‘The Second Skin’ 
MICHAEL GILBERT

OFFICER: Sergeant Patrick Petrella 
FORCE: Metropolitan Police, London 
TIME: 1958

CASES: ‘Blood and Judgement’ (1959), ‘London Manhunt’ (1967), ‘The Body of a Girl’ (1972), ‘Petrella at Q’ (1977) etc.

PROFILE: Patrick Petrella is a traditionally hardworking and dedicated member of the Met who began his career at Crown Road police station, Highside in the ‘fifties. He has progressed steadily up the ladder, to Detective Inspector, and is currently a Detective Chief Inspector. Well built, slightly earnest in appearance, and generally unflappable, he dresses in dark suits and occasionally wears a hat over his neatly trimmed hair. Petrella is a man respected by his fellow officers and accorded a healthy regard by the city’s criminals, and during his career he has tackled virtually every type of crime from blackmail to arson, theft to murder, and even taken on that most hated of all villains-the cop killer. Off duty he enjoys a glass of port and a good book. His first cases appeared as short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1958, to be followed the next year by a full-length novel, ‘Blood and Judgement’, in which a female body was discovered near a reservoir by three little boys, setting Petrella off on an exceptionally difficult manhunt. The book was recommended by the American critic Anthony Boucher as one of the best mystery novels of 1959 and Petrella has never looked back, in dozens of short stories and a handful of novels.

CREATOR: Michael Gilbert (b. 1912) has been a practising lawyer as well as a mystery-story writer for over forty years, and the Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection has called him ‘one of the finest of the Post-World War Two generation of detective story writers’. In his early days as a London solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn he became legal adviser to Raymond Chandler, who in turn proved an inspiration when he began to write crime fiction. Gilbert’s work is highly regarded for its complex plotting and well-rounded characters. ‘The Second Skin’ is one of Patrick Petrella’s early cases when he was still a sergeant at Highside in 1958-but even then he was showing all the qualities of perseverance, attention to detail and interest in people which have made him such an outstanding detective.

THE STORY:

The table was the first thing which caught your eye as you came into the room. Its legs were of green-painted angle-iron, bolted to the floor; its top was a solid block of polished teak.
Overhead shone five white fluorescent lights.
On the wide, shadowless, aseptic surface of the table the raincoat looked out of place, like some jolly, seedy old tramp who has strayed into an operating theatre. A coat is such a personal thing, almost a second skin. As it loses its own shape and takes on the outlines of its wearer, as its pockets become a repository of tobacco flakes and sand and fragments of leaves, and its exterior becomes spotted with more unexpected things than rain, so a coat takes on a life of its own.
There was an element of indecency, Petrella thought, in tearing this life from it. The earnest man in rimless glasses and a white laboratory overall had just finished going over the lining with a pocket-sized vacuum cleaner that had a thimble-shaped container. Now he was at work on the exterior. He cut a broad strip of adhesive tape and laid it on the outside of the coat, pressing it down firmly. He then marked the area with a special pencil and pulled the tape off.
There was nothing visible to the naked eye on the under surface of the tape, but the laboratory man seemed satisfied.
‘We’ll make a few microslides,’ he said. ‘They’ll tell us anything we want to know. There’s no need for you to hang around if you don’t want to.’
Sergeant Petrella disliked being told, even indirectly, that he was wasting his time. If the truth must be told, he did not care for Scientific Assistant Worsley at all.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll push off and come back in a couple of hours.’
‘To do the job completely,’ said Worsley, ‘will take about six days.’
He looked complacently at the neat range of Petri dishes round the table and the test samples he had so far extracted. ‘Then perhaps another three days to tabulate the results.’
‘All the same,’ said Petrella, ‘I’ll look in this evening and see what you have got for me.’
‘As long as you appreciate,’ said Worsley, ‘that the results I give you will be unchecked.’
‘I’ll take the chance.’
