“It was a million-to-one chance,” he says. “The pay office had a broad counter like a Western saloon. When the robbers burst in, one stayed by the door, and his partner vaulted over the counter. For a moment his weight was poised on his hand, splitting the thin rubber over the ball of his thumb. After he’d tossed the money into a bag and thrown it to the man at the door, he vaulted back over the counter, planting three-quarters of a perfect thumbprint through the gap in the rubber. Ivor Grange’s thumb: not just his loops and whorls, but a distinctive scar.”
Unfortunately, between incompetence and pressure of work, that finding was not confirmed until forty-eight hours later. By then Tom McKell had the distinct impression that Grange was dead.
The Waterman’s Arms was a genteel pub, not one of Longdown’s standard boozing booths. Most of the takings were generated by its restaurant, which was featured in several good food guides.
So the owners, a gay retired architect and his personable young chef, were horrified when the fight broke out. It might have passed unseen, a covert imposition of will and settling of scores out in the unlit car park, if Cyril Donahee hadn’t stepped outside for a breath of fresh air.
“Oi,” he shouted, “pack it in, three onto one’s not fair.” And by his own account, Donahee, six foot two and overweight for his height, “sort of pushed” one of the brutal attackers.
The man turned on him. Donahee, not too big to move quickly, jumped back just in time before retreating. He did not want to reason with a yard of motorbike drive chain used as a flail. Cyril Donahee, angry over bullying and even angrier at fleeing from it, counterattacked ninety seconds later with five fellow members of Longdown Rugby Football Club’s first team, who appreciated gourmet meals but liked mayhem even better.
When the police arrived, the rugger players were in possession of the field and the enemy had dispersed. Tosh Fisher was picked up a quarter-mile along the riverside path, unable to disperse far because his ankle was sprained.
The uniformed sergeant rang Inspector McKell as soon as Fisher was identified. The sergeant proposed to charge Tosh Fisher with making an affray; Cyril Donahee, who’d done his share of making it, was a magistrate’s son and a local hero besides, claiming to have intervened in a mugging and then conducted spirited self-defense, so he got off with a warning.
“I ought to get a medal,” Donahee asserted when Tom McKell quizzed him later that evening. “The fellow was in a terrible state. Trying to stay on his feet, but they were really laying into him, they’d broken his jaw, you could tell from the way it hung down. More blood than skin showing on his face. They were animals, using chains and I swear one of them had a razor—”
“Very likely, but what interests me is who this chap was.”
“Dunno, he was a terrible mess when I saw him. Must have dragged himself away when we started mixing it with the other three. I’m amazed he could move at all.”
Pressed for a description, Cyril Donahee scratched his head. “It was dark, just the light from the pub door, and you know how it is in a ruck... He had white hair, well, silvery. Struck me it wasn’t natural, maybe a dye job, bit poofy on a feller.”
“Ivor Grange,” Inspector McKell muttered. “I thought it would be.”
Tosh Fisher was in a cell at Central, waiting for his London solicitor to appear. “I think you were provoked,” McKell needled, with small hope of its working. “Grange cheated you out of your half of the payroll job, you were in order, taking it out on his hide.”
Mr. Fisher, broken, blood-plugged nose rendering him indistinct, retorted, “Dawk to buy ’awyer, leeb be alode.”
So Inspector McKell went in search of Ivor Grange, without success, then or on subsequent days. “Grange was cute,” he explained to me. “Insisted on holding all the money and paying fellow members of the firm in dribs and drabs afterwards. Enough to keep them going, too little to splash out with. Wouldn’t dole out the remainder until the dust settled.
“Tosh Fisher accepted that until he began thinking below the belt instead of above: needing to dazzle his popsy, he demanded his share right away. It didn’t take much working out that Grange had held firm, or that Tosh took a few pals along to beat a change of heart out of his partner.
“It was a damned nuisance, especially when that fingerprint evidence turned up. But for Fisher’s greed, Ivor Grange would have been snugged up with Ivy Challis and a false sense of security, and we would have detained him easy as kiss-my-hand. But now he was on the run, not from us but Fisher and company... All very messy and unsatisfactory.”
When Grange had been missing for four days, Inspector McKell paid another visit on Ivy Challis. The house had a pretentiously pillared frontage; its interior evoked a furniture store display, expensive without being homelike.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she replied edgily when McKell said it was bad business and looking worse for her lover with every passing hour. Pampered, groomed, Ivy had a disciplined cloud of auburn hair, green eyes, spectacular legs, all set off by a redhead’s pale skin, creamed, lotioned, and toned to perfection. It was hard to believe that she was pushing forty.
“Search all over again if you like,” she offered. “I’d be delighted for Ivor to be here.” She twisted the diamond ring on a long finger, as if trying to saw through. “To be honest, if it hadn’t been for that fight... Usual run of things, you come asking, I would keep my trap shut. But he must be hurt. On my mother’s eyes, Mr. McKell, if he comes back or calls me, you’ll be the first to know. I don’t want him arrested, he’ll give me a bad time after — but at least you lot would get Ivor into hospital. He might even finish with me for giving him away. I don’t care, as long as he’s all right in the end.”
McKell had believed her. The clincher coming when, eyes wet, Ivy Challis faltered, “He is just... you know, only hurt, isn’t he?”
“I hope so, Ivy. From what I hear, he was in a bad way when last seen.”
“And that damned pub is by the river...”
“We’ve dragged it, dear. Your feller didn’t fall in.” He did not share the theory that Tosh Fisher’s heavies had taken Grange with them, aiming to dispose of the body. Having gone too far in trying to beat the stash’s location out of him, they might have treated human wreckage with a spark of life as evidence to be destroyed.
Ivy wasn’t listening. “He knew Tosh was after him, some row or other, I didn’t want to know. Safer for me, right? I begged him to stay home. But no, Ivor goes out on the booze. Reckoned he would be all right at The Waterman’s, Tosh wouldn’t look for him there.” Her face twisted. “All this is down to Fisher! Not just the fight, you’re after Ivor for that factory business, but he never had anything to do with it. Tosh gets up to strokes and always drags my Ivor in.”
“That’s as may be. All Fisher admits is fighting at the pub. Grange wasn’t involved, he says. Tosh had a drink on his ownsome and was getting into his car when an assailant, whom he’d never seen in his life, set on him. Two passing strangers just happened to join in on Tosh’s side, protecting him.”
Ivy laughed bitterly. But when McKell urged, “You know more than you’re letting on... be frank with me, and I can really ruin Fisher’s day,” she shook her head.
“All I know is you lot keep persecuting Ivor. Just find him and get him to a doctor — please.”
“She played me like an old violin,” Inspector McKell admits cheerfully. “I bought the whole act. Until my new friend Tania Wark marked my card about Ivy, that is. Then I caught on to how, um, parochial I had been. Ivor Grange wasn’t at his mistress’s house; therefore she was not sheltering him. But that was tunnel vision, blinkered to anything outside Longdown.