Tom McKell looked pained. “Then you didn’t listen right. She told me ever so much and, having told it, laid herself open to be squeezed for more. As for money, she expected money’s worth.”
He sighed and shook his head. “Look, for good and sufficient reasons we were very anxious to locate Ivor Grange. He had been involved in a major brawl and taken a first-rate beating some days before La Wark confided in me. Longdown’s jungle drums suggested that Grange had crawled away to die — unless he’d been helped. All the usual tales were circulating: his body was part of a motorway bridge foundation or floating around the English Channel in an oil drum.
“I didn’t let on to Tania, but we believed the rumors had substance. Ivor Grange was Ivy Challis’s fancy man, lived with her at Longdown inasmuch as he had any fixed abode. Her home was his foregone refuge after a fight. But she denied seeing him again after he went out for a drink on the night he disappeared. She invited me to see for myself that Grange wasn’t in her house, and I did. What’s more, Ivy was ringing Central every day, asking if we had news of him.
“Then up popped Tania Wark with two nasty bits of news, count ’em — Grange was still alive, and his girlfriend knew where he was. Wake up, chum... the baby food! Get your teeth broken, maybe a fractured jaw into the bargain, that’s the only slop you can handle. Especially if you daren’t go to a hospital or even a dentist in case that gets police on your tail.”
“And the painkillers,” I said, anxious to shine. “They weren’t for Ivy Challis, she wanted them for her missing lover.”
“Top of the class,” the inspector commended, insultingly insincere. “Of course, when Mrs. Wark went out of her way to tell me she hadn’t sold tablets to Ivy, it meant that she had. Probably charging well over the odds for the privilege, else why bother. That’s what I meant by Tania getting her money’s worth. She’d scratched my back, so... you know how the saying goes.
“Tania Wark was what you might call a sociable sort. Given the slightest encouragement, she’d have had my trousers off on that park bench, even if it was a business discussion. What a cheated wife would call our Tania is a husband-stealing bitch. Women like her have enemies. She reckoned that sooner or later one or more of them would tip us off about her dodgy dealings at the chemist’s. She wasn’t wrong, by the way; I’d already had a poison pen letter, and one of my sergeants was sniffing around on the same line. So she was just in time, applying for her insurance policy.”
“That’s corruption or conspiracy or something,” I said.
“No, it’s the way things work in the real world,” Tom McKell said. “Don’t start the po-faced and tut-tut routine. La Wark wasn’t operating a crack kitchen in her basement. Run a small retailing business these days, you cut corners or go under. For the price of a bus ticket, her suburban customers could get any item she sold twenty percent cheaper at the hypermarket outside Long-down or any of the big outlets in town. So why did they keep going to her shop? Partly for convenience, it was just round the corner.
“And because she did little favors, not just hand delivering medicine if a customer was housebound but bending the rules when she thought it was safe. Like selling painkillers, and probably the occasional uppers or downers, without benefit of prescription.”
Reading my dubious expression, he shrugged. “If it consoles you, I wasn’t giving Mrs. Wark a free license, and she knew it. But she could be fairly sure that if she kept her nose clean in the future and supplied me with tidbits — bear in mind that she mixed with a lot of fellers, was bound to hear things — then my investigation into previous misdeeds might be, let’s say, cursory.”
Grimacing, he reached for the scotch. “I love telling war stories to civilians. Dotting every i and crossing the t’s, holding their hand and leading them through the real world. You really are innocents. Look, d’you want to hear what happened, or concentrate on moral indignation, our police aren’t so wonderful, and all that good stuff?”
Ivor Grange was a Londoner who happened to spend a great deal of time in Long-down. It wasn’t that he’d made the capital too hot to hold him — more to do with being too lazy and arrogant to travel to Streatham in South London, where his main associate lived.
The payroll job wasn’t enormous, just under a hundred thousand pounds taken in an armed raid on an aircraft factory outside Longdown. But then it wasn’t a very big gang: Grange, an unidentified getaway driver, and a certain Tosh Fisher.
“We knew it was Grange and Fisher. From experience, and I’m only speaking of my county’s Force, I would say that in half the professional robberies we know who is responsible — sooner than their wives or girlfriends most often.
“Proving it, though... Grange was a prudent fellow, quite wily. Kept his head, didn’t spend like a drunken sailor the moment he scored. Didn’t run a flash car, own a big house. Fairly uncommon, for a bandit. Tosh Fisher was nearer your generic London toerag, but until then he’d done what Ivor Grange told him to. Not Fisher’s forte, playing second fiddle, but it had paid dividends for years, so he seemed to be solid.
“Grange and Fisher had alibis. Checkmate. Or rather it might have been if Tosh Fisher had been blessed with a grain of patience and self-discipline. Half share of a hundred K — near enough half, their driver would have been on a flat fee — got Fisher’s greed glands in an uproar. Easy money and sex, where would us poor coppers be without them? Fisher was courting a beautiful girl, and being homely and sixty years old to her twenty-three, he guessed that loads of money might work better than just changing his aftershave or buying her a bouquet.”
Here Inspector McKell made a brief detour to explain that he’d picked this case not to brag — for he rated himself slow and stupid — but to demonstrate how different real grasses are from any I had invented.
“For instance, we knew about Fisher from his ex-wife. She was a Longdown girl who moved back there after the divorce. But she stayed in close touch with Tosh Fisher’s dear old mum. Mrs. Fisher-as-was lived for the day he would come unstuck and wasn’t above urging it along as far as she was able. We never paid her a penny, mark you, but money was the motivation — she wasn’t getting as much as she wanted from him.
“Anyway, his ex-wife whispered to us that Tosh Fisher had promised his mama a nice holiday abroad, soon as his latest ship came home. He’d sussed out a caper involving a pay office — meaning Ivor Grange had set it up, but Tosh liked playing Napoleon of Crime, the ideas man. His mum, poisonous old bat, moaned to her former daughter-in-law that she’d be lucky to get a week in Brighton despite his big talk. Because he was obsessed with this young tart and meant to buy his way between the sheets.
“Now, Grange and Fisher had pulled all their previous jobs in London or Birmingham; it never occurred to me that this forthcoming robbery would be local. We alerted both cities, but Brum and London are full of pay offices so it wasn’t much of a warning. Then the Long-down factory was raided, and we felt pretty silly.”
Shortly after the robbery, Ivor Grange was invited to assist with Longdown C.I.D.’s inquiries. Grange claimed to have been at a golf driving range ten miles in the other direction at the time of the robbery. The range’s manager confirmed that.
Interviewed at Streatham, Benjamin “Tosh” Fisher stated that he had played snooker at a hall there while the robbery was in progress. Again, his presence was confirmed, for what little that was worth.
There matters stood until fingerprint evidence emerged. McKell had watched the scene-of-crime officer laboriously dusting the robbery site, and dismissed it as a ritual as meaningless as tossing a pinch of spilt salt over the left shoulder to avoid bad luck. A dozen people had been in and out of the pay office all day; the masked robbers had worn surgical gloves. But Inspector McKell, not for the first time in the case, was wrong.