There were two obvious explanations of this. The first was that they hadn’t connected him with the police, and thought him a casual and fairly harmless intruder.
The second – but he wouldn’t think about that just at the moment.
“I suppose,” he said, “that you couldn’t tell me why someone had to hit me on the head. I mean—so far as I know the war in Europe ended last May.”
“Sure,” said the Child obligingly (McCann noticed that he had a good deal of “Film American” – most of it some years out of date). “Curly said you’d bin following him so he sent word ahead, and we had the reception committee waiting. Of course, it was money for old rope when you walked straight into the joint and started asking questions about upstairs.”
“I see,” said McCann slowly.
“There wasn’t much time to count the change – you might have been a slop and you might not – so bonko, out you went.”
“Quite so,” said the Major. “Bonko.”
“Then Curly comes and gets a good look at you and says: ‘You haven’t half been and gone and done it,’ he says.
‘That’s not a rozzer, that’s one of my—officers.’ So we ran the hand over you, just in case you were toting a rod or anything funny, but we didn’t find a sausage. Then we carried you up here – see?”
“You’ll excuse me seeming inquisitive,” said the Major, “but do you—er—’bonko’ everyone who comes round asking if you’ve got an upper floor flat to let?”
“No,” said the Child (actually he said something usually represented as “Not —ing likely but his meaning was clearly negative). “It just looked a bit off, you following Curly, and this being the day of the move and all.”
“I see,” said the Major. He was, in fact, beginning to see a good deal. He thought that whilst the Child was in a chatty mood there was no harm in keeping the ball rolling.
“You’ll excuse my mentioning it,” he said. “It’s just that I did a good deal of co-operating with our American Allies in the closing stages of the battle – it’s not now correct to refer to a pistol as a ‘rod’. That went out altogether at about the time of Al Capone. The more modern expression is ‘Luger’ or just ‘Loogue’, or possibly ‘Heater’.”
“Thanks,” said the Child.
He appeared genuinely grateful for the information. He did not, however, come the desired step nearer.
After another little pause he embarked on a fresh line of thought.
“Look,” he said. “You’re going into a room. You’ve got a rod – a heater, I should say – in your hand. Inside the room there’s three guys sitting at a table, and you’re gonner shoot them all – see? Well, when you pokes around the door, these three guys sees you, and they sees you’ve got a heater, and you looks dirty. One guy, he starts to shout out. The second guy, he starts to get to his feet. The third guy, he says nothing, and doesn’t move at all. Now which of them three are you going to shoot first?”
He propounded this little problem in ethics as seriously as any doctor conducting a
viva voce
of medical students; indeed, there
was
something almost professional about the dispassionate gleam in his pale eyes.
“You shoot the man who’s sitting still,” said McCann.
“That’s the answer,” admitted the Demon Child, grudgingly. “That’s what Curly always says. I can’t see it. Me, I’d shoot the guy who was hollering.”
“You’d be wrong,” said McCann. “If he was shouting for help, it would be too late to shoot him, probably, and if no one had heard his shout, they’d certainly hear your gun going off. So what’s the use of shooting to stop him shouting?”
“What about the guy who’s getting up to come at you?”
“Most people do one thing at a time. If he’s engaged in getting up the chances are he’s not engaged in drawing his own gun. The man who’s sitting still is the dangerous character. He’s probably reaching for his own gun under the table. And he’ll shoot better sitting down.
“It’s just a question of intelligent anticipation,” went on McCann, “like boxing.”
This long shot landed in the gold all right.
His gaoler’s face broke into what might have been quite an attractive smile if its owner had ever bothered to clean his teeth.
“Say, mister, what d’you know about boxing?”
He jumped into a quick weaving action, feet and hands right and left – unfortunately bringing himself no closer to the Major’s ever-ready foot.
“I’ve done a bit,” said the Major modestly. “Amateur stuff. But we had some good boys in our crowd. Lefty Cusins, Patsy Williams.”
