Fear to Tread (27 page)

The noise seemed to die in the fog.

Carefully he pushed his hand in and undid the catch.

“Curse the fog,” said Hazlerigg mildly.

“That’s all the paint factories, and all the stores,” said Duffy. “They seem to be O.K. Unless it’s a lot further from St. Pancras than we think.”

‘”Over a sort of paint factory near St. Pancras.’” repeated Hazlerigg.

He stared out of the window at the drifting curtain. It was yellowing now, as the grime of London settled upon it.

Suddenly Duffy made the noise of one who has had an inspiration and said: “Quigleys.”

“What’s that?”

“You couldn’t really call it paint. They make some paint. Chiefly it’s boat varnish and printers’ ink.”

“Where is it?”

Duffy pointed down at the map on the table.

“That’s in St. Pancras all right,” said Hazlerigg. “Backing on to the canal.”

“What made me think of it,” said Duffy, “was that I remembered that Quigleys never used more than the ground floor. It was an old building they took over. Too big for them, you see. In my day, the top storey was used for hides.”

“Could be what we want,” said Hazlerigg.

He got on to the DDI.

“I’ll send a man just as soon as I’ve got one,” said that harassed official. “They’re all out in the fog now.”

Hazlerigg rang off and tried operations.

“I’ll chance sending a car straight there,” he said to Duffy. “I’ve got a feeling about this.”

The junior inspector in charge of the operations room reported back a minute later.

“I’ve given the order,” he said, “It may take a little time to carry out. I’m told there’s a sort of private hell going on at King’s Cross.”

The room Sergeant Donovan was in was full of varnish. The darkness was full of it, a sweet, sickly resinous smell. Without using his torch, he picked his way to the door and found it unlocked.

From the hallway, a flight of shallow wooden stairs ran up, with one turn, to the first-storey landing. Here there was another door, which was locked. There was a white card tacked on to it and there was some sort of printing, but the words were too grimy to be read easily.

The door was old and ill-fitting and the lock was a catch lock. He produced from his top pocket a flattened cone of stiff talc and inserted the small end between the jamb and the door edge. A gentle pressure and he felt the tongue of the lock give way. The door opened inwards.

There was a further short passage with partitioned rooms on either side, and beyond that a very large storeroom.

This was full of stuff. Most of it was in crates and cartons but some was spilled out on to benches and tables. Sergeant Donovan, picking his way among the jumble, used his torch more freely. A wooden box with the label of a well-known whisky distillery caught his eye and he bent to inspect it.

As he did so he heard the sounds which told him he was not alone.

Someone was coming up the stairs; worse than that, there were people inside the room already, near the door.

There was very little time to do anything. He jumped towards the ladder which his torch had shown him at that end of the room and went up it. It was a short ladder, four or five steps, leading up to a sort of loading-platform, with crates on it. He had no hope of hiding. He just wanted to get his back to something solid.

The platform ended in double doors, which were shut and barred. He turned with a grunt of satisfaction. He could hear men below him moving in the darkness.

Then all the lights went on.

Some of the fog had got into the room and hung in shreds round the overhead lamps, but there was plenty of fight for Sergeant Donovan to see his pursuers. There were five of them, all looking up at him with the bleak intent look of a pack who have had a long run but are close to a kill.

He knew every one of them.

There was Guardsman, with his scrubbed cheeks, his immature nose and knowing eyes. Beside him, like a banner, the red mop of big Whittaker, and Sailor Jackson with his black hair, white face and dead eyes. Behind them stood the coffee-coloured boy from Jamaica. His face alone had a sort of excitement in it, out of keeping with the solemnity of the others. The ex-boxer Prince was the fifth. He had just come through the door. As the lights came on, he shut it behind him and came forward, blinking his single, puffy eye in the sudden glare.

As they closed on the platform, Sergeant Donovan, instead of retreating, came forward to meet them. He put his foot out and kicked the ladder away. It fell on to the floor with a noise which emphasised the silence.

Without a word Jackson stooped to pick the ladder up.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Sergeant Donovan.

