The Case of the Demented Spiv (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Read online

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  The Case of

  the Demented Spiv

  by

  George Bellairs

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE DEMENTED SPIV

  AT the Oddfellows’ Arms, Brockfield, they had come to the end of a perfect day and with the help of Drake and his merry, merry men had laid the enemy low. Or rather Jack Stansfield had done it with the assistance of several pints of beer, a tinny piano and a reedy tenor voice. To mark their approval the occupants of the bar parlour clapped unanimously or banged their pots on the beery table-tops, and one occupant, half-seas-over, emptied his glass in the piano in gratitude for its share in the victory.

  It was an October Saturday night and raining cats and dogs outside. That hadn’t kept the regulars away, of course. The crack of doom couldn’t have done that. But the casuals were missing and that irritated the landlord. He almost struck the man who’d lubricated the piano, but the offender was silly with drink and kept on grinning and saying it was a “good ole pianner.” What can you do with anyone like that? But it caused an awkward lull in the good-feeling for a bit. They asked Stansfield to sing an encore and after a florid introduction, played by ear by the paid accompanist, he started “Absent.”

  Sometimes, between long shadows on the grass.…

  It floated out feebly into the deserted street and made the solitary policeman, standing under a gas-lamp, his cape shining like jet with the rain, wish he were in the warm, steamy pub instead of outside. He’d still four hours of this to endure. The red lamp on the top of the police-box nearby began to twinkle and he hurried to answer the telephone in the cupboard underneath it. Some children had been letting off fireworks prematurely and were keeping an old lady on tenterhooks waiting for the next bang. He’d better go and see about it.

  “Very good.… I’ll go.…”

  Nothing exciting ever happened in Brockfield. A few drunks, kids with fireworks, cats left in lock-up shops over week-end, stray dogs.… The constable sighed. He was fed-up.

  The church next door to the Oddfellows’ Arms was a blaze of light. They were holding a revivalist rally. Brockfield has more pubs and churches per square mile than any other town in England. Any of the burgesses will tell you that. Of course, other towns boast the same thing, but we can’t waste time refuting it. The fact was that the big, well-illuminated church was full of people and they couldn’t begin the service because the organist was missing. The deputy organist was laid-up with lumbago, too, and they were in a fix. The only other person who could play was the preacher himself, and as it was quite impossible to work the people up satisfactorily without a rousing hymn beforehand, the parson had to keep leaving the pulpit, playing a verse or two and then hurrying back to say what he had to say before the congregation went off the boil. It was hard work. Everyone was annoyed with the fugitive organist, to say the least of it. Strains of Drake and his merry, merry men and Absent floated in now and then from the Oddfellows’ next door, and they had to close the windows on that side, although the church was like an oven from congestion.

  Rain lashed the street as the dripping constable returned to his stand under the gas-lamp. He had effectively silenced the young pyrotechnicians, who, on account of the rain, had been lighting their thunder-flashes under their jackets and then throwing them into convenient dust-bins to go off. Now the bobby had nothing to do but get wet. He longed for a drunken brawl to break out, or even a serious road accident. Anything where he could behave with efficiency and earn a pat on the back from his superior officers, who were beginning to regard the hush of law and order in the town with suspicion. The police always missing when they were wanted, so to speak. As if P.C. 132 could help it.…

  Now they were singing “Abide with me” in the church and the strains having reached the Oddfellows’, the occupants of the bar parlour took it up, and chapel and pub side by side echoed the same hymn. P.C. 132 stopped his troubled thinking to listen and said to himself it sounded very nice and that people weren’t always as pagan as you thought they were.…

  Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, trouble invaded the sodden, silent street. A closed van with headlamps full on, dazzling the eyes until they pained, and lighting up the floods of water rushing to the gutters, zigzagged dangerously down the incline of shining cobblestones and pulled-up with a frightful squeal of brakes in front of the Oddfellows’ Arms. The door opened and was closed again with a bang and a flying figure ran into the pub. P.C. 132 ponderously crossed the road and began to examine the vehicle.…

  “Give me a double brandy,” the newcomer was saying inside the inn. Unable to find anyone at the little bar at one end of the long corridor which led from the vestibule, he had opened the door of the bar parlour.

