Death and the dutch uncl.., p.1
Death and the Dutch Uncle, page 1
part #8 of Henry Tibbett Series
Henry Tibbett of New Scotland Yard has been promoted to Superintendent, and his first job in this new position is as puzzling a case as he has ever faced before. He must answer the question: How does the bushwhacking killing of a smalltime gambler in a seedy British pub affect an international dispute between two newly formed African nations?
Adding a soupcon of unusual perception to ordinary police procedure, Henry finds himself making a precipitous journey, accompanied by his willing but perplexed wife, Emmy. From England to the Netherlands and into the rural waterways of the picturesque countryside, Henry pursues a stalking killer who is to endanger many more lives before he is tabbed by Tibbett . . .
“A shrewdly plotted puzzler, filled with lively characters that compel belief. One of Miss Moyes’s best—and that is high praise indeed.”
—New York Times
There is, of course, no such organization as PIFL, nor are there any such states as Mambesi, Galunga, or Northern and Southern Bimbasi. All the characters in this book are imaginary, as The Pink Parrot and Dominic’s Hotel. By contrast, however, the American and Amstel Hotels in Amsterdam and the Hotel Modeme in Rethel are, I am glad to say, very real indeed, and I can warmly recommend a visit to any or all of them.
Copyright © 1968 by Patricia Moyes
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-24750
SBN 345-02247-5-095
All rights reserved.
This edition published by arrangement with Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
First Printing: May, 1971
Cover art by Don Crowley
Printed in the United States of America
BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.
101 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003
For Jonk Mouton,
in grateful and affectionate memory
1
The hospital was exactly like any other hospital—green and white and hygienic and profoundly depressing under a veneer of brisk jollity. The London traffic, swirling and hooting around the building’s austere walls, had no more power to penetrate them than it had to invade the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. The hospital was an island, a small enclosed unit which bore toward the world outside something of the relationship of anti-matter to matter.
In a green-painted cell in the heart of this antiworld, Detective Sergeant Derek Reynolds sat on a hard, upright chair and stifled a yawn. The man in the white bed did not stir. Outside in the corridor nurses’ footsteps clicked busily on the linoleum; trolleys clattered importantly; occasional masculine voices cracked jokes. It occurred to Sergeant Reynolds that men seemed to take hospitals less seriously than women did. He supposed that it was because they did not have the responsibility of running them. Men in hospitals were either the infinitely superior doctors and surgeons or the cheerfully inferior porters. Both could afford to laugh irreverently in the sacred groves.
The door of the room opened and a nurse looked in. “No sign of life?” she asked with a professional smile.
“Not so far.”
“Ring at once if his breathing changes, won’t you, Sergeant?”
“I’ll do that.”
The smile flickered on and off again, like a flashlight, and the nurse disappeared. Beyond the double-glazed window of the small room, Reynolds could see the traffic moving noiselessly, as on a television screen with the sound switched off. It was a warm evening in early April, and as the twilight deepened to violet the streetlights sprang suddenly to life, threading necklaces of light along London’s thoroughfares. The conscientious buses put on their sidelights, like fireflies.
The man in the bed moved uneasily and murmured, “One forty-five, one forty-five . . .”
And a fat lot of help that is, thought Sergeant Reynolds. He sighed, picked up his notebook, glanced at his watch, and wrote, “1948 hours. One forty-five, one forty-five.”
Around the bed complicated machines and bottles and plastic pipes dripped and bubbled and hummed. The whole panoply of modem medicine had been mobilized to save the life of “Flutter” Byers, small-time crook, burglar, gambler, and occasional gunman. Sergeant Reynolds could not help wondering whether it was worth it.
Ten minutes later the man on the bed said, “Madeleine . . .” He said the name twice, quite distinctly. Then he murmured, “One forty-five” again, and after that he sounded as though he wanted to say “Phyllis,” but he didn’t quite make it.
Sergeant Reynolds made another careful note and then yawned again.
The change in breathing came suddenly. A change from a deep, steady rhythm to a harsh, irregular snorting. Reynolds leaped to the bell, and within seconds the room was full of people in white.
