Hide My Eyes (3 page)

“Had he, by George? That must have been useful!” The thin man was puzzled. “Extraordinary you got no further. Or wasn’t it?” he added as Luke’s face grew darker.

“I thought so.” The new Superintendent was inclined to be off-hand. “The chap wasn’t specific. He thought he’d seen them in Edge Street and he was certain it was through glass. He reckoned they must have been sitting in a tea shop and he’d seen them through the window as he passed by.” He hesitated and after a moment’s indecision remarkably unlike him turned and nodded towards the chart on the wall. “Those three yellow flags mark the only eating places in the area where he could have done that.”

Mr. Campion’s brows rose. He had been warned that Luke was catching at straws.

“Hardly conclusive,” he ventured.

Luke sniffed. “Hardly there at all,” he conceded handsomely. “I warn you, my evidence gets thinner still as I go on. That’s one reason why the Old Man is so windy. That blue flag on the corner there marks the branch of Cuppages the cheap outfitters where this was bought in a sale.” He leant over the desk, dragged open a drawer and drew out a thick brown envelope.

Mr. Campion watched him while he took out the glove it contained. It was cut for a man’s left hand in imitation hogs-kin and was nearly new. Luke’s narrow eyes met Mr. Campion’s squarely.

“This is the glove left behind in the Church Row shooting case.”

“
Oh dear!
” Mr. Campion’s protest was so completely spontaneous and like himself that his friend had the grace to colour.

“All right.” Luke threw the exhibit on the brass tray of a pair of letter scales which he kept on the desk top and it lay there, limp and unimpressive, kept in the air by the small column of weights on the other side. “I’m not trying to prove anything. I only point out that this glove left behind by the unknown gunman who shot his way out of a house in Church Row when he discovered that there were more people in the building than the woman householder, was bought in Cuppages
on that corner
.”

“My dear fellow, I wouldn’t dream of arguing with you,” Mr. Campion made it clear that he was not a man who argued at all. “But I would point out that the Church Row shooting happened quite three years ago.”

“Just about.” Luke spoke cheerfully. “It was about this time, October. The Goff’s place business was last February.”

“A gap of two years and four months?” Mr. Campion’s expression was very dubious.

Luke returned to his map. “Well I wondered, don’t you know,” he said deliberately. “I wondered if it was all gap. See that pink marker halfway down Fairey Street, just behind Cuppages? That’s a small jewellers. Belongs to an old boy called Tobias. I’ve known him for years. Not long ago a
young
woman who was on holiday from Dorset—she’s a country school teacher there—passed by his window and went up in the air. She’d seen this in his cheap tray.” He dived into the drawer again to return with a small box containing a gold ring decorated with ivy leaves which he passed to his visitor. “She’d recognised it as belonging to her auntie and she was excited about finding it because her auntie and uncle completely vanished two years and three months ago—in the June following the September of the Church Row shooting.”

Mr. Campion sat looking at the Superintendent with misleading innocence.

“I trust you don’t suggest that the aunt and uncle travelled by ’bus, Charles?”

“No,” said Luke. “No one knows
how
they travelled, or even if they travelled. That’s the interesting part of the story. They were retired people, comfortably off in their own little house in Yorkshire, and they sold up and collected all their money and got on a train for London without a word of explanation to anyone except that the old lady, in writing to the school teacher to thank her for a white plastic handbag which she’d sent her for her birthday, had mentioned that they’d met a very nice young man who had told uncle wonderful things about Johannesburg, and how suitable the handbag would be if ever they went. That was all. Auntie never wrote again. When the niece investigated she and uncle had packed up and gone away without a word.”

He paused and thrust his jaw out with sudden savagery.

“I don’t want to make cases but you would think that once the police got on to it they could find some trace of these people having taken ’plane or ship within a reasonable time of them closing their bank account. We couldn’t. We can’t find a whisper of them anywhere except that auntie’s ring, which never left her finger, turned up right in the middle of the area in which I’m interested.”

Mr. Campion looked at the ring. It was not valuable but the design was unusual and rather beautiful.

“How sure is the niece about this?” he enquired.

