Policeman's Progress (16 page)

With this Jimmy had to be satisfied and they parted until the late evening.

Bolam left the house in his usual sullen rage at about eight thirty, after stonily refusing to be drawn by taunts about yet another night spent in club-crawling.

His daughter had gone upstairs soon after tea and kept out of the way until she heard the front door slam and the Morris reverse noisily from the drive. Then she came down and joined her mother in a cup of tea in the kitchen.

‘I'll bet he's gone there again tonight – he knows I always go to see Freddie on a Saturday,' she said almost tearfully.

Vera Bolam felt torn between sympathy for her daughter and an almost reflex need to make excuses for Alec as soon as he was out of earshot.

‘I know, pet, but he
is
mixed up with that murder … I gather that this man Stott is suspected of killing the Armstrong fellow.'

Betty stared stubbornly into her cup. ‘I don't care!' she murmured. ‘I only know that I want to see Freddie as usual.'

Vera fiddled with her spoon. She felt awkward – her previous backing of Betty's infatuation was mainly a weapon to use against Alec. But now things had gone a bit too far. This was no ordinary ‘boy meets girl' affair – Betty's attitude was almost pathological; she ate, slept and lived Freddie. Three times a week, the girl went to the club, just to look at him and sit at a table for a few minutes of his company.

‘Why do you always have to go on your own, Betty?' she began gently. ‘After all, it's almost entirely a man's club – gambling and striptease and that … couldn't you at least go with a friend from the office?'

Betty looked up suspiciously.
Now she's changing her tune, is she
, the girl thought. ‘Did you ever go courting and take a girlfriend along, Mum?' she asked coldly and went back to staring glassily into her teacup.

Vera Bolam hardened her voice. ‘Well, I don't know that it's all right, Betty. Not now that there's been all this trouble at the club. It's not safe for you to go there, really, Betty. Your father flatly forbade you to go; he said there was sure to be more trouble in the next day or two.'

Betty raised her head again and snapped at her mother. ‘That's right – you start siding with him, now that it suits you! I'm mad about Freddie, I tell you … I don't care if all the gangsters in the world come there – I'm going to see him!' She jumped up and grabbed her handbag from the table. ‘I'm over twenty-one now, I can do what I like. If you try to stop me, well … I'll leave home. I'm fed up here, anyway, with you and Dad always fighting.'

With this parting jibe, she ran sobbing from the room. Her feet pounded on the stairs and there was the slamming of a bedroom door.

Vera started after her, then stopped and walked slowly back to the kitchen. She felt alone, deserted.

This had been on the boil for a long time, she told herself.
Alec was right, blast him
. This Freddie, whom she had seen only once at the party, was a worthless lout, but after defending him for so long against her husband, she was having a job to climb down.

She sat down at the table and cried – not from real misery but from frustration at having a happy, pleasant life handed to her on a plate, yet knowing full well that she would not enjoy taking it.

A few minutes later, Betty came back down the stairs and the front door slammed with almost prophetic finality.

The young detective constable planted in the Rising Sun had not long to wait for trouble to start. He settled himself at the bar and kept a sharp lookout from behind a glass of McEwen's' Export Ale. Then he began chatting up the barmaid, Freda, while keeping his eyes skinned for any characters who might be infiltrating on behalf of Papagos and Casella.

There were three or four tough-looking men distributed around the room at the moment and he felt uneasy about them until Freda put him wise.

‘Like our Defence Corps, love?' she chirped, hanging her prominent and over-exposed bust across the bar. He raised his eyebrows enquiringly and she jerked a thumb in the direction of the big men. ‘Some of Joe Blunt's pals – recruited as Jackie's bodyguard until this protection scare is over. Glad they're there, really – I had half a mind to jack it in when that bloody bomb came in … but we gotta stick by old Jackie in a bad patch like this … though some I could name don't seem to care.'

She sniffed and looked pointedly across to where Laura Levine sat at a table with Thor Hansen.

The detective took the opportunity to pick up some local gossip. ‘She's Jackie's girlfriend, isn't she?'