An hour later Detective Sergeant Reynolds was walking down the long hospital corridor with Superintendent Henry Tibbett of the C.I.D. “Flutter” Byers lay in the mortuary, having disdained all efforts to persuade him to stay in the world, even in the anti-world of the hospital. He had died of gunshot wounds, which had patently not been self-inflicted. So the case had become murder, and Henry Tibbett had arrived to take charge.
Beside Reynolds, who was a dark, strongly built six-footer, Henry looked small and unimpressive in his crumpled mackintosh. His promotion to superintendent had not changed him in the least particular. His sandy hair, quiet voice, uninsistent manner, and blue eyes, which could appear positively vague if required—all these added up to an impression as far removed from that of a great detective as can conveniently be imagined. Henry had always denied strenuously that he cultivated this harmless air as a pose; but to himself he admitted that it had been useful on more than one occasion. For a man in Henry Tibbett’s position, it could be an advantage not to be taken too seriously by the opposition.
Reynolds was saying, “Just the sort of case I hate, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so. The world’s no worse off for the loss of ‘Flutter’ Byers, and you and I are going to have one hell of a job pinning it on anyone. As if it mattered. One small, nasty crook shoots another small, nasty crook, and look at the trouble everyone’s put to.” Reynolds was thinking of the doctors and nurses, not of himself. He had been there when Byers died. He knew the trouble that had been taken.
“It happened at The Pink Parrot, I understand,” said Henry.
“That’s right, sir. Reported by the landlord at 1356 hours today, by telephone. It’s all written down in my report. You know the place, sir?”
“The Pink Parrot? Only by repute, as the drinking haunt of a lot of minor villains. It’s not a club, I gather.”
“No, no. The Major’s too shrewd for that. A club would mean lists of members, names and addresses. An ordinary pub doesn’t have members, and every single patron can be a complete stranger to the guv’nor, if the need arises. Much more convenient, if you follow me.”
“It’s in Notting Hill somewhere, isn’t it?”
“Comer of Maize Street and Parkin Place, sir. Just on the edge of respectability, if you know what I mean. And it has a perfectly respectable clientele as well as the others. Businessmen who drop in for a drink in the saloon bar on the way home from the office, and working chaps who use the public for a pint or so. Nothing wrong there. It’s the private bar—upstairs—that’s where the hard lot meets. You don’t get outsiders in there. Or if you do, they don’t stay long.”
“And Byers was shot in the private bar?”
“Where else?”
“What about the landlord?”
“Nothing against him personally, sir.” Reynolds sounded regretful. “Keeps his nose clean. He can’t help it if some undesirable characters choose to drink in his pub. It’s a free country. That’s his line, and it’s a hard one to crack.”
“I see.” Henry was thoughtful. “You say he phoned the police just before two. I suppose our friend in the morgue had been in for a lunchtime session.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Him—and who else?”
“Ah.” Reynolds sighed. “That’s just it, sir. Talk about see no evil, hear no evil. You get a shoot-up like this, and you’d be surprised at the characters that turn temporarily blind, deaf, and dumb. Nobody saw anyone, recognized anyone . . .”
“I presume the pub was empty when you arrived?”
“But for the Major and poor old ‘Flutter.’ ”
“And Byers himself was no help?”
“None at all, sir. He had quite a lucid spell when they first got him to the hospital. But he’d seen nobody, heard nobody, recognized nobody. They’re all the same.”
“What exactly was the landlord’s story?”
“Ah well, sir, for that you’ll have to ask Sergeant Roberts. He stayed at The Pink Parrot, you see, while I rode in the ambulance with ‘Flutter,’ hoping he might talk. Some hope. All I gathered before I left the pub was that he’d been found by the Major in the gents, lying on the floor more dead than alive.”
The two men had reached the big swinging doors of the hospital. As Reynolds pushed them open, the sounds and smells and sights of the world crowded in from outside. Cars, buses, taxis, trucks, people—real people, some dirty, some highly perfumed, some in a hurry, some drunk—but all real, all with names. Not a sterile collection of puppets labeled “Patient,”
“Nurse,”
“Porter,”
“Doctor,” or even “Corpse.” Reynolds heaved a huge sigh of relief.
