Introducing The Toff (11 page)

She shivered: she felt afraid.

It was just twenty-four hours after the affair at the ‘Red Lion’, Shadwell, that a clean-shaven, yellow-faced man with narrow, compelling eyes, looked up from the evening paper he was reading into the glittering eyes of a tough-faced man sitting by a table, with one ugly hand on the neck of a whisky bottle.

The room was well-furnished, although it was badly littered. No one seemed to have worried whether anything unwanted went on the floor, the tables, the chairs or the cupboards. Three daily papers were lying about the room, one of them ripped across. There were even empty whisky bottles on the floor, and a broken glass.

Few people would have recognized the clean-shaven man as Achmed Dragoli until he spoke. His voice was as slow and measured as ever, and anyone who had known him well would have seen in their mind’s eye the long, silky beard, the heavy eyebrows.

‘You’re drinking too much, Garrotty.’

‘Aw, shucks!’ The American lifted the bottle without troubling to use a glass, and emptied some of its fiery contents down his capacious throat. He drank neat whisky like water. ‘We gotta live, Drag.’

‘Ye-es.’ Dragoli spoke very softly. ‘We’ve got to live a long time, and there is a great deal of work to do. It’s to be done – sober.’

He leaned forward, and snatched the bottle. It clattered from Garrotty’s grasp to the floor, crashed, and the whisky spilled out. Garrotty’s face flushed an ugly red, and his hand darted towards his shoulder holster.

But Dragoli had a gun in his hand before the half tipsy gangster could draw.

Garrotty’s eyes narrowed venomously, but his hand moved away, and his lips formed a grudging apology.

‘O.K., Drag. No need for that between friends.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Dragoli, but he kept his gun in sight. ‘Listen, you drunken fool. We have six months or more to go, most of the cocaine to be unloaded, and – a quarter of a million pounds to collect. Does that make sense?’

Garrotty stared. The figure mentioned was seeping through the whisky fumes that had befuddled his brain.

‘How – hic – how much wassat?’

‘A quarter of a million.’

‘P-pounds or dollars?’

‘English pounds,’ said Dragoli slowly. ‘And your share, if you work well, will be a big one. Say a quarter. Will that make you change your mind and stop drinking? You’ve taken enough since last night to last most men a year.’

Garrotty grinned, a little sheepishly. He lifted his hands and dropped them. Cupidity, not hate, was glittering in his eyes, and he wiped his shirt-sleeve across his wet lips.

‘Jus’ a little holiday, Drag, yuh can’t say no t’ thet.’

Dragoli shrugged.

‘Don’t have too many of them. We are safe enough here and five of your friends are able to work. In addition,’ he added slowly, ‘to the rest of my own friends, ready to work in England. But we shall do most of the actual handling of the cocaine, Garrotty. Understand?’

‘Sure – sure. I understand.’ Garrotty wiped his lips again, and staggered up from the table. He went to the window and pushed it up, although it was pitch dark outside.

Silence greeted him.

The silence of the countryside after dark, broken by the odd murmurings of the trees and hedges and the night birds, and yet intensified by it. The cool air did him good. He turned round cumbersomely, and he no longer looked drunk.

‘All right, Dragoli. I’m with you. But here’s one thing I’m worried about. The Toff . . .’

He spoke casually, but he failed to make the words seem casual. In that room, on the top floor of a small country house near Camberley, in Surrey, the presence of the Toff seemed to make itself felt, although he was thirty miles away and helpless in a hospital. Garrotty, for the first time, was really beginning to feel the influence of the Toff.

So was Dragoli, but he succeeded in hiding the fact.

‘He’s finished for weeks, Garrotty, if not for longer. Don’t worry about him.’

‘I don’t trust de guy,’ said Garrotty. ‘Dere’s just one way I’d like to see the Toff, and that’s in a box. Sure’ – he scowled, and lit a cigarette, letting it droop from the corner of his thick lips. ‘In a box, Dragoli, an’ I reckon I’d pay somep’n to put him there myself.’

‘You’ll have the chance,’ said Dragoli. ‘But we will forget the Toff while he is in hospital. According to this’ – he lifted the evening paper –’he is in a bad way. An emergency operation was performed this morning.’

Garrotty grinned.

‘That so? Good hearing, Drag. How many of the dicks got theirs?’

