Page 63 of Return Ticket

He let Hartridge out, then locked the door again. But he didn’t go back to the cabinets just yet. He walked back to stack 7 and lifted box 91 from where it sat, on the shelf below box 45.

It was in the wrong place, which had caught his attention, and then, as he’d reached up for box 45, he’d noticed the name of the officer-in-charge on the side. Whetford.

He pulled it down, took it back to the table, and then went to the cabinet to find the matching file. Surprise, surprise, the box had been placed in the wrong stack completely. It should have been in stack 17, not stack 7, he saw, and gave a cynical smile.

If it was someone else, he’d chalk it up to just a filing error. Just a simple administrative mistake. But it wasn’t someone else.

The case was from 1955, the second year Whetford had been on the force.

He flipped open the file, then decided to take a look at the evidence box first. The contents gave him pause, and he pulled his gloves from his pocket and put them on before lifting out the evidence, piece by piece.

Bloody clothes. A bloody knife. And a five pound note with smudges of blood on it.

He stared at them for a bit, and then put them back, setting the box down at his feet before he began to page through the file.

Whetford had caught the case because his boss had been off sick. It looked like a gangland killing, one thug murdered by another. Or that was the conclusion Whetford had come to, reading from his notes.

And because it was Whetford, James suspected it was all bollocks. Except, this was very early in Whetford’s career. Maybe he had been straight back then.

Maybe he was seeing corruption and spin where there was none.

According to the file, no one had ever been arrested for the crime. So why had Whetford hidden the evidence in the wrong stack?

Could this just be exactly what it looked like? A misfiled box?

He lifted the box back onto the table and studied its contents again. He held up the five pound note and saw there weren’t just smudges of blood on it. There were two clear prints.

He went back to the file.

The five pound note was in the evidence list. No mention of the fingerprints.

It was impossible that they could have been missed.

So. This whole setup was insurance.

Whetford had stashed the box here in the archives, where no crook had access, and hidden it away in the stacks to keep it safe.

It was unlikely to be discovered where it was and keeping it here was certainly safer than keeping it at the office or his home.

James thought of the letter in his inner jacket pocket that he had planned to send to the Police Commissioner, as well as the Police Board, about Whetford and his schemes, and wondered if there was a better way to deal with the situation than literally sticking his neck out and jeopardizing his career.

He mulled it over as he set the Whetford case aside and went through the last of the files from 1941 that seemed relevant.

There was no mention of either of Teddy Roe’s cases, nothing at all about his concerns that he had reported any suspicious deaths, but James wasn’t that surprised.

The search was still worth his time, because he found another report about an attack on a woman outside a pub. The man had come ‘out of nowhere’ the woman said, and just a moment after he’d attacked her, the air raid sirens had sounded.

As people poured out of the pub, he’d run away, pursued by a couple of the pub-goers, but he disappeared and they had to get to cover.

The woman was only slightly injured, her arm badly bruised as she lifted it to defend herself against a blow.

This man had come at her from the front, so in that respect, it didn’t fit with the other crimes, but he might have been acting on impulse, James thought. He had seen his prey and couldn’t resist, so he didn’t take the time to get behind her.

Maybe this mistake had reinforced to him to always take his victims completely unaware.

He noted down her name and address, although chances were she had moved on since then. It was still worth checking out.

Then he picked up the Whetford evidence box, placed the file on top, and let himself out of the basement.

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