Lonely Road (21 page)

There was a long, awkward silence after I said that. In the distance I heard the children playing in the street outside, and the long clanking of an engine shunting in some siding near
at hand. He stood there like a naughty schoolboy, looking down and scraping the earth with the toe of his boot. “You’re to do with the police?” he inquired.

I shook my head. “Not me.”

“Billy,” said Mollie, “he isn’t with the police. He was ever so good when I was in the station, and stopped them, and got a lawyer all the way from London, and everything. Honest, he did.”

I wondered if that sentence was comprehensible to him. I doubt it, for he raised his head sullenly, with an ugly flush. “Then if he’s not from the police, what the hell does he want here? I do my business, and don’t worry nobody.”

“What is your business, anyway?” I asked.

“Lorrying,” he said defiantly. “Now you clear out o’ this. I’ve had enough of you. I’ve got my work to do.”

Sixpence said: “But, Billy.… You can’t just push us out like that.”

“Cheese it, girl,” he retorted, not unkindly. “You buzz off now, and I’ll write to you.”

I moved to the Morris Cowley and sat down upon the running-board, my elbows resting on my knees. “The police have got your lorry,” I remarked, “—the one that was burnt out. They know the number plates were false. They found the three carpet-sweepers that you left behind, two burnt up in the lorry, and one behind the hedge. They’re looking for you all over the country. They’ll have got your description by this time.” I paused reflectively. “It was a good game, but it’s finished now.”

There was another long, uneasy silence. He stood there shuffling a little with his feet, and shooting furtive glances at me as I sat there on the running-board. “I don’t see who you are,” he said at last.

I tried a long shot. “I’m the fellow who was in the car,” I said.

“Oh, chuck fooling,” he said irritably. “I know that.” He was silent for a minute, and then he said: “What I want to know is—what’s the game?”

Mollie was standing silent a little way away from us, and leaving the whole thing to me. I sat there for a minute staring out across the littered, oily yard, watching the smoke from a bonfire in a rubbish-pit curling lazily up into a light blue, summer sky. My long shot had gone home all right. “There’s no game,” I replied. “No game at all.”

I glanced up at him, standing over me. “When you left that lorry burning on the road, the police were after you like a knife. They couldn’t find you, but they got to know that Miss Gordon was your sister, and they took her down to Dartmouth to question her about you. I came in then, and got a lawyer to look after her.”

“That’s right, Billy,” put in Sixpence eagerly. “And all the way from London, too. It was ever so good of the Commander.”

I smiled a little, wondering idly where she had picked that up. Only the servants call me the Commander and the men down at the yard. She must have picked it up from Rogers or one of the maids.… Then I came back to earth.

I met his eyes. “I’m here to tell you that the police are looking for you now,” I said. “You haven’t got a chance. You can’t even get out of the country, now. If you stay here they’ll get you in a day or two. And if you run, they’ll get you in a week.”

He burst out: “But I ain’t
done
nothing!” He stared at me. “Nothing, save lorrying for them, and leaving me lorry on the road. Them things aren’t crimes—they can’t do nothing to you for that. What do they want with me?”

I motioned him to the step of the lorry opposite me. “Sit down,” I said. “There’s no sense standing up all day.” And Mollie came and sat beside me on the Cowley running-board, and I said:

“They want you because they want the other lot. They can’t find out anything about them—yet—but they’ll get you all right.”

He repeated sullenly: “I ain’t done nothing wrong.…”

Sixpence stirred irritably beside me. “Don’t act so soft,” she said. “The Commander’s all for us, not for the police or anyone. Why don’t you tell him what’s been going on?”

He looked a little foolish, laughed, and pushed back his cap to scratch his head with an oily hand. “Reckon he knows most of it,” he said, embarrassed.

“I’d like to hear what happened when we met before,” I remarked.

And cutting short his tale, it came to this. He had picked up two foreigners near Newton Abbot by an assignation, and had driven on down to Dartmouth with them in the empty lorry. They arrived on the shore road at about one o’clock in the morning and stopped a few hundred yards up the road from the corner where my car was subsequently found, towards the town. From there his companions made their signal to the sea and got the reply. His two companions then went down to the shore, and Gordon stayed by his lorry. He had no part in handling the cargo.

