“Say you get off with two years,” he went on. “That works out at a hundred pounds a year. That’s a handsome sort of compensation for a prison record – something which will hang round your neck for the rest of your life. A hundred a year. Chicken feed! Any man with five fingers on his hands is worth at least three times that at the present moment.”
“What’s done’s done,” said Andrews sullenly.
“Certainly it’s done, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything more about it. If that was so I wouldn’t be here. I’d be wasting my time somewhere else. If you’d think for a moment you’d see the police angle. They’re not all that interested in you; it’s the higher-ups they’re after, the big league players. They aren’t making any promises, but if you give them a lead up to the top, I shouldn’t be surprised if somehow or other your case came to be overlooked in the general excitement. These things can be arranged, you know. Even if that wasn’t possible, you must realise that there’s all the difference in the world between a short sentence of imprisonment, with the authorities on your side and everybody willing to forgive and forget, and a term of penal servitude.”
Andrews grunted.
“Another thing – there’s the Regimental Association. It’s a poor argument, because they’ll probably help you anyway. The least they can do is to keep an eye on your family. But I can really get them moving on your behalf. We’ll get you a good lawyer, for a start.”
McCann wondered if all this sounded as nonsensical to Andrews as it did to him. Andrews hardly seemed to be listening to him. His eyes were on the dusty sash window and his lips were moving quietly. Not hysterically, but as if he was an unpractised orator rehearsing his first speech.
McCann had the sense to keep quiet.
Andrews finally turned. A good deal of the last six years looked out of his eyes.
“By Christ, I wish I was out of this,” he said. “It’s good of you to try and help me, sir. And don’t think I don’t appreciate it. I was a mug to get into this game. It doesn’t do no harm to realise you’re a mug. But I can’t tell you what you want to know. If I did—”
His lips kept moving silently, mumbling over a string of words. But all he said out loud was: “I suppose you think I’m being a fool, sir.”
“Aye,” said McCann, “I do. I think you’re being every sort of bloody fool. But I also see that you’ve made your mind up. Well,
you
may regard the matter as settled, but I don’t. I shall always be handy if you want me. And I’ll do what I can for you. It probably won’t be much.”
Five minutes later he was trying to make sense out of this conversation for Hazlerigg’s benefit.
“I thought for a moment that he was going to talk. It wasn’t my lucid patter about legal aid. I don’t think he heard me. His thoughts were on their own tack. Then, for no reason at all, he jammed. Don’t ask me why, because I’m not a thought-reader. I saw from the look in his eye that he’d made his mind up. For the time being, anyway.”
“Pity,” said Hazlerigg. “Go back again over everything he said. Any little thing might give us a lead.”
“I’m afraid that I did most of the talking. Oh, one thing. He was most emphatic that it wasn’t him that coshed the watchman. He said it was the ‘ruddy little half-pint pot with him’. That sounds like one of your juvenile delinquents.”
“Yes, we knew there was a kid with him. Our informant told us that. Well, it’s a pity, but it can’t be helped. I’m sure you did your best.”
The Major felt that he was being dismissed. He screwed up a considerable degree of moral courage and said rather abruptly: “Can I help you?”
“You have helped us,” said Hazlerigg courteously.
McCann ignored this.
“I’m at a loose end. I live in London, and I don’t mind work.” He didn’t mind danger, either, but he didn’t say so. If Hazlerigg hadn’t gathered that from a study of his record it wasn’t up to him to say as much.
“That sergeant you lost,” he went on, “Pollock – that was his name, wasn’t it? – he must have been handicapped from the start by the fact that half the crooks in London knew him.”
Hazlerigg hesitated. He was captivated for a moment by the sincerity of the offer. The inevitable doubts flooded in.
What would the Assistant Commissioner in charge of C.I.D. say? What would the Commissioner say? Above all, what would the public say, through its supreme mouthpiece, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Home Affairs; if something should happen to McCann.
As it certainly would.
He said rather weakly: “If a situation arises in which we could use your services, I will get in touch with you.”
McCann saw that he had lost and felt an unreasonable spasm of anger against the man behind the desk and the officialdom which he represented.