‘That, of course, is for you to decide.’ The laboratory man’s voice contained a reproof: impetuous people, police officers; unschooled in the discipline of science; jumpers to conclusions. People on whom careful controlled research was usually wasted. Worsley sighed audibly.
Sergeant Petrella said nothing. He had long ago found out that it was a waste of time antagonising people who were in a position to help you.
He consulted his watch, his notebook, and his stomach. He had a call to make in Wandsworth, another in Acton and a third in South Harrow. Then he would come back to the forensic science laboratory to see what Worsley had got for them. Then he would go back to Highside and report to Superintendent Haxtell.
All this activity-and, indirectly, the coat lying on the laboratory table-stemmed from a discovery made by a milkman at 39 Carhow Mansions. Carhow Mansions is a tall block of flats overlooking the southern edge of Helenwood Common.
Miss Martin, who lived alone at 39, was a woman of about thirty. Neither beautiful nor clever; nor ugly, nor stupid. She was secretary to Dr Hunter who had a house and consulting room in Wimpole Street. She did her work well and was well paid for it.
The flat, which was tucked away on the top storey and was smaller than the others in the block, was known as a ‘single’-which means that it had about as little accommodation as one person could actually exist in. A living-room which was also a dining-room. A cubbyhole which served as a bedroom. Another cubbyhole called a kitchen and another called a bathroom. Not that Miss Martin had ever been heard to complain. She had no time to waste on housework and ate most of her meals out. Her interests were Shakespeare and tennis.
Which brings us to the milkman who, finding Friday’s milk bottle still unused outside the door of flat 39 on Saturday, mentioned the matter to the caretaker.
The caretaker was not immediately worried. Tenants often went away without telling him, although Miss Martin was usually punctilious about such matters. Later in the morning his rounds took him up to 39 and he looked at the two milk bottles and found the sight faintly disturbing. Fortunately he had his passkey with him.
Which brought Superintendent Haxtell on to the scene in a fast car. And Chief Superintendent Barstow from District Headquarters. And photographic and fingerprint detachments, and a well-known pathologist, and a crowd on the pavement, and a uniformed policeman to control them; and, eventually, since Carhow Mansions was in his district, Sergeant Petrella.
Junior detective sergeants do not conduct investigations into murders but they are allowed to help, in much the same way as a junior officer helps to run a war. They are allowed to do the work, while their superiors do the thinking. In this case there was a lot of work to do.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Barstow in the explosive rumble which was his normal conversational voice. ‘Here’s this girl, as ordinary as apples and custard. No one’s got a word to say against her. Her life’s an open book. Then someone comes in and hits her on the head. Not once-five or six times.’
‘Any one of the blows might have caused death,’ agreed the pathologist. ‘She’s been dead more than twenty-four hours. Probably killed on Friday morning. And I think there’s no doubt that that was the weapon.’
He indicated a heavy long-handled screwdriver.
‘It could have belonged to her,’ said Haxtell. ‘Funny thing to find in a flat like this though. More like a piece of workshop equipment.’
‘All right,’ said Barstow. ‘Suppose the murderer brought it with him. Ideal for the job. You could force a front door with a thing like that. But it’s still’-he boggled over the word and its implications-‘it’s still mad.’
And the further they looked, and they wider they spread their net, the madder it seemed.
Certain facts, however, came to light at once. Haxtell talked to Dr Hunter of Wimpole Street within an hour. The doctor explained that Miss Martin had not come to work on Friday because he himself had ordered her to stay in bed. ‘I think she’d been overworking her eyes,’ said the doctor. That gave her a headache, and the headache in turn affected her stomach. It was a form of migraine. What she needed was forty-eight hours on her back, with the blinds down. I told her to take Friday off and come back on Monday only if she felt well enough. She’s been with me for nearly ten years now. An excellent secretary, and such a nice girl.’
He spoke with so much warmth that Haxtell, who was a cynic, made a mental note of a possible line of inquiry. But nothing came of it. The doctor, it developed, was very happily married.
‘That part of it fits all right,’ said Haxtell to Chief Superintendent Barstow. ‘She was in bed when the intruder arrived. He hit her as she was coming out of her bedroom.’
