Cash My Chips, Croupier Read online

  ‘I’ll be interested in her reaction.’

  ‘You think she’s lied?’

  ‘I’ll settle for her not telling me all she could about that visit last night. When I hear what you find out, Dunmore, I’ll take it from there. Meantime I’ll be getting back to London.’

  A few minutes later the meeting broke up. The occupants of the police car heading back to the metropolis were curiously silent, like men who were confronted by conflict in their own thoughts.

  As it was approaching Dorking the journalist turned his gaze from the window and said, ‘You know, we didn’t have a drink with Dunmore.’

  Frank Drury remained staring out of the opposite window as he remarked with a straight face, ‘I got the impression he wasn’t a daiquiri drinker.’

  Bill Hazard, who for once wasn’t smoking as he drove, suddenly had an impediment in his throat and was seized by a fit of dry coughing. When he had finally overcome it he decided to run a risk.

  ‘All the same,’ he observed, ‘he struck me as a bit of a rum bird.’

  The continuing silence behind him was so noticeable that the big inspector risked taking his eyes off the road for a backward glance. Perran was grinning with his mouth compressed at the same time. It was Drury who said, ‘That’s going to cost you the first round when we stop, Bill. They just might be daiquiris.’

  Hazard drove to the journalist’s Putney flat, where Drury wanted to poke around before returning to the Yard. The only thing he found of interest in a quick search was a twenty-pound blue marker chip.

  ‘It was lying beside the handbasin in the bathroom,’ he said, showing it to Perran. ‘You seen it before, Micky?’

  Perran shook his head.

  ‘Hell, they’re illegal.’

  ‘When they’re discovered or reported. How about Bandelli’s casinos?’

  I’ve not seen marker chips used by any of his houses.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t know where this one came from?’

  ‘I can make guesses.’

  ‘So can I. Several. But I said know.’

  ‘I can’t help you.’

  The phone rang.

  It was the features editor of the Banner. When Perran clapped a hand over the mouthpiece and told Drury the Yard man said, ‘I’m not surprised.’

  He walked into the bedroom, where Bill Hazard was on his hands and knees crawling over the carpet. When the inspector saw Drury’s shoes arrive at his side he looked up and shook his head.

  ‘Keep at it,’ Drury said and returned to the bathroom.

  He was in there when Perran came and stood in the doorway.

  ‘They want me at the Banner. How about it?’

  ‘I’m not stopping you. We’ll close the front door when we leave, Micky.’

  Perran nodded as though he understood, but turned back when on the point of moving away to ask, ‘Just what the hell are you still looking for?’

  Drury opened his eyes wide in a bland stare.

  ‘If I could tell you that, Micky, I’d feel better. The trouble is I shan’t know till I find it.’

  ‘But you expect to find something.’

  ‘I’ll be disappointed if I don’t.’

  ‘What makes you feel there is something to find?’

  ‘That marker chip. It was placed too obviously to be found. A sort of come-on to whoever might be looking. What else has been left will be hidden, so it should be really worth finding.’

  Micky Perran rubbed his jaw.

  ‘You make it sound like I should stay.’

  Drury shrugged. ‘Please yourself as to that. It’s your flat. But don’t worry. When I find it I’ll let you know.’

  ‘When, I note, not if.’

  ‘That’s because you know it’ll look incriminating.’

  ‘For me?’ Perran sounded surprised.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Yes,’ the journalist said with a shade of new bitterness, ‘who else indeed. Maybe I’d better hurry to the Banner office and see if there’s a contract to be signed while I’m still free to write my name.’

  ‘Depends what I find,’ said Drury laconically. ‘It could help your price.’

  ‘Oh, go to hell, Frank!’

  Perran left the other to continue his search of the bathroom and hurried out of the flat. The front door banged, and the sound brought Hazard from the bedroom.

  ‘Sounded in a hurry.’

  ‘That’s the way these Fleet Street characters like to sound, Bill.’

  Hazard allowed surprise to register on his face. ‘He’s gone back to the Banner?’

  ‘Just like a well-trained Pavlov puppy when he hears his own bell tinkle.’