About half an hour later the two foreigners came back, carrying the first case; behind them came two men from the ship, carrying another one. One of these men was a young Englishman that he had seen before on these occasions; he thought that he had to do with the vessel that they used.

It was at that point that the car appeared.

They saw the headlights on the road two or three miles away; it was clear to them that the car was being driven very fast. As a precautionary measure they covered up the cases in the lorry, two of them got inside, and Gordon lifted the bonnet as if with engine trouble. But the car stopped short of them. They heard it come along at a great pace, and in the still night they heard the squeal of brakes as it drew up a quarter of a mile away. Then the headlights stopped motionless upon the road, and they stood staring at each other in consternation.

Presently two of the men detached themselves, got over into the fields, and made a wide circuit in the darkness towards
the strange car to investigate. Gordon stood waiting by his lorry; after a time the Englishman slipped off and went direct down to the beach.

That was all he saw, but he told me what had happened. “When they got close they seen a man walking from the car down to the beach,” he said. “Walking quiet like, over the grass, he was.” They went close enough to the car to see that there was nobody else there, and then they followed on the stranger’s heels down to the beach. “They took him for a coastguard of some sort They come up behind him down there somewhere, and slugged him proper,” he explained. “With a pistol, with the handle, like.”

I felt Mollie stir beside me, and I smiled. “That’s right,” I said. I paused a minute, and inquired: “What happened then?”

He laughed. “They weren’t half in a stew.” The next thing he knew was that they came up from the beach to the lorry, all three of them, together with a girl. He had not seen the girl before; he thought that she must have come upon the boat. They were carrying what seemed to be a corpse, and in the party there were bitter words passing. At the lorry they laid the body down and the girl at once began attending to it, removing and renewing a rough, bloodstained bandage on the head. The man was quite unconscious.

They stood there for some time wrangling over what was to be done, and then they went off to view the car up the road, still arguing as they went. And by the time they got there it had begun to dawn on them that there was no significance at all in what had happened at the beach; the man was quite alone, and he was very drunk. Actually, there had been no necessity to strike him down at all; if they had humoured him he would have gone away and would have forgotten the whole thing next day. But there he was, drunk and unconscious, and with a serious head injury. A well-dressed fellow, too—possibly somebody of importance.

They’d got themselves into a pretty mess.

It was the young Englishman who suggested that they
should stage a motor crash. He argued, rather forcibly, that the fellow was so drunk that he’d probably have piled his car up anyway before he reached his home, and that it was just as likely to have happened here as anywhere. Nobody had any better solution to their difficulty to suggest, and so they set about it.

Gordon drove the car a hundred yards along the road to the corner and transversely into the ditch in skidding attitude. With the assistance of a crowbar they contrived to turn it over on its side into the hedge—a big job, for it was a heavy car. They went round it with the crowbar then, breaking the glass and damaging the wings, but it was the young Englishman who thought of kicking through the roof above the driver’s seat. They did the best they could. Taking it all round, I think they must have made a rotten job of it; if any serious inquiry had been made it must have been obvious at once that that was no real crash. But no inquiry of that sort was necessary, I suppose. The fellow’s habits were well known.

And finally they brought along the body and laid it in the car. The man was still breathing heavily, and the bleeding from the scalp had stopped. The girl insisted that the position should be such that the head was raised a little, and they had some difficulty over this.

So they finished the unloading of the boat and came away. The man was still in a deep coma when they left, and it was close on dawn. They found out two days later that he had been found a couple of hours afterwards; he was in a nursing home and likely to get over it. It seemed a very satisfactory solution to what might have been a nasty incident.

Gordon laughed, a little ruefully. “They wasn’t half pleased when they heard that,” he said. “Well out of it, they thought they was.…”

I nodded slowly. “Would you recognise the man again?”

There was a little silence in the yard. He hesitated, and then said: “I would, sir. It was you.”

