of his body to compensate for the murk in his mind; unconventional sexual pleasures; and the abnormal quality of being able to look carefully at a crippled hand and
No, I didn’t care for Howard Kraye one little bit.
SEVEN
‘Chico,’ I said. ‘How would you overturn a lorry on a pre-determined spot?’
‘Huh? That’s easy. All you’d need would be some heavy lifting gear. A big hydraulic jack. A crane. Anything like that.’
‘How long would it take?’
‘You mean, supposing the lorry and the crane were both in position?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only a minute or two. What sort of lorry?’
‘A tanker.’
‘A petrol job?’
‘A bit smaller than the petrol tankers. More the size of milk ones.’
‘Easy as kiss your hand. They’ve got a low centre of gravity, mind. It’d need a good strong lift. But dead easy, all the same.’
I turned to Dolly. ‘Is Chico busy today, or could you spare him?’
Dolly leaned forward, chewing the end of a pencil and looking at her day’s chart. The cross-over blouse did its stuff.
‘I could send someone else to Kempton…’ She caught the direction of my eyes and laughed, and retreated a whole half inch. ‘Yes, you can have him.’ She gave him a fond glance.
‘Chico,’ I said. ‘Go down to Seabury and see if you can find any trace of heavy lifting gear having been seen near the racecourse last Friday… those little bungalows are full of people with nothing to do but watch the world go by… you might check whether anything was hired locally, but I suppose that’s a bit much to hope for. The road would have to have been closed for a few minutes before the tanker went over, I should think. See if you can find anyone who noticed anything like that… detour signs, for instance. And after that, go to the council offices and see what you can dig up among their old maps on the matter of drains.’ I told him the rough position of the subsiding trench which had made a slaughterhouse of the hurdle race, so that he should know what to look for on the maps. ‘And be discreet.’
‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ he grinned.
‘Our quarry is rough.’
‘And you don’t want him to hear us creep up behind him?’
‘Quite right.’
‘Little Chico,’ he said truthfully, ‘can take care of himself.’
After he had gone I telephoned Lord Hagbourne and described to him in no uncertain terms the state of Seabury’s turf.
‘What they need is some proper earth moving equipment, fast, and apparently there’s nothing in the kitty to pay for it. Couldn’t the Levy Board…?’
‘The Levy Board is no fairy godmother,’ he interrupted. ‘But I’ll see what can be done. Less than half cleared, you say? Hmm. However, I understand that Captain Oxon assured Weatherbys that the course would be ready for the next meeting. Has he changed his mind?’
‘I didn’t see him, sir. He was away for the day.’
‘Oh.’ Lord Hagbourne’s voice grew a shade cooler. ‘Then he didn’t ask you to enlist my help?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t see that I can interfere then. As racecourse manager it is his responsibility to decide what can be done and what can’t, and I think it must be left like that. Mm, yes. And of course he will consult the Clerk of the Course if he needs advice.’
‘The Clerk of the Course is Mr Fotherton, who lives in Bristol. He is Clerk of the Course there, too, and he’s busy with the meetings there tomorrow and Monday.’
‘Er, yes, so he is.’
‘You could ring Captain Oxon up in an informal way and just ask how the work is getting on,’ I suggested.
‘I don’t know…’
‘Well, sir, you can take my word for it that if things dawdle on at the same rate down there, there won’t be any racing at Seabury next week-end. I don’t think Captain Oxon can realise just how slowly those men are digging.’
‘He must do,’ he protested. ‘He assured Weatherbys…’
‘Another last minute cancellation will kill Seabury off,’ I said with some force.
There was a moment’s pause. Then he said reluctantly, ‘Yes, I suppose it might. All right then. I’ll ask Captain Oxon and Mr Fotherton if they are both satisfied with the way things are going.’
And I couldn’t pin him down to any more direct action than that, which was certainly not going to be enough. Protocol would be the death of Seabury, I thought.
Monopolising Dolly’s telephone, I next rang up the Epping police and spoke to Chief-Inspector Cornish.
‘Any more news about Andrews?’ I asked.
‘I suppose you have a reasonable personal interest.’ His chuckle came down the wire. ‘We found he did have a sister after all. We called her at the inquest yesterday for identification purposes as she is a relative, but if you ask me she didn’t really know. She took one look at the bits in the mortuary and was sick on the floor.’
‘Poor girl, you couldn’t blame her.’
‘No. She didn’t look long enough though to identify anyone. But we had your identification for sure, so we hadn’t the heart to make her go in again.’
‘How did he die? Did you find out?’
‘Indeed we did. He was shot in the back. The bullet ricocheted off a rib and lodged in the sternum. We got the experts to compare it with the one they dug out of the wall of your office. Your bullet was a bit squashed by the hard plaster, but there’s no doubt that they are the same. He was killed with the gun he used on you.’
‘And was it there, underneath him?’
‘Not a sign of it. They brought in “murder by persons unknown”. And between you and me, that’s how it’s likely to stay. We haven’t a lead to speak of.’
‘What lead do you have?’ I asked.
His voice had a smile in it. ‘Only something his sister told us. She has a bedsitter in Islington, and he spent the evening there before breaking into your place. He showed her the gun. She says he was proud of having it; apparently he was a bit simple. All he told her was that a big chap had lent it to him to go out and fetch something, and he was to shoot anyone who got in his way. She didn’t believe him. She said he was always making things up, always had, all his life. So she didn’t ask him anything about the big chap, or about where he was going, or anything at all.’
‘A bit casual,’ I said. ‘With a loaded gun under her nose.’
‘According to the neighbours she was more interested in a stream of men friends than in anything her brother did.’
‘Sweet people, neighbours.’
‘You bet. Anyway we checked with anyone we could find who had seen Andrews the week he shot you, and he hadn’t said a word to any of them about a gun or a “big chap”, or an errand in Cromwell Road.’
‘He didn’t go back to his sister afterwards?’
‘No, she’d told him she had a guest coming.’
‘At one in the morning? The neighbours must be right. You tried the racecourses, of course? Andrews is quite well known there, as a sort of spivvy odd-job messenger boy.’
‘Yes, we mainly tried the racecourses. No results. Everyone seemed surprised that such a harmless person