  ‘But they practically blacklisted him.’

  ‘Now he might have a story they could badly use. That changes things, Bill.’

  The inspector watched Drury shut a bathroom cabinet and rake over some laundry in a box stool with a hinged cork seat that opened like a lid. Drury let the lid slam.

  ‘The kitchen,’ he said. ‘Let’s try there.’

  ‘Have we any idea what we’re looking for?’

  ‘None. But when we find it I expect it to be more interesting than that marker chip.’

  ‘And if we don’t find it?’ Hazard asked, following the other man to the small compact kitchen.

  Drury looked at him over a shoulder. ‘You sound like Perran.’ The words were critical in tone. ‘We’ve got to find what that marker chip was meant to lead us to.’

  ‘Bathroom — kitchen,’ murmured Hazard. ‘How could I miss the connection?’

  Just then his expression wasn’t easy to see behind cigarette smoke. He stooped to brush the knees of his trousers for Drury’s benefit, as though to rub away dust picked up from the bedroom floor.

  It was Hazard who came upon the object that brought a keen look of satisfaction to Drury’s face. He found it in a coffee percolator whose lid had been replaced hurriedly. The object was a Corkel bottle opener, which consisted of a thin metal tube, rather like a hollow needle, through which air, compressed by the plastic handle, could be forced down through the cork in the neck of a bottle to raise the cork.

  ‘This is it, Bill,’ Drury said as soon as he was shown the open percolator and what it contained. He lifted the cork extractor with a fork from a drawer under one of the small worktops, and stared at the stained needle-like steel probe which was about four inches in length. ‘I’d say blood,’ he said, like a man speaking his thoughts aloud.

  ‘So we’re finished here?’ Hazard said.

  ‘I hope so,’ Drury nodded soberly, ‘for friend Perran’s sake.’ He closed the coffee percolator and pushed it at Hazard. ‘Wrap it in a tea towel so that the damned thing doesn’t rattle.’

  He threw the fork back in the drawer, closed it, and went to collect his hat.

  Thirty-five minutes later the returned detectives entered Drury’s office to find a note propped against the superintendent’s phone. The note informed him that Inspector Dunmore of the Sussex Regional Crime Squad had rung him three times and would ring again in half an hour from the time on the note. Drury glanced at his watch.

  ‘If he’s on time we’ve got three minutes. Long enough to let you collect a couple of cups of tea, Bill.’

  Hazard was already going through the door.

  The tea was half-cold canteen brew and the two cups on Drury’s desk were empty when the phone rang. It was Dunmore. What he had to pour into Drury’s ear took several minutes and then the man listening to the call had some questions to ask. They were questions that made Bill Hazard jerk up his chin and stare with narrow-eyed interest.

  ‘All right, Inspector,’ Drury finished. ‘You’d better clear this also with Superintendent Laidlaw at Lewes and then see if you can turn up anything with Bowmander.’

  He waited long enough to hear Dunmore’s reply, and then replaced the phone. For some minutes he said nothing, but wrote notes on a sheet of paper he took from a drawer of the table-top desk. He read over what he had wr
itten, put the notes in the drawer, and started to fill his pipe.

  Hazard already had a fresh cigarette burning. The inspector knew he was about to be told something that Drury considered significant.

  ‘The directories at Little Dipper Farm are missing,’ he began. ‘Dunmore scared her plenty. Must have, because she suddenly broke into tears and told him she’d had a phone call from her husband. He was on a driving job. He had been told to say nothing, but he didn’t want her to worry. Well, after he’d rung up she worried herself sick.’

  ‘What sort of driving job?’ Hazard asked.

  ‘She didn’t say. But someone has to dump Perran’s Ford. This Bowden was a driver. He probably won’t even know what sort of load he’s carrying. Car ignition keys are usually different from keys for boot lids. Of course, the number’s no use. That will have been changed.’

  ‘Did his wife know where he was ringing from?’

  ‘Not according to Dunmore. That was when the tears arrived. She thinks he’s in danger.’

