The Tiger In the Smoke (3 page)

He had a studious mind and thought

Deeply about himself

And food and sex.

He was also a liar.

He wasn't proud:

He'd shake hands very gravely

With almost anybody not in uniform …

I'd like to talk to him again;

Now I'm a soldier we've a lot in common.'

She was silent and Levett did not move. It was as though the fog had brought coldly a third person into the cab. At length, since something had to be said, he made the effort.

‘A queer chap,' he murmured briefly.

‘I don't think so.' It was evident that she was trying to remember. ‘He was being a soldier then, you see. He was doing that all the time I knew him.'

‘Oh God, yes!' He recognized the haunt at last from his own days in that strange hinterland of war which was receding faster and faster with every day of the fleeting years. ‘Oh God, yes! Poor little chap. Poor silly little chap.'

Meg bowed her head. She never nodded, he noticed suddenly. All her movements were sweeping and gracious, like an Edwardian woman's, only less studied.

‘I never saw him out of war,' she said, in much the same way as she might have said ‘I never saw him sober'. ‘I didn't know him, I suppose. I mean, I don't really know him at all.'

The last word faded and ceased uncertainly. The taxi started again and, seizing an opportunity, swung sharply into the station approach.

‘Are you coming with me, Geoff?'

‘No.' The disclaimer was altogether too violent, and he hastened to soften it. ‘I don't think so, do you? I'll telephone you about five. You'll be all right with Campion and his bloodhound, won't you? I think you'll be happier without me. Won't you?'

The final question was genuine. The flicker of hope appeared in it unbidden. She heard and recognized it but hesitated too long.

‘I just don't know.'

‘You go along.' He kissed her lightly and had the door open just before the taxi stopped. As he helped her out she clung to his sleeve. The crowd on the pavement was large and hurried as usual and they were crushed together by it. Once again he saw her as he had been seeing her at intervals all the afternoon, afresh, as if for the first time. Her voice, reaching him through the bustle, sounded nervous and uncertain. The thing she had to tell him was altogether too difficult.

‘I haven't really
told
you, Geoff. I'm so muddled. I'm so
sorry
, darling.'

‘Shut up,' he said softly and thrust her gently away.

The crush snatched her and bore her from him into the dark archway of the entrance, which was festooned like a very old theatre proscenium with swathes of fog. She turned to raise a small gloved hand to him, but a porter with a barrow and a woman with a child frustrated her, and she was swept on out of his sight as he stood watching, still with the cab door open.

Meanwhile, Mr Albert Campion and Divisional Detective Chief Inspector Charles Luke, who was Father Superior of the second most tough police division in metropolitan London and proud of it, stood in the covered yard of the southern end of the terminus and waited. Apart from bleaching him, the years had treated Mr Campion kindly. He was still the slight, elegantly unobtrusive figure exactly six feet tall, misleadingly vacant of face and gentle of manner, which he had been in the nineteen-twenties. The easiest of men to overlook or underestimate, he stood quietly at his point of vantage behind the rows of buffers and surveyed the crowd with casual good temper.

His companion was a very different kettle of fish. Charlie Luke in his spiv civilians looked at best like a heavy-weight champion in training. His dark face, with its narrow diamond-shaped eyes and strong sophisticated nose, shone in the murky light with a radiance of its own. His soft black hat was pushed on to the back of his close-cropped curls and his long hands were deep in his trouser pockets, so that the skirts of his overcoat bunched out behind him in a fantail.

Members of that section of the district who had most cause to be interested in him were apt to say that ‘Give him his due, at least you couldn't miss him. He stuck out like a lighthouse.' He was some inches taller than his companion, but his thick-set build made him seem shorter. As usual he conveyed intense but suppressed excitement and rigidly controlled physical strength, and his bright glance travelled everywhere.

‘It may be just some silly game, a woman playing the goat,' he remarked, idly sketching in a pair of horns with his toe on the pavement. ‘But I don't think so. It smells like the old “blacking” to me. All the same, an open mind, that's what we want. You never know. Weddings and so on are funny times.'