  At the sight of him, the occupants suddenly stopped singing. Some of them left their mouths open in surprise, the song suddenly cut off from them.

  “Give me a double brandy.…”

  “We haven’t any,” said the landlord, still in a bad temper. He had some hidden away for special occasions but he wasn’t serving it to any Tom, Dick or Harry who had the cheek to call on the off-chance and ask for a double.

  “Give me anything.…”

  “Only rum.…”

  “For God’s sake… Rum… Anything.…”

  The man looked in a state of collapse. He was wet through and bare-headed. His dark, long hair was so heavily oiled that the rain formed in globules on it and ran down his face and back instead of soaking in. Narrow slits of eyes, a thin, long, pointed nose, and a fleshy-lipped mouth with a streak of dark moustache across the top of it. Dazzled by the light and apparently thrown into confusion by some unknown terror, he grimaced and twitched like an idiot. The rain ran from his clothes and formed a pool round his feet.…

  The customers of the pub looked hard at him and summed him up. A cheapjack, a street-corner boy, the sort who stood on the local open-air market selling odds and ends of jewellery, and, on the sly, clothing coupons. They gave him the collective cold-shoulder at once. They were all honest-to-goodness working folk and there was no place for an easy-money boy among them. They eyed his clothes with disdain. Heavy overcoat of light cloth, with high padded shoulders and waist pinched in like a pair of corsets; limp, soaked, baggy trousers escaping from beneath the coat and falling low on a pair of long, brown pointed-toed shoes. The trembling hand holding the double rum was long and mean, but the finger-nails were effeminately manicured.…

  “Give me another.…”

  The landlord reluctantly did so. The chap was so obviously all-in, it seemed a kindness to do it. Especially after singing a hymn.…

  The outer door opened and closed and P.C. 132 stood with his huge back to it, taking all in before enquiring what it was all about.

  “Spiv.…”

  One of the party more impudent than the rest and made bold by beer, uttered the word like an expectoration. The rest sniggered and looked pleased at the joke.

  The word seemed like the last straw to the strange figure in the padded coat. He removed the glass, from which he was gulping, from his mouth with a gesture so quick that it spilled the contents half-way across the room.

  “Spiv, did you say…?”

  The man who had been bold, braced himself against the wall behind his chair as though expecting a sudden assault.

  “Spiv.… Yes, I am a spiv. That’s
what they all say. They stop in the street and shout it after me. Well, they’re right. I am a spiv. I’m a spiv… spiv… spiv.…”

  He shouted the word as though it pleased him, like someone who has earned a degree or received a title mouthing it to himself with deep satisfaction. He stood there, the rain dripping from him, his slits of eyes now widened and round, terror in every line of his body.

  “’ere, ’ere, what’s all this?”

  The huge figure of the law stood in the doorway. Everyone sighed with relief. They didn’t quite know how to deal with the situation. P.C. 132 looked ready for anything.

  “What’s all this?”

  The newcomer turned and faced the officer.

  “I’m a spiv.…”

  “Well, now, who’d have thought it?”

  The bobby was being heavily jocular, but the man in the waisted overcoat was deadly serious.

  “Yes.… But whatever I’ve done, I never killed anybody. I didn’t do it.… I swear I didn’t.…”

  The constable stiffened and towered over the man.

  “Who says anybody’s killed somebody?” he said in his best constabulary style.

  “I didn’t do it.… He was dead when I got there.…”

  The drinkers round the fire were petrified. They all sat there like the cast of “The Sleeping Beauty” struck immobile by the witch’s curse.

  “Where’ve you come from and what you been doin’?”

