The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Page 9

  “Mr Glossop. Your wife’s secretary delivered this threatening letter to her.”

  “Yes. Honoria was working at home and Sue brought it over from her pigeon-hole at the university.”

  “You’ve told us that she was very brave, of course. That she had said it was probably from some nutcase and that she intended to ignore it. But you insisted on taking the letter to the police.”

  “An extremely wise decision, if I may say so,” Graves took it upon himself to note.

  “And I think you gave the story to the Press Association so that this death threat received wide publicity.”

  “I thought Honoria would be safer if it was all out in the open. People would be on their guard.”

  “Another wise decision, the members of the jury might think.” Graves was making sure the jury thought it.

  “And when the letter was traced to my client, everyone knew that it was Hussein Khan who was the author of the letter?”

  “He was dismissed from the university, so I suppose a lot of people knew, yes.”

  “So if anything were to have happened to your wife after that, if she were to have been attacked or killed, Hussein Khan would have been the most likely suspect?”

  “I think that has been obvious throughout this trial.” Graves couldn’t resist it.

  “My Lord, I’d really much rather get the answers to my questions from the witness than receive them from your Lordship.” I went on quickly before the judge could get in his two pennies’ worth. “You took your wife to the university on that fatal night?”

  “I often did. If I was going somewhere and she had work to do in her office, I’d drop her off and then collect her later on my way home.”

  “But you didn’t just drop her off, did you? You went inside the building with her. You took her up to her office?”

  “Yes. We’d been talking about something in the car and we went on discussing it as I went up to her office with her.”

  “He escorted her, Mr Rumpole,” the sepulchral voice boomed from the bench. “A very gentlemanly thing to do.”

  “Thank you, my Lord.” Ricky’s smile was still full of charm. “And what were you discussing?” I asked him. “Was it divorce?”

  “It certainly wasn’t divorce. I can’t remember what it was exactly.”

  “Then perhaps you can remember this. How long did you stay in the office with your wife?”

  “Perhaps five, maybe ten minutes. I can’t remember exactly.”

  “And when you left, was she still alive?”

  There was a small silence.

  The witness looked at me and seemed to catch his breath. Then he gave us the invariably charming smile.

  “Of course she was.”

  “You spoke to Mr Luttrell at the reception area on your way out?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “He says you asked him if Hussein Khan was in the building?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I suppose I’d heard from someone that he might have been there.”

  “And what did Mr Luttrell tell you?”

  “He said that Khan was in the building, yes.”

  “You knew that Hussein Khan’s presence in that building was a potential danger to your wife.”

  “I suppose I knew. Yes.”

  “I suppose you did. And yet you left and drove off in your car without warning her?”

  There was a longer silence then and Ricky’s smile seemed to droop.

  “I didn’t go back to the office. No,” was what the witness said.

  “Why not, Mr Glossop? Why not warn her? Why didn’t you see that Khan left before you went off?”

  And then Ricky Glossop said something which changed the atmosphere in court in a moment, even silencing the judge.

  “I suppose I was in a hurry. I was on my way to a party.”

  After a suitable pause I asked, “There was no lock on your wife’s office door, was there?”

  “There might have been. But she never locked it.”

  “So you left her unprotected, with the man who had threatened her life still in the building, because you were on your way to a party?”

  The smile came again, but it had no effect now on the jury.

  “I think I heard he was with the senior tutor in the library. I suppose I thought that was safe.”

  “Mr Glossop, were you not worried by the possibility that the senior tutor might leave first, leaving the man who threatened your wife still in the building with her?”

  “I suppose I didn’t think of that,” was all he could say.

  I let the answer sink in and then turned to more dangerous and uncharted territory.

  “I believe you’re interested in various country sports.”

  “That’s right, my Lord.” The witness, seeming to feel the ground was now safer, smiled at the judge.

  “You used to go shooting, I believe.”

  “Well, I go shooting, Mr Rumpole.” A ghastly twitch of the lips was, from the bench, Graves’ concession towards a smile. “And I hope you’re not accusing me of complicity in any sort of a crime?”

  I let the jury have their sycophantic laugh, then went on to ask, “Did you ever belong to a pistol shooting club, Mr Glossop?” Fig Newton, the private eye, had done his work well.

  “When such clubs were legal, yes.”

  “And do you still own a handgun?”

  “Certainly not.” The witness seemed enraged. “I wouldn’t do anything that broke the law.”

  I turned to look at the jury with my eyebrows raised, but for the moment the witness was saved by the bell as the judge announced that he could see by the clock that it was time we broke for lunch.

  Before we parted, however, Soapy Sam got up to tell us that his next witness would be Mrs Glossop’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, who would merely give evidence about the receipt of the letter and the deceased’s reaction to it. Miss Blackmore was, apparently, likely to be a very nervous witness, and perhaps his learned friend Mr Rumpole would agree to her evidence being read.

  Mr Rumpole did not agree. Mr Rumpole wanted Miss Sue Blackmore to be present in the flesh and he was ready to cross-examine her at length. And so we parted, expecting the trial of Hussein Khan for murder to start again at two o’clock.