“Patsy—! Oh boy, what a dancer! You oughter watch his footwork. I heard he was finished with fighting, now.”
This was an understatement, seeing Patsy had left his right foot behind in Sicily. However, the Major merely nodded. He was watching the boy’s face.
“Lefty—I never knew him. I knew his big brother—I was glove boy to him once—”
He broke off.
The Major prodded the conversation into life again.
“Where did you learn to box?” he asked. “At school – or picking fights in the street?”
The Demon Child seemed to take more offence at the first suggestion than at the second. “School,” he said in tones of the deepest disgust. “I never went to no—school.”
The Major was not a very imaginative man. But he had a curious little gift of seeing things objectively rather than logically, which was probably why he was a good soldier and only a very second-class business man.
Looking at the creature standing beside him he saw suddenly, quite clearly, what he was up against. He, and a great many other law-abiding citizens. He saw the qualities and the defects, set opposite to each other in the plainest black and white. He saw the guts and the courage and the quite considerable perseverance – he saw the shallowness of purpose, the streak of natural cruelty, and the dreadful sterilising selfishness. He saw, though yet in embryo, the perfectly natural criminal. After his men had come to know McCann, and on occasions when their mouths had been unbuttoned by drink or the imminence of danger, they had talked quite freely to him about their homes and background.
So he knew things which he might not otherwise have known. He knew that it was still possible, in London or Liverpool, or Glasgow, for a boy to live the seventeenth-century life. If he once
did
go to school the school system probably kept him there – but if he never went at all, particularly if his parents had thoughtfully refrained from registering his birth into this world – well. School Inspectors were hard-worked men, and no system is infallible. He himself personally knew of one man who was still “off the record” since the day when he had deserted from the army in the 1914-18 war.
The unconscious object of these thoughts was now standing quietly, with his head bent forward. He seemed to be listening.
Downstairs a door shut.
Then came the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs.
McCann waited with the greatest interest to see who would come through the door. So far he had observed no one but his present gaoler with any clearness, and it occurred to him that it might be useful, if dangerous, to be in a position to identify a few more faces. The steps were outside the door now.
In his excitement he half sat up on his bed and quite forgot to watch the Child Menace. All that he heard was the faint swish of the leather-covered cosh, and then he seemed to be standing on his head in a pit of the inkiest darkness.
Doctors, when asked about double concussion, usually take refuge in saying that we know nothing about the brain anyway. The first blow shakes up the whole cerebral unit. A second blow within a short space of time may have a variety of effects. It may double the effect of the first, and drive a man near to insanity – or the two blows may neutralise each other, in some curious way making the effect of the second much less than it should have been.
The fact remains that though McCann was “out” in every technical sense of the word, without movement or hearing or feeling, he was still able, in a dim and rapidly decreasing degree, to use his eyes.
Through the mists he saw the door open, and a man come in.
He recognised that he was in the presence of a very powerful and mature sort of evil. A face swam across the narrowing surface of his vision. It was elongated and extraverted as if seen in a distorting mirror. And the curious conviction seized McCann that he had seen the face before.
Then blackness came down like a blind.
At an unknown time later – which was actually not more than an hour – McCann recovered consciousness. This time he came cleanly back to the world of light, with none of the obvious ill-effects which he had felt on the previous occasion.
It was only when he got to his feet that he discovered how weak he was, and he collapsed incontinently on to his knees and remained for a few grotesque moments on all fours, for all the world like an indulgent parent playing at bears with his children.
The room was now quite empty, and the house crouching below it was, if anything, even quieter and more still. The sweat was collecting and dripping from his forehead, and falling coldly on to the backs of his hands.
His braces and shoes were on the end of the bed, his coat over the chair.
McCann dressed painfully. Unless his watch had stopped the time was eleven o’clock. Carrying his shoes he crept over to the door and listened. After a moment’s consideration he grasped one of them firmly in his right hand, and with his left hand turned the handle. The door opened easily.
Complete silence reigned.
Suddenly McCann laughed. It had struck him how ludicrous he must look. The house felt empty – and he had had enough of playing bogey-man for one evening.