‘Then you think he was simply a housebreaker?’
‘I imagined so. Yes,’ said Haxtell. ‘The screwdriver looks like the sort of thing a housebreaker would carry. You could force an ordinary mortice lock right off with it. He didn’t have to use it in this instance because she used a simple catch lock that a child of six could open. I don’t doubt he merely slipped it with a piece of talc.’
‘But why did he choose her flat?’
‘Because it was an isolated one on the top floor. Or because he knew her habits. Just bad luck that she should have been at home at that time.’
‘Bad luck for her,’ agreed Barstow, sourly. ‘Well, we’ve got the machine working. We may turn something up.’
Haxtell was an experienced police officer. He knew that investigating a murder was like dropping a stone into a pool of water. He started two inquiries at once. Everybody within a hundred yards of the flat was asked what they had been doing and whether they had noticed anything. And everyone remotely connected with Miss Martin, by ties of blood, friendship or business, was sought out and questioned.
It is a system which involves an enormous amount of work for a large number of people, and has only one thing in its favour: it is nearly always successful in the end.
To Sergeant Petrella fell the task of questioning all the other tenants in the building. This involved seven visits. In each case at least one person, it appeared, had been home all Friday morning. And no one had heard anything at all, which was disappointing. Had anything unusual happened on Friday morning? The first six people to whom this inquiry was addressed scratched their heads and said they didn’t think anything had. The seventh mentioned the gentleman who had left census papers.
Now by then Petrella was both hot and tired. He was, according to which way you looked at it, either very late for his lunch or rather early for his tea. He was on the point of dismissing the gentleman with the census papers when the instinct-which guides all good policemen-drove him to persevere with one further inquiry. Had he not done so, the Martin case would probably have remained unsolved. But as the sergeant probed, a curious little story emerged. The gentleman had not actually left any papers behind him. He had been making preliminary inquiries as to the number of people on the premises so that further arrangements for the census could be made. The census papers themselves would be issued later.
Petrella trudged down three flights of stairs (it is only in a grave emergency that policeman are allowed to use private telephones) and rang up the Municipal Returning Officer from a call box. After that he revisited the first six flats. The occupants unanimously agreed that a ‘man from the Council’ had called on them that Friday morning. They had not mentioned it because Petrella had asked if anything ‘unusual’ had happened. There was nothing in the least unusual in men from the Council snooping round. Petrella asked for a description and collected, from his six informants, the following: the man in question was ‘young’, ‘youngish’, ‘and sort of middle-aged’ (the last from a teenaged daughter in 37); he was bareheaded and had tousled hair; he was wearing a hat; he had a shifty look (flat 34), a nice smile (teenaged daughter); couldn’t say, didn’t really look at him (the remainder); he was about six foot, five foot nine, five foot six, and didn’t notice; he had an ordinary sort of voice; he was wearing an old Harrovian tie (old gentleman in ground-floor flat 34); he seemed to walk with rather a stiff sort of leg, almost a limp (four out of six informants).
Petrella hurried back to Crown Road police station where he found Haxtell and Barstow in conference.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much doubt,’ he reported, ‘that it was a sneak thief posing as a Council employee. I’ve checked with the Council and they are certain he couldn’t have been genuine. His plan would be to knock once or twice. If he got no answer he’d either slip the lock or force it. He drew blank at the first seven flats-someone answered the door in each of them. When he got to 39, on the top floor, I expect Miss Martin didn’t hear him. The migraine must have made her pretty blind and deaf.’
‘That’s right,’ said Barstow. ‘And then she came out and caught him at it. So he hit her.’
‘The descriptions aren’t much good,’ said Haxtell, ‘but we’ll get all the pictures from the CRO of people known to go in for this sort of lark. They may sort someone out for us.’
‘Don’t forget the most important item,’ said Barstow. ‘The limp.’
Petrella said, ‘It did occur to me to wonder whether we ought to place too much reliance on the limp, sir.’
