Читать книгу Dr. Morelle and the Doll - Ernest Dudley - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

P.C. Frank Jarrett had promised himself a quiet Saturday evening. A few official reports to clear up, then some reading, and early to bed. Charles Hafferty’s telephone-call had caught him with his shoes off, his toes curling before the fire. P.C. Oxley had answered the phone in the office and then came back to the sitting-room.

‘This sounds like yours,’ he said.

When he hung up, Jarrett came back in his socks, and began to put on his shoes again. Oxley’s eyebrows went up. ‘Trouble?’

‘Old man Hafferty,’ Jarrett said. ‘Gone and got himself lost, or something.’

‘Tod Hafferty?’

Jarrett nodded. ‘Seems he hasn’t got back.’ He reached for his overcoat. ‘I could do it in a couple of minutes on your motorbike,’ he grumbled.

‘Maybe they’ll reconsider it after your last report,’ Oxley said. ‘You knocked up enough miles, last month.’

Jarrett went out of the warm sitting-room, muttering over his shoulder at this arbitrary allocation of motorcycles. If that lot over at Sandwich had to manage on a push-bike they’d soon change their ideas.

A few minutes later he was riding out of the handful of houses and cottages which comprised Eastmarsh, along the road towards Asshe. By now his head was no longer full of the inconvenience of having to use a bike instead of Oxley’s motorcycle; his thoughts revolved round the business of the previous afternoon, and the couple he had kept an eye on, and which had haunted him ever since.

When P.C. Jarrett had first noticed the girl and the way she wore her flashy clothes, a way well ahead of her years, which made her technically at any rate under the age of consent. He had thought it would not be long before she caught some male roving eye. But he had not expected that it would turn out to be the man he had seen her with six weeks or so ago.

There may have been others before him, but Jarrett knew nothing about that.

He didn’t require much experience to realize that this sort of case was difficult to handle. It would have been the last sort of job he wanted to take on, anyway, but the identity of the man complicated the whole thing even further.

He had seen him and the girl on three or four occasions after the first one. Once under the shelter of a hedge, then, a haystack, the edge of a cornfield; he had watched them once disappear into a clump of bushes.

But until he saw them yesterday afternoon, when he was off-duty, in plainclothes, on their way to Eastmarsh railway-station, he had no evidence to support his suspicions. It was in the middle of the Friday afternoon at an hour when passenger traffic was slack; and it seemed to him that an empty railway compartment was probably just the job for the man and the girl.

Jarrett had followed them to the booking office while the man bought two returns to Sandwich. He kept unobtrusively close behind the pair on the platform.

When the train came in he saw, as he had expected, that it was less than half-full, and again as he had anticipated the pair got into an empty compartment just as the train was about to move out. There was another empty compartment immediately next to theirs, and Jarrett nipped in as the guard blew his whistle.

To obtain the evidence he needed he realized he would have to leave his own compartment, step on to the running-board of the train, now travelling at speed and observe through the next window what was taking place.

He lowered the window of the right-hand door of his compartment, opened it, grabbed the hand-grip which is provided for the cleaners when the carriages are in a siding, and stood on to the running-board. He eased himself clear of the door as he closed it from the outside, making certain that it was fast, and then, changing hands, swung himself a foot or so forward, when he should find himself level with the window of the next-door compartment.

He accomplished the manœuvre without much difficulty. The man and the girl occupied the seat with its back to the engine, and his first glance told Jarrett all he needed to know to charge the man.

It was then that it occurred to him to take a look to see that the line ahead was clear, and two hundred yards off, he saw a tunnel. The train was doing forty miles an hour, and he knew that he couldn’t escape being struck by the wall of the narrow tunnel.

There was no time to regain his own compartment. There was nothing left for him but to remain where he was. The tunnel appeared to be rushing towards him while he remained hanging on to the hand-grip. The tunnel yawned at him, a vast and appalling menace, swelling to a gigantic size until he could make out the mortar between each brick.

The daylight disappeared like a light suddenly switched off. The acrid stench of smoke filled his nostrils, the thunder of the racing wheels became a deafening uproar. Stones displaced from the track cracked against the tunnel wall like pistol-shots.

He felt the brickwork grazing his back and shoulders while the escaping steam from the pressure pipe beneath the running-board blinded him. After what felt like an eternity he was once more in the daylight, and the train was rattling along steadily. He was still there.

Eventually he got back into his own compartment, and collapsed into a corner, and looked at his clothes. One trouser leg was half-torn off. His raincoat was split down the back. He was black with soot from head to foot.

But what worried him most was the problem of what he should do about the evidence he had. He could go into court now and describe with convincing detail what he had witnessed taking place between the man and the girl; it would be enough to send the man to jail.

But P.C. Jarrett had done nothing about it.

He had got out of the train at Sandwich and without waiting for the two in the next compartment he had crossed over to the other platform, managed to clean himself up a little, and then caught a train back to Eastmarsh.

His duty was to have charged the man on the spot, but he had not done so. He had kept the entire business to himself, not even mentioning it to Oxley.

And now here he was dragged out over the very man he ought to have pinched yesterday afternoon having gone and got lost. The girl was the daughter of an Eastchurch lay about, a no-good who’d done time for house-breaking.

The man who had been with her was faded film star, Tod Hafferty.

By now Jarrett had passed the bungalow, a long and low brick-built building called The Nest, which stood back from the road with a wide drive leading up to it. It was masked by tall trees, except for a low, white swing-gate. Jarrett glanced over the gate as he rode by, glimpsing the comforting light from the windows. This was where the slightly mysterious Professor Kane lived alone, with a housekeeper, a middle-aged little woman, to look after him.

