“Then up pops our Mel and what she proposes is this: The shooter had the piece out ready, all along. Little .38 snubnosed held vertically by the side of his head. A guy has a small, dark object up to his lughole, deeply suspicious, what can he be up to? Calling a bookie, telling lies to his wife, asking for train times is what. Nothing suspicious, is the short answer; he’s on the phone, what else?
“Nigel Crane walks past Tasty Eddie, shoots him just above the ear, whips the revolver back into phone mode and walks on, talking to the piece. ‘That has to be it,’ Melanie Skeets said. ‘It didn’t sink in till he’d gone through that archway. He never looked round when there was that bang. He was the only one expecting it. The only one who knew what it was.’ ”
The inspector was less impressed than Mrs. Skeets had expected him to be. He believed that she had produced a viable explanation. Sadly, ‘That has to be it,’ falls short of the standard demanded by the Crown Prosecution Service. Mrs. Skeets was honest: at no stage of the incident had she seen a weapon rather than a mobile phone.
Belatedly she recognized that El Greco’s gesturing left hand had been a conjuror’s ploy to divert attention from what his other hand cradled as he left the corpse behind. An ingenious theory, and it might even be valid. The not-looking-round thing was persuasive — but it wasn’t evidence.
Melanie Skeets was positive that she knew better, although as she had feared, nobody took her seriously. Not at first, that is. Assertive in her quiet way, she got a hearing in the end.
That might have been the end of it; the inspector took her name and address without troubling her for a formal statement. If a prime suspect emerged, then she would be asked to attend an identification parade.
As for the rest — cute idea, the woman had a vivid imagination, don’t call us...
Sadly for Nigel Crane, his bad luck persisted.
There was, as has been stated, a platoon of reluctant visitors to police stations across Southeast London. Most demanded legal representation before uttering so much as “No comment.” Not any old first-cab-off-the-rank brief neither, but ‘their’ Mr. So-and-so, who took time to respond.
Our Inspector was dealing with the potential witnesses at the crime scene. He was ready to clock off when Inspector B drew him aside to beg a massive favor.
Inspector B had investigated the violent removal of a costly watch from the wrist of a minor yet delectable Hollywood actress in London for an awards ceremony. She had agreed to have dinner with him that evening. “There’s only a couple of faces left at Harvest Green. It’s just round the corner, you’ll be home in an hour. These are Couldn’t-Possibles, just give ’em a spin and kick ’em out the door...”
Reading the paperwork at the Harvest Green police station, Our Inspector decided that Inspector B hadn’t been kidding. Somebody seemed to be using Tasty Eddie Balch’s demise as pretext for hassling the opposition.
Nigel Crane was a glaring example. A scrawled note from the copper who had picked him up at the airport confirmed that the man’s ticket to Brazil had been booked months in advance. Somebody had spotted the wretch checking in, asked if there was any interest, and bang went Nigel Crane’s vacation.
His reputation as hit man had been enough for the chief investigating officer. The CIO wasn’t riding off in all directions, but he was pulling in bad citizens from as many compass points.
Noting that Crane had waived legal representation, Our Inspector started with him to get the dross out of the way. Nigel Crane told his sad story of Paradise Lost, Copacabana Beach anyway, and Our Inspector, heartless fellow, sniggered, “You shouldn’t tell lies to the girlies if you can’t take a joke, killer.”
“Very droll,” Nigel Crane groaned. Restless in the hard chair, he smoothed his hair. Wincing, he pulled his hand away and switched to tapping his feet. “What?”
Our Inspector was studying him raptly. “Nasty place on your face, you need some ointment on that, my son.”
“S’nothing, razor burn.”
“But first,” Our Inspector continued as if Crane had not spoken, “we’ll get that injury photographed, have the doc take a look. Doesn’t look like razor burn to me.”
Nigel Crane swallowed once. “I want my brief.”
“No sooner asked than granted.” Yet Our Inspector kept inspecting Crane’s face. “I know you slotted Balch, and now that that’s established, the rest is routine. The only way you got to the airport that quick is on a motorbike, and something tells me you aren’t into them. You paid somebody for the ride, probably a courier who knows all the shortcuts. And probably a mate of yours, so he’d ask no questions. That cuts the candidate list down.”
“I want my brief.”
“When your mate is looking at joining you on a murder charge it will loosen his tongue a treat. Tell me I’m wrong...”
Nigel Crane remained unhappily mute.
“We’ll find your ride, depend on it. What with traffic control, speed cameras, cameras monitoring the buses-only lanes, and a load more watching for terrorists, you’ll have been a right little film star. We’ll run all the tapes, look for a bike with two aboard, one in a dark suit — nowhere to change near the mall and you were in a hurry anyway, so you changed at the airport before checking in.
“The rider will get out from under at the speed of light, swear he didn’t know what was going on, all he did was give you a lift from the mall maybe ninety seconds after the shooting. And there’s a corker of an eyewitness can place you there, right next to Balch when he went down.”
Nigel Crane couldn’t resist venting his feelings. “That many cameras, you reckon? I said it in the car coming here and I say it again, this year has been pants for me.” Then he folded his arms and fell glumly silent again.
“Melanie Skeets worked it out perfectly,” Our Inspector gloats. “Crane walked past Eddie Balch, slotted him and kept going, ‘on the phone’ again. What he didn’t reckon on was this: The passage of a bullet heats up a revolver barrel something cruel. Even a short barrel. Nigel has skin a girl would envy — ultra sensitive. When I saw the nasty new burn near his earlobe, from putting the gun up against it again and talking away, it was Game Over.
“None of the traffic or security camera coverage had caught him en route to Heathrow, by the way. We had enough, though. He wore transparent gloves for the hit but a dark suit and white shirt were recovered from a washroom bin at the airport, and there was gunshot residue on the shirt and jacket sleeves. Nothing to connect Crane to the clothing bar his DNA traces, pardon my sarcasm...
“His defending brief could tell they were on a hiding to nothing, didn’t contest the evidence, and went all-out on the mitigation speech: ‘A tragedy for the defendant as much as the victim, both casualties of society.’ It sounded good but the jury didn’t quite agree. They conferred for, oh, all of forty minutes. Not quite as fast as his trip to the airport, but close. Guilty as charged.”
At which point — in hindsight one understands that he had been working up to it, chortling inwardly for minutes — Our Inspector produces his treasured and excruciating pun, polished by frequent use.
“It was enough to make a man religious, clocking that redness on his skin. You could say our Nigel bore the mark of Crane.”
Dark Eyes
by R. T. Lawton
“Armenian, come with me. The Russian requests your presence.”
I left off sorting the bright silk scarves the southern traders had brought in the day before and glanced up. The schoolteacher for the Tereski Cossack Regiment stood in the doorway of my hut, a hut that I had rented on a previous trip for my business here. During the few other times I’d seen the teacher, he had carried himself with the air of authority, but on this early morning he seemed perturbed over some weighty matter that occupied his mind. Ah, those sorts of things were for the local officials to handle. I had no wish to meddle in the affairs of the tsar’s representatives, nor to be drawn into them. I was merely a seller of goods in this foreign land.