‘One more died, in hospital,’ said Dragoli. ‘Three were dead last night. Harry’s dead too.’

‘Sure. That won’t make me keep awake at nights’ grunted Garrotty. ‘The squirt was scared all through.’

Dragoli laughed, showing his yellow teeth.

‘Of the Toff,’ he said. ‘But remember this, Garrotty. We have made it impossible to work in the open much now. The police are different over here from what they are in your country, and they won’t take kindly to the death of three detectives.’

There was a swagger’in Garrotty’s manner as he went towards a radiogram in a corner of the big room.

‘That so? They ain’t so dumb in Noo York State, Mister, an’ I reckon I saw the way to get past ‘em. I’m not worryin’.’

‘Excellent,’ said Dragoli smoothly. ‘Well, our next big task, Garrotty, is Colliss.’

Garrotty swung round from the radio.

‘Dat guy, huh! What’s on him?’

‘A great deal. Colliss is home from Stamboul, as I told you before – last night’s interruption. He has been investigating the Black Circle for the police over there, and he is to contact with Scotland Yard. He is first, of course, going to his country house. It is believed that he visited Turkey solely as an archaeologist. The English police are showing some imagination, my friend, for they are realizing the importance of the Black Circle.’ He laughed, as though at some secret joke. ‘But there are leakages of information at Scotland Yard –’

‘Sure, graft,’ grunted Garrotty. ‘You can’t tell a Noo Yorker about dat, Drag.’

‘It is more difficult in England,’ said Dragoli. ‘The information came somewhat reluctantly, and the price paid was considerable. But this afternoon I had information that Colliss can give the police some unpleasant facts. Facts that might prevent us from earning that large sum of money.’

Garrotty’s eyes glittered more viciously than ever.

‘Where’s de guy?’

Dragoli laughed, well satisfied.

‘That is what I wanted to hear. Colliss, as it happens, Jives near Winchester. On this road. I want you to take two of your men and get rid of him. Here is a photograph.’

Dragoli took a wallet from his pocket, slipped a postcard photograph from it, and handed it to Garrotty. The gangster stared at the photograph of a thick-set man whose large mouth and chin seemed out of proportion to the rest of his face.

‘I got him.’ Garrotty passed the photograph back. ‘I’ll put him out for ten, an’ more, Boss. When do I start?’

‘The police are visiting him the day after tomorrow, at ten o’clock in the morning. Tomorrow night is the best opportunity, Garrotty.’

‘O.K. I’ll fix it.’ Garrotty grinned, wiped his forehead with a dirty handkerchief, and at last switched on the radio. It was just after nine o’clock, and he scowled when he heard the end of the weather report.

‘Keep it there!’ Dragoli snapped as the gangster was about to turn the dial to a more amusing subject. Garrotty scowled but obeyed. The measured voice of the B.B.C. announcer came over the wires, and Garrotty’s hands tightened, while Dragoli let the paper fall from his grasp.

‘We regret to announce,’ said the radio dispassionately, ‘yet another death as a result of last night’s East End explosion following a battle between police and gangsters. At half past seven this evening the Hon. Richard Rollison succumbed to his wounds. The revelation of his great part in the fight against crime was a surprise to his many friends in London. Mr. Rollison was born in nineteen . . .’

Dragoli and Garrotty heard nothing more. They stared at each other, expressionlessly at first, and then Garrotty began to laugh.

The laugh echoed horribly about the room, far worse when Dragoli joined in.

The Toff, in a sitting position and with bandages round his head and his right arm strapped to his side, managed to put something of his old insouciance into his expression, something of the old devil-may-care gleam in his one visible eye.

‘Miss Farraway,’ he said with mock ferocity, ‘you’re proving a nuisance and a worry. There are supposed to be only five people concerned in the conspiracy to make me die, and you are not included.’

Anne laughed a little, softly.

‘I hope you’re not really annoyed. I can’t see you properly with those bandages on.’

‘Oh, save me!’ appealed the Toff, lifting his left arm towards the white ceiling of the small private ward in the nursing-home to which he had been shifted from the Grandley Hospital only three hours before. ‘You’ve known me about five minutes, and after your stuff with Dragoli and Garrotty you ought to be beyond lifting your voice above a whisper, and here you are trying to humour me.’ He paused. ‘Hand me a cigarette, Anne, and you’d better light it for me. Then, as you’ve worried Warrender’s life out until he let you come, I’ll tell you. Don’t say that I haven’t warned you that I’ve a tortuous mind.’

