“You didn’t steal him from the column,” said Milton with a grudging admiration. “You disguised him as Napoleon so that you could take him down legitimately – or so it appeared – today. No wonder you came so quickly when I called the office number of ‘Gostelow and Crabtree’. You were ready and waiting. Now I see why you wanted us to keep the media off your back when you took the statue away. You didn’t want them around when you made the switch. The fake Napoleon was already under the tarpaulin when you laid Lord Nelson beside him. All you had to do was to unload the plaster version and send your men off with the real statue. Ingenious.”
Newton was sullen. “We could never have stolen it in the pitch dark. Too complicated. So I got myself a job with Crabtree because I knew he had the contract for cleaning Lord Nelson. While I was up there, I took exact measurements of the statue. I paid a sculptor to create a fibreglass Napoleon which would fit Nelson like a glove. Nobody could tell the difference from down below.”
“You covered every option,” said Milton. “But made one mistake.”
“Yes,” agreed Hurrell. “You tried to be too clever. You played the Nelson game to the hilt and it was your undoing. You couldn’t resist one final trick on that name. Villeneuve. New Town. You were taunting us, Charlie. Telling us exactly where you were hiding.”
“There weren’t all that many new towns to choose from,” said the Commander. “Milton Keynes was the most obvious. We got the local police to check the footage on their motorway cameras and there you were. You’d painted out the name of ‘Gostelow and Crabtree’ on the lorry but you couldn’t disguise a seventeen foot statue under a green tarpaulin. It showed up clearly, taking the exit for Milton Keynes. All we had to do was to check up on warehouse space that had been recently let and we had you. Caught in here like standing statues.”
“You lost the battle,” said Hurrell. “Just like Admiral Villeneuve.”
They took him by the arms and marched him out. As they headed towards the police van, the Commander gave a ripe chuckle.
“It wasn’t all a case of brilliant deduction,” he admitted frankly. “Luck came into it. But, then, I’ve been due a bit of good fortune for some time and this was it. You were so busy playing games with your own name that you never thought to consider mine.”
“Yours?” said Newton.
“Dick Milton. Poet by name and policeman by nature. And where did you decide to hole up and toast your success? The whole of Britain was at your mercy but you picked Milton Keynes. There’s a poetic justice in that, Charlie. Thank you.”
He shoved the prisoner hard into the rear of the police van.
“Any room in there for Lord Nelson?” he asked.
THE AMOROUS CORPSE by Peter Lovesey
Peter Lovesey (b.1936) rapidly established himself with his first novel about the Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb, Wobble to Death (1970). Apart from the Cribb series he has also written novels featuring the Prince of Wales (the future EdwardVII) as detective in Bertie and the Tinman (1987), Bertie and the Seven Bodies (1990) and Bertie and the Crime of Passion (1993). He won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for the year’s best novel with The False Inspector Drew (1982) set aboard the S.S. Mauretania in 1921. The following story, however, has a modern-day setting, and was specially written for this anthology.
I’d been in CID six months when the case of the amorous corpse came up. What a break for a young detective constable: the “impossible” evidence of a near-perfect murder. You’ve probably heard of that Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn’t bark in the night-time. Well, this was the corpse that made love in the morning, and I was the super sleuth on the case. I don’t have a Dr Watson to tell it for me, so excuse me for blowing my own trumpet. There’s no other way I can do it.
It began with a 999 call switched through to Salisbury nick at 9.25 one Monday morning. I was in the office waking myself up with a large espresso. My boss, a deadbeat DI called Johnny Horgan, never appeared before 10, so it was up to me to take some action. An incident had just occurred at a sub-post office in a village called Five Lanes, a short drive out of the city. The call from the sub-postmistress was taped, and is quite a classic in its way:
“Police, please… Hello, this is Miss Marshall, the sub-postmistress at Five Lanes. Can you kindly send someone over?”
“What’s the emergency, Miss Marshall?”
“Well, I’ve got a gentleman with a gun here. He asked me to hand over all the money, and I refused. I don’t care for that sort of behaviour.”
“He’s with you now?”
“Yes.”
“Threatening you with a gun?”
“At this minute? Don’t be silly. I wouldn’t be phoning you, would I?”
“He’s gone, then?”
“No. He’s still here as far as I know.”
“In the post office?”
“On the floor, I believe. I can’t see him from where I’m speaking.”
“Are you injured, Miss Marshall?”
“No. I’m perfectly all right, but you’d better send an ambulance for the man.”
I decided CID should be involved from the beginning. Having told the switchboard to inform DI Horgan, I jumped into my Escort and burned rubber all the way to Five Lanes. I’m proud to say I got there two minutes before uniform showed up.
The crime scene was bizarre. The post office door was open. A man lay on the floor in front of the counter with a gun beside him. He was ominously still. And two old women were buying stamps. They must have walked around the body to reach the counter. The doughty Miss Marshall was serving them. Crazy, but I suppose they remembered doing things like that in the war. Business as usual.
We put tapes across the entrance to stop a queue forming for stamps and I took a deep breath and had a closer look at the git-em-up-guy. He was wearing a mask – not one of those Lone Ranger jobs, but a plastic President Nixon. I eased it away from his face and didn’t care much for what I saw. I can’t handle death scenes. I felt for a pulse. Nothing.
My boss, Johnny Horgan, arrived soon after and took over. He was supposed to be the rising star of Salisbury CID, an inspector at thirty-one, one of those fast-track clever dicks, only two years older than me. “Did you call the hospital?”
“I just got here, guv.”
“The man is obviously dead. What’s the ambulance outside for?”
The sub-postmistress spoke up. “I sent for that.”
DI Horgan phoned for the meat wagon and a pathologist. Meanwhile, we got the full version of the hold-up from Miss Marshalclass="underline"
“No one was here at the time. The man walked in wearing some kind of mask that made him look very peculiar.”
“Nixon.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Nixon, the ex-President of America.”
“He didn’t sound like an American. Whoever he is, we don’t walk about wearing masks in Five Lanes, so I was suspicious. He pointed a gun and said, ‘This is a gun.’ I said, ‘I can see that.’ He said, ‘Give us it, then.’”
“How did you respond?”
“I told him not to be ridiculous, to which he replied, ‘Hey, come on. I’ll blow your frigging head off.’”
“He actually said ‘frigging’?”
“I may be unmarried, but I’m not mealy-mouthed, inspector. If he’d said something stronger, I’d tell you.”