He received a glare which would have daunted a less self-confident man but he persisted.
‘He would have to have somewhere to hide that big screwdriver. It was almost two feet long. The natural place would be a pocket inside his trouser leg. That might account for the appearance of a stiff leg.’
Haxtell avoided Barstow’s eye.
‘It’s an idea,’ Haxtell said. ‘Now just get along and start checking on this list of Miss Martin’s known relations.’
‘There was one other thing-‘ Petrella went on.
‘Do you know,’ observed Chief Superintendent Barstow unkindly, ‘why God gave young policemen two feet but only one head?’
Petrella took the hint and departed.
But the idea kept gnawing at Petrella and later that day, when he was alone with Superintendent Haxtell, he voiced it again.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘about six months ago, I think it was, we had an outbreak of this sort of thing in the Cholderton Road, Park Branch area? A man cleared out three or four blocks of flats, and we never caught him. He was posing as a Pools salesman then.’
The man who left his coat behind?’
That’s right,’ said Petrella. ‘With Colonel Wing.’
Colonel Wing was nearly ninety and stone deaf, but still spry. He had fought in one Zulu and countless Afghan wars and the walls of his top-floor living-room in Cholderton Mansions were adorned with a fine selection of assegais, yataghans, and knobkerries. Six months before the Martin case he had had an experience which might have unnerved a less seasoned warrior. He was not an early riser. Pottering out of his bedroom one fine morning at about eleven o’clock he found a man kneeling in front of his sideboard and quietly sorting out the silver. It was difficult to say who had been more taken aback. The intruder had jumped up and run from the room. Colonel Wing had regretfully dismissed the idea of trying to spear him with an assegai from the balcony as he left the front door of the flats, and had rung up the police. They had made one curious discovery.
Hanging in the hall was a strange raincoat.
‘Never seen it before in my life,’ insisted Colonel Wing. ‘D’you mean to say the fellow had the cheek to hang his coat up before starting work? Wonder he didn’t help himself to a whisky and soda while he was about it.’
Haxtell said that he had known housebreakers to do just that. He talked to Colonel Wing at length about the habits of criminals; and removed the coat for examination. Since the crime was only an attempted robbery, it was not thought worthwhile wasting too much time on it. A superficial examination produced no results in the way of name tabs or tailor’s marks, but the coat was carefully placed in a cellophane bag and stored.
‘I’d better have a word with him,’ suggested Petrella.
He found Colonel Wing engaged in writing a letter to the United Services Journal on the comparative fighting qualities of Zulus and Russians. The Colonel listened to the composite descriptions of the more recent intruder, and said that, so far as he could tell, they sounded like the same man. His intruder had been on the young side of middle age, of medium height, and strongly built.
‘There’s one thing,’ said the Colonel. ‘I saw him in a good light, and I may be deaf but I’ve got excellent eyesight. There’s a tiny spot in his left eye. A little red spot, like a fire opal. You couldn’t mistake it. If you catch him, I’ll identify him for you.’
‘The trouble is,’ said Petrella, ‘that it looks as if he’s never been through our hands. Almost the only real lead we’ve got is that coat he left behind him at your place. We’re going over it again-much more thoroughly this time.’
Thus the coat had grown in importance. It had improved its status. It had become an exhibit in a murder case.
‘Give it everything,’ said Haxtell to the laboratory. And the scientists prepared to oblige.
That evening, after a weary afternoon spent interrogating Miss Martin’s father’s relatives in Acton and South Harrow, Petrella found himself back on the Embankment. The forensic science laboratory observes civilised hours and Mr Worsley was on the point of removing his long white overall and replacing it with a rather deplorable tweed coat with homemade leather patches on the elbows.
‘I’ve finished my preliminary work on the right-hand pocket,’ he said. ‘We have isolated arrowroot starch, pipe tobacco, and a quantity of common silver sand.’
‘Splendid,’ said Petrella. ‘Splendid. All I have now got to do is to find a housewife who smokes a pipe and has recently been to the seaside and we shall be home and dry.’
