Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Reading my dubious expression, he shrugged. “If it consoles you, I wasn’t giving Mrs. Wark a free license, and she knew it. But she could be fairly sure that if she kept her nose clean in the future and supplied me with tidbits — bear in mind that she mixed with a lot of fellers, was bound to hear things — then my investigation into previous misdeeds might be, let’s say, cursory.”

Grimacing, he reached for the scotch. “I love telling war stories to civilians. Dotting every i and crossing the t

’s, holding their hand and leading them through the real world. You really are innocents. Look, d’you want to hear what happened, or concentrate on moral indignation, our police aren’t so wonderful, and all that good stuff?”

Ivor Grange was a Londoner who happened to spend a great deal of time in Long-down. It wasn’t that he’d made the capital too hot to hold him — more to do with being too lazy and arrogant to travel to Streatham in South London, where his main associate lived.

The payroll job wasn’t enormous, just under a hundred thousand pounds taken in an armed raid on an aircraft factory outside Longdown. But then it wasn’t a very big gang: Grange, an unidentified getaway driver, and a certain Tosh Fisher.

“We knew it was Grange and Fisher. From experience, and I’m only speaking of my county’s Force, I would say that in half the professional robberies we know who is responsible — sooner than their wives or girlfriends most often.

“Proving it, though... Grange was a prudent fellow, quite wily. Kept his head, didn’t spend like a drunken sailor the moment he scored. Didn’t run a flash car, own a big house. Fairly uncommon, for a bandit. Tosh Fisher was nearer your generic London toerag, but until then he’d done what Ivor Grange told him to. Not Fisher’s forte, playing second fiddle, but it had paid dividends for years, so he seemed to be solid.

“Grange and Fisher had alibis. Checkmate. Or rather it might have been if Tosh Fisher had been blessed with a grain of patience and self-discipline. Half share of a hundred K — near enough half, their driver would have been on a flat fee — got Fisher’s greed glands in an uproar. Easy money and sex, where would us poor coppers be without them? Fisher was courting a beautiful girl, and being homely and sixty years old to her twenty-three, he guessed that loads of money might work better than just changing his aftershave or buying her a bouquet.”

Here Inspector McKell made a brief detour to explain that he’d picked this case not to brag — for he rated himself slow and stupid — but to demonstrate how different real grasses are from any I had invented.

“For instance, we knew about Fisher from his ex-wife. She was a Longdown girl who moved back there after the divorce. But she stayed in close touch with Tosh Fisher’s dear old mum. Mrs. Fisher-as-was lived for the day he would come unstuck and wasn’t above urging it along as far as she was able. We never paid her a penny, mark you, but money was the motivation — she wasn’t getting as much as she wanted from him.

“Anyway, his ex-wife whispered to us that Tosh Fisher had promised his mama a nice holiday abroad, soon as his latest ship came home. He’d sussed out a caper involving a pay office — meaning Ivor Grange had set it up, but Tosh liked playing Napoleon of Crime, the ideas man. His mum, poisonous old bat, moaned to her former daughter-in-law that she’d be lucky to get a week in Brighton despite his big talk. Because he was obsessed with this young tart and meant to buy his way between the sheets.

“Now, Grange and Fisher had pulled all their previous jobs in London or Birmingham; it never occurred to me that this forthcoming robbery would be local. We alerted both cities, but Brum and London are full of pay offices so it wasn’t much of a warning. Then the Long-down factory was raided, and we felt pretty silly.”

Shortly after the robbery, Ivor Grange was invited to assist with Longdown C.I.D.’s inquiries. Grange claimed to have been at a golf driving range ten miles in the other direction at the time of the robbery. The range’s manager confirmed that.

Interviewed at Streatham, Benjamin “Tosh” Fisher stated that he had played snooker at a hall there while the robbery was in progress. Again, his presence was confirmed, for what little that was worth.

There matters stood until fingerprint evidence emerged. McKell had watched the scene-of-crime officer laboriously dusting the robbery site, and dismissed it as a ritual as meaningless as tossing a pinch of spilt salt over the left shoulder to avoid bad luck. A dozen people had been in and out of the pay office all day; the masked robbers had worn surgical gloves. But Inspector McKell, not for the first time in the case, was wrong.