“Yes,” I said absently, “I suppose it was.” I was thinking
of the further links I wanted to get out of him and for the moment I was silent, till I said:

“How did that lorry come to go on fire?”

He was annoyed. “Silliest thing you ever saw,” he said. “I never seen such!” He glanced at me, irrepressible. “But coo! she didn’t half flare up! Filling up, it was. I’d got the filler off the tank and pouring in from the can, and another can unstoppered beside me. An’ then one of them went to light a fag.” He laughed. “She went off with such a puff I fell backwards off the running-board into the road, an’ dropped the can and petrol over everything. You never seen such a mess! They fellows was out of the back like a knife and there she was. We just couldn’t do anything with her.”

I wrinkled my brows. “You had a load on board?” I asked. “I suppose it happened after you’d left the boat?”

“Oh, aye,” he said. “We got the most of it off her before it got too bad—all the cartridges and that, but some of the stuff we had to leave. I had the little Morris with me that trip”—he indicated the car beside us—“and we piled it all into her till she was down on her springs. Then she was full, an’ still a case or two left, an’ we put them down behind the hedge and went on in the Morris. But I reckon they must have been found, because they was gone next day. Still, I don’t see what else we could have done.…”

I asked him where the stuff was going to, and to my surprise he told me readily. He took it to Trepwll in Breconshire, about thirty miles north of Cardiff. That was a run of about a hundred and sixty miles, which usually took ten hours or so. His garage in Gloucester was handy for this run, and he eked out the business of these journeys with a certain amount of local work of various descriptions.

He told me that in all he had made five trips. I had blundered into the second landing, and his lorry had been burnt upon the last. The lorry that he had now was another one, which he had purchased second-hand as a replacement. He was overhauling it for the next journey.

“When is that?” I asked.

He did not know. It would be in about a week’s time; he only got two days’ notice of each trip. They paid him forty pounds a trip—not bad, he said, for twenty-four hours’ work. For this he promised secrecy.

He deposited his loads at a farm about two miles from Trepwll. Sometimes he had passengers upon these journeys and these were mostly foreigners; once he had gone alone. He did not know the names of any of the men that he had met, and he had resolutely kept his eyes shut upon the nature of the business. He was content to obey orders while things went well; in the event of any trouble he would look after himself, and get out of it as best he could. He got his orders from a man that he knew as Mr. Palmer, who came to him personally before each trip.

That was the substance of the tale he had to tell. I liked the man, I must say; if he was a rogue he was a cheerful one. To him the whole affair had been a matter of business and no more; he had made good money, and he wasn’t one to worry about ethics. He seemed to have no knowledge of the purpose of the guns, or interest. In fact, he told me that he had not known the nature of his cargoes till the lorry was burnt out, but it made no difference when he did discover it. His business was lorrying.

“Your next trip’s in about a week’s time, then?” I asked.

“That’s right, sir,” he replied. He sat there musing for a minute. “I don’t know as I’ll go on that one now. I don’t want to get mixed up with no police.…”

Mollie said: “Oh, Billy, you might have thought of that before!”

He looked up at her, and grinned, a little sheepishly. “Strewth,” he said, “I never thought of it like that.”

It seemed to me that there was information here that Fedden and his policemen ought to have, and that I could not allow this thing to be suppressed. I was equally certain that Jenkinson should be with this man when he made his statement to the police. As far as I could see it, the extent of his wrongdoing would be well covered by a ten-bob fine; they might
not take that view of things at Scotland Yard. Jenkinson must be there. I sat and thought about it for a minute, till at last I said:

“The police will be here any day now—you’ll have to be prepared for that. You’ll have to tell them all that you’ve told me.”

He shifted uneasily. “That’s no way to go on. I got good money to keep my mouth shut.” And then he burst out again: “I ain’t
done
nothing!”

It was Mollie who replied to that. “Oh, don’t keep on like that,” she said impatiently. “You been smuggling guns into the country, that’s what you been doing, like the Commander says. It’s no good you kidding yourself that way.”