Free A Spoonful of Luger by Roger Ormerod Page A

Then how’d you know which ones? Cleave tell you, did he?”
    He looked at me with contempt. It had been clumsy. “I said I wasn’t in with ’em. But I’d know, see. If he went out on the Friday with the pick-up, and he came back towing nothing, then I’d guess he’d just been to fix something up, ’cause every time that happened there’d be a car turn up for spraying on the Saturday afternoon.”
    “A pattern,” I said. He nodded. I was wondering why he was suddenly loosening up. But having denied his involvement in the racket, he’d have to produce something convincing to explain his close interest.
    “Did it happen very often?” I asked.
    “Every two or three months.”
    “And it happened last Friday, the day before he died?”
    He nodded. “That’s why I was round there and found him.”
    “And the previous Friday?” I asked casually.
    He shook his head. I assumed he was refusing to answer.
    “That was the day Dulcie Randall went missing,” I reminded him.
    “I know.”
    “He went out that Friday, too?”
    “Yes.”
    “And he came back towing nothing?”
    “Yes.”
    “So for two successive week-ends he followed the pattern of going out on a Friday and coming back with nothing — and on both Saturdays no stolen car arrived?” He didn’t say anything, and I took this for agreement. “Didn’t you think that was strange?”
    “I wasn’t thinking like that,” he burst out.
    “Then how were you thinking?”
    “Just that ... I dunno — that it’d all packed in or something.”
    As it would have done, possibly, with Norman dead. Tony was admitting to more than he realized.
    I shook my head. “You’ll have to do better than that for Inspector Bycroft. He’ll throw the book at you. If he can find it, that is. Now tell me how Norman Lyle came to be carrying the duplicate key to Cleave’s deed box.”
    “I don’t ... ” he began. Then he thought better of it and grimaced with contempt, as though I was pursuing a very minor point.
    “It was me gave Norman the duplicate.”
    “Now that’s what I wanted to hear,” I said approvingly.
    “What’s it to you?” he demanded. “I don’t get it.”
    “I told you I’d got a client. His name is Randall, and I’m employed to find Dulcie. All this Cleave business is wasting time. I want it out of the way. That good enough for you?”
    “Find her?” he said with furious scorn, almost distress. “She’s bloody dead, and you know it.”
    “I know it, yes, and the police know it. But the Randalls aren’t going to accept it till she’s found. Haven’t you got any imagination? His wife’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perhaps even a mental one. He’s about hanging on — living on his nerves. It’s the waiting that’s killing them, and you can help cut that short.”
    “Me?” he demanded. “How would I know where she is?”
    “You can help me get this Cleave business out of the way. This inspector, he’s got some wild idea about how the gun got itself locked in the box. Just you tell him, Tony, tell him the circumstances in which you gave Norman Lyle the key, and make him happy.” Make me happy, rather, because that seemed to be the one definitive moment, when the key had come to light, and could perhaps have been copied.
    He moved his head, cocked it, half turned back to the window. “They’re here now,” he said, and he almost smiled. “How’d it be if I promised?”
    I heard the car draw up. I’d got a few more seconds in which to dig Bycroft out of his dead end.
    “And how did you give it to him?” I asked, as a car door slammed outside.
    His father left to answer the door, anticipating a bit. Tony shrugged.
    “He asked me if I could bust open the box.”
    “This was on one of his visits with a stolen car?”
    “Yes, yes,” he said quickly, sensing the urgency. “I said nothing doing, so he asked about a key. That was a couple of jobs ago, and ... well, I’d seen that spare pouch, so I said I’d get him