He picked his hat up, ignored Hazlerigg’s placatory handshake, and made his way to the door. He was just grown-up enough not to slam it.
He lost direction promptly in the maze of branching corridors, and by the time that he had inquired his way out into the open he had cooled down enough to realise that he was behaving rather stupidly.
Further, he had behaved rather naughtily. By concealing the one real tit-bit of genuine information which had come to him so fortuitously.
“Curly!”
When he had asked Andrews, point blank, how he had got into the racket, he had started, “Me and Curly . . .” and had then pulled himself up.
Curly was Curly White or Blanco White. The man whom Sergeant Dalgetty had told him he had seen in Berkeley Square. Curly was a very rough character indeed. And he had been a great friend of Andrews.
It was a lead.
Every particle of common sense which he possessed told him that this lead should be placed in the hands of the police.
Every ounce of McCann’s Scotch pride said that he was – if he would. They had turned down his proffer of help. Not exactly turned it down, perhaps, but made it quite obvious that they didn’t intend to use it.
Very well.
He would follow out this private and exclusive little piece of information himself, and see where it led.
The day suddenly seemed brighter, the sun shone with a beneficial warmth and Major McCann felt happy for the first time since landing in England.
As happy as any unworldly little fly, flitting and twirling lightheartedly towards the spider’s carefully camouflaged web.
He turned into Whitehall.
He was not even experienced enough to know that he was being followed.
Hazlerigg studied the report which a uniformed constable had just left on his desk. As he read it he pivoted solidly in his chair and the chair squeaked in protest.
It was a monastic little office for a Chief Inspector. Curtain-less windows let the light on to worn linoleum. A square “partner’s” desk and a swivel chair. The only notable feature of the desk was that it had three telephones on it. One on the public line, one on the house line, one on the special line.
In the corner of the office stood a camp bed. Hazlerigg had slept there every night since Folder 26 had opened. Folder 26 was the Yard’s unromantic name for the series of happenings, some of which Major McCann had just learned of.
In so far as the folder had any exact location in space it was represented by the set of filing cabinets standing behind the Inspector’s desk. These were of a pattern peculiar to Scotland Yard, being small models in facsimile of the big cabinets in the basement which housed the millions of entries in the Records Department. The cards were identically slotted. So that if, for instance, one of Hazlerigg’s suspects left a fingerprint behind him the card on which it was filed could be put through the selector; and in an astonishingly small number of minutes a name would be put to its owner; provided of course that the owner was a previous customer.
So far none of them had been, which didn’t make life any easier. In fact, life was far from easy, just at the moment. Hazlerigg had seen the Commissioner that morning. The Commissioner had been both kind and, considering all things, appreciative. He was known as a man who backed his heads of department to the limit. And he had the very rare and very great attribute of accepting responsibility without underwriting his risks.
That morning he had calmly doubled the stakes. He had left Hazlerigg in no doubt as to the seriousness of the situation. And he had offered him commensurate powers. What he had given him was the nearest thing to a
carte blanche
since the British fifth column had been liquidated in the autumn of 1938. Which made it all very nice for Hazlerigg – if he succeeded. He turned again to the paper in front of him. It was a typed transcript of Major McCann’s interview with Gunner Andrews, duly taken down in the next room as it came over the tannoy speaker connected to the microphones under the wainscoting of that functional apartment.
He was puzzled about Curly. It was possible, of course, that McCann had not noticed the slip, and in that case his failure to mention it was venial. It was equally possible that McCann
had
noticed it, and deliberately kept the information to himself. In order not to incriminate another of his men? Possibly. Or in order to follow the line himself. That was a more likely solution.
The thought made Hazlerigg shudder.
He had taken the precaution of putting a man on to the Major’s tail, but this did not really solve the problem. To shadow a suspect successfully twenty-four hours of the day, day after day, needed a minimum of six trained operatives. Even with his new powers he couldn’t throw men about on that scale.