“A hundred per cent.” By some alchemy Luke managed to
transform
his thin face into a round blank one, solemn eyed and utterly practical. ‘‘Auntie had a terrier pup who used to try to bite it off her finger. Look at it with this.”

He passed him a jeweller’s glass from the miscellany on the desk and the thin man made the examination carefully.

“Yes,” he said at last. “What a beastly little tale. What does Tobias say?”

“So little he must be telling the truth.” Luke sighed gustily. “He can’t remember when the ring came in. He only put it in the window a couple of days before the niece spotted it. He was turning out the drawer in which he keeps the junk he buys over the counter and found it under the bit of newspaper he’d used as a lining last time he cleaned up. He says it must have come in with a parcel of second-hand stuff but he can’t recall it. The odd thing is that the date on the piece of newspaper is just a couple of weeks after uncle and auntie left home. It proves nothing, but it’s curious.”

He took the ring and dropping it back in its box placed the package on top of the glove. Mr. Campion saw where the manœuvre was leading and decided to be obliging.

“What about the last flag,” he enquired. “The one in the middle of the green.”

Luke laughed as he caught his eye.

“Well, its a good trick,” he said and, returning to the drawer once more, produced a large lizard-skin letter-case of very good quality. He did not pass it over at once but sat turning it inside out and back again, showing a torn strap on one of the inner pockets. “In April this year a kid picked this up from the grass in Garden Green,” he said presently. “After kicking it about for a bit he gave it to a bobby and it turned out to be just the thing the Kent police were looking for. It belonged to a car salesman whose body had been found in his coupé at the bottom of a chalk pit on the Folkestone-London road. Skidmarks on the surface suggested that he’d been forced off the road by another car, so no one was very surprised when it was discovered that he’d been carrying all of seven hundred pounds on him when he set out from the coast. When he was found he had a pocketful of loose change but no note-case of any kind although his
other
papers were intact. His family identified this. It’s a distinctive wallet and his wife remembered the torn strap.” He let his mouth widen into a ferocious grin and dropped the leather folder on to the glove and the ring. Its weight turned the scales and the brass tray clattered gently as it hit the polished wood of the desk. “There you are,” he said; “it doesn’t mean much but how good it looks?”

Mr. Campion rose and walked over to the wall to have a closer look at the chart.

“You haven’t a scrap of evidence of any kind, have you?” he murmured absently. “You’d be more convincing with a crystal ball. I don’t know Garden Green. What is it like?”

“Sad,” Luke drooped, impersonating a willow perhaps. “Used to be a graveyard. The church came down in the blitz and the Council had the ground levelled and the stones set round the boundary wall. A hoarding separates it from the Barrow Road and round the back there are the usual little houses—beautiful porches, horrible plumbing. Mostly they’re let out in rooms but there are some in private hands still. It’s quiet. Not a slum. This chap I have in mind doesn’t
live
there, you know.”

There was something so convinced and familiar in his tone that Mr. Campion was startled. The Superintendent was speaking of someone as real to him as the friend before him. Luke saw the expression in the pale eyes and laughed.

“I’ve got him under my skin good and proper haven’t I? I worry about him you know. He didn’t make anything out of the Church Row shooting so I figure he had to catch up on auntie and uncle. He got a few hundred quid from them but not enough to square the moneylender who must have been pressing. So he attended to that little problem; but he didn’t actually touch much cash, if any, in Deban Street and therefore, a couple of months later, he gave his mind to the car salesman. I don’t know how long that drop of lolly would last him because I don’t know what his debts were, you see.”

“This is pure fiction,” said Mr. Campion reproachfully. “It’s fascinating but it doesn’t touch the ground. Why watch Garden Green if he doesn’t live there?”

“Because he’s treating it as a hide. He’s not counting it. He thinks he’s safe there.” Luke’s deep voice had become soft. It was almost a purr Mr. Campion thought with sudden astonishment, and he was aware of a small and secret thrill creeping down his spine.

“You can’t tell what he’s got out there,” Luke was saying. “But it’s something which gives him an entirely false sense of security. It could be a pub where they know him well but in some different character to his real one, or it might be a girl friend who doesn’t ask questions—they do exist they tell me. Anyway he goes there when he wants to leave himself behind. I may sound as if I’m shooting a line but I know his state of mind about that place. He thinks he’s almost
invisible
there and that things he takes from there or chucks away there couldn’t ever be traced to him.” He paused and his quick dark eyes met Campion’s own, “It’s an old idea—sanctuary they call it, don’t they?”

