‘Did he have many friends?’
‘None, as far as I could tell. He wasn’t popular in this street, you’ve probably gathered that.’
Harry had. After the arrival of police and ambulance, a knot of local people had gathered in the street. Women in curlers had whispered behind their hands and scruffy young children had pointed and jigged about with excitement. Everyone had been fascinated by the activity, but even though word soon got around that Miller had died, no-one gave any appearance of sorrow. For the people of Mole Street, it seemed that their neighbour’s demise was a source of entertainment to match anything on the telly rather than a cause of dismay.
Yet that was not true of Gloria Hegg. Whether or not she had ever fancied Ernest Miller, at least she mourned his passing. Her eyes were still brimming with tears and the puffiness of her skin made her look even older than her years.
‘Did he have any regular visitors?’
‘No, I hardly ever heard his doorbell ring. People collecting for charities only called once on Ernie, I’m afraid. He always sent them off with a flea in their ear.’
‘Yet he instructed me that he meant to leave his money to charity.’
She dabbed at her cheeks with a small handkerchief. ‘Just goes to show, doesn’t it? He wasn’t the mean old sod that people said.’
‘And no-one called yesterday, for instance, or earlier today?’
She hesitated before replying. Again he had the feeling that she was about to unburden herself.
‘Yes, Gloria?’
‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said slowly.
‘Tell me anyway.’
She gave him a grateful glance. ‘At least you don’t speak to me as though I’m a stupid old woman, like that young whippersnapper from the police. Whatever you may think inside.’
‘Of course I don’t think you’re stupid. Come on, Gloria, you’ve had a grim experience and I can see that something’s preying on your mind. Why don’t you share it?’
‘All right. As a matter of fact, someone did bang on Ernie’s door last night. I remember, because it was so unusual.’
‘A sales rep or someone rattling a collector’s tin?’ Harry was sure that Gloria would have had her face pressed to the window at the sound of activity next door. An inquisitive man himself, he recognised Gloria as a woman capable of turning nosiness into an art form.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said with evident regret. ‘I heard the knocking, but as it happens, I was on the phone to my sister in St Helens and I could hardly ring off. But no-one called on me, so when I thought it over afterwards, I felt sure it hadn’t been anyone selling or collecting.’ She gave him a fierce look and added defensively, ‘I like to know what’s going on in my street. When you’re a woman living alone, you never feel safe.’
‘Do you know if Ernie invited his visitor inside?’
‘I suppose so. I didn’t hear anyone leave later, but there’s no reason why I should have done. I was talking to Myrtle for over an hour. She lives alone and she likes a good natter once in a while.’ She hesitated and said, ‘It doesn’t matter, does it, that I didn’t mention it to the policeman?’
‘Don’t worry about it, Gloria, don’t fret yourself any more.’
Yet as he finished his tea, he mulled over the implications of what she had told him. Suppose Miller’s visitor had been someone connected with the Sefton Park case. Ray Brill, for instance. What if the old man had some reason for suggesting that Brill’s alibi for the killing of Carole Jeffries would not stand up to scrutiny? Might his visitor have struck him down and then, realising the old man was dead, have panicked and fled, leaving the door to the house open? Guesswork, guesswork, guesswork. He needed to know what Miller had learned and the answer, he felt sure, lay in the old man’s file on the case.
‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘I ought to have a quick look round the house before I go.’
‘Yes, yes of course. As his solicitor, you need to make sure everything is secure.’
He gave her a smile on his way out, thanking his lucky stars that she did not know that his own office had been burgled less than forty-eight hours earlier. Letting himself back into Miller’s house, he thought the place had the atmosphere of a graveyard. The dust irritated his sinuses and the musty smell was as strong as before. He knew he was trespassing in the secretive old man’s castle and he felt uneasy, as if from somewhere Miller was watching his every move.
He padded up the stairs and took a look around. As well as a bathroom there were two bedrooms of reasonable size together with a third scarcely big enough to accommodate a pygmy. He glanced into each room. Miller slept at the front of the house in the double bed he had presumably once shared with his late wife. The second room he evidently used as his study and the third was filled with junk accumulated over the years: an old mattress, bundles of old suits and a radiogram from the days of 78 rpm records and the BBC Light, Third and Home programmes. No prizes for guessing that he had never listened to the Brill Brothers here.
Harry concentrated his attention on the study. It was the only neat room he had seen in the entire house. This, he felt sure, was the place Ernest Miller loved to be. On a large mahogany desk stood an anglepoise lamp and a plastic tidy full of paper clips and drawing pins. A bookcase was full of cheap true crime paperbacks: turgidly written accounts of murder from Whitechapel to Wisconsin, books stuffed with theories about the Ripper’s identity and gory details of how each of his victims had died. There were grisly studies of sadism and murder, chock-full of pictures of sociopaths who mostly looked like the man on the Clapham omnibus and psychobabble which pandered to readers who like to cloak their voyeurism with a pseudo-academic fig leaf.
A two-drawer filing cabinet stood next to the desk. Its key was in the lock. Harry opened it and rummaged through the suspensions, each of which held a red file of the kind Miller favoured. Every file and suspension was neatly marked: bank statements, building society correspondence, savings certificates, long-term investment, bills and all the rest. Nothing of interest there, he thought. The real question was: where was the one marked CAROLE JEFFRIES?
He checked through the cabinet a second time and looked to see if anything might have slipped to the bottom, but again he drew a blank. There was, however, at the back of the lower drawer, one suspension that bore no name tag and contained no file. He scratched his head. It was impossible to believe that a well-organised man like Ernest Miller would have used one more suspension than was absolutely necessary.
And all too easy to believe that last night’s intruder had searched here for the file on the Sefton Park Strangling and stolen it to conceal facts which revealed that he, rather than Edwin Smith, had murdered Carole Jeffries.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Bloody bad news,’ said Jim Crusoe the next morning when Harry told him about Miller’s death. He gazed at the heavens as if in reproach. ‘If only you’d managed to get him to sign his bloody will, we’d be quids in. Normally we have to wait years to convert a loss leader on the fee for a will into profit on a probate.’
‘I don’t think Ernest Miller meant to be inconsiderate. I’m sure he would have preferred to hang on for a while himself.’
‘And now the bloody government will get the lot.’ Jim shook his head and then a thought occurred to him. ‘No suspicious circumstances, are there?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’ve learned from experience that you and sudden death seem to go hand in hand. Being your partner has probably doubled the cost of my life insurance.’
‘As a matter of fact, the whole business bothers me.’ No exaggeration, this: thinking about Miller’s death, and that of Carole Jeffries, had kept him awake for half the previous night. ‘You see, it goes back thirty years…’
‘For God’s sake,’ Jim interrupted, ‘you haven’t got time now to give me a history lesson. Tell me later on today. Have you forgotten you’re due back in court in half an hour? What’s the latest on the sergeant, by the way?’
