THE TELEPHONE ON Joe’s desk rang at exactly eleven o’clock. Professor Reginald Stone declared himself and gave Joe five minutes to say his piece. He was not pleased to be caught between lectures. He listened to Joe’s request to recall once again the sequence of events between the finding of the gold coin and the stowing away in the colonel’s handkerchief, sighed and tutted in irritation.
“Thank you, sir. Commendably succinct,” Joe said, when he’d finished.
“Brevis esse laboro,” came the predictable reply.
“Indeed. I will try to be equally brief. I’ve got two minutes left,” Joe said. “To set your mind at rest—I’m sure you’ve been worrying—the coin in the girl’s mouth was, as you warned us it might be, a copy. A very good one and one with a high gold content but—a facsimile. So convincing a specimen must have been moulded from an original, according to our expert with a microscope. I’d like you to give me the names of the London owners of such a coin. Including such as have sold them on or reported them stolen.”
The professor listed five names.
“Thank you for that. You’ve been a considerable help, Professor.”
Five names. One recurring.
He’d got him.
The man he’d begun to think of as the mad choreographer. The identity of the person behind these unpleasant crimes: the mistreatment of a body, the murder of a seaman, the terrorising and threat to the life of a good-hearted American senator for reasons Joe did not yet understand, was clear. Joe’s only problem was that he simply did not accept it. All he could do was arrange an interview and see how far he could push the evidence. He picked up the telephone again and made a careful call.
A knock on the door announced Inspector Orford.
“Orford! Come in and have a cup of coffee. You look as though you need one. Tell me how it went.”
Joe listened to the no-frills, professional account, guessing only from the occasional pause and use of a telling adjective that the announcement of death had been its usual gruelling experience.
“Well done. Good decision to let the story finish at the hospital. No need to burden the old girl with all those muddy riverbank theatricals and the disfigurement. That generation has a certain reverence for the dead which we are losing. We’re not in the business of piling pain on pain. Speaking of which … Orford, I know now who is responsible for that pain. The toe-chopping, the neck-breaking, the alarming notes and all the rest of the terrors. I’m not clear as to the motive that’s behind all the brutality and the madness and I doubt I ever shall be. But I have the identity. I’ve traced it back to a directorship of that clinic you charmed your way into: St. Catherine’s Clinic.”
Orford opened his eyes wide and whistled. “No! Sir, you’ll never get near! Untouchable, I’d say.”
“On the contrary,” Joe said with more cheerfulness than he felt. “I’ve issued an invitation to come up and see us. We have an appointment here in my office in half an hour. In preparation for which—pass me that envelope of prints from the lab, will you? I must study it again. And remind me … how many matches do we require these days to establish an absolute identity? Is it still twelve?”
“That’s right—twelve. Between eight and twelve, the judge will listen but take it only in conjunction with other elements of the evidence. Whatever that means! Fewer than eight—forget it.”
“Hmm …” Joe traced the photographs of smudgy prints with the end of his pencil, frowning. “We’re on thin ice here then. We have five. Decidedly dodgy. I’ll see what I can do. I shall just have to make a little go a long way. It convinces me but then—that’s why we have judges and juries. Look, Orford, I want you to be present to back me up. Don’t worry—I shan’t tell any whoppers but I may make an odd emphasis or two. All deniable. If I’ve got the wrong man it will soon be evident. I shall make a grovelling apology and off he’ll go, cursing me for a time-waster and ringing up his uncle in the Home Office. But I don’t think that’s how it’s going to turn out. You were in on this right from the beginning. It’s still your case. I’d like you to make the arrest. Can you buzz off and organise two uniformed coppers to stand by and … yes … a Black Maria, I think would be a fitting conveyance to the local nick. Vine Street, I suggest.”
CHAPTER 26
“I’m glad that Sam and Joel are not present to hear this, Commissioner.”
Colonel Swinton spoke more in sorrow than in anger. “They had formed a considerable regard for you, were you aware? They’d never met a senior policeman before and, far from being an ogre of the type they’d heard stories of, they found you to be ‘a real gentleman and sharp with it.’ I fear they would now have to revise their judgement on the official who, pompously and with not a jot of evidence, sits before me ranting of murder, despoliation of corpses, suppression of evidence and what was the other thing …? Oh, yes. High treason.”
His grin was disarming. He stirred in his seat on the other side of Joe’s desk and leaned closer. “I say—would you like to send your inspector out to get some tea or something? Wouldn’t want to embarrass the top brass in front of the minions, would we? I’ll wait.”
Seeing that Orford, having got over his initial astonishment, was now beginning to flush with righteous rage, Joe decided it would be politic to send him out. And the colonel might well, in the absence of any witness, be more freely indiscreet.
“Tea? I expect you’re gasping for one, Colonel. Thank you, Orford.”
Joe looked across at the bland broad face with its slight sneer and wondered why he hadn’t seen the unpleasant features below the mask of respectability the last time he’d sat in that chair. On that occasion he’d been flanked by his gardeners. Sam and Joel with their Suffolk grace and good manners had lent him cover, two angels hauling him up to heaven, Joe reckoned. Impossible to think badly of a man who employed men like that. Their shining innocence implied a reciprocal blameless goodwill, a kindly fatherliness on the part of the employer.
“Orford is nobody’s minion and nobody’s fool,” Joe heard himself snap back when the door had closed behind the inspector. He began patiently to re-evaluate the evidence Swinton had just dismissed with derision.
“The body of the dancer. She was not the nameless, unclaimed derelict you and your friends had assumed. She has a name, you know. Marie Destaines. A talented young ballerina and beloved of her grandmother. Marie died—not by any malice, I’m sure—at the clinic of which you are a director and major shareholder. Whilst her body lay in storage pending enquiry into her identity and next of kin, neither of which she had declared, an emergency arose. In collaboration with Miss Kirilovna, whom we believe to have been your associate in things other than management of the clinic, you evolved a scheme in which the apparently unwanted body might be put to use as part of a political plan to unsteady, unseat, send mad, or otherwise discommode an American senator, guest of this country.
“You knew well ahead of Marie’s death of the scheme to dowse the riverbank. It occurred to you that if the body were unearthed in the dramatic way it was, it would turn the screw on the senator further. Nothing left to chance. You’d already prospected the area, you had the table of Thames tides to hand. If the body were washed away in spite of your careful calculations as to depth—well, no matter. One problem would have ebbed away with the tide. A slight hiccup in confidence perhaps when it came to preparing the body for ‘burial’ and amputation of toe? Or merely a theatrical gesture? You put a copy of a gold coin—you have, I’m told, three genuine examples at least in your possession, and several copies—under the girl’s tongue. You may well have accompanied this hocus-pocus with a funeral oration in Latin. Some dark flourish from the Aeneid? An impressive gesture.” On an impulse he added, “Matron must have been charmed by it.”