Then he was sent for several months to Paris as a sales representative for his company and took the opportunity to seek information from the relevant newspapers of the time and the archives of the Ministry of Defence. Many of the army records had been lost during the various wars, but eventually he tracked down the siege of Yen Bai, which would have been when he was a small infant.
Then his researches at last came upon the tragedy of the missing child of Captain and Madame Louis Dumas. Convinced that he must be the missing boy, he then had to trace them and further problems arose from the reluctance of the military authorities to divulge personal information. However, with the help of the Red Cross, they were tracked first to London and then, through Louis’s pension payments, to the address in South Wales.
He managed to get a temporary transfer to the British sales office in Slough and made his first contact by telephone.
‘And that is where our bittersweet problems began!’ said Louis Dumas, pensively.
SIXTEEN
On the first day of Christmas week, there was a development in the efforts of the Birmingham police to move forward their investigation into the Winson Green murder, as it had become known. A period of frustrating stagnation had occurred since the head had been matched to the bog body. Attempts to find Mickey Doyle’s former gangsters and winkle information out of them had proved futile. A couple of minor thugs had been unearthed who had once been associated with his felonies, but they steadfastly denied knowing anything about the bizarre corpse, other than that, years ago, the head had occasionally been exhibited during drunken revels at the Barley Mow.
Then on that Monday, a letter addressed ‘To Whom it May Concern’ arrived at the police headquarters and rapidly filtered down to the detective chief superintendent. After reading the short message, he hurried to the ACC’s office and within an hour, a conference was being held in his room, to which DI Trevor Hartnell had hastened up from Winson Green.
Several other senior CID men were present and their chief lost no time in passing around copies of the letter that had arrived in the morning’s post. Eyebrows were raised as they scanned the brief note and a DCI muttered, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ as his comment on the news.
‘May be a red herring, of course,’ cautioned the chief. ‘There may have been more than one Batman tattoo in Britain at that time!’
He cleared his throat and read the letter aloud, to impress it on his listeners. ‘He says, “I am an antiques dealer in Ludlow, having been in business there for many years. Yesterday, I happened to see in a copy of the Birmingham Post, which was wrapped around a delivery, a request for any information about a man with a Batman tattoo, of which there was a sketch in the article. I recall seeing a man in late 1944, who had an identical tattoo on his upper arm. I could give some further details if they were of interest to you… Yours sincerely, Bertram Tomlinson.”’
He looked around at his audience for a response.
‘Seems that the Chief Constable’s idea about publicity paid off,’ offered a DCI from the Division adjacent to Hartnell’s.
‘But why the hell didn’t he give us the details he mentioned?’
Lively speculation followed, but the chief super cut it short with a decisive order. ‘Hartnell, you’re still the prime investigating officer, so get yourself down to Ludlow straight away to see this chap. I’ll fix it with the Shropshire force, to tell them you are on their territory. Squeeze what you can from this fellow and let me know what you find.’
Inside another hour, Trevor Hartnell was in a plain black Ford Consul with Sergeant Rickman driving him south-west towards Kidderminster and onward to Ludlow, which was almost on the Welsh border. Hartnell had never been there before and was impressed by the medieval feel of the little town, perched on a hill alongside a huge castle, its narrow streets abounding with half-timbered buildings. Tom Rickman manoeuvred the Ford through the congested lanes to find Broad Street, which was the address on the copy of the letter which Hartnell held on his knee.
‘Tomlinson’s Antiques… there’s the place,’ he pointed out. Broad Street lived up to its name as there were some empty parking spaces and, moments later, the bell inside the double-fronted shop tinkled as they went in. A gloomy cavern, half-filled with furniture and scattered remnants of past years, led back to an area partitioned off by frosted glass panels. As they approached, a figure came out warned by the bell. It was a cadaverous old man, stooped and slow-moving. Fancifully, Trevor felt he had been transported back into a Dickens novel — the shopkeeper was not actually wearing woollen mittens and round spectacles, but he did have a long, shapeless brown cardigan over a waistcoat.
The policemen displayed their identifying warrant cards and Hartnell explained that they had come in response to his letter, thanking him for his public-spiritedness. Bertram Tomlinson seemed amazed at the rapid reaction and invited them into his glassed-in den, which was awash with papers and documents overflowing from a large desk. He found two hard chairs for them and sat behind the desk, after they had politely refused his offer to make them a cup of tea.
‘We were most interested in your statement that you recall seeing a man with that unique tattoo, sir.’
Tomlinson’s scraggy head bobbed, his thin grey hair becoming even more dishevelled. ‘I had no idea it was something called “Batman” until I read that newspaper on Friday,’ he said.
‘It’s from an American cartoon character, sir. But tell me, in what circumstances did you see this device?’
The old man explained that towards the end of the war, he was visiting the weekly market in Castle Square in the centre of the town, always on the lookout for articles for his shop.
‘Most of the stalls were for produce and used clothing, but there were some bric-a-brac dealers who sometimes had items of interest to me. This day, I saw a nice Georgian card table and, rather to my surprise, the stallholder accepted a low offer that I made without too much haggling.’
‘Was he the man with the tattoo?’ asked Rickman.
‘No, he was a heavily built man with a strong foreign accent. I paid cash for it — twenty pounds, I recall — but as it was too awkward for me to carry away, the man offered to drop it from his van when they closed up for the day.’
He went on to describe how the purchase was delivered to Broad Street just after five o’clock. ‘It was a very hot day and when the van arrived outside, the driver got out and carried the table into the shop. After exerting himself, he took off his shirt to cool down and as I gave him a half-crown tip for the delivery, I noticed this very odd tattoo on his arm.’
He paused and frowned. ‘That was not the end of the story, because a few weeks later, a policeman came around with a list and photographs of recently stolen goods and one of the items was the card table. It was part of a robbery from a large manor house near Oswestry. There were many such thefts in those days, I’m afraid.’
‘There still are, sir,’ replied Rickman, rather bitterly.
‘So what happened then?’ asked Hartnell.
‘The police took the table away, and though I eventually had a few pounds compensation from an insurance company, I certainly came off badly.’