Six Days to Death by Roderic Jeffries

Author:Roderic Jeffries [Jeffries, Roderic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2018-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The national newspapers carried the story of the bomb incident in Fortrow on their front pages and most had photographs of the damage. In addition, two of them also printed the story that a member of the Fortrow borough force had been receiving threatening letters and that this bomb could be directly linked to the threat of those letters.

*

Recovered strychnine, used to kill the two guard dogs, was analysed by the Duprés method – very accurate for minute amounts of a substance, yet suffering the disadvantages of necessarily destroying that substance. The strychnine proved to be ninety-nine point five per cent pure: it was the remaining point five per cent which was interesting. Relatively speaking, only small amounts of strychnine came into the country in any one year and these were imported by only five importers. Each of these five was asked whether, from the details of the impurities, it could say if it had imported the strychnine. A firm in York replied that the poison – bought in Malaya – had been handled by them. The firm was asked to give a list of all wholesalers and retail chemists it had supplied and the exceedingly difficult task was begun of trying to trace out who had bought the fatal poison.

By noon on Wednesday, everybody who might have had relevant information had been interviewed – householders, postmen, milkmen, bakers’ roundsmen, meter readers, dustmen, door-to-door salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses . . . All had been asked whether, at any time on Monday, he or she had noticed anyone or anything unusual in or around Abbotts Avenue and, more particularly, if he or she had been out in the streets after ten o’clock that night who and what he or she had seen. Many claimed to have noticed suspicious incidents – men carrying odd looking parcels, some of which were even said to have been ticking loudly, men furtively watching number fourteen, men trying the handles of parked cars . . . Each report had to be carefully checked, in some cases by reference more to the narrator’s character than to actual events. Report after report proved to be false or meaningless.

*

At four in the afternoon, Fusil drove over to Western Divisional H.Q., called there to a conference by the chief constable, a choleric, sometimes bombastic, retired army officer who wasn’t the stupid old blimp his appearance and manner often suggested.

After meeting Kywood he followed the D.C.I. into the chief constable’s office. They sat down in front of the large desk on which, neatly positioned, were a large silver cigarette box, a silver lighter, a silver paperweight in the shape of a muzzle loading cannon, a battered brass ash-tray made from an old shell case, and a leather bordered blotter.

The chief constable wasted little time in formalities. ‘It’s a week since the P.C. received the first letter.’

‘Exactly a week,’ confirmed Kywood. A cautious man under all circumstances, he tried never to allow any subordinate in C.I.D. to be present with the chief constable without his also being there: of an intriguing nature, he was forever suspecting intrigue.

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