‘Was, you mean … if “girlfriend” is the right word. Every day of thirty, she is … and
girlfriend
means jumping around a bed with him to get top of the bill at a few clubs. The other feller's her latest heart-throb.' She nodded across at the Dane. ‘They been playing it real quiet until now. That damn fool Jackie can't see further than his nose, but this last day or two, they been canoodling as bold as brass. If he catches them at it, there'll be some fur flying – as jealous as hell over her, is Jackie!'

The constable filed away this bit of knowledge for Bolam, but his main interest was the gang war and about twenty minutes later, things began to happen.

On that Saturday night, in spite of the previous disturbances earlier in the week, there was an almost full house. Jackie and his manager had noticed this an hour before with some gratification, putting it at least partly down to curiosity, and the lack of any trouble on the previous night.

Jackie was upstairs at the moment, keeping an eye on the gaming tables, which were also attracting a record house.

‘Have to have a bomb-throwing every week, eh, Thor!' he said almost gaily to Hansen.

The fiasco of the police investigation into Geordie's death had restored his spirits, especially as he had had a favourable forecast from the insurers of the
Mississippi
.

Downstairs, the stripper was just starting her routine. Encouraged by the big audience, she was sweating herself into even more enthusiastic contortions than usual, as she swayed and squirmed amongst the tables nearest the stage.

The crowd was thick around her, most of the men standing up for a better view. The lights were out except for the brilliant spot that was focused on the dancer and the detective constable lost sight of the men who were supposed to be Jackie's private army.

The band was thumping out the rhythmic beat with which the girl's generous hips moved synchronously, punctuated by whistles and lewd remarks from the front row.

Sudden the erotic atmosphere was ruined by a piercing shriek. The stripper stopped dead and yelled the most obscene series of words the policeman had ever heard.

The band croaked to a wheezing halt as the girl swung a tremendous slap against the face of a man sitting at the edge of the dance floor.

In the sudden silence, she swore again. ‘You lousy swine, I'll teach you to stub your fags out on my backside!' and she hit him again, then ran back to the platform and vanished through a door at the side.

The man she had slapped guffawed and threw a beer bottle after her. It went wide of the door and smashed against the wall above Freddie's head. He screamed with fright and there was an echoed scream from Betty Bolam, sitting alone in a corner.

The man with the roving cigarette whistled shrilly and threw another bottle, which crashed through the skin of the band's big drum, making a tearing boom.

Instantly, all hell was let loose.

The lights were still down and Thor Hansen, who was standing near the switches, made no move to snap them on.

Four or five men, who had been sitting quietly in various parts of the room, suddenly upturned their tables, began yelling and screaming and followed their leader in throwing empty bottles at the stage and lashing out indiscriminately at their neighbours in the gloom.

The terrified musicians ducked and staggered away, the organist getting a cut head in the process.

The audience degenerated into a yelling, screaming, swearing mass and Jackie's paid protectors were paralyzed by the darkness and the lack of anyone to fight.

Within seconds, there was complete pandemonium. The young detective had had his orders – no joining in, just get out and raise the alarm. Sprinting to the doors he headed off the first would-be escapers and clattered down the stairs. A few yards down the road, at the top of the Cloth Market, stood a blue Austin, with no outward signs of a police car about it. As he ran up to it, Jimmy Grainger was already getting out.

‘It's started, bottle-chucking and all – hell of a shemozzle!'

Bolam grabbed the radio handset. ‘Q-Four to L-K … hello, L-K, expected disturbance at Rising Sun Club. Please send the cars as arranged. Q-Four out.'

He dropped the microphone and ran with the other officers towards the bright neon sign at the entrance to the club. Already a thin stream of dishevelled customers was straggling out, and the policemen forced their way upstairs and entered the chaos of the big room. Jackie Stott was just in front of them, having thundered down from the casino above.

‘Somebody put the bloody lights on!' he yelled.

Ahead of him was the even larger figure of Joe Blunt, flailing his way through the crowd with complete disregard for friend or foe.