  But Khan’s trial for murder didn’t start again at two o’clock or at any other time. I was toying with a plate of steak and kidney pie and a pint of Guinness in the pub opposite the Old Bailey when I saw the furtive figure of Sam Ballard oozing through the crowd. He came to me obviously heavy with news.

  “Rumpole! You don’t drink at lunchtime, do you?”

  “Yes. But not too much at. Can I buy you a pint of stout?”

  “Certainly not, Rumpole. Mineral water, if you have to. And could we move to that little table in the corner? This is news for your ears alone.”

  After I had transported my lunch to a more secluded spot and supplied our Head of Chambers with mineral water, he brought me up to date on that lunch hour’s developments.

  “It’s Sue the secretary, Rumpole. When we told her that she’d have to go into the witness box, she panicked and asked to see Superintendent Gregory. By this time, she was in tears and, he told me, almost incomprehensible. However, Gregory managed to calm her down and she said she knew you’d get it out of her in the witness box, so she might as well confess that she was the one who had made the telephone call.”

  “Which telephone call was that?” Soapy Sam was demonstrating his usual talent for making a simple statement of fact utterly confusing.

  “The telephone call to your client. Telling him to go and meet the senior tutor.”

  “You mean …?” The mists that had hung over the case of Khan the terrorist were beginning to clear. “She pretended to be …”

  “The senior tutor’s secretary. Yes. The idea was to get Khan into the building whilst Glossop …”

  “Murdered his wife?” I spoke the words that Balla
rd seemed reluctant to use.

  “I think she’s prepared to give evidence against him,” Soapy Sam said, looking thoughtfully towards future briefs. “Well, she’ll have to, unless she wants to go to prison as an accessory.”

  “Has handsome Ricky heard the news yet?” I wondered.

  “Mr Glossop has been detained. He’s helping the police with their enquiries.”

  So many people I know, who help the police with their enquiries, are in dire need of help themselves. “So you’ll agree to a verdict of not guilty of murder?” I asked Ballard, as though it was a request to pass the mustard.

  “Perhaps. Eventually. And you’ll agree to guilty of making death threats in a letter?”

  “Oh, yes,” I admitted. “We’ll have to plead guilty to that.”

  But there was no hurry. I could finish my steak and kidney and order another Guinness in peace.

  “It started off,” I was telling Hilda over a glass of Château Thames Embankment that evening, “as an act of terrorism, of mad, religious fanaticism, of what has become the new terror of our times. And it ends up as an old-fashioned murder by a man who wanted to dispose of his rich wife for her money and be free to marry a pretty young woman. It was a case, you might say, of Dr Crippen meeting Osama Bin Laden.”

  “It’s hard to say which is worse.” She Who Must be Obeyed was thoughtful.

  “Both of them,” I told her. “Both of them are worse. But I suppose we understand Dr Crippen better. Only one thing we can be grateful for.”

  “What’s that, Rumpole?”

  “The terrorist got a fair trial. And the whole truth came out in the end. The day when a suspected terrorist doesn’t get a fair trial will be the day they’ve won the battle.”

  I refilled our glasses, having delivered my own particular verdict on the terrible events of that night at William Morris University.

  “Mind you,” I said, “it was your friend Gerald Graves who put me onto the truth of the matter.”

  “Oh really.” Hilda sounded unusually cool on the subject of the judge.

  “It was when he was playing Father Christmas. He was standing in for someone else. And I thought, what if the real murderer thought he’d stand in for someone else. Hussein Khan had uttered the death threat and was there to take the blame. All Ricky had to do was to go to work quickly. So that’s what he did – he committed murder in Hussein Khan’s name. That death threat was a gift from heaven for him.”

  One of our usual silences fell between us, and then Hilda said, “I don’t know why you call Mr Justice Graves my friend.”

  “You got on so well at Christmas.”

  “Well, yes we did. And then he said we must keep in touch. So I telephoned his clerk and the message came back that the judge was busy for months ahead but he hoped we might meet again eventually. I have to tell you, Rumpole, that precious judge of yours does not treat women well.”

  I did my best. I tried to think of The Old Gravestone as a heartbreaker, a sort of Don Juan who picked women up and dropped them without mercy, but I failed miserably.

  “I’m better off with you, Rumpole,” Hilda told me. “I can always rely on you to be unreliable.”

  The Temp

  by René Appel

  The plump woman in the pale-blue smock introduced herself as Anja. She looked around and giggled shyly, as if she wasn’t sure exactly how to handle the situation. A man wouldn’t have laughed like that.

  “Ki—.” I caught myself and turned it into a cough.“Marjolein.”

  We shook hands. “I’ll take you around and show you the ropes,” she said. The corners of her mouth inched tentatively upward. “These are the cash registers, of course, and upstairs” – she pointed at a narrow door set into the far wall and led me off in that direction – “is the, well, we call it the lounge. You can eat your lunch there, hang up your coat. Did you get your code yet? No? Well, I’ll give it to you later.”

  Anja punched in her own code, and the door clicked open. At the top of the stairs, she indicated another door, also closed but without the metal locking mechanism. “This is Mr Hovenkamp’s office. The boss.” She glanced at me meaningfully, but I had no idea what meaning I was supposed to attach to the look.