  ‘We’re not quarrelling with that, are we?’ Hazard stared at the coffee percolator on Drury’s desk. ‘But I should say she could take a bit more pushing about last night.’

  Drury grinned around his pipe-stem. ‘Dunmore knows his job all right. She more or less admitted her husband had a late phone call last night. That’s when he wanted her to take the sleeping pills. As soon as she heard that her tooth ached worse. Well, Bill.’ Drury pushed back his chair. ‘We better get Perran to dig up his car’s log book. We’ll want the engine and chassis numbers and any body marks that might help to identify it. Maybe he’d welcome someone busting in on his session with the Banner’s features editor. Anyway, we can try.’

  Drury picked up the phone again. Three minutes later he was speaking to the paper’s features editor, who sounded angry and abrupt and inclined to blame Scotland Yard for a keen disappointment. Drury said nothing to alter his opinion. He rang off.

  ‘Surprise, Bill. Perran hasn’t arrived.’

  The inspector stubbed out the butt of his cigarette in an ash-tray half filled with previous butts and stale pipe dottle and match ends. He took his time, as though the process required an exquisite skill, and then stood back, sinking his hands into his trousers pockets.

  Drury watched him walk across the office to where the black leather case with the Sussex phone directories had been dumped on a spare chair.

  ‘It could all be very bloody clever,’ he said.

  ‘But what, Bill?’ Drury blew smoke across the desk without removing his gaze from his assistant. ‘I mean, considering there hasn’t been very much blood,’ he added on a note dry enough to crackle.

  ‘But,’ said Hazard, turning around and frowning, ‘I wouldn’t have bet Micky Perran was that much clever.’

  ‘So, Bill?’

  ‘So I come back to Bandelli hating his guts, setting him up as a patsy in a play to get rid of Toni Cuzak and this woman whoever she is — or was, and then planting him in a cow stall and that trick cork remover in his coffee pot of all places.’

  ‘Bandelli?’

  ‘Bandelli hates Perran, Micky Perran hates Bandelli. It’s a case of take your pick.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t think so.’ Drury shook his head. ‘No, Bill, I don’t go for either. Possibly because the way it’s been staged we’ve been given just that choice.’ He shook his head again. ‘To be inelegant but truthful, Bill, it stinks.’

  ‘Then you — ’

  Bill Hazard didn’t finish what he had been about to say. Instead, he stared past Drury to the door, which had opened. Drury turned his head after observing the surprise on his assistant’s face.

  ‘What the hell!’ he exploded.

  In the open door stood Perran. He came in and closed the door behind him. He looked like a man with a fresh problem looming large in his mind.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so I didn’t get myself announced. I’ve got a reason.’

  ‘It had better be good.’ Drury sounded like someone who had been offended by a stranger taking a liberty.

  ‘I didn’t go to the Banner’s office.’

  ‘That’s not news.’

  ‘I’ve been to — ’ Perran broke off. ‘Isn’t that one of my tea towels?’ He pointed to the covered coffee percolator on the desk. ‘I bought half a dozen with that pattern and — ’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ muttered Drury. ‘Where have you been, and what’s your reason for not being announced and checked in like anyone else?’

  ‘I didn’t go to the Banner because I went to Bush House. What I found out meant I had to see you without delay. I phoned my flat, but there was no answer. I rushed here.’ The penny had dropped for both his listeners.

  ‘Bowmander,’ said Hazard, walking away from the chair with the black leather bag. ‘You’ve checked on that Brighton company.’

  ‘I came up with something interesting, too.’

  ‘Like Mario Bandelli is a director?’ suggested Drury quietly.

  Perran shook his head. ‘Not Bandelli. But Harvey Harris. Bandelli’s enforcer.’

  When he paused Drury said, ‘Don’t stop. I can tell there’s more, Micky.’

  ‘There is,’ the journalist went on, taking out a notebook and opening it. He scanned a page before looking again at Drury and adding, ‘Bowmander is registered as a holding company. It has several properties, including the Cross Counties Transport Company. They’re registered in the East End with a manager named Harvey Harris. I rang them up, and found they hired out lorries. Including big stuff like — ’

  ‘Articulated lorries,’ said Hazard.

