The Tiger In the Smoke (11 page)

Charlie Luke had begun to fidget. The muscles on his back showed through his jacket as he strode restlessly down the little room.

‘Duds wasn't alone,' he said. ‘He was terrified on the station and he was terrified in here. And he wasn't frightened of me and he wasn't frightened of Levett. He couldn't have been working
for
Levett, as I had thought at one time, because in that case he wouldn't have had to have the office address written down for him. Levett must have given him that in the pub. The envelope was new. It only went through the post last night.'

‘That is why I slipped along.' The Assistant Commissioner felt in his pocket. ‘Seen any Express Messages tonight, Charles?'

Luke pulled up sharply, his forehead wrinkling. ‘No, sir, can't say I have. I've been on this business since I came back tonight.'

Oates waved his hand. ‘Don't excite yourself, my boy. Quite probably it hasn't come in yet. Very occasionally they tell me an item first. By some oversight, of course.' He was dourly amused. ‘We're wonderfully highly mechanized at Central Office these days, Campion. Teleprinters, radar, coloured lights everywhere. It's only when we get a power cut that the whole blessed police system is liable to go out of action. Well, I put on my hat and came down here myself because a convict called Havoc has made a getaway from the Scrubs.'

Luke drew a deep sigh and his smile became contented.

‘Havoc. That was the man who was cased with Duds. They did the hold-up together. So that's it. I wondered when we were going to see a little daylight.'

Oates did not respond. He had taken two blue slips of paper from his pocket and was busy comparing them. He looked indescribably mournful, his spectacles crooked on his sharp nose.

‘It's very unsatisfactory,' he said at last. ‘Your people picked up Duds Morrison's body at six forty-two, I see, but at six forty-five Jack Havoc was only just making his break half across London. He was killing another friend of his, as a matter of fact – at least I assume he's dead. The report which I saw just before I came out said “sinking”.'

Charlie Luke became uncharacteristically annoyed. He stood jingling the coins in his pockets, his dark face lowering.

‘These perishing crooks, who do they think they are all of a sudden?'

‘Gods,' said Oates calmly. ‘Splendid and superior beings, with winged heels and thunderbolts in each hand. Yet you'd think that any old bit of looking-glass, let alone a long period of prison food, would cure any man of a delusion of that sort