  She knocked and went in without waiting for a response, her steps heavy, as if she was loaded down with suitcases. I followed close behind. Hovenkamp looked up from the papers on his desk in surprise, like he’d seen a ghost. Maybe there were secrets buried in his pile of paperwork, or perhaps we’d caught him paging through an issue of Playboy.

  “This is Marjolein,” said Anja, “the new temp.”

  “Temp?” asked Hovenkamp, still preoccupied with his papers.

  “Don’t you remember? Today’s her first day.”

  Hovenkamp stood up. “Fine, fine, we definitely need the help. All summer long, this place is a madhouse. Three times as many customers as in the off-season. You’ll take care of her, Anja, yes? Get her all settled in?” He wiped his forehead with an oversized handkerchief. “Warm in here, isn’t it?”

  “I’m on it,” said Anja.

  We left the office, crossed the narrow hallway and entered a sterile little room holding nothing but a table, a couple of chairs, and a half-dozen pale-blue smocks on hooks screwed into one dingy wall.

  I’d told Anja over the phone that I needed the job because I was practically broke. “I’ve got a little tent over at the campground, I thought I’d brought enough money to make it through the summer, but you know how it goes. You splurge a little on a nice dinner, you have a couple of drinks too many at the disco, and pretty soon your pockets are empty. You’ve been there yourself, I bet.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I’ve been saving every cent.” Again a little laugh escaped her. “I’m getting married next year.”

  “Congratulations! What’s his name?”

  “Gerard.”

  “Marriage, wow. Not for me! But, anyway, I can’t use my debit card, my account’s pretty much overdrawn. So I need a job, because I do want to stick around for the rest of the summer. I met this guy, Marcel …”

  I wondered if that was giving away too much.

  “Anyway, I used to work in a supermarket in Rotterdam, so I’ve got plenty of experience. I can start right away.”

  A supermarket in Rotterdam, that was vague enough.

  Anja explained a bit about the store’s practices and procedures, how to handle possible register problems and what they did with the money.

  “… and it winds up in Mr Hovenkamp’s office. The safe’s in there, an old-fashioned one, no time lock or anything” – she laid a hand on my arm confidentially – “but you didn’t hear that from me.” She wore a ring, probably an engagement ring. They’d had a big party, I figured, lots of presents from their families and friends to get them started in their little life together. I did my best to look interested.

  This was obviously a more primitive neck of the woods than Rotterdam. Their busy season lasted ten weeks, tops, and then the place went into hibernation, which probably suited Hovenkamp and Anja just fine.

  “Just to be safe,” said Anja, “not that anything like this would ever happen here, knock on wood” – she rapped her knuckles on the tabletop, just like she’d rapped on Hovenkamp’s office door earlier – “but if the place was to get robbed, you just hand over everything that’s in your register, no argument. Here, look, it’s in the rulebook.” She opened the mimeographed sheaf of pages she’d laid on the table between us and pointed to a paragraph.

  I read a few lines about “the safety of the employees and customers”.

  “So,” she said, pulling a smock down from the wall and handing it over, “you ready to get started?”

  Anja stood right behind me for a while, explaining this and that. It didn’t take me long to get into the swing of things. After half an hour, she left me on my own. There was nothing to it: every transaction followed pretty much the same pattern.

  “Have you got 13 euro cents, ma�
��am?”

  “Here you go.”

  “Thanks very much. Have a nice day!”

  I’d been instructed to wish each customer a nice day. The only variation on the theme came when one punky girl of sixteen with two little silver hoops in her lower lip shot back, “You don’t give a shit what kind of day I have.”

  I didn’t argue with her.

  I’d ordered myself not to look too often at my watch, but it had to be getting close to the end of my shift when I noticed a young man hanging around in the area behind the registers, over by the empty cardboard boxes and the bulletin board for local announcements and advertisements. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses. Despite the summer heat, he had on a leather jacket. Just looking at him made me sweat. He stuck his hands in his pockets and hurried towards me with long strides.

  Marcel looked at his watch. Quarter past five. Another hour to wait. He stretched like a cat, then reached for the bottle of beer that stood in the umbrella’s shade and took a refreshing swallow.

  Meeting her had been like winning the lottery. He’d noticed her right away at DaDa Dance. She’d been standing by herself in a corner, just scoping out the scene. He’d gone and stood next to her. They’d checked each other out, and they’d each liked what they saw.

  From the way she’d acted, he knew he’d better not try anything that first night. She wasn’t that kind of girl, that was obvious. They’d made a date for the next evening, and just thinking about that second encounter made him hard. Damn, she knew what she had and how to use it. Obviously she’d never gone back to her stupid campground. No, his casa had quickly become her casa. This was going to be a summer to remember, with a hefty payoff at the end. She was definitely something, coming up with the whole plan on her own.

  He emptied his beer. Ten months of the year, it was beyond boring here, but this would make up for a lot. No, this would make up for everything.

  The guy in the leather jacket seemed to hesitate, turned his head towards the other registers, but then took another step toward me.