Body of a Girl by Michael Gilbert Page B

on others. He always set out from home at the same time. It was worrying his mother.”
    The outer bar was very quiet now. The landlord had got rid of the other customers and must have departed to organise his own supper.
    â€œGo on,” said Bull sleepily. “Tell me.”
    â€œHe’d been put on by his older brother to watch the bank manager and report what time he arrived at the bank. Sometimes the manager was punctual. Then the boy got to school in time. Sometimes he wasn’t. Then the boy was late. It was as simple as that.”
    â€œLet’s have the punch line,” said Bull. “The older brother was a bank robber and you caught him.”
    â€œHe was working for a crowd who organised wage snatches. I stopped that particular snatch, and I caught this.” His finger caressed the scar on the left side of his face. “It’s a memento from a very undesirable character called Fenton.”
    There was a long silence after this. A casual observer might have supposed that the two big men stretched out in chairs in front of the fire were asleep.

Chapter Eight
    â€œWho was Mrs. Tyler?” said Mercer.
    â€œNever heard of her,” said Tom Rye.
    â€œMrs. Agatha Mainwaring Tyler of the Thatched Cottage, Stoneferry Common. Where’s Stoneferry Common?”
    â€œSouth of the river between Chertsey and Laleham. High-class district. The Thatched Cottage is probably a little place with twenty bedrooms standing in its own park.”
    â€œNo,” said Mercer. He was turning over the pages of a dusty office docket, one of a dozen he had unearthed from a cupboard and spread over his table. “Judging from the evidence available, Mrs. Tyler may have been a gentlewoman—but she was a depressed gentlewoman. Depressed, and oppressed.”
    â€œWho by?”
    â€œAccording to her, by Bull’s Garage.”
    â€œWhat would they do that for?”
    â€œIt’s an interesting story. Like all these dockets. All interesting stories. Some with beginnings and some with middles, but very few with endings.”
    â€œThe ones in that cabinet were all Dick Rollo’s cases. I don’t think I’ve looked at them since he—”
    â€œSince he went.”
    â€œThat’s right,” said Rye. “Since he went.” Mercer had noticed that talking about Sergeant Rollo always made him edgy. “What’s so interesting about Mrs. Tyler?”
    â€œIt’s a very human story. Mrs. Tyler was seventy-seven years old. She had long outlasted Mr. Tyler and she lived, in modest but declining widowhood, in the Thatched Cottage which stands—” Mercer consulted the docket—“three miles from the nearest railway station and half a mile from the nearest bus stop.”
    â€œShe can’t have got about much.”
    â€œThat’s where you’re wrong. The old duck possessed a motor car. And a driving licence.”
    â€œAt seventy-seven.”
    â€œOld ladies of seventy-seven cause less trouble on the road than kids of seventeen.”
    â€œTrue,” said Rye. “So what happened?”
    â€œHer car went in to Bull’s Garage for its three-year road test. Since it had been driven by Mrs. Tyler alone, and maintained with scrupulous care, she had no reason to anticipate trouble and was therefore horrified when she was told that the differential was in such a bad state that it would have to be removed and replaced. At a cost of eighty-five pounds.”
    â€œLousy workmanship. I’m told one car in ten that comes out of the factory has something radically wrong with it.”
    â€œYou may be right. But that’s not the point. The point is, there was nothing wrong with the differential at all.”
    Rye stared at him.
    â€œMrs. Tyler had a grandson, who was a friend of Sergeant Rollo. They’d been at school together. They were both mad about cars. Not just mad about driving them. They loved taking them