Help the Poor Struggler (2 page)

Macalvie followed every conceivable lead — there were few enough — down to the milk-float man, and had the little wren of a woman who ran the sub-post office chirping nearly daily about the way Rose bought her food. Macalvie had browbeaten the teacher of the Infant's School into delivering up her small quota of information about Teresa Mulvanney. Nor was he beyond using the same tactics with the odd school chum if he could collar one. The headmistress finally complained to the Devon-Cornwall police.

 • • • 

One of the most important persons in the case, one he had not questioned initially, was Rose's older daughter. She'd been away on a school trip when the little sister had made the awful discovery.

She'd come bursting into Macalvie's office, a lanky kid of fifteen with toothpick arms and no breasts and long hair. She'd stood there with fire in her eyes and yelling at him, spattering obscenities like blood on his office walls. Her baby sister, Teresa, had been taken to hospital. Teresa was catatonic. All she did was lie on her cot, curled up like a baby, sucking her thumb.

It was as though Macalvie had been sitting in a warm bath of his own infallibility (it never occurred to him he wouldn't come up with the answers), and this kid had come along and pulled the plug. She got so hysterical she slammed her arm across the stuff on his desk, sending papers, pens, and sour coffee cups all over the floor.

He never solved the case; he never forgave himself; he never saw the kid again.

Her name was Mary Mulvanney.

Twenty Years Later . . .

S
IMON
Riley never knew what hit him.

That was, at least, the opinion of the medical examiner called to the scene by the Dorset police. The wound in the boy's back had been administered very quickly and very efficiently by a knife honed to razor sharpness. The pathologist agreed and added that, given the angle of the downward thrust, the knife had been wielded by someone considerably taller than Simon. That didn't help the Dorset police greatly, since Simon had been a twelve-year-old schoolboy and was wearing, at the time of his death, the black jacket and tie which constituted the school uniform. That the killer was at least a foot taller would not be particularly helpful in establishing identity.

The boy lay face downward in the alley by the Five Alls pub, crumpled in fetal position against the blind wall which was the pub's side facing the alley. Scattered around the body were a ten-packet of John Players Specials and a copy of
Playboy.
Simon had been indulging in every schoolboy's twin sins — smoking fags and looking at naked women — when the killer had come up behind him. This was the construction
of Detective Inspector Neal of the Dorset police, and there was no reason to think it inaccurate.

It was the kitchen girl at the pub, opening the side door of the Five Alls to toss a bag in the dustbin, who had been unlucky enough to find him on that awful evening of February tenth. She had come in for some stiff questioning and had had to be sedated.

The Five Alls was a tucked-away place on a Dorchester side street. The squinty little alley where the boy had been found dead-ended on a blank wall. For Simon Riley's secretive pastimes, it was well located. Unfortunately for Simon, it was just as well located for murder.

R
ILEY'S
. Fine Meat and Game. Superintendent Richard Jury and Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins looked through the shop window at their own reflections superimposed over the hanging pheasants. The shop was (a sign announced) licensed to sell game. A young man and an older one were serving a queue of women who were armed with wicker baskets and string bags. From the description given Jury, he took the older man to be Albert Riley himself, the boy's father. It was two days after Simon's body had been found and one day before his funeral. Jury was a little surprised to see the boy's father working.

Apparently, best British beef was in strong demand and short supply, given the way the drill-sergeant eyes of the line of women followed Jury's and Wiggins's progress to the front of the queue. There were mutterings and one or two astringent voices telling these two interlopers where the end of the line was just in case they were blind.

When Jury produced his identification, the young man's face went as white as that part of his apron which was still
unblotched. Then he turned to the master-butcher, who was defatting some pork chops with swift and measured strokes. It was an unpleasant reminder of the autopsy performed on his son. Riley's knife stopped in midair when his underling turned him toward the Scotland Yard policemen.

Riley handed over the pork chops to the youth as the women behind Jury and Wiggins passed the information along like buckets of water in a fire brigade. Scotland Yard. Jury realized that Riley's fine meat and game might be even more popular today; murder usually had that effect.