Two hundred yards further on, P.C. Jarrett passed the Kelly’s place, converted from two farm-labourers’ cottages. The name on the iron gates under a brick arch was Roselands; in the summer the front-garden was filled with roses. But Jarrett’s interest whenever he passed was less for the picturesque house or Major Kelly or his wife, but more for Fay Kelly, their daughter. If only he wasn’t an ordinary village cop, he had told himself often enough, he might have chanced his luck with her.

She had given him one or two long, smiling glances when they had encountered each other, and he had felt his heart beat somewhat faster.

Another hundred yards or so, and he was passing Woodview, occupied by Charles Hafferty and his wife. He frowned to himself as he brought his mind to bear on business. He knew that Charles Hafferty was some sort of commercial artist whose efforts, Jarrett imagined, could hardly be coining money; but the pair of them appeared to be reasonably well-off.

The life of the locality, with its slow rhythms, held little appeal for P.C. Jarrett. The mesh of human activity, not the pattern of the rural year, stirred his interest; people, not the village-fêtes or flower-shows, the local football-teams or darts-championships, aroused his concern and a feeling of responsibility. People like Tod Hafferty and the rest of his family. Charles Hafferty’s house was in darkness, Jarrett saw as he rode past. He and his wife would be down at Asshe House waiting for Tod Hafferty.

Curious if the old boy had gone off somewhere, instead of going home. Jarrett’s mind went back to the railway carriage episode. Had he been with that girl again, and something happened which he had not bargained for? Jarrett also wondered what his family knew, if anything, about his carryings-on. Mrs. Hafferty, for instance, did she know, or suspect?

He reached the double, ornamental iron gates of Asshe House, with a shoulder-high wall on either side. He left his bicycle propped against the wall, went up the short, wide flagstoned path and rang the bell. The light was on in the hall, he saw, as Bess Pinner opened the door to him. She stared as if he was a ghost, though she had seen him often enough.

‘Will you come in, please?’

He stepped into the hall, looking curiously about him at the walls smothered with the photographs, film-stills and posters. He had been a keen film-goer and remembered seeing Tod Hafferty in a number of films; and then some of them had been shown lately on television, which Jarrett had chanced to see.

Marie Hafferty came from the sitting-room, smiling brilliantly at him. Despite himself his eyes travelled quickly over her, the sweater too tight and showing the nipples of her breasts, the hip-hugging skirt. Why did she dress that way, he thought? She looked like a plumper version of the kid he’d seen with her father-in-law. Who was there to impress? Her brother-in-law, Bill Parker? He was a bit of a bottom-pincher, by all accounts.

So Tod Hafferty had not returned.

‘So kind of you to come so quickly,’ she said. ‘My husband will be here in a moment; he’s just reassuring his mother. She’s become very upset, I’m afraid.’

P.C. Jarrett pulled off his overcoat and with it over his arm and clutching his helmet, he followed Marie Hafferty across the hall. She opened the door and they went in. The dining room was white-painted, with a dark, polished refectory-table, a welsh-dresser with rows of pewter jugs and dishes, and china plates hung on the walls.

Jarrett was aware of Marie Hafferty’s vitality, the scarcely controlled animal energy that seethed in her as she stood beside him. She made him feel very young and uncomfortable. When she caught his eye she smiled coolly.

‘What do you think could have happened to Mr. Hafferty?’

‘Difficult to say. The chance is he may have had an accident and be lying helpless somewhere.’ He looked at her. ‘Could he have gone off by himself without letting anyone know?’

‘Doesn’t seem like him,’ she said.

Charles Hafferty came into the room. He was still wearing an old duffel-coat and had put on rubber boots. His face was set in grim lines, his small, deep-set eyes anxious. His face relaxed when he saw Jarrett. They talked briefly, Marie’s husband explaining how he had already made a quick search, while she watched them, and Jarrett noticed she was smiling that disconcerting, secret smile. She hardly seemed aware of her husband.

‘You’ll want to cover the ground your father would have taken this afternoon,’ P.C. Jarrett said to him.

‘I went as far as the chalk pit when I went out,’ Charles Hafferty said. ‘Then I turned back. I felt I needed help to look properly.’ He turned to Marie. ‘We won’t be long, we hope.’

She turned suddenly to Jarrett. ‘Can’t I come with you? I can see like a cat in the dark.’

Her husband said quickly: ‘You’re better indoors. Somebody ought to stay with mother.’

‘That’s Olivia’s job,’ Marie said. ‘She’s her daughter, not me.’

‘Will Mr. Parker be coming with us?’ Jarrett said hastily.

‘Not likely,’ Marie snapped. ‘He and his wife took very good care to nip off before you arrived. Tramping about in the dark isn’t Bill Parker’s idea of fun.’

It wasn’t his idea of fun, either, Jarrett thought; a curious sense of oppression filled him, making him feel anxious to get away from this house. An atmosphere of unhappiness had gathered around them as they stood there.

‘If you want rubber boots there’s an extra pair in the kitchen,’ Marie Hafferty was saying to him. ‘I daresay they’d fit you.’

She led the way through the hall. In the large, bright kitchen, where the radio was playing, Bess found the rubber boots and Jarrett pulled them on to replace his own shoes. They came up to his knees and would be useful. There would be a soaking dew for certain. Bess took charge of his shoes and he followed Charles Hafferty out of the kitchen-door. Bess had told him the rubber boots were used by the daily handyman, Alf. P.C. Jarrett knew Alf Layton. ‘Alf s got pretty big feet for a shortish man,’ Bess said, ‘but I daresay they’ll be all right.’

A minute later he and Charles Hafferty were heading towards the orchard, their powerful torch-beams picking out details from the surrounding darkness. They came to the end of the orchard, went through the gate and made for Asshe Woods, and the chalk pit.