Mr. Campion shivered. He did not know why. He hastened back to concrete matters.

“What about this new telephone?” he enquired.

The dark man chuckled and nodded towards an instrument which stood away from the others on a file in the corner.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s caused the trouble downstairs. You can go as batty as you like if you do it cheaply, but spend a bit of Government money on your delusions and authority starts having kittens at once! That’s my private line to the Barrow Road station. If anything comes in from the Garden Green beat I shall hear of it quicker than soon. It’s been waiting, costing all of thirty bob, for a couple of weeks but it’ll ring in the end. You’ll see!”

The thin man in the horn rims returned to his chair and sat down eyeing the little pile of exhibits on the scales.

“You make it very convincing, Charles,” he said at last. “Although there’s no great similarity of method you force me to admit there’s a strong family likeness in the mental approach. Of course there are no bodies in the ring story but then there isn’t one in the ’bus business either.”

Luke thrust his hands in his pockets and began to play softly with the coins there.

“That idea of Yeo’s about me trying to revive Havoc or the Reddingdale multi-murderer is absurd,” he said. “This chap isn’t a fraction like either of them. Havoc had got out of touch with the Peace-time world in jug and the Reddingdale chap was a bore with a blood-lust like Blue Beard or Christie, but this man is different. He’s almost refreshing. He’s got a brain and he’s got nerve and he’s not neurotic. He’s perfectly sane, he’s merciless as a snake and he’s very careful—doesn’t like witnesses or corpses left around.”

Mr. Campion studied his finger tips; he was thinking that he had heard white hunters describing game they were after with the same almost loving interest.

“You see him as simply out for money, do you?” he enquired presently.

“Oh yes, and not necessarily big money.” As he spoke the Superintendent took a handful of silver out of his pocket absently, glanced at it and put it back again. “He’s a crook. He makes a living by taking all he needs from other people. The really unusual thing about him is that he kills quite coldly when it’s the safest thing to do.”

He slid off the desk and going round behind it sat down in his chair and swept the exhibits back into their drawer again.

“He’s the enemy,” he said, catching Campion’s eye with a flicker in his own which was half shy. “My enemy. Professional
and
natural, and I tell you, I’m as certain as if I was reading it on my tombstone, either I’m going to get him or he’s going to get me.”

Mr. Campion opened his mouth to express a polite hope that he was not beating an empty covert when behind him, on the top of the green file, the newly installed telephone began to ring.

Chapter 3

GARDEN GREEN

EARLY IN THE
day on which Mr. Campion went to visit Superintendent Luke, Garden Green achieved a beauty which was not normally its outstanding characteristic.

Sunlight, yellow and crystal in the mist, glowed through the wet black branches of the plane trees while the fallen cream-coloured leaves made a fine carpet hiding the bald patches, the cigarette cartons and the ’bus tickets which in the ordinary way disfigured the discouraged grass.

A narrow concrete path ran round the green like a ribbon round a hat. At the furthest loop was a single wooden seat and upon it sat a girl.

She was not very tall but curved as a kitten, and was clad in an elegant tweed coat with matching tan shoes and gloves. At her feet was a small canvas travelling bag.

P.G. Bullard, heavyweight and elderly, who was on duty at the corner, had strolled down the path twice already to have a look at her, once in the way of duty and once for pure pleasure. Her sleekly brushed hair was honey coloured, her grey eyes flecked with gold were widely set, and her mouth might have been drawn with a copperplate pen, so fine and yet so bold were its lines.

The man on duty was puzzled by her. He thought he had never seen anything so out of place. If she was waiting for someone who was very late she certainly did not mind, for she sat there contentedly in the cold morning, her fair skin glowing and the sunlight burnishing her uncovered head. He judged that she was something over seventeen trying to look twenty, and he was not far out except that it was twenty-four she was aiming at. Apart from her beauty, which was outstanding, the other thing which impressed him was her self-possession. The second time he passed her she
caught
him eyeing her and wished him a polite good morning as a matter of course.