 • • • 

Simon's father wiped his hands on a cloth and removed his apron. His thick spectacles magnified his small eyes and made his round face rounder. He was soft-spoken and apologetic, clearly embarrassed at being caught working in such dreadful circumstances. The authority with which he'd used the knife was completely lost when he put it down.

“Shop was closed yesterday,” he said. “But I thought I'd go mad, what with pacing up and down and the wife — that's Simon's stepmother — yelling her head off.” While saying this, he was leading them to a door at the rear of the shop. “Suppose you think it's cold-blooded, me working —”

Wiggins, seldom given to irony, said, “Not our business to wonder whether it's hot or cold, sir. Just that it's blood.”

Riley winced as he led them up a twisting staircase. “Scotland Yard. I told the wife to leave off with that Queen's Counsel person of hers. Told her Dorset police could handle —” Then, seeming to feel he'd made a blunder, he quickly added, “Expect they need all the help they can get. We keep this flat over the shop. Have another house, but this is handy. The wife'll make a cuppa. I could do with something stronger myself.”

 • • • 

The “something stronger” was Jameson's and the wife was not at all inclined to make a cuppa. Although it was lunchtime,
she was more interested in whiskey than in lunch or tea. Her own hand didn't shake as she downed her drop, but her husband's did, as if he had palsy. When Riley took off his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose, Jury saw the eyes were red-rimmed — from tears, probably. Mrs. Riley's were red, too, but Jury supposed that was owing more to the bottle than to bereavement. Since she was not the natural mother, she might have thought that released her from weepy demonstrations.

Beth Riley was a big, brassy woman; her face would have done better with a simple hairstyle than with the florid waves, red-rinsed, that framed the head. She was better-spoken than her husband, even given her lubricated voice. The Jameson's had already got a workout.

“Beth insisted on getting that Q.C. in London to call you people —”

“It's just as well
one
of us knows someone in high places.” She turned to Jury. “Leonard Matching, Q.C. He's to stand for Parliament in Brixton.” From the vague reports Jury had got of mealymouthed Matching, he doubted very much if Brixton would stand for him. The only reason Jury and Wiggins were here was that an assistant commissioner was a personal friend and had handed the request down the line to Chief Superintendent Racer, who had wasted no time in deploying Jury to the provinces. Too bad (Jury imagined Racer thinking) it was only a hundred and sixty-odd miles from London and the old market town of Dorchester rather than Belfast. Jury could just guess how much Inspector Neal enjoyed having his authority presumed upon, but Neal was too much of a gentleman to make Jury's life hell. Many would have.

“. . . and not two decent relations to rub together,” Beth Riley was saying in a shocking display of acrimony. The child was dead. What had family connections to do with it?

“All right, all right, pet,” said Riley, in some attempt to
shush her. Though why the father should have to minister to the totally unfeeling stepmother, Jury couldn't say. Indeed, he couldn't see the two of them together at all, if it came to that. She lost no chance to remind him of her superior education, and Jury simply let her get it out of her system as his eye traveled the room. Over the fireplace were photographs that might bear out her claim, for all its coldness. There was even one of those mahogany coats-of-arms that tourists seemed forever gathering in the race for their roots; there were also framed documents, one with a seal.

“I'm sorry to intrude upon your grief,” said Jury to Mrs. Riley. His tone was icy. “But there are a few questions.”

Beth Riley sat back, said nothing, left the question-and-answer period up to her husband. Simon had been (she reminded Jury)
Albert's
son.

“Had you remembered anything at all since you talked to Inspector Neal, Mr. Riley? About your son's friends  . . . or enemies?” Predictably, Riley disclaimed any enemies — how could a lad of twelve have enemies? It was true the Dorset police had established to their satisfaction that Simon Riley had neither. He was not popular with his schoolmates, but neither was he hated. Nor did anyone seriously believe a schoolboy would be carrying the sort of knife around Dorchester that had inflicted the wound.