  “Fennings’ Mill.… I didn’t do it.…”

  The constable placed a warning hand on the stranger’s shoulder and it seemed that that was all that was needed to crack him up altogether. As though the huge paw were a ton in weight, the man crumpled under it, sank to the tiled floor and sat there talking to himself.

  “He was dead, staring at me. I didn’t do it. I’m not a murderer; I’m only a spiv.…”

  The embarrassed bobby stooped with difficulty, for his cape and his paunch impeded any bending movement, and tried to raise the man.

  “He’s gone off his rocker,” said someone.

  There was a murmur of general assent.

  The constable looked angrily at the figure on the floor, jerked back his helmeted head as though seeking guidance from heaven, and then rubbed his chin with the back of his hand.

  “I’m phonin’ for help,” he said. “You lot look after ’im till I get back.”

  And he stamped purposefully out and across to the police-box. Something was happening with a vengeance now!

  Back at the inn, the occupants of the bar parlour, men and women, were on their feet and had gathered round the stranger, like participants in a parlour game. The man on the floor was sitting there, fully conscious, talking to himself an unintelligible gibberish, but in a tone of self-comfort and excuse.

  Two more constables soon arrived and the little posse picked up the spiv, carried him out, dumped him in his own van and drove him to the police station, where, in due course, the surgeon with the concurrence of a colleague, certified him as having the balance of his mind disturbed, to say the least of it, and committed him to the asylum under police guard.

  “Better have a look at Fennings’ Mill and see what he’s been at,” said the Inspector on duty to P.C. 132 after hearing his report. “Expect it’s just a mad tale, but we’d better look round.”

  Fennings’ Mill was an old stone factory, chiefly engaged in weaving cotton for shirtings, and stood just behind the police station. It was approached by a maze of narrow streets, terminating in a large walled croft on which stood the mill, with dumps for coal, packing cases, warehouses and a small reservoir for the engines, surrounding it.

  There was no watchman on duty, but the constables found the iron gates which broke the surrounding wall wide open.

  “Hullo,” said P.C. 132 gruffly.

  “Hullo,” said his colleague, 124, in another key.

  “So there ’as been somethin’ up!”

  “Looks like it.”

  There was a gas-lamp burning near the gates. It threw long shadows down the alley and illuminated a few scuttering rats. Otherwise there was nobody about. The rain was still coming down in torrents. A real night for keeping people indoors.

  The constables turned on their torches and cautiously walked across the cobblestoned mill-yard. All was still. The first building was a block of stone offices, single-storied, the lower halves of its windows covered in gauze screens with W. & H. J. Fenning, Ltd., printed across them in gilt. The bobbies tried the doors, which they found locked.

  Next, the main entrance to the mill itself. Doors locked here, too. No signs of disturbance at all. Then the boiler-house, where they fired the great furnaces to drive the engine. This was secure and safe behind its drawn steel shutters. Beyond, you could hear the crackle of the fires, damped down for the week-end. Steam hissed somewhere, gently like a distant angry snake. Otherwise, not a sound.

  “Urn,” said P.C. 132.

  “Aye,” assented 124.

  “Better try the warehouse. Looks like a false alarm.”

  They tramped across the yard to the square, two-storied block which held the raw yarn and the finished products awaiting delivery.

  The door was open!

  The two policemen entered shoulder to shoulder, as though expecting a massed attack of startled intruders. All was quiet, however, but on the floor, about a dozen paces from the door, lay a figure, staring at the ceiling. The open eyes and the livid face gave the constables quite a turn. They groaned with surprise.

  “Jeepers!” said 124.

  “Wot?” said 132.

  “I only said ‘Jeepers’.”

  P.C. 132, his mind momentarily removed from the horror at his feet by his comrade’s strange utterance, looked puzzled and then switched back to business.

  “Bin strangled by the looks of it.…”

  “’orrible.…”

  “I’ll say. Better ring-up the station. Is that a ’phone in that corner over there?”

  Whilst his colleague telephoned for help, P.C. 132 knelt with an effort and cautiously examined the body.