He had taken his right hand out of his pocket and was holding something lightly and lovingly in it.

All movement in the room ceased.

“It’s powerful stuff,” said Sergeant Donovan. “Makes the old Mills grenade look like a penny cracker. Incendiary too, as well as explosive. And whilst we’re talking about fires, I hope you’ve none of you forgotten what you’re standing on top of. Did you ever watch varnish burn? All right, Whittaker, I can see you’ve got a gun. What good do you think it’s going to do you? The pin’s out. Take a look. No deception. It’s a short fuse, too. I’ve only got to open my fingers and there’ll be just three seconds between you and the bonfire.”

He spoke slowly, relishing his words.

“You weren’t thinking of going, were you, Prince?”

Four heads jerked round. Prince had taken a few furtive steps back towards the door.

“I could toss this beauty right into your lap from here. Like to see if you can catch it? I’ve got another with me in case you miss. Three seconds should be plenty. That’s right. Back you come. All nice and cosy.”

“Look here,” said Whittaker. He seemed to be the only one who had a voice. “We don’t want any trouble. You clear out and we’ll let you go. Is that right?” He looked quickly at the others. There was a murmur of agreement from everyone except Jackson whose hungry eyes had never left the man on the platform.

“May I take that as a firm offer?” said Sergeant Donovan, coming a further step forward, to the very edge of the platform. “How very generous. Perhaps you’d care to put it in writing? Or get down on your knees and sing it. You big yellow gasbags. Take a look at yourselves. You’re frightened. I can see the guts running out of you like rain. Perhaps you’re thinking you can talk yourselves out of this one. Or buy yourselves out. I haven’t heard any mention of money yet. Nothing to say, Guardsman? You’re not on parade now. What about you, you little brown bastard? You’re not dealing with a woman this time. Do you understand enough English for that? You’ve come to the wrong party. There’s no woman here to be tied up, and gagged, and suffocated.”

The strong light shone down, picking out the lines on Sergeant Donovan’s scarred face.

“Did you think,” he said at last, almost conversationally, “that I was really going to let any of you go?”

It was not in Sammy’s nature to sit still for long. Anyway the cold forced him to move.

He had heard Mr. Holloman return some time before and all thought of shouting for help had drained out of him. He had no desire to lie in that cold damp place, his limbs twisted grotesquely behind him, hardening gradually into a knot that none could untie.

There had been a cripple of that sort, he recalled, who had lived near them in Ratcliff Lane and who had propelled himself round on a trolley, and Sammy remembered now with shame the occasion, one Guy Fawkes night, when he had lit a Chinese super- cracker behind him to find out how fast he could be made to move.

One blessing, the electric light worked. He was not in darkness.

He started by examining all the jars on the shelves, taking each one down in turn, opening it and sniffing the contents. What was in his mind was that he had once seen a film about a man who had been locked up in a storeroom by an enemy agent and who had discovered some sticks of gelignite and had succeeded in blowing the door down.

He re-examined the jars but none of them (apart possibly from the essence of cascara) looked even remotely explosive.

It was whilst he was up at the far end of the room that he heard the voices.

They were odd voices; so distant, so clear, so disembodied, that they might have been sounding inside his own head.

“Bleak,” said the first voice. “Bleak is the word I should use. It’s not the sort of climate that suits everyone. Take my sister. The one who went to live at Westcliffe. She could never stand it. That girl was born with asthma.”

The second voice was deeper. Possibly it was a man’s voice, if disembodied spirits differentiated between man and woman. “When he goes away,” said the second voice, “do you think he makes any arrangements? He’s the only one who’s allowed to sign for the petty cash. You’d imagine he’d sign a cheque before he went. What do you expect me to do, Mr. Stanley, I said, raise a loan from the bank every time I want to go to the lavatory.”

Sammy was entranced. There were lesser voices, too; voices which said things like: “There now,” and “Well, fancy that, so did mine” but the two leading voices over-rode them.

Sammy took another look at the end wall.