“Nice to be out of there,” he said.
Henry grinned at him. “I quite agree with you.” Then he looked at his watch. “It’s nearly half past nine. We’ll pick up Sergeant Roberts’ report, and then I’ll go on to the Pink Parrot and have a word with this Major of yours. What’s his name, by the way?”
“Weatherby, sir. Or so he says.”
“Is he really a major?”
“Heaven help the British army if he is,” said Reynolds.
In the police car, threading its way through the glittering, untidy mass of London, Henry said, “Tell me more about Byers.”
“Nothing much to tell that isn’t in his record,” said Reynolds. “His name, of course, was a sort of pun in reverse on butterfly—and ‘Flutter’ was appropriate because he was a compulsive gambler. Funny how the underworld goes in for nicknames, isn’t it? Like schoolboys. Anyhow, to judge by his record, it was simply to get money for gambling that he took to crime in the first place. Quite a decent background, no broken home or any of that jazz,” added Reynolds, conveying eloquently his opinion of modem psychiatric theories about the causes of criminal behavior.
“What was his particular line?” Henry asked.
“Anything and everything. Small stuff mostly. A sort of hired help to the big boys. He hadn’t the initiative to plan jobs on his own. His heart wasn’t really in it, you see. Now, your big-time crook, he really cares. It’s a profession to him. But men like ‘Flutter’ steal and cheat and even kill sometimes strictly for the money, money to gamble or to spend on women. In his case, both.” Reynolds stopped suddenly. In the darkness of the car he had gone very red. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Sorry, Sergeant? Why?”
“Well—shooting my mouth off like that about criminals to you. As if you didn’t know them better than . . .”
“But I don’t, Sergeant,” said Henry. “Murderers are seldom criminals, you know, not in the professional sense. It’s quite some time since I had to do with the regular small-time mob. Tell me more. What form did Byers’ gambling take? And what about his sex life?”
“It was horses mostly,” said Reynolds, and added hastily, “the gambling, that is.” Henry smiled to himself in the darkness, as Reynolds went on. “He’d play the tables from time to time, but horses were the thing. As for women, his tastes were expensive, very expensive. The latest was a very classy bit, name of Madeleine.”
“You seem to know a great deal about his private life,” said Henry. “Do you keep tabs on all your clients’ girl friends, just in case?”
“Well, you see, sir, she was there at The Pink Parrot when we arrived to answer the 999 call. That’s how I know. I’d forgotten about her when I said there was only the Major. I was thinking of the mob. She was sitting there at the bar, cool as you please, drinking gin. Never even looked at ‘Flutter’ when they took him away. Never came to the hospital either, even though they called her.”
“Called her?”
“He was asking for her, you see. Pathetic, really.”
“What exactly did he say in the hospital before he died?”
“It’s all down here in my book, sir, the exact words and times. But it doesn’t amount to much. The first bit, while he was conscious, I asked him questions, as you’ll see. His answers were like I told you. Nobody in the pub he recognized. No idea who shot him. He was having a pee, he said, when he was shot in the back. That’s all he knew. Then he got worse, sort of delirious. That’s when he started on about Madeleine— repeating her name over and over. That, and racing.”
“Racing?”
“Yes, sir. ‘One forty-five,’ he kept saying. That’ud be the one forty-five race at Sandown Park today, I suppose. Over and over he said it, with the name of a horse. Phil—something. I couldn’t catch it properly. I suppose he’d put a big bet on this horse and wanted to know if it had won. He never did know, poor sod. That’s about the lot, sir. It’s all written down.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” said Henry.
He felt profoundly depressed. Like Reynolds, he had no taste for this sort of investigation. The petty feuds of the underworld were about as boring as anything Henry could think of, and when they erupted into violence they brought nothing but a great deal of unrewarding work.
