“It would be.”
“What do you know?” Cribb said. “Someone else has the same idea.” He took down a razor from the ledge.”
“There’s nothing remarkable in that,” Mountjoy said. “You’d find others up there, I’m sure.”
“Yes, I’m not saying this is the murder weapon. I’m just satisfying myself that a razor could be acquired by anyone using this wash-house on a regular basis.”
“Razor Bill, you mean?”
“No, I was thinking of the killer of Mary Smith. That murder has been troubling your conscience, hasn’t it?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“No, sir, I’m not suggesting you did, but you have a suspicion who did, which is why you came to see us. You’ve noticed things at home, heard things said, perhaps. You don’t know for sure, but you have a horrible suspicion Mary Smith was killed by your own wife Lettice. Hold her, Thackeray.”
Lettice Mountjoy had already made a move for the door. Thackeray grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her back.
Cribb switched his words to her. “You’re the one who works inside the wash-house. You’re the one with access to the razors.”
Thackeray, a strong man, had to struggle to hold her. This devoted woman, the gentle soul who welcomed fallen women to the mission, was abruptly transformed into a virago. “Yes,” she said with chilling ferocity, “I killed Mary. The night he was at home I collected a razor from here and went looking for her. He told me he feared she’d gone back on the streets, and she had. She didn’t deserve to live after the chance of redemption he gave her, after the solemn promise she gave him. He’s a saintly man. These feckless sluts hold his happiness in their hands, and this one betrayed him. I’m not sorry.”
Mountjoy had covered his face and was sobbing.
“You did the right thing, reverend, passing on your suspicions,” Cribb said, as Thackeray handcuffed Lettice Mountjoy and led her outside. “It could have happened a second time.”
“But I blame myself. She acted out of loyalty to me.”
Towards dawn, when statements had been made, and a long spell of duty was coming to an end, Thackeray said to Cribb, “Was the Reverend right, Sarge, about the motive? Was it loyalty that drove her to kill that woman?”
“Loyalty, my foot. She was jealous. Didn’t you hear what she called them — ‘feckless sluts’? There her own husband was, saving all these woman’s souls and taking her for granted. All right if they reformed, but heaven help them if they didn’t. Makes you grateful for the job we’re in.”
“Why is that, Sarge?”
“Our wives never know what we get up to.”
Thackeray observed a philosophic silence. Cribb didn’t need to know what Mrs Thackeray had said about the clean-shaven chin and the rouge on the pillow.
Needle Match
Murder was done on Court Eleven on the third day of Wimbledon, 1981. Fortunately for the All England Club, it wasn’t anything obvious like a strangling or a shooting, but the result was the same for the victim, except that he suffered longer. It took three days for him to die. I can tell you exactly how it happened, because I was one of the ball boys for the match.
When I was thirteen I was taught to be invisible. But before you decide this isn’t your kind of story let me promise you it isn’t about magic. There’s nothing spooky about me. And there was nothing spooky about my instructor, Brigadier Romilly. He was flesh and blood all right and so were the terrified kids who sat at his feet.
“You’ll be invisible, every one of you before I’ve finished with you,” he said in his parade-ground voice, and we believed him, we third-years from Merton Comprehensive.
A purple scar like a sabre-cut stretched downwards from the edge of the Brigadier’s left eye, over his mouth to the point of his chin. He’d grown a bristly ginger moustache over part of it, but we could easily see where the two ends joined. Rumour had it that his face had been slashed by a Mau Mau warrior’s machete in the Kenyan terrorist war of the fifties. We didn’t know anything about the Mau Mau, except that the terrorist must have been crazy to tangle with the Brigadier — who grabbed him by the throat and strangled him.
Don’t ever get the idea that you’re doing this to be seen. You’ll be there, on court with Mr McEnroe and Mr Borg — if I think you’re good enough — and no one will notice you, no one. When the game is in play you’ll be as still as the net-post, and as uninteresting. For Rule Two of the Laws of Tennis states that the court has certain permanent fixtures like the net and the net posts and the umpire’s chair. And the list of permanent fixtures includes you, the ball boys, in your respective places. So you can tell your mothers and fathers and your favourite aunties not to bother to watch. If you’re doing your job they won’t even notice you.”
To think we’d volunteered for this. By a happy accident of geography ours was one of the schools chosen to provide the ball boys and ball girls for the Championships. “It’s a huge honour,” our headmaster had told us. “You do it for the prestige of the school. You’re on television. You meet the stars, hand them their towels, supply them with the balls, pour their drinks. You can be proud.”
The Brigadier disabused us of all that. “If any of you are looking for glory, leave at once. Go back to your stuffy class-rooms. I don’t want your sort in my squad. The people I want are functionaries, not glory-seekers. Do you understand? You will do your job, brilliantly, the way I show you. It’s all about timing, self-control and, above all, being invisible.”
The victim was poisoned. Once the poison was in his system there was no antidote. Death was inevitable, and lingering.
So in the next three months we learned to be invisible. And it was damned hard work, I can tell you. I had no idea what it would lead to. You’re thinking we murdered the Brigadier? No, he’s a survivor. So far as I know, he’s still alive and terrifying the staff in a retirement home.
I’m going to tell it as it happened, and we start on the November afternoon in nineteen-eighty when my best friend Eddie Pringle and I were on an hour’s detention for writing something obscene on Blind Pugh’s blackboard. Mr Pugh, poor soul, was our chemistry master. He wasn’t really blind, but his sight wasn’t the best. He wore thick glasses with prism lenses, and we little monsters took full advantage. Sometimes Nemesis arrived, in the shape of our headmaster, Mr Neames, breezing into the lab, supposedly for a word with Blind Pugh, but in reality to catch us red-handed playing poker behind bits of apparatus or rolling mercury along the bench-tops. Those who escaped with a detention were the lucky ones.
“I’ve had enough of this crap,” Eddie told me in the detention room. “I’m up for a job as ball boy.”
“What do you mean — Wimbledon?” I said. “That’s not till next June.”
“They train you. It’s every afternoon off school for six months — and legal. No more detentions. All you do is trot around the court picking up balls and chucking them to the players and you get to meet McEnroe and Connors and all those guys. Want to join me?”
It seemed the ideal escape plan, but of course we had to get permission from Nemesis to do it. Eddie and I turned ourselves into model pupils for the rest of term. No messing about. No detentions. Every homework task completed.
“In view of this improvement,” Nemesis informed us, “I have decided to let you go on the training course.”