  “We found a dead body ’ere in Fennings’ warehouse. Yes, stone dead. Strangled by the look o’ things. Very good, sir.…”

  “Hey, look at this,” shouted P.C. 132 to P.C. 124.

  “What?… Who is he?”

  “I don’t know. But look at this.”

  With a heavy finger the constable indicated the upper lip of the corpse. It was covered by a large dark moustache, obviously a false one. The constable touched the cheeks, too, and then looked at his finger under the light of his lamp.

  “Theatrical paint!” he murmured as though to himself. “He’s disguised himself or somethin’.…”

  “Rum go, isn’t it?”

  “I know that face. Seen it before somewhere. Now.…”

  The policeman pondered and then, suddenly growing impatient, bent and pulled off the false moustache.

  “Got to come off anyhow. Might as well,” he said as though excusing himself to himself.

  “See who it is? See who it is?”

  P.C. 124 was almost beside himself with the delight of discovery.

  “Why, it’s Ambrose Barrow, secretary of this ’ere mill.”

  “Right you are, Joe.”

  “No wonder they was runnin’ about like a lot of loonies at Hake Street Chapel to-night. He’s organist there and they’ve some sort o’ special service on. Put ’em in queer street when he didn’t turn up.”

  “I’ll bet it did, Joe. And them little thinkin’ he was lyin’ here, dead. Strangled.…”

  “I wonder if that spiv done it.”

  The two policemen drew closer together. It was eerie in the dim light, with the rain dripping monotonously outside and the rush of water in the gutters overhead. Somewhere, the yowling of a cat split the air. Rats were scuttering about on the floor above.

  “No wonder ’e went potty and they had to put him away,” said P.C. 132.

  “I’ll say,” answered his
mate.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN THE HEADLINES

  FROM being a small-town nine-days’-wonder, the case suddenly flared up to national proportions.

  The police who took the demented spiv to the asylum had a rough time with him. He thought he was being arrested for murder and grew violent. They had to hold him down, which, apart from the strength generated by his frenzy, wasn’t a difficult job. He was slim and flabby and when his large exaggerated overcoat and baggy trousers were removed, he looked half the size of the man who had caused the commotion at the Oddfellows’ Arms.

  Ambrose Barrow was a medium-sized, heavily-built man of middle-age and in good physical condition. Unassisted, the spiv, whose name appeared to be Samuel Judge, could never in his life have strangled Barrow. And the police surgeon stated that it was a case of deliberate throttling after a scuffle and that the dead man had not otherwise been injured. No blow to knock him senseless; cold-blooded strangling, presumably with his assailant sitting on top of him.

  All this puzzled Inspector Faddiman of the local police. Taking the circumstances into account, it looked as if someone had killed Barrow before Sammy Judge arrived and that the little spiv’s tale was true. What, then, was Barrow doing in the warehouse when he met his death? Why was he disguised? And what had he to do with Judge?

  There was no doing any good with Judge for several days. When interviewed at the asylum by the police, he could give no intelligible account of his movements in Brockfield on the day and night of the crime. All he could do was protest his innocence, shriek to be released, weep as he denied ever having murdered anyone, and then lapse into fits of silent moodiness. The police found Sammy’s home address from letters in his wallet and got in touch with it. This resulted in the arrival in Brockfield of an inflated replica of Sammy Judge, padded overcoat and the rest to match, who declared he was the spiv’s brother and had come to take him home.

  When the police declined to let Sammy go, his brother, Benny, threatened them with all kinds of horrible things. He talked of bringing his lawyer, of suing for wrongful detention, of making the doctors who had certified poor Sammy sit up and pay huge damages, and other pains and penalties. The police pointed out that Sammy was a self-confessed intruder in enclosed premises and would therefore be held in custody whatever Benny said or did. So, Benny, having satisfied himself concerning the expenses of his brother’s detention, departed for the time being, but before doing so gave the police some information about Sammy’s business and condition.