Inspector Neal had looked almost unhappier than the father himself when Neal had said
psychopath.
What else could it be?
You know what that means, Superintendent. Child-killer. In Dorchester?

I wouldn't like it much in London, either, Jury had thought.

“ . . . psychopath.” Albert Riley echoed the word of Inspector Neal. He was wiping his eyes with a much-used handkerchief. Jury's feeling about Riley had changed when he realized that the man probably did have to work to keep from crumbling. Certainly, he was getting no support from his wife.

But with Neal's and Riley's verdict upon who killed Simon, Jury did not agree. The single wound in the boy's back was clean, neat, quick — not the multiple stab-wounds one might have expected from a person who was out for blood or boys. There had been no molesting of the body. This was all Jury had to go on, but he still thought the murder was probably premeditated and that it was Simon — not just any child — the killer had been tracking. According to Neal's report, Simon's mates — though not close ones — hadn't known he stopped in that alley to smoke fags and look at dirty pictures. Thinking of it that way, the wrong questions were perhaps being asked. Certainly, it was possible the boy had an “enemy.” It was also possible that the Rileys themselves had.

He did not pose that question at the moment. All he said to Riley was that he wasn't convinced the boy's death was the work of a deranged mind.

Riley looked utterly astonished. “What other reason could there be? You sound like you think someone wanted to — murder
Simon.”

“I could think of half a dozen, Mr. Riley. They could all be wrong, of course.” Jury allowed Mrs. Riley to give him another shot of Jameson's, more to keep her in a comradely mood than because he wanted a drink. Beth seemed actually curious about other reasons. She perked up a bit. Jury found her curiosity and perkiness as depressing as the gray weight of the sky beyond the window. “One is that someone actually meant to kill your son — I'm sorry,” he added, when Riley flinched at the suggestion. Jury took a sip of the whiskey under the approving eye of Beth Riley. Approving what? That the law drank on duty? Or that someone had meant to kill her stepson? “Another is that Simon might have known something that someone didn't want him to know. Seen something that someone hadn't wanted him to see. Simon could have had knowledge he didn't even
know
he had, too. The thing is that he was in an alley that none of his schoolmates seemed to know about. It's not on his way home from
school. And school had been out over an hour, if the medical examiner fixed the time correctly. Somewhere between five and perhaps eight o'clock. It might make one think that someone had been, possibly, following him —”

Riley was into his third whiskey, drinking with blind eyes, the handkerchief wadded against his face. “He could have been dragged there —”

Jury was already shaking his head. “No. There'd be — signs, if that were the case.” Bloodstains, marks — Jury didn't elaborate.

The Rileys exchanged glances, but shook their heads.

“Could he have been meeting someone?”

They looked blank.

“Kids get up to things —”

Riley was out of his chair like a shot. Wasn't it enough the boy was dead? Did police have to go about ruining his character, too? Even Beth got in on this scene. She mightn't have missed Simon, but the family name was something else again.

Jury rose and apologized for intruding upon them, as he took another look at the pictures, the memorabilia over the fireplace. Beth as a young girl, Beth as a young woman. Nothing of Riley that he could see. Wiggins stood beside him, notebook clapped shut, pocketing his pen, taking out his lozenges.

February was hell this close to the sea. Dorchester was ten miles from it, but that was close enough for Wiggins.

 • • • 

They stopped outside and Jury lit a cigarette. “We wouldn't have got any more out of them. And the boy's funeral is tomorrow. Leave it for now.”

The queue of shoppers had disappeared, but Jury saw in the faces of passersby more fear than curiosity. They walked at the edge of the pavement, as if coming nearer the scene of such a tragedy might contaminate them, might spread danger to their own children.

The Closed sign hung a little askew. Wiggins was studying a brace of pheasant, feet trussed up, heads dangling down. “No need to cause more suffering.” Jury thought he was referring to the Rileys, until he added, “That's why I've been thinking of going vegetarian.”