‘What use you make of the data we provide must be entirely a matter for you,’ said Mr Worsley coldly. He was already late for a meeting of the South Wimbledon Medico-Legal Society to whose members he had promised a paper titled The Part of the Laboratory in Modern Crime Detection.
Petrella went back to Highside.
Here he found a note from Superintendent Haxtell which ran: ‘A friend of Miss Martin’s has suggested that some of these were, or might have been, boyfriends of the deceased. I am seeing the ones marked with a cross. Would you tackle the others?’
There followed a list of names and addresses ranging from Welwyn Garden City to Morden. Petrella looked at his watch. It was half-past seven. With any luck he could knock off a few of the names before midnight.
In the ensuing days the ripples spread, wider and wider, diminishing in size and importance as they became more distant from the centre of the disturbance. Petrella worked his way from near relatives and close friends, who said, ‘How terrible! Whoever would have thought of anything like that happening to Marjorie,’ and then through more distant connections who said, ‘Miss Martin? Yes, I know her. I haven’t seen her, for a long time,’ all the way out to the circumference where people simply looked bewildered and said, ‘Miss Martin? I’m sorry, I don’t think I remember anyone of that name.’ And on being reminded that they had danced with her at a tennis club dance two years before, they said, ‘If you say so, I expect it’s right-but I’m dashed if I can remember what she looked like.’
It was in the course of the third day that Petrella called at a nice little house in Herne Hill. The name was Taylor. Mr. Taylor was not at home but the door was opened by his wife, a cheerful redhead who banished her two children to the kitchen when she understood what Petrella was after. Her reactions were the standard ones. Apprehension, followed as soon as she understood that what Petrella wanted had nothing to do with her, by a cheerful communicativeness. Miss Martin was, she believed, her husband’s cousin. That is to say, not his cousin but his second cousin, or something like that. Her husband’s father’s married sister’s husband’s niece. So far as she knew they had only met her once, and that was six months before, at the funeral of Miss Martin’s mother who was, of course, sister to her husband’s uncle by marriage.
Petrella disentangled this complicated relationship without too much difficulty. He was already a considerable expert on the Martin family tree. But unfortunately Mrs Taylor could tell him nothing more. Her acquaintance with Miss Martin was confined to this single occasion and she had not set eyes on her since. Her husband, who was a commercial traveller for Joblox, the London paint firm, was unlikely to be back until very late. He was on a tour in the Midlands, and his return home depended on the traffic. Petrella said he quite understood. The interview remained in his memory chiefly because it was on his way back from it that he picked up his copy of the laboratory report on the raincoat.
The scientists had done themselves proud. Not one square inch of the coat’s surface, interior or exterior, had escaped their microscopic gaze. Petrella cast his eye desperately over the eight closely typed foolscap pages. Stains on the exterior had been isolated, chemically tested, and proved beyond reasonable doubt to be, in two cases, ink, in one case rabbit blood, and in one case varnish. A quantity of sisal-hemp fluff had been recovered from the seam of the left-hand cuff and some marmalade from the right-hand one. A sliver of soft wood, originally identified on the Chatterton Key Card as ordinary pinus sylvestris, was now believed to be Chamaecyparis Lawsoniana. In the right-hand pocket had been discovered a number of fragments of oyster shell and a stain of oil shown by quantitative analysis to be thick oil of the sort used in marine engineering.
Petrella read the report in the underground between Charing Cross and Highside. When he reached Crown Road he found Haxtell in the CID room. The Superintendent had in front of him the reports of all his visits made so far. There were two hundred and thirty of them. Petrella added the five he had completed that afternoon and was about to retire when he remembered the laboratory report and cautiously added that, too, to the pile. He was conscious of thunder in the air.
‘Don’t bother,’ said Haxtell. ‘I’ve had a copy.’ His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. ‘So has the Chief Superintendent. He’s just been here. He wants us to take some action on it.’
‘Action, sir?’
