering that he’d been truthful enough for one day.

  “And might I ask why?”

  “Robbie was a villain from way back. He hadn’t changed.”

  “Do you have any proof of this?”

  “No, sir.”

  The Chief Superintendent sighed. “You really leave me very little choice of what action to take in this matter, Sergeant. You will be suspended pending an investigation into your conduct.”

  It was unfair, Gower thought, but then that was only to be expected in this life. It wasn’t fair that his wife had run off with a bloody milkman. It wasn’t fair that he had to stand there now, listening to this prat who wouldn’t know real police work if it hit him in the eye. But that was just the way things were.

  Once out in the corridor, Gower quickly reviewed the meeting in his mind. He’d have been suspended whatever he’d said, he decided. So he’d played it just right – because the Chief Superintendent still had no idea that he was on to Robbie Peterson’s daughter.

  Doris Peterson replaced the hall telephone on its cradle, lit a cigarette and walked into the kitchen where her elder daughter was on her knees scouring the oven. “Well, that’s settled,” she said.

  Jenny Clough, who had been cleaning and polishing relentlessly all day, looked up from her work. “What’s settled?” she asked.

  “I’ve just been talking to Wally on the blower. He thinks he can get me extra staff for tonight.”

  “Extra staff!” Jenny repeated incredulously. “You’re never thinking of opening tonight, are you? Not with Dad hardly cold?”

  “You can’t afford sentimentality in this business,” her mother replied practically. “Customers expect you to be open, and if you’re not, they just go somewhere else. And there’s a danger that might become a habit with them.”

  “It’s not right,” Jenny protested.