It was perfectly possible, for instance, that even if McCann meditated independent action he might not put his plans into operation immediately. He might wait for a week. He might take a month’s holiday in the country first. “Take someone to help you,” he had said to Crabbe, “and watch him for the rest of the day. If he seems to be doing anything in the least bit odd, phone me straight away, and I’ll think about making a permanent job out of it.”
McCann had lunch at the Corner House and then walked home across Regents Park. He found that thinking was easier if he kept moving. The first thing, of course, was to get hold of Sergeant Dalgetty. He would write to him. Meanwhile he would formulate a plan of campaign. Several ideas, remarkable equally for their audacity and impracticability, were considered and discarded before the simple solution forced itself on him. He quickened his pace, causing Sergeant Crabbe acute distress, and arrived home with a splendid appetite for tea.
After tea it struck him that Sergeant Dalgetty might have a telephone and he tried out the idea on Directory Inquiries; without any success, however; so he wrote a post card suggesting a rendezvous in Shepherd’s Market on the evening of the day after next, borrowed a stamp from his sister, posted the card (as duly observed by Detective Walkinshaw) and went to the local cinema. None of this seemed very suspicious to Sergeant Crabbe and his assistant, nor (when reported by him) to Hazlerigg, who duly called them off, which, of course, was the biggest mistake he had made so far.
Two days later McCann had met Sergeant Dalgetty in the bar of one of the many pleasant Shepherd’s Market hostelries. He wished that he could take the Sergeant into his confidence but felt unable to abuse the trust which Inspector Hazlerigg had placed in him.
Clearly no middle course was possible. Either he handed over his information to the police or he acted on it by himself.
Sergeant Dalgetty had been obliging enough to walk part of the way home with him and point out the doorway into which he had seen Curly White disappear. They hadn’t lingered to inspect it. It was the north-west corner of the Square, where Flaxman Street ran into it, opposite the triangular corner formed by the 1940 Blitz and enlarged by a V2 in the last week of the war.
Next morning McCann walked past the house again, and stopped this time to light his pipe – sheltering in the porch as he did so. It was an Early-Georgian affair. Obviously it had once been a gentleman’s residence and it still retained a frontage of some taste and elegance. But equally obviously it had come down in the world, and was now tenanted by no less than five firms who were willing to pay twice the normal rent in order to put Berkeley Square on their notepaper.
The Major scanned the indicator board rapidly. Starting from the third floor he had his choice of Saxifrage Lamps (London Agency); Leopold Goffstein, furrier; The Cherubim Employment and Domestic Agency; and on the ground floor, visible from where he stood, the offices of Messrs. Knacker & Bullem, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. The basement was given over to the Winsome Press (“Books of Curious and Artistic Interest”).
It took the Major several minutes to get his pipe going to his satisfaction, and during that time no one came or went in the quiet passage. Messrs. Knacker & Bullem’s Inquiry door remained unopened. No prospective employers plodded up the narrow steps leading to the first floor offices of the Cherubim Employment and Domestic Agency. (They had probably all given up trying long ago.)
McCann rapidly jotted the names down in his notebook, against future reference, and passed on.
He was on his way to visit his old friend Glasgow, at the Leopard, but a thought now occurred to him, and he directed his steps westward, and half an hour later was entering the doors of the Law Society, an august and sociable body which not only possesses one of the finest reference libraries in London, but is not unduly particular as to who makes use of it.
He located Messrs. Knacker & Bullem in the Law List and ascertained, amongst other items of information, that the existing partners were a Mr. Browne, a Mr. Greene and a Mr. White. Leopold Goffstein was featured in the Directory of Directors. He appeared to have controlling interests in several Fur Firms and was on the board of three Turning and Pressing businesses and Megalosaurus Milk Bars Ltd. Saxifrage Lamps were a Birmingham firm and looked solid. The
Authors’ and Artists’ Year Book
dealt with the Winsome Press, but in a somewhat reserved way. It gave a list of their publications for the year, consisting mainly of translations from the Silvery Latinists and illustrated versions of French writers who, until the directors of the Winsome Press selected them for the English speaking public, had lingered in a well-deserved obscurity. Of the Cherubim Domestic and Employment Agency he could find no written trace.