“Thought you’d be out at Battersea,” Eddie said. “Turnbull’s over there, ‘e asked me to tell you if you came here first. A man named Tony Brown, Eve Franklin’s ex, was found dead in his room this morning. Gassed.”
“My God!” ejaculated Roger, and grabbed a telephone. “Give me Superintendent Pinkerton of Clapham, quickly, please. . . . I wonder if Eve knows? . . . Hallo, Pinky! I’ve just heard about the Flodden Road job, and I’ll be on my way in a few minutes, but there are one or two oddments you could get cracking on before the official report’s ready.”
“Always a jump ahead,” jeered the Divisional Superintendent. “Tell me what they are, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Ta. If you could get me Brown’s history, going back to his first tooth, it would help. Then see if he’s ever had anything to do with The Daytime, the night club Raeburn owns in Clapham. This could be suicide because of unrequited love, but if it’s murder, we might find a double motive.”
“Jumping a bit fast, aren’t you?”
“I can’t jump fast or far enough to get Raeburn,” Roger said. “See you at the morgue.”
CHAPTER VI
TURNBULL, MASSIVE and frowning, watched the pathologist who was examining Tony Brown’s body, which was cherry pink except where it had been in contact with the bed. His face was as red as a cherry trodden by a clumsy foot. The smell of gas had now almost gone, although in die corners of the room there were still traces. The tap of the gas fire, the door and the brass rails of the bedstead were covered with a film of grey fingerprint powder, and a detective officer was on his knees in front of the fire, brushing the tap gently with a small camel’s- hair brush.
The pathologist straightened up.
“Isn’t much more I can do,” he said. “He’s been dead since late last night. No signs at all of violence. There’s the usual pink coloration of the body, and the flesh is flattened where he was lying. He’d been drinking heavily,
I’d say—tell you more about that after the post-mortem. You needn’t keep him here any longer.”
“Right,” said Turnbull.
“Nothing more you want me for?”
“No, thanks.”
“All right.” The doctor nodded and went out, leaving Turnbull alone with the body and the man who was on his knees. Photographs of the room and the body had already been taken, and an ambulance was waiting outside.
The officer in front of the fire stood up and dusted his knees. “Nothing at all suspicious,” he said.
“Sure?” Turnbull was hard-voiced.
“The only prints on the tap are Brown’s. I took an impression off his fingers, sir, and they’re identical with all the others in the room. He looked after himself; no one else in the house ever came in here. Looks as if he did himself in all right.”
“He may have,” conceded Turnbull. “Raeburn might be an honest man, too.”
The detective pretended not to have heard. “Shall I send the ambulance men up?”
“Not yet, Symes,” Turnbull said. “Have another go at the people across the landing and the woman downstairs. We want to know exactly what time Brown came in last night.”
“They all say—”began Symes.
“Try them again,” ordered Turnbull, brusquely.
“Right, sir,” Symes, who so obviously thought that Brown had committed suicide, turned to the door, which was ajar. It opened wider, and Roger came in.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Morning,” Roger said, waited until Symes had gone, and said to Turnbull, without rancour:” If you talk to men like that, you’ll make them hate your guts, and you’ll never get the best out of them.”
“Morning, preacher,” Turnbull said.
It was a touchy moment. Turnbull, a rank below Roger, was always aggressive, often nearly insolent, as now, for they had clashed before. Roger bit back a sharp retort, and bent over Tony Brown, but soon turned away and looked about him. The telltale evidence of police work was everywhere. He did not ask questions, although, when he looked at the fire and glanced up, Turnbull shook his head. Roger went to the window, overlooking a terrace of grey houses, three stories high, mostly shabby, but some of them resplendent with new paint. At intervals along the street were plane trees, their branches spreading upward, dotted here and there with dry leaves hanging on tenaciously. Three stone steps led up to the front door of each house.
Leaning forward, Roger could see a cluster of trees in Battersea Park; not very far from this spot, Raeburn’s victim had been run down.
“Found anything useful?” Roger asked at last.
“Not a thing.”
“Know much about this fellow yet?”
“Not much,” Turnbull answered. “He didn’t do any particular job, but managed to make a fair living. Fond of whisky and women, and”—Turnbull paused deliberately —”in love with Eve Franklin.”
