‘Did you wonder about the driver at all?’
She seemed puzzled by his question.
‘Why he never came through reception?’
‘Oh, I see what you mean.’ She shook her head. ‘No, I never gave it a thought. I only had one thing on my mind… Jimmy!’ She rolled her eyes again.
‘So you looked inside the car?’
‘Did I?’ Her good humour had returned, along with her crooked grin.
‘You saw the upholstery. You must have noticed if there was anything lying on the seats.’
‘Give me a break, officer.’ Her American accent came from the cinema. ‘It was three years ago.’
Billy lit another cigarette. He seemed to have relaxed himself. ‘Come on, Doris. You can’t fool me. What did you see?’
She laughed. ‘Not that much. There was a man’s hat lying on the passenger seat. I remember that. But I can’t tell you what colour it was, or anything.’
‘How about the back seat?’
She put her head on one side, inspecting him through lowered lashes. ‘Just how important is this, Sergeant Styles?’
‘I don’t know. I’d have to hear it first, wouldn’t I?’ He returned her grin.
‘What if I told you there was a body lying there?’
‘I’d say you had a good imagination as well as a good memory.’
She tossed her head, laughing once more. ‘Well, it wasn’t a body. Just a packet of fruit.’
‘Fruit?’ Billy went very still. She hadn’t noticed.
‘Yes, in a brown paper packet, but the packet had split and the fruit was spilled out on the seat. I can see it lying there now.’ She was smiling, pleased with herself.
‘What sort of fruit?’ Billy asked casually. ‘Can you see that?’
‘Of course I can. I’ve got a good memory, haven’t I?’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘They were oranges. Lovely golden oranges…’
12
‘But would he really have chosen such a public place to leave his car? In a nudists’ club?’ Chief Superintendent Holly clung to his doubts. ‘Surely he would have been spotted there?’
‘No, that’s just the point, Arthur.’ In effervescent mood, Angus Sinclair was inclined to be forgiving towards his plodding superior, who was proving unusually stubborn that day. ‘The area the club uses is fenced off. You can’t see in or out. The killer could easily have driven into the parking lot with the child, left his car there with the other vehicles and taken her down to the lower part of the gardens, near the river, without being seen. They are, and were then, overgrown and untended, Styles says. The Oxfordshire police are searching the grounds now. It’s been three years, I know, but they might find something.’ The chief inspector switched his gaze to Bennett, who was sitting behind his desk. ‘It was a fine, alert piece of deduction, sir. All Styles had to go on was a hint this girl had dropped during their conversation. A lot of people would have missed it. I’ll be putting his name down for a commendation when this is over.’
‘Yes, yes! And I’ll be happy to approve it.’ Bennett spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness. ‘But all in good time, Chief Inspector. We’ve still a long way to go.’
The assistant commissioner was in a testy mood. He’d been away for two days, chairing a police conference in Manchester, and had only returned to the capital that morning to find Sinclair’s request for an urgent appointment on his desk. Guiltily aware of the mass of paperwork awaiting his attention, Sir Wilfred had summoned the chief inspector and sent a message to Arthur Holly, as well. Much as he wished to keep in touch with the investigation, he was beginning to realize that this piece of self-indulgence on his part meant time stolen from other labours; ones better suited to his lofty station, furthermore.
‘So where do we stand now?’ Bennett drummed his fingertips on the desktop. He had listened with scarcely concealed impatience to the chief inspector’s detailed report. ‘Obviously this car is a crucial lead. A Mercedes-Benz, you say?’
‘Yes, and since it’s foreign-made, there won’t be many of them on the road in this country. What’s more, we know the model!’
‘How’s that possible?’ Holly asked, with more than a hint of disbelief in his tone. The chief super had recently been placed on a diet by his wife – he’d confessed as much to Sinclair – and the regime seemed to have had a dampening effect on his spirits. ‘I can’t believe this girl told Styles that.’
‘No, but she gave him the name of her old boyfriend,’ Sinclair countered cheerfully.
In contrast to the other two, he was in a capital frame of mind. This sudden break in what had promised to be the most intractable of investigations had come out of the blue. ‘A Mr James Stoddart, of Birmingham, and he’s already been interviewed by the police up there, at my request. He no longer has his car. He had to sell it when his wife threw him out a year ago – it seems she had the money. But, my goodness, does he cherish the memory of it!’ The chief inspector’s chuckle was hard-hearted.
‘Now, it turns out that particular model, the one Stoddart owned, was offered for sale in this country for the first time in 1929. I have that from the Mercedes representatives here – they’re located in Mayfair – along with the details of the car.’ He took a sheet of paper from his file and squinted at it. ‘Six cylinders, two hundred and twenty horsepower, overhead-valve… it can do up to one hundred miles an hour, would you believe? There’s a photograph of it, too.’ He slid a glossy print across the desk to Bennett. ‘I’m having that reproduced and circulated in the Brookham area in case anyone remembers seeing it. Someone with an interest in motor cars. There are always a few of them around, and it’s unusual enough to have been noticed.’
Sir Wilfred had been studying the picture of the sleek, longbonneted saloon. ‘It certainly looks a rather fancy piece of machinery,’ he conceded. ‘Not something for the average motorist, would you say?’
‘Not at the asking price!’ Sinclair smiled wolfishly. ‘It sells for a little over two thousand pounds.’
Holly’s gloom lifted momentarily and he whistled. ‘You’re right, Angus. There can’t be many of them around.’
‘No, and the advantage for us, of course, is that we only have to check purchases made between the spring of 1929, when the car came on the market here, and that summer, when the Barlow child was murdered. The Mercedes people are sending me a list of them this afternoon. It’s not a long one…’ He paused to reflect. ‘Of course, it’s quite possible the man we’re after no longer owns the car he had then. He may be driving something else now. But it makes no difference. If his name’s on that list, we’ll get to him.’
‘Yes, I see. This really is quite extraordinary.’ Bennett was recovering his enthusiasm. ‘If necessary, everyone on that list could be interviewed.’
‘They could,’ Sinclair agreed. ‘But I doubt that’ll be necessary. We can probably eliminate a good number, for one reason or another, right from the start.’
‘How will you approach the others?’ The assistant commissioner was eager now to know more. ‘You haven’t got that much to go on, after all. A car with a packet of oranges in the back…?’
‘To start with, we’ll simply ask them to account for their movements.’
‘Three years ago?’ Arthur Holly came to life with a growl of disbelief.
‘No, no, sir…’ Sinclair strove to keep a curb on his impatience. He wondered if it really was hunger that was dulling the chief super’s wits that morning. ‘All I’ll want to know initially is where they were and what they were doing on those dates in July and September when the girls were murdered at Bognor Regis and Brookham. If any of them says he can’t remember, well, we’ll have a special word with him.’
Holly rumbled unhappily.
‘What’s the matter, Arthur?’
‘You can’t haul innocent citizens off the street and interrogate them, Angus.’ The chief super set his jaw. ‘Not in this country.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Stung by the remark, Sinclair reddened. ‘But since you’ve raised the question, let’s examine it. To begin with, there’ll be no question of an interrogation until I’m morally sure we’ve found the man we’re after. And while it’s fair to say the information we need to identify him may soon be in our hands, knowing who he is could be one thing, and proving it another. Unless some hard evidence comes our way, we’re going to be faced with a problem of bricks and straw. How to make a case against him. In that event, we may be forced to take the only path left to us, which is interrogation.’