‘There's a man involved, at any rate,' objected Mr Campion mildly. ‘How many photographs have you got of him in all – five?'

‘Two taken in Oxford Street, one at Marble Arch, one in the Strand – that's the one which shows the movie advertisement which dates it as last week – and then the one with the message on the back. That's right, five.' He buttoned his coat and stamped his feet. ‘It's cold,' he said. ‘I hope she's not late. I hope she's beautiful too. She's got to have something if she can't even recognize her old man for sure.'

Campion looked dubious. ‘Could you guarantee to recognize a man you hadn't seen for five years from one of those snapshots?'

‘Perhaps not.' Luke put his head under an imaginary backcloth, at least he ducked slightly, and sketched in a piece of drapery with waving hands. ‘Those old photographers – mugfakers we call 'em – in the street don't use very new cameras or very good film. I'm allowing for that. But I should have thought a woman would know her own husband if she saw the sole of his boot through a grating or the top of his hat from a bus.'

Mr Campion regarded him with interest. It was the first trace of sentimentality he had ever observed in the D.D.C.I. and he might have said so, but Luke was still talking.

‘If it's blackmail, and it probably is, it's a very rum lark,' he was saying. ‘I don't see how or when the bloke expects to collect anything out of it, do you?' His eyes were snapping in the smoking mist. ‘The ordinary procedure is “Give me fifty quid or you'll be up for bigamy”. Well, she's not married again yet, is she? Crooks can be peculiarly wanting in the top storey but I've never heard of one who'd make a blob like that. If it had been her wedding which had been announced and not her engagement it might have made sense. Even so, what's the point of sending her one picture after another and giving us all this time to get on the job?'

Mr Campion nodded. ‘How are you getting on with the street photographers?'

The other man shrugged his shoulders. ‘I'd rather ask those sparrows,' he said seriously, nodding towards a cluster of the little mice-like birds twittering over some garbage in the gutter. ‘Same result and less halitosis. They all take several hundred snaps a day. They all remember photographing someone exactly like him, only it wasn't quite he. They all lost money on the deal. My boys are still working on it, but it's a waste of time and public money. The pics themselves are covered with fingerprints. All five show the same bleary, smeary figure in the street. Nothing to help at all. This last one with the train time on the back is the craziest of all, to my mind,' he added earnestly. ‘Either he
wants
to get the police on the job or else he expects the young woman to be a darned sight more windy than she appears to be. You say she's not lying. I haven't seen her; I wouldn't know. I'm just taking your word for it. That's why I'm here getting so perishing cold.'

His piledriver personality forced home the suggestion but he spoke without offence. If one of the great West Country locomotives which lay panting and steaming on the ralls ahead of them had advanced the same argument, it could hardly have been more powerful or impersonal.

‘No, she's not lying,' said Campion. ‘Hasn't it occurred to you that Elginbrodde may be alive?'

‘The War Office says “No, go away”.'

‘I know. But they've been wrong before.'

‘If it's Elginbrodde himself, he's “psychological”.' The D.D.C.I. let his eyes cross horribly and for an instant his tongue appeared, loose and lolling. ‘I hate psychiatry.' His glance darted off again, scanning the hurrying travellers. Almost at once a soft but unmistakable whistle escaped him. ‘This is it.' His tone ran up in triumph. ‘This is our young lady, I'll bet a pound. See that where-are-you-I-hope-or-don't-I look? Am I right? What a smasher!'

Campion glanced up and started forward. ‘Clever of you. That is Mrs Elginbrodde.'

Meg saw them bearing down upon her. In her hypersensitive mood they appeared monstrous.

There was Campion, the amateur, a man who never used his real name and title. In appearance a middle-aged Englishman typical of his background and period. She saw him as kindly, unemotional, intelligent, and resourceful, all inbred virtues ensuring that his reactions would be as hidebound as a good gun-dog's. She knew his kind so well that she was prepared to find almost any hidden peculiarity in him. It was typical of his variety that he should perhaps be very brave, or very erudite, or possibly merely able to judge Chinese prints or grow gardenias.

