The Gigantic Shadow (11 page)

He spent the rest of the afternoon in Knightsbridge and South Kensington, checking up again on the collection plan. It is in their arrangements for collection that those who demand money with menaces fail most frequently, and although Hunter’s idea was not quite foolproof, it did seem to guarantee safety for him, providing he exercised reasonable care. It was the only part of the plot that had really given him any pleasure, and he felt a rising excitement as the time approached for carrying it out.

At half-past six that evening he telephoned again, from a booth in Piccadilly. This time Moorhouse himself answered the telephone, and there was a difference in his tone. He was more abrupt, more anxious, yet at the same time somehow more guarded. Did it mean that he had informed the police, and that they were listening in?

Hunter tried to add a shade of northern accent to his voice, how successfully he could not tell.

‘I’ll keep it short,’ he said. ‘My friend rang this morning. Have you got the money?’

‘Yes.’

‘In one pound notes, not new, not consecutive.’

‘Yes. I want to know –’

‘I’ve got no time for answering questions. Pack the money in a zipping canvas bag. Wait for further instructions. I’ll ring in the morning. Early.’

‘My daughter. Anthea.’ Hunter was both ashamed and ignobly pleased to hear the anxiety in Moorhouse’s voice. ‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s all right. She won’t get hurt if you do as I say. Be ready for a call in the morning. Before nine o’clock.’

‘But I want to know –’ Hunter put down the receiver. He walked out of the booth hurriedly. There was a small glowing core of warmth in his stomach, as if he had been drinking brandy.

He breakfasted before seven-thirty next morning. The Russian exile was not up, but the young Indian smiled and bowed to him across the room. Alphonse was on duty. There was no sign of Bert. Hunter ate with a kind of spurious eagerness, but he could not taste the food in his mouth. When he had finished he asked in the reception hall for his bill. He told the Italian manageress that he was going out of London for a few days. She shrugged, to imply that it was no business of hers.

Hunter had bought a new zipping bag. He put his things in it and deposited it in the cloakroom at Victoria station, keeping with him the old blue suitcase. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just past eight o’clock.

He took a bus to Knightsbridge, and made the last telephone call from a box outside the Underground station. This time there was no doubt about Moorhouse’s anxiety. He spoke before Hunter could say anything.

‘Is Anthea all right?’

Hunter pressed button A. ‘Yes. Now, listen –’

‘How can I be certain of that? I must know, don’t you understand. I want to
know
before I pay you anything.’

‘You’ll have to take my word for it. She’s perfectly well.’

‘I want a letter from her saying so.’

Hunter experienced the irritation often felt by criminals towards victims who do not behave exactly as they should. ‘If you’ve kept your mouth shut, and if you’ve got the money, she’ll be all right. If we don’t get the money today you can say goodbye to her.’ For the moment he almost believed what he was saying. There was a sharp indrawing of breath at the other end of the telephone. ‘Have you got the money ready?’

‘Yes. In a canvas bag, as you said.’

‘Right. Go to 191 Lower Sloane Street. It’s a newsagents. Go in and ask for a letter for Mr Graham. Be there within fifteen minutes. If not, the deal’s off.’

He stepped out of the box, went into the Post Office next door, and took a telegram form from the rack. Through the window he could see up and down Lower Sloane Street, and Number 191, almost opposite.

The arrangement with the newsagent was simple. A week earlier Hunter had telephoned them, using the name of William Graham, and asked if he could have letters addressed there for a fee. Yesterday a small boy, to whom he had given a shilling, had delivered a letter there. It was possible that the police might eventually trace the small boy, but by that time Hunter would be out of England. If everything went to plan, Moorhouse would come to the newsagents and collect the letter. It told him to cross the road, go into Knightsbridge tube station, and take a sixpenny ticket. He was to take a westbound train, get out at the next station, South Kensington, and enter the lift. The lift at South Kensington is unique in the Underground system. The trains travelling east and west are on different levels. At the bottom the lift picks up passengers from westbound trains. Then it moves up to a higher level and stops to pick up the eastbound ones. Finally it disgorges both at the top.

Moorhouse would get in at the bottom. Then he was to get out at the next level and go back east as far as Piccadilly Circus station, where he was to ring up a number given in the letter. The number was fictitious, and for Moorhouse that would be the end of the trail. He was to put down the canvas bag when he entered the lift, and leave it there when he got out. Hunter would be in the lift, standing near to him. He would simply pick up the bag when he reached the top, drop it into his own larger zipping bag which would be open, and walk out.

