Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

To hell with Camelot, he decided savagely. Mary Taylor had died at far-from-idyllic Caldwell Green, and that was where he must search.

Dick Flinders, leaning against a lamppost, told himself that Mary must have stood at this spot, trod this same sidewalk, only a few days ago.

Suddenly he yearned for her to come walking around the corner, head down, cuffs of the shabby blue pants swirling. Just so that he could tell her... what? Nothing to do with his feelings, or not directly. Just to be careful.

Detective-Sergeant Taylor had been ambitious, and believed — rightly, as it happened — that a common police trick of borrowing lower colleagues’ brainwork and passing it off as your own was sharpened in her case by sexual discrimination. So she tended to hoard insights and discoveries until an ironclad conclusion could be presented, firmly attributable to herself and delivered in front of several senior figures. Preferably ones who disliked each other and would be ruthless over demolishing a rival’s false claims.

Flinders had seen minor instances of her technique during Operation Nail. She hadn’t changed, and very likely it had been the death of her.

Shaking off the sterile reverie, Flinders stared across the road. Roger Endaby’s yard was rather well camouflaged, shoehorned into an unexpected gap in a row of small, Edwardian-era row houses. The policeman guessed that one of them had been demolished by bombing in the 1940’s blitz, and never rebuilt. London is pitted with such tiny and generally squalid sites in places where they shouldn’t be.

There was no sign on the blistered door set in an extra-tall, uninformative fence. Walking to the end of the row, turning right and immediately right again, Flinders made his way to the rear of Endaby’s secretive little property. Again the fence, with two strands of barbed wire topping it for good measure.

Over the way was a small block of concrete garages in a sawtooth formation offering good cover after dark. Wandering along them, Flinders came across a niche strewn with toffee papers and the trodden-out corpses of Gauloise cigarettes smoked for only the initial inch or so.

Mary had waited and watched from here, and not just the once.

Dick Flinders turned away abruptly, returning to the Consort Street side of Endaby’s yard. Peering through the crack between the gate and fence, he saw tea chests apparently full of scraps of copper and lead piping, cartons of empty jars, several old pedal-bikes. A garden shed at the far end must be where Roger Endaby made his deals and kept his accounts, if any.

There was a white car off to one side, only partly visible. Covered in a plastic sheet, but not completely. He could see the number plate of a vehicle registered new, in the past two months, and was able to identify a Mercedes costing enough to pay the yard’s annual rent several times over.

“There’s a funny motor for a poor but honest rag-and-bone man,” Flinders mumbled. He moved to the other side of the solid gate, in case the crack was wider at the hinges.

“He’s not around.”

Flinders looked about, without reward until the voice came again. “The one above sees all.” The young man in dark pants and white shirt with rolled sleeves was perched in the bay window of the row house next to Endaby’s yard. He had a snub nose, a friendly grin, and was eating toast and butter and honey. Pop music floated out from behind him.

“Rog went off to Derby last night,” the youngster explained. “Anyway that’s what he told me — so he’s probably in Cornwall. He’s a terrible old crook, is Rog.”

Flinders spread his hands and returned the grin. “That’s what I heard. But I need him pretty urgently,” he lied.

“Come on up a minute, the door’s open, I’m in the top flat.” The young man pulled his head inside.

“Quite a place you’ve got here,” said Flinders, having shaken hands with the tenant, Dennis Webb. He wasn’t flattering a probable source of information; the flat was surprisingly luxurious compared to the modest exterior of the street. Waxed boards with good rugs, some expensive paintings — expensive looking anyway, though they must be reproductions — and half a wall of stereo equipment.

Dennis Webb made the usual English incoherent noise for acknowledging a compliment. “Well, these places are dirt cheap, no parking space with ’em. Doesn’t matter because I’m not here long enough to need a car, and when I do, I can always hire one.”

He jerked a thumb at a cluster of dolls on the mantelpiece, mostly in outlandish costumes. “I’m with Allworld Airlines, I bring one of those back for every new country we get to. As for the rest, my family’s motto is, ‘I can get it for you wholesale...’ and I hold them to it.”

Webb shrugged meaninglessly and bounded out to the kitchen. “Coffee?” he said.

Flinders wondered what had brought on the hospitality. Young Dennis might be gay, of course, but Flinders didn’t believe so; even less did he believe in his own power as a charmer.