He sat down and put his shoes on. Before getting up he forced his head down between his legs and held it there.
Then he got to his feet and walked downstairs. He went down three flights and found himself in a small front hall, remarkable only for the fact that it was entirely devoid of furniture. A minute later he was in the street.
It was the chemist’s shop all right, so far as he could see by the dim street lighting.
McCann walked away slowly, in the general direction of Kensington, and as the quiet and the grateful coolness of the night air began to have their effect, so his brain began to work again.
Slowly, but effectively.
His paramount, aching desire was to get into bed and sleep for thirty-six hours. But there was work which had to be done. Badly as he had played the hand, he did not intend to throw away the last tricks without a struggle.
Firstly, and vitally, was he being followed?
He found himself unable to say.
His eyes were no help. The night was dark with an overcast moon, and the streets were by no means restored to their pre-war lighting.
He stopped for a moment, but the blood was beating so unpleasantly in his ears that he could hear very little. He jumped as a bicycle swished past him on quiet rubber tyres.
It was essential to think clearly and quickly. It was at moments like the present, as he knew, that bad mistakes were made. Shock and fatigue were apt to make people do stupid things.
But it was really very simple.
He
must
contact Inspector Hazlerigg at once – and he
must not
be observed doing so.
As soon as the problem presented itself in such plain terms the answer became apparent.
McCann took the first turning to the right and started to run.
He was a good runner. Not a sprinter, but an excellent club performer at a mile and over.
Through the maze of genteel Groves and Gardens, secluded Places and desirably residential Terraces he padded, keeping steadily towards the east. Rain had fallen that evening and the streets were black and shining and quiet. He crossed Gloucester Road without seeing a soul, and by the time he was approaching Knightsbridge he was beginning to get his second wind. He dived into the Park, happily railing-less at this point, and by-passed the right hand end of the Serpentine. By the time he reached Park Lane he was almost happy, though his head was splitting. No pursuit on foot, he reckoned, could have been both quiet enough to escape his attentions yet swift enough to keep up with him. Pursuit on wheels would have been baffled by his detour through the Park.
At the top of Curzon Street he broke into a walk. There was a light still showing at the “Leopard” and his knocking brought Miss Carter to the door. She took one look at him, and then dragged him through the hall into her pleasant little office-cum-sitting-room. Glasgow was finishing her nightly cup of tea on the sofa. Both ladies regarded him in fascinated silence.
“Are they after you?” said Miss Carter, a little breathlessly.
“The devils!” said Glasgow. “Russians, I suppose.”
McCann had fortunately a sufficiency of his wits about him to remember the ingenuous explanation he had given to his female aides. It seemed simplest to swim with the tide.
“You mustn’t tell a soul,” he said earnestly, “but you’re right, it was The Ogpu.”
He put his hand to his head in a telling gesture.
“My God,” said Glasgow. “We’ve nothing but a poker between us.”
“It’s all right,” said McCann, “I’ve thrown them off the scent. Now I must use your telephone, and I’m afraid I shall have to be alone whilst I do so.”
As the ladies trooped obediently from the room, the Major picked up the telephone, and dialled O.
“Get me code 060572 – it’s a private number, I think.”
The night operator seemed unsurprised, and in a minute McCann heard Hazlerigg’s voice. He poured out his story.
When he had finished, Hazlerigg sounded neither obviously pleased nor angry, but somehow he reminded McCann uncomfortably of certain Colonels and Brigadiers he had had the misfortune to cross in his army career.
“Give me those localities again, please. An office block on the corner of Flaxman Street and Berkeley Square—yes—and a block of five shops, two hundred yards south of the Kensington High Road—wait whilst I fetch a map, please—yes— you turned south, then west. I see—one of them was a tobacconist’s or newsagent’s, and one a chemist’s shop. One looked like a greengrocer’s. All four-storey buildings. All right. We’ll find them easily enough. Where are you phoning from?—I see. Were you followed?”