‘I don’t mind what kind of mind you’ve got, providing you’re alive,’ said Anne. She lit a cigarette, took it from her lips and pushed it between his. Rollison made a scowl with the visible half of his face.

‘If your husband-to-be could see you doing that he would probably sue me for divorce or breach-of-promise. I can –’

‘You mean
I
can manage my husband-to-be,’ said Anne, ‘and after all he can’t very well grumble at me lighting a cigarette for a corpse.’ Her eyes were gleaming, and Rollison leaned back in his pillows, puffing contentedly and studying her.

It was easy to understand now how she had managed to hold out against the pressure of Dragoli’s gang. She had more spirit than he had realized, and she had a deep understanding. He knew that he was fond of her, and he hoped that he did not for once let his heart rule his head. He had often dreaded the day when he might be bowled over. But she was young: no more than twenty-two or three. That made her complete self-possession the more remarkable.

It was the morning after the radio and newspaper announcements of his death. It had taken him several hours and a great deal of effort to get the announcement put out. No one, not even Warrender, had liked the idea of it. But Warrender had learned a great deal since the affair at the ‘Red Lion’, and he knew just how effective was the Toff’s reputation in the East End. From Harry the Pug, before he had died, Squinty, and others, he had discovered the not very palatable fact that the Toff was more feared by the gentlemen of crime than were the police.

Apparently Rollison had been unconscious all the way from the ‘Red Lion’ to the hospital. There he had gathered strength enough to ask for Warrender. The Assistant Commissioner and a doctor had been present when the Toff’s one eye had opened to its widest, and his lips had curved in a cheerful smile.

‘I’m a lot better now the crowd’s away.’

To say the least of it, the startling recovery in a few seconds had been a surprise. Before Warrender and the house-surgeon had been able to make any intelligent comment, the Toff had explained that although he had had a nasty packet he had not lost consciousness, but he had considered it an excellent idea to play possum. His idea widened out. Many people, including, in all likelihood, many of Dragoli’s people, had seen him looking badly wounded. It would be an excellent idea if he died, from two points of view.

First, he said firmly, Dragoli and Garrotty and any others concerned in the menacing association of the Black Circle would be inclined to take more chances. He said, as gently as possible, that he believed they would be more scared of the Toff than of the police, and in the light of his recent discoveries Warrender had been forced to admit that was true.

‘Right,’ the Toff had said. ‘Point one: with the Black Circle operatives in this country a little careless, when I’m in fighting order again I can manage to pull something off against them. And when I virtually rise from the dead, I can promise you that a lot of people of the Harry-the Pug kidney are going to be a damned sight more careful of me in future. You may not be inclined to believe it, but as the Toff I have a strong corrective influence on all manner of queer people.’

Warrender had admitted that was probably true, and later, reluctantly, had agreed to let it be reported that Rollison was dead.

After the announcement he had been smuggled from the hospital to a private nursing-home only a few hundred yards from his Gresham Terrace flat. Warrender, a nurse, the surgeon, Jolly, and Chief-Inspector McNab – also wounded – had been the only people concerned in the trick. Warrender covered the house-surgeon and the nurse against any possible trouble for making out false death certificates: and officially, at half past seven on the previous evening, the Toff had died.

Anne Farraway had been told by Warrender. Just why she had disbelieved it she hardly knew. Perhaps it was the fact that the Assistant Commissioner did not look as worried and grieved as he should have been.

Showing something of the dogged persistence with which she had refused to answer Garrotty’s questions, she had pestered Warrender, stating frankly that she thought it was false. Finally, and because Warrender was afraid she would start making unnecessary investigations, he had told Rollison.

Now the girl was sitting by the side of the Toff’s bed, and smiling somewhat whimsically. The man who married her, thought the Toff, was going to be a lucky devil, and God help him if he didn’t deserve her.

‘And there you are,’ he said after five minutes of brisk talking. ‘Now I’m tired, and the nurse will tell you shortly that I’m ill. My name, remember, is not Rollison, but Browning. Mr. Bernard Browning, as a matter of fact, and I hope to be up and doing in a couple of weeks.’