Inspector Yarrow

Chapter 10

The next morning DI Yarrow read Rawlings’ report together with the typed and signed confession of Adelaide Milburn. He did not like either. Rawlings’s report was too thin on facts, he had not questioned Mrs Christina Wallace, the complainant, in any depth and his conclusion that Adelaide had panicked and thrown the allegedly stolen earrings into the river did not bear up either. Why did she panic? The police were not involved at that time. It did not make any sense.

Nothing about the report or the confession stood up. Rawlings had not properly interviewed Mrs Wallace, simply assuming that the complaint was genuine. He had then automatically assumed guilt because the accused happened to be a West Indian immigrant. The time scales were wrong, the geography was wrong, everything about the confession was wrong.

Adelaide Milburn worked for Mrs. Wallace two days a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. The alleged theft took place on Tuesday morning and Rawlings had interviewed Adelaide Milburn that same afternoon. The following morning, Wednesday, Rawlings had brought her to the station for further questioning when she had eventually signed her confession.

The whole case stank of the shoddy and slipshod methods of Rawlings’s mentor, DCI Terry Mason, and Yarrow decided to follow it up himself. If the cleaner had not stolen the earrings, where were they if not in the house? One distinct possibility was that Mrs Wallace might have pawned them temporarily and then blamed Adelaide Milburn to prevent being found out. Yarrow determined to discover the truth and summoned Harding to his office.

‘Marcus, many pawnbrokers are there in town?’ he asked.

‘Pawnbrokers, sir?’

‘Yes, how many?’

‘Don’t know off hand, sir, never had occasion to use one.’

‘I can think of four, but you can check the telephone directory, pawnbrokers are very useful contacts, they get to hear about all sorts of stolen goods. Of course they don’t always report it, but it can very helpful to get to know them.’

Ten minutes later, Harding came back with his list, scribbled out on a piece of paper. Yarrow peered at it, trying to decipher the scrawl. ‘Harding, your handwriting is execrable; you should have been a doctor,’

‘Yes sir, agreed, anything’s better than being a copper.’

‘OK, smarty pants, translate this for me. If you can.’

‘Yes sir, we’ve got Mendelssohn’s on Claybrick Street, they are mostly jewellers, but they do have a side entrance for pawnbroking.’

‘They’ve never come to our attention, as you say, their business is mainly jewellery. Next?’

‘West Garside Loans and Investments’

‘A posh name for a second-rate pawnbroker, it’s run by Albert Seers, who went to school with local so-called gangster Benny Blades and is suspected of fencing goods for him, but we can never prove it. As the saying goes, Albert Seers is so bent that if he swallowed a nail, he’d s**t a corkscrew. Go on.’

‘Maurice Greenspan on 257 Sheffield Road, that must be close by the brewery.’

‘Clean so far as we know.’ Yarrow answered, reaching for his cigarettes.

‘Dickinson’s Loans?’

‘Run by Benjamin ‘Bendy’ Bendigo. Caters for the better class of customer temporarily short of cash, you’ll find lots of diamond tiaras in Dickinson’s window.’

‘Really, sir, I must go and have a look,’ Harding responded sardonically. ‘Any suspicions of dodgy dealings with Dickinson’s?’

‘Not that I know of, but who knows for sure, it’s a cash in hand business, anything could be passed over and then sold on further up the chain, but in general, I would have to say, if not totally straight, then Bendy Bendigo is not especially corkscrewed either.’

‘Why is it called Dickinson’s and not Bendigo’s, sir?’

‘I guess that he thought Dickinson’s sounded a bit classier than Bendigo’s. Next?’

‘That’s all in the town centre or close by, there’s another, Cash’s Instant Cash, over by the industrial estate.’

‘Jimmy Cash, better known as Gimme Cash, nasty piece of work, did time for loan sharking, he’s not really a pawnbroker as such, just strong-arm loans and that’s not what we are looking for here.’

‘What are we looking for, sir?’

are ‘A Mrs Christina Wallace accused her cleaner, a West Indian lady called Adelaide Milburn, of stealing a pair of diamond stud earrings. Harry Rawlings did the investigation, such as it was and I’m not happy with the outcome. Rawlings interviewed Mrs. Milburn, or perhaps I should say interrogated her, and got a confession out of her. I’m not convinced the confession will stand up and I want to investigate further. Rawlings barely spoke to the accuser; automatically accepting the accusation and the presumption of guilt. Which is why I want to follow up with pawnbrokers, see if Mrs Wallace herself disposed of the earrings. It’s not unknown, get some ready cash and blame somebody else of theft.’

‘But the cleaner, she confessed?’

‘Don’t be naïve, Marcus’

‘Sir.’

‘Eustace Pink sat in on the interview, but he’s only months away from retirement and liable to go along with anything Rawlings said or did.’

‘Have you spoken to Rawlings or Eustace Pink about it, sir?’

‘Not yet, I want to get to the bottom of things before I do that,’