There was a risk in the scheme. It was that a detective would be trailing Moorhouse, and would catch Hunter in the lift. But Hunter would be watching Moorhouse all the time. If he made any signal on leaving the newsagents, if there was any man at all who entered Knightsbridge station after Moorhouse, and who got into the lift with him at South Kensington and stayed in the lift, then he would not pick up the canvas bag. If the detective got out with Moorhouse on the eastbound level, and left Hunter alone in the lift, then it would be safe to collect the money. The beauty of the plan was that Moorhouse could not possibly tell the police what was in the letter containing the final instructions, and that if the detective got out on the eastbound level there was no possible way in which he could communicate with the surface in the time it took for the lift to reach the top.

If he exercised reasonable care it could not go wrong. But if it did go wrong – on his telegram form Hunter drew a pair of handcuffs.

Just across the road a taxi stopped. Lord Moorhouse, a neat little bird, got out of it, paid the driver, looked questioningly at the newsagent’s shop, and went in. He had a canvas bag in one hand. The taxi drove away.

A minute elapsed. Then Lord Moorhouse appeared in the door of the shop. He had opened the letter and was reading it, his lips moving. Was this some sort of signal? Hunter looked up and down Lower Sloane Street, but could see nobody moving, no recently parked car. With a decisive gesture, Lord Moorhouse thrust the letter into his pocket, looked left and right, trotted across the road and down the steps into Knightsbridge station. Quickly, but with an appearance of leisureliness, Hunter screwed up the telegram form, walked out of the Post Office and into the station. He was only a few paces behind Moorhouse.

Hunter had chosen this particular time in the morning because, although the Underground stations are busy, it is mostly with people coming out of the central London stations from their suburban homes. The number of people travelling from a station like Knightsbridge at this time is comparatively small, and in fact there were only three people behind Moorhouse at the ticket office. Hunter watched them. One, a girl wearing a neat little blue and white hat and a blue frock seemed obviously a secretary going to her office, another was an old man who limped along with a stick. But the third – the third was a man about thirty years old, with the anonymous air that is almost like the badge of a plain-clothes detective. When he saw this man, Hunter felt none of the fear he had expected, but simply an increased tension throughout his body. It was as though he were encased in a rubber suit, already tightly-fitting, which had suddenly shrunk a little.

Now it was a matter of seconds in the way he timed it. Hunter waited just long enough to make sure that nobody else was entering the station, and then passed through the barrier with the ticket he had already bought. Going down in the escalator he saw Moorhouse a few steps ahead of him. He was followed by the girl, the old man and the detective – if he was a detective – in that order. They all walked down the passage to the trains. Hunter passed the old man. Moorhouse and the detective stood a few feet apart on the station platform. The train came in, and the two of them stepped into the same carriage. Hunter hesitated for a moment, then got in after them. They sat on opposite sides of the carriage and as far as he could see no communication passed between them. In any case, however, he had decided that if the detective got into the lift, and stayed in it, he would not collect the money.

They were at South Kensington station within three minutes. Hunter got out. So did Moorhouse. So did the detective. So did twenty or thirty other people. They walked along the platform again, the detective just half a dozen steps behind Moorhouse, towards a cavern that said, ‘Way Out and to District Railway.’ Hunter’s chief feeling now was one of disgust – disgust with Moorhouse and the police for employing such an obvious plain-clothes man, disgust with Anthea for misjudging her stepfather’s character, disgust with himself for working out a poor plan. Gloomily he walked along the platform, hardly bothering to keep Moorhouse and the detective in view. Gloomily turned right to the lifts, standing in the queue for them a little behind Moorhouse.

The detective was no longer there.

Hunter turned his head, caught a glimpse of the man walking down the passage towards the District Railway. He had not been a detective at all.

Moorhouse was not being followed.

Hunter felt a pulse in his throat throbbing. He was wildly excited. It’s going to come off, he told himself, it’s going to come off.

The lift came down. The doors opened with a clank. People poured into it. Hunter stood a little behind Moorhouse, not close to him. He looks old, Hunter thought, old and tired. He’s worried about Anthea, he really does love her. Yet he could feel no sympathy in this moment, only exultation.

Now the lift stopped at the level for eastbound trains, and a mass of people came in so that the lift was completely full. For a moment Hunter felt anxiety lest Moorhouse should be unable to get out, but the little man pushed his way through.

‘Goin’ the wrong way, guv?’ said the liftman. ‘Where d’ye want to get to? Eastbound trains, this stop, not the exit.’

Moorhouse muttered something. Then he was gone. He had not been carrying the bag. Hunter did not look down, but moved forward two steps. A man in front of him said indignantly, ‘There’s no need to push.’

The lift gates changed, but the lift did not move. He wriggled to the side of the lift, his back to the advertisements, moved his leg cautiously, pressed against another leg, felt the pressure returned. For the life of him he dared not look down, dared not put his hand down in the direction of the bag.

The pressure against his leg was withdrawn completely, then renewed. He had been conscious only of the crowd in the lift, the bodies tightly pressed against each other which prevented him from moving along to see where Moorhouse had put the bag. Now he turned his head to see where the pressure was coming from. Standing next to him, also with her back to the advertisements, looking not at him but at a thick red neck directly ahead of her, stood the girl in the blue frock and the blue and white hat.