  ‘Thought you ought to know right away,’ Perran said. He gestured to the covered coffee percolator again. ‘I’m damned sure that’s one of my tea towels. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Drury, picking up his cold pipe and emptying it in the ash-tray. ‘This is what we found.’

  He removed the tea towel from around the coffee percolator and raised the lid. Perran moved forward and peered into the metal pot.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘A Corkell.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s a patent bottle opener, removes corks by injecting air which pushes the cork out.’

  ‘I don’t own one of them. I’ve never heard the name before. How did it come to be in my coffee percolator?’

  ‘I thought you might be able to tell us, Micky?’

  Perran choked. ‘So that’s it. The big find. The mystery pointed to by that marker chip. Well, croupier, you’ve just cashed my chips. I’m out of the game. I don’t know what the hell is being played any more.’

  Drury removed the cork extractor with the tea towel, pointed to the four-inch hollow needle-like steel end.

  ‘It’s stained, Micky.’

  Perran moved away from the desk and almost collapsed into a chair.

  ‘Congratulations, Frank,’ he said bitterly. ‘Looks like you can make out a case, doesn’t it?’ Perran almost choked on the words. ‘You’ve got it tied up neatly, haven’t you?’

  ‘You can’t tie up anything the way you mean neatly by using slip-knots, Micky,’ Drury said gravely. ‘Stop giving your memory a holiday. I think you were expected to struggle free of those knots, find your car, and be on your way with a bag full of waste paper and a female corpse in the boot. Then you really would have been in the pottage, boyo. By the way, where do you keep the log book of your car?’

  ‘In the glove compartment, so it’s handy when I want it.’

  Hazard groaned theatrically.

  ‘Oh,’ said Perran, ‘I get it.’

  ‘Assuming the number-plates have been changed, is there any way this car of yours could be readily recognised from any similar model? Any fancy badges or noticeable dents in the bodywork?’

  ‘No badges except the usual A.A. monogram. But there is a front near-side over-rider missing. I’ve been meaning to replace it, but didn’t get around to doing so. You know, waiting for the
next service and putting that off. After all, I haven’t been using the car lately.’ Perran paused. ‘There is something, though. I fixed a white plastic coat hook to the rear window behind the driver’s seat. If that isn’t pulled off it should help to identify the car.’

  The phone rang.

  After speaking into the receiver Drury said, ‘Put him through.’

  He looked across his desk to say, ‘Dunmore again.’

  ‘Hell, he certainly keeps busy,’ Hazard grunted. ‘Maybe he sees a chance to push for promotion.’

  But Drury was speaking into the instrument he held and his attention was concentrated nearly forty miles away. Just before putting down the phone he said, ‘Thank you, Inspector. Extremely helpful of you.’

  ‘You sounded as though you meant it,’ Micky Perran offered from his chair across the office.

  ‘I did. Dunmore’s just heard from his chief, Superintendent Laidlaw in Lewes, to whom he had reported after we left the Hare and Hounds. Laidlaw had been on to Brighton, and a local squad car had called at the Bowmander premises. There’s a parking area at the back. At the moment there’s one car in that area.’

  ‘Mine!’ Perran exclaimed, rising to his feet.

  Hazard waited with his chin tucked into his right shoulder.

  Drury shook his head. ‘Not yours, Micky. Bert Bowden’s.’

  Hazard’s chin stopped skulking and his eyes opened wide at the same moment.

  ‘A phone call took Bowden to the Bowmander place. He leaves his car and collects yours, Micky.’ The big inspector gave his superior a hard look polished with a suspicion of challenge. ‘Your car was driven from Putney last night. There was a red car left in your garage, Micky. Another car,’ Hazard went on, ‘must have collected whoever dumped you in the cowshed, because Bowden’s car was left for him to use. But your key was in the ignition, all ready for you to burst loose and escape — only you didn’t oblige. Now Bowden is driving your car and his is in Brighton at Bowmander’s — ’

  ‘Actually,’ Drury put in, ‘it’s been collected by the Brighton police.’