There was no window but, as he saw now, there were two ventilators, one in each corner. It was undeniably through these holes that the voices were coming into the room. More, when Sammy stood on a stool and applied his ear to the vents, it appeared that the man’s voice was coming through one and the woman’s voice through the other. It was because he had been standing in the middle that he had picked them both up.

Wireless? Neither of them sounded like any programme he had ever listened to. Then was he hearing, by some trick of sound, people talking in the houses on either side?

Sammy set himself to consider the layout of No. 5 Strudwick Road.

The cupboard he was in occupied the space between the dining-room and the kitchen. The house was semi-detached – its other half-section, No. 7, lying beyond the dining-room. Therefore, while the voice from the right-hand ventilator could, by a fluke of construction be coming from No. 7, by-passing the dining-room, as regards the left hand any such explanation was impossible. There was the width of a garden between him and No. 3.

There was no back garden in the proper sense of the word, it was all front and side. In other words, thought Sammy, his mind suddenly springing to attention, the wall he was listening at formed part of the outer wall of the house. Take it away and you would step straight out on to the pavement of Mutlow Terrace. Even so the problem remained.

For why, in heaven’s name, thought Sammy, should two groups of people be standing, on a night like this, some three yards apart from each other, discussing general topics with the idle persistence of people who had a night to kill.

As he put the question the whole glorious answer presented itself.

There was only one sort of person who would stand through the night in any weather (the worse the weather the more persistently they would stand). And it was on Friday evening in winter and in a road like Mutlow Terrace that they would be likely to be found.

Sammy could see it as clearly as if the wall had suddenly rolled up, like the curtain at a theatre. The whole road would be full of the supporters of the Elephants Football Club, waiting for the morrow and Manchester United.

As the truth dawned on him, Sammy’s heart began to thump. Thousands of potential allies, separated from him by less than twelve inches of brickwork.

He applied his ear to the right-hand vent again. “Dead ignorant,” said the relentless voice. “The doctor told him. You can take game but you can’t take fish. You know what he said? I’ll have crab. Crab’s game, isn’t it?”

Sammy even picked out the laugh which followed. There was balm in the sound.

He sat down and thought furiously.

The obvious thing to do was to shout or whistle or poke something through the hole. Anything to attract the attention of the crowd. Perhaps he might write out a message on a spill of paper and push it through the hole. There was no lack of paper. The shelves were lined with it. He had no pen or pencil but there must be something in one of the jars he could dip his finger into for ink. Or he could write in his own blood.

But even as he thought of them, Sammy could see only too clearly the weakness of all these ideas. He knew what would happen.

If he succeeded in attracting someone’s attention, and if that someone was sufficiently interested to do anything about it, he would come round to the door and ask Mr. Holloman what it was all about. And Mr. Holloman, who was a horribly plausible man, would say: “Oh, that’s my little boy. I’ll see he doesn’t bother you any more. So sorry you’ve been troubled.” And ten to one the man would be satisfied and would go away, and then Mr. Holloman would come along and—Sammy’s arms and legs already ached in anticipation.

Dare he risk it?

On the other hand, dare he not risk it? Mr. Holloman had already tried to kill him once, and, if he could safely do so, would have as little compunction about trying again as he would about cracking the top off a soft-boiled egg.

And then, quite suddenly, the plan was there, fully formed.

With fingers that trembled in spite of himself, Sammy pulled off one of the pieces of stiff white paper which lined the shelves and rolled it into a thin tube. Then he cast his eye round for the jar he wanted.

Mr. Jeffery was a keen supporter of the Elephants, and, like all their keenest supporters, was a fanatic. He took a perverse pride in the sufferings he endured. For important matches he could cheerfully stand for eighteen hours in any weather. The worse the weather, the greater the attraction (did they not still talk among themselves of that night of snow in 1947, when five women had collapsed and a family party of four had entirely lost their voices and been unable to do anything but wave their arms when the Elephants came through that celebrated replay into the final?)

A bit of fog was nothing. The braziers were alight, and voluntary helpers with cans of tea were passing up and down the queue and Mr. Jeffery, taking a deep breath, had just said: “We must be clear in our definition of free-will,” when he felt it. It was no more than a breath of gritty air on the back of his neck.