Herbert Lumley was standing helplessly near his cubby hole as customers besieged him for their clothes. He wanted to join in, but the frightened and angry patrons were determined to get their coats and clear off.

‘Where are the switches, Herbert?' snapped Bolam, before plunging into the melee.

‘On the left-hand wall, halfway to the stage.'

He hesitated.

‘Mr Hansen was sitting near them. I don't know why he hasn't put them on. I hope he isn't hurt.'

Alec thrust forward against the stream of people, but before he got to the switches, the lights suddenly went up. Jackie Stott had reached them first and was now looking around wildly for someone to punch. But there was now no sign of anyone actually fighting or causing damage – the only scrap going on was between two of Jackie's own thugs who had failed to recognize each other in the darkness.

‘Where are they, Joe?' yelled Jackie. ‘Who done it? I'll murder 'em.'

In the heat of the moment, he forgot that his words were rather too topical to shout in the presence of policemen.

Four uniformed officers appeared at the top of the stairs and began holding back those who were trying to leave but the confusion took a long time to die down, many customers still thinking they were in mortal danger of being knifed by the Mafia.

Jimmy Grainger, who knew that Betty Bolam was supposed to be in the Rising Sun that night, forced his way towards the band platform, but failed to see any sign of her.

He did find Freddie, however. Pale and trembling, the guitarist was carrying a black handbag and trying to get back to the stage.

‘Where's Betty Bolam, Freddie?' snapped Jimmy.

‘I dunno, she just went out.'

‘You've got her bag.'

‘She left it – I'm keeping it for her.'

Jimmy was about to call him a liar, when Bolam's bull-like voice bellowed from across the room for him. Torn between getting the truth out of Freddie and the urgency in his boss's voice, Jimmy hesitated, then rammed his way back towards the chief inspector.

‘Get all the exits closed and organize the uniformed men into checking all the customers and their membership cards,' he snapped, ‘We've lost a canny few already, but some of them should be Papagos's boys.'

Jimmy started to talk to him about Betty, but Bolam ploughed off again to intercept Jackie Stott.

‘You were bloody quick on the scene,' raved the club owner.

‘Just as well – your defence team were a right flop … who kept those lights dowsed – it was tailor-made for those hoodlums to raise hell and get away with it?'

Stott swung round on Thor Hansen. ‘I thought you would have seen to that … what happened?'

‘I was over on the other side from the switches – I couldn't get through,' he lied easily.

Bolam swung away and found his sergeant still hovering behind him. ‘Get with it, Jimmy – any sign of my daughter, by the way?'

‘I've got a feeling that she went out the back way with Freddie Robson – I saw him with a handbag that could have been hers. I was going to follow, but you called.'

Bolam slapped his arm. ‘You're a good lad, Jimmy. I expect she's run off home. About time she learnt a lesson, silly bitch. Come on, let's try to nobble some of these yobs.'

After two hours' work, they managed to get enough information to arrest one man. The one, in fact, who had jabbed his cigarette at the stripper's bottom. Two nearby patrons were willing to swear that he was the one who had started the trouble. The other vandals were unidentifiable, either because they had got out before the police arrived or because no one could pinpoint them in the darkness and confusion.

The one arrested would give nothing away except his name and address … he was from Doncaster. He had no membership card and refused to say anything at all, by far the best policy when accused of a crime. He seemed not unduly worried – he had been well paid by Papagos's henchman and had nothing to lose apart from a few weeks in prison, at the worst. He did not even know that he was working for the Greek, so could not incriminate him in any way. The thugs were no less presentable than most of the other patrons and in fact were much less repulsive than Jackie's bodyguard, so with genuine membership cards provided by Thor Hansen, there was no way of spotting them.

Stott fumed impotently up and down, looking at the wreckage. Tables were overturned, chairs broken and the walls running with beer dregs and scarred by broken glass.

‘You're about finished now, Stott,' said Bolam grimly. ‘Your place has been busted up twice in a few days, your customers scared half to death!'