On the other hand, the man behind him was something new to her, and at first glance she found him frankly shocking. Hitherto she had thought very little about policemen, classing them vaguely as necessities which were on the whole beneficial, like banks or the parliamentary system. But here, as she could see, was a very male person of considerable if not particularly pleasant interest.

Luke came bouncing forward with the unaffected acquisitiveness of a child espying a beautiful cuddly pet. His eyes were flickering and his live, shrewd face expressed boundless tolerance.

The interview was so clearly just about to get off on the wrong foot that they all recognized the fact in time. Campion performed the introduction with iron under his velvet words, and Charlie Luke shut off his magnetism regretfully, like a man switching off a light. He watched the girl cautiously, noting her beauty but discounting it, and when he replaced his hat he put it on straight. Yet there had been no chill in her greeting; she was simply obviously worried, a woman so torn by her loves and loyalties that her genuineness was unquestionable.

‘I was so sorry I couldn't find you any snapshots for comparison,' she said earnestly. ‘My husband didn't live in England before the war, so none of his things were here. We didn't have very long together and somehow we didn't seem to run to snapshots.'

Luke nodded. He recognized her mood. That preoccupation with the problem so acute that it excluded even the ordinary social preliminaries was familiar to him. He had seen worried people before.

‘I understand that, Miss – I mean Mrs Elginhrodde. He was in France, wasn't he, brought up by a grandmother? And he wasn't very old when he died – twenty-five, I think?'

‘Yes. He'd be thirty now.' She looked round as she spoke, nervously and yet not entirely unhopefully. The movement was quite subconscious and it struck both men as pathetic. It was as though the war years had peeped out at them suddenly and the coloured clothes all round them in the fog had been washed over briefly with khaki. To add to the illusion, the dreary thumping of a street band away out in Crumb Street behind them reached them faintly through the station noises. It was only the ghost of a tune, not recognizable yet evocative and faintly alarming, like a half-remembered threat. Luke hunched his wide shoulders.

‘The studio portrait and the passport didn't really tell us much, you know,' he said, sketching in a very large square followed by a very small one with his restless long-boned hands. ‘I think I ought to tell you that as far as our experts can tell from measurement of the features, as far as they can
tell
, it's not the same man.' He was watching her, trying to appraise her reaction. The face she turned to him was both disappointed and relieved. Hope died in it, but also hope appeared. She was saddened and yet made happy. There was shame there and bewilderment. She might have been going to cry. He began to be very sorry for her.

‘I did find this last night,' she said, turning to Campion. ‘I'm afraid the whole thing is very dark, but it's a snap a child took of a dog we had, and that's Martin in the background. I don't know if it's any use at all, yet I think anyone who knew him would recognize it.'

She brought a little faded square from the depths of her big handbag and handed it to him. The D.D.C.I. looked over his shoulder. It was the yellowing print of an overexposed snap of a plump, negroid-looking dog wallowing on a London lawn, and far in the background, laughing, with hands in pockets and head thrust forward, was a boy wearing a braggadocio moustache. There was nothing definitely characteristic there except perhaps his spirit, and yet the picture shook them both, and they stood looking at it for a long time. At length Luke tapped his coat pocket.

‘I've got one of the street pictures here but this isn't the time to get it out,' he murmured, and once again his glance roved round the vast station. He was puzzled and making no secret of it. ‘Yes, I see why you got the wind-up.'

His shrewdness and friendliness took any offence out of the observation. ‘There is a look there. I see what you mean. Yes. Tell me, Mrs Elginbrodde, did your husband have any young brothers or cousins?'

‘No, none I ever heard of.' The suggestion was a new idea to her and in the circumstances hardly attractive.

‘Now look here – ' Luke became a conspirator and his over-padded shoulders seemed to spread even wider to screen her, ‘ – the only thing you've got to do is to keep your head. It all depends on you. It's a million to one that this will turn out to be the usual blackmail by a customer with a record as long as a train. He's behaving altogether too cautiously so far, and that may mean that he's not sure of his ground. He may just want to look at you, or he may risk talking to you. All you've got to do is to let him. Leave the rest to me, see?'