At the local police station Henry dropped Sergeant Reynolds, picked up Sergeant Roberts’ report, and telephoned his wife, Emmy, that he would be home late and she must expect him when she saw him. Then he set off with very little enthusiasm for The Pink Parrot.
On the way Henry stopped the car to buy a late paper, and out of curiosity turned to the racing results. The 1:45 race at Sandown Park had been won by Paddy’s Fancy at 100 to 8, with Sunspot second and Minstrel King third. So. “Flutter” had lost his last bet. Perhaps, Henry reflected, it was just as well that he never knew.
The black police car pulled up smoothly in Maize Street. On the comer a curiously old-fashioned inn sign swung in the light breeze. It depicted, crudely, a pink parrot. There were no other cars in the street. The news of Byers’ death had not yet broken—if broken was the word. It would hardly cause a furor in Fleet Street when it did. So far, the wounding of a minor crook in a pub lavatory in Notting Hill had rated no more than a two-line filler paragraph, if Henry’s evening paper was anything to go by.
The police experts, the photographers and fingerprint men, had done their work and departed long since. Lights shone from the windows of the bars. It was obviously business as usual at The Pink Parrot. Henry got out of the car, told the driver to wait, and began to look for the private bar.
There did not appear to be one. The swinging doors opening onto Maize Street were clearly labeled PUBLIC BAR. Around the comer, in Parkin Place, similar doors were marked SALOON BAR. Then Henry remembered that Sergeant Reynolds had said “upstairs.” He looked up. In a room above the saloon bar lights were burning behind carefully curtained windows. Henry went into the saloon bar.
It was an unnecessarily ugly room, which seemed to have been expressly designed for the discomfort of its patrons—peeling veneered chairs, tables topped with dirty green oilcloth, harsh overhead lighting, cream paintwork darkened to a hideous yellow by dirt and neglect, a dartboard so placed that only dwarfs could have enjoyed a game. Hardly surprisingly, there were no customers. Behind the bar a thick-set man in a grubby white coat was reading a lurid magazine.
Henry walked up to the bar. “Mr. Weatherby?” he asked.
The man did not even look up. He gave his head a curious sideways jerk and said, “Upstairs.”
It was then that Henry saw, in the comer of the big bleak room, the steep staircase and the yellowing notice which read PRIVATE BAR. An arrow pointed unenthusiastically heavenward beside it.
Henry smiled to himself. There was no law against it, of course. Licensed premises could be on any level, and plenty of pubs still retained a private as well as a saloon bar, even though the fine Victorian distinction between the two had long since disappeared. But here the combination of the word “private” and the narrow stairway winding upward into obscurity were quite sufficient to discourage any casual customers. As an added advantage, anybody visiting the private bar had to approach it through the saloon. As he moved away from the bar, Henry was not in the least surprised to notice that the barman was pressing a small bell push under the counter. Major Weatherby would be expecting his visitor. And yet, as Reynolds had pointed out, The Pink Parrot possessed all the advantages of not being a club.
Henry was impressed. He began to climb the stairs.
2
It came as a surprise to Henry to find the private bar so full, not because he doubted the ability of the underworld to bluff out a little matter like a shooting affray behind a façade of blank unconcern; but for a more interesting reason. Outside, on the dark landing at the top of the stairs, there had been no noise at all, and yet, as soon as he pushed open the door of the bar, a wave of voices spilled out. That meant that the room was efficiently soundproofed. It also meant that nobody outside the private bar would have heard the shots.
The private bar was private in every sense, even as to its privies. Downstairs Henry had noticed the usual doors marked “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” leading off the saloon bar. Here they were repeated on the floor above. It was, presumably, behind the door labeled “Gentlemen” which now had an “Out of Order” notice hung on its handle—that Byers had been shot down. His murderer must have walked out into the private bar, down the stairs, through the saloon bar, and out into the street. If the bar had been half as full at lunchtime as it was now, at least a dozen people must have seen him, and probably recognized him. It needed only one honest man among them and Henry’s case would be solved; but honest men, as he knew well, were rare in the private bar of The Pink Parrot.