The lift began to move.

It took – Hunter had timed it – thirty seconds to make the journey up to the street exit. Those were the most painful seconds of his life, seconds in which an agonising battle of rival theories went on in his mind. One part of himself cursed his own stupidity in failing to take into account the possibility that the police agent might be a woman. It was not timidity, he told himself, it was merely elementary caution which dictated that he should not return the pressure, should not pick up the canvas bag, but should walk straight out of the lift, out of the station, out of the whole ridiculous plot. But there was another part of Hunter, the part that had fired a gun many years ago, and had learned in prison that men must live by calculated risks. This part of him said that women police agents do not call attention to themselves by sexual advances to suspects, that the money – more money than he could earn in years by hard work – lay almost at his feet ready to be picked up, that the risk was worth taking. And this part of him said also that there was really no room for argument, that for him there was no decision to make, the decision had been made years ago.

When the time came, when the lift stopped and the people got out and the girl in the blue dress, still without looking at him, walked with them, his action was almost automatic. He looked down, saw that the bag lay within inches of his feet, picked it up, dropped it in his own bag, zipped it up, and went out of the lift. Outside the station he saw no sign of the girl. He took a taxi to Victoria. Looking out of the taxi’s small back window he could see nobody following him.

At Victoria station he went to the public lavatory and there, with the bolt firmly shot, took out Moorhouse’s canvas bag, unzipped it, and turned over the brown paper parcel it contained in hands which, he was surprised to see, trembled slightly. The paper was brown and shiny, and the parcel was both tied with string and sealed with sticky tape. It seemed surprisingly small for the number of pound notes it was supposed to contain.

The string came off easily. The tape was more difficult, and by the time he had torn it open he was sweating. Inside there was more brown paper. And inside that? He found it difficult to stand up and sat down on the seat, pulling desperately at the brown paper. The whole thing was brown paper, he felt sure, it was one of those tricks often used to fool kidnappers trying to collect ransom money.

Something dropped out of the parcel on to the floor. He picked up a wad of pound notes banded together, rifled through them like a pack of cards, felt their texture, looked at their lovely greenness. Now he lifted up the parcel with utter recklessness and bundles of notes cascaded out on to the tiled lavatory floor. He made an inarticulate sound in his throat, knelt down and picked them up, felt them, and began to count the notes in each bundle. He had never thought of himself as a man particularly greedy for money, but the effect of seeing so much money, and of seeing it in this particular place, littered in bundles over the floor of this dim, secret room in which the walls were covered with scrawled obscenities, was extraordinary. This triumph for criminal Hunter over timid Hunter moved him so that for a minute or more he found it difficult not to shout or shriek. He had an impulse to unlock the door and ask everybody in the place to look at what lay on the floor.

He began to count the packets, as he pushed them methodically into his own zipping bag. He lingered over the task, and he did not realise that something was wrong until fifty packets had been counted. Then he looked at the remainder. There were a great many of them, far more than he had already packed, but surely there were not enough. Now he began to put in the rest of the packets hurriedly, throwing them in, concentrating on the counting, telling himself that he must be mistaken, and that the three hundred packets, each with a hundred pound notes in, that would make up thirty thousand pounds, positively must be here.

He had counted another thirty-five packets, making eighty-five in all, when he found the note pinned to one of the bands. It was written in a regular, almost copperplate hand that he assumed to be Moorhouse’s. The note said:

I have packed up £15,000 in one pound notes as requested by you. The remaining £15,000 will be paid on my stepdaughter’s return. I do this to protect her. You can be assured that I shall keep my word if you keep yours. If I do not hear from you within twelve hours of delivering this package I shall inform the police.

There was no signature. Hunter looked at the note unbelievingly, read it again, and then said aloud, ‘The tricky swine. The low-down tricky swine.’ He felt the indignation of a confidence trickster deceived by somebody of whose absolute integrity and innocence he has been assured.

He packed the rest of the money in the bag, tucked Moorhouse’s zipper and the brown paper wrappings in as well, opened the door and walked out of the lavatory. Fifteen thousand pounds was not what they had expected and talked about, and certainly it was much less than Anthea’s original seventy-five thousand – but it was still a lot of money. Since Anthea did not intend to return to her stepfather, there was no point in telephoning Moorhouse. They would get no more money. Presumably when the twelve hours had elapsed Moorhouse would carry out his threat to inform the police. This meant that they had until about nine o’clock this evening before he told them. In that time he had to make the final exchange arrangements with Westmark, book the air passages, and if possible get out of the country.

Perhaps it was a mark of some essential innocence in Hunter that it never occurred to him that Moorhouse might already have informed the police, or that he might get in touch with them before nine o’clock that evening.