‘He suggests,’ said Haxtell in ominously quiet tones, ‘that we re-examine all persons interviewed so far’-his hand flickered for a moment over the pile of papers on the table-‘to ascertain whether they have ever been interested in the oyster-fishing industry. He feels that the coincidence of oyster shell and marine oil must have some significance.’
‘I see, sir,’ said Petrella. ‘When do we start?’
Haxtell stopped himself within an ace of saying something which would have been both indiscreet and insubordinate. Then to his eternal credit, he laughed instead.
‘We are both,’ he said, ‘going to get one good night’s rest first. We’ll start tomorrow morning.’
‘I wonder if I could borrow the reports until then,’ said Petrella.
‘Do what you like with them,’ said Haxtell. ‘I’ve got three days’ routine work to catch up with.’
Petrella took the reports back with him to Mrs Cat’s where that worthy widow had prepared a high tea for him, his first leisured meal in three days. Sustained by a mountainous dish of sausages and eggs and refreshed by his third cup of strong tea, he started on the task of proving the theory that had come to him.
Each paper was skimmed, then put to one side. Every now and then he would stop, extract one, and add it to a much smaller pile beside his plate. At the end of an hour Petrella looked at the results of his work with satisfaction. In the small pile were six papers-six summaries of interviews with friends or relations of the murdered girl. If his theory was right, he had thus at a stroke, reduced the possibles from two hundred and thirty-five to six. And of those six possibles only one was a probable. He knew it in his heart of hearts.
There came back into his mind the visit he had made that afternoon. It was there, in that place and no other, the answer lay. There he had glimpsed, without realising it, the end of the scarlet thread which led to the heart of this untidy, rambling labyrinth. He thought of a nice redheaded girl and two redheaded children, and unexpectedly he found himself shivering.
It was dusk before he got back to Herne Hill. The lights were on in the nice little house, upstairs and downstairs, and a muddy car stood in the gravel driveway leading to the garage. Sounds suggested that the redheaded children were being put to bed by both their parents and were enjoying it.
One hour went by, and then a second. Petrella had found an empty house opposite and he was squatting in the yard, his back propped against a tree. The night was warm and he was quite comfortable, and his head was nodding on his chest when the front door of the house opposite opened, and Mr Taylor appeared.
He stood for a moment, outlined against the light from the hall, saying something to his wife. He was too far off for Petrella to make out the words. Then he came down the path. He ignored his car and made for the front gate for which Petrella was thankful. He had made certain arrangements to cope with the contingency that Mr Taylor might use his car, but it was much easier if he remained on foot.
A short walk took them both pursuer and pursued, to the door of the King of France public house. Mr Taylor went into the saloon. Petrella himself chose the private bar. Like most private bars it had nothing to recommend it save its privacy, being narrow, bare, and quite empty. But it had the advantage of looking straight across the serving counter into the saloon.
Petrella let his man order first. He was evidently a well-known character. He called the landlord Sam, and the landlord called him Mr Taylor.
Petrella drank his own beer slowly. Ten minutes later the moment for which he had been waiting arrived. Mr Taylor picked up a couple of glasses and strolled across with them to the counter. Petrella also rose casually to his feet. For a moment they faced each other, a bare two paces apart, under the bright bar lights.
Petrella saw in front of him a man of youngish middle age, with a nondescript face, neutral-coloured tousled hair, perhaps five foot nine in height, and wearing some sort of old school tie.
As if aware that he was being looked at, Mr Taylor raised his head; and Petrella observed, in the left eye, a tiny red spot. It was, as Colonel Wing had said, exactly the colour of a fire opal...

‘We showed his photograph to everyone in the block,’ said Haxtell with satisfaction, ‘and all of them picked it out straight away, out of a set of six. Also the Colonel.’
‘Good enough,’ said Chief Superintendent Barstow. ‘Any background?’
‘We made a cautious inquiry at Joblox. Taylor certainly works for them. But he’s what they call an outside commission man. He sells in his spare time and gets a percentage on sales. Last year he made just under a hundred pounds.’
‘Which wouldn’t keep him in his present style.’
‘Definitely not. And of course a job like that would be very useful cover for a criminal side line. He would be out when and where he liked, and no questions asked by his family.’
Barstow considered the matter slowly. The decision was his.
‘Pull him in,’ he said. ‘Charge him with the job at Colonel Wing’s. The rest will sort itself out quickly enough when we search his house. Take a search warrant with you. By the way, I never asked you how you got on to him. Has he some connection with the oyster trade?’
Petrella said cautiously, ‘Well no, sir. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t. But the report was very useful corroborative evidence.’
‘Clever chaps, these scientists,’ said Barstow.
‘Come clean,’ said Haxtell, when the Chief Superintendent had departed. ‘It had nothing to do with that coat, did it?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Petrella. ‘What occurred to me was that it was a very curious murder-presuming it was the same man both times. Take Colonel Wing: he’s full of beans, but when all’s said and done he’s a frail old man, over ninety. He saw the intruder in a clear light and the man simply turned tail and bolted. Then he bumps into Miss Martin, who’s a girl, but a muscular young tennis player, and he kills her, coldly and deliberately.’
‘From which you deduced that Miss Martin knew him, and he was prepared to kill to preserve the secret of his identity. Particularly as he had never been in the hands of the police.’
‘There was a bit more to it than that,’ said Petrella. ‘It had to be someone who knew Miss Martin, but so casually that he would have no idea where she lived. Mightn’t even remember her name. If he’d had any idea that it was the flat of someone who knew him he wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. What I was looking for, then, was someone who was distantly connected with Miss Martin, but happened to have renewed his acquaintance with her recently. He had to be a very distant connection, you see-but they had to know each other by sight. There were half a dozen who would have filled the bill. I had this one in my mind because I’d interviewed Mrs Taylor only that afternoon. Of course, I’d have tried all the others afterwards. Only it wasn’t necessary.’
There was neither pleasure nor satisfaction in his voice. He was seeing nothing but a nice redheaded girl and two nice redheaded children...

It was perhaps six months later that Petrella ran across Colonel Wing again. The Taylor case was now only an uncomfortable memory, for Mr Taylor had taken his own life in his cell at Wandsworth and the redheaded girl was now a widow. Petrella was on his way home, and he might not have noticed him, but the Colonel came right across the road to greet him, narrowly missing death at the hands of a motorcyclist of whose approach he had been blissfully unaware.
‘Good evening, Sergeant,’ the old man said. ‘How are you keeping?’
‘Very well, thank you, Colonel,’ said Petrella. ‘And how are you?’
‘I’m not getting any younger,’ said the Colonel. Petrella suddenly perceived that the old man was covered with embarrassment. He waited patiently for him to speak.
‘I wonder,’ said the Colonel at last, ‘it’s an awkward thing to have to ask, but could you get that coat back-you remember-?’
‘Get it back? asked Petrella. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’
‘If it was mine, I wouldn’t bother. But it isn’t. I find it’s my cousin Tom’s. I’d forgotten all about it, until he reminded me.’
Petrella stared at the old man.
‘Do you mean to say-‘
Tom stayed the night with me-he does that sometimes, between trips. Just drops in. Of course, when he reminded me, I remembered-‘
‘Between trips,’ repeated Petrella weakly. ‘He isn’t by any chance an oyster fisherman?’
It was the Colonel’s turn to stare.
‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘He’s one of the best-known breeders of budgerigars in the country.’
‘Budgerigars?’
‘Very well known for them. I believe I’m right in saying he introduced the foreign system of burnishing their feathers with oil. It’s funny you should mention oysters though. That’s something he’s very keen on. Powdered oyster shell in the feed. It improves their high notes.’
Petrella removed his hat in a belated salute to the forensic science laboratory.
‘Certainly you shall have your coat back,’ he said. ‘It’ll need a thorough cleaning and a little repairing, but I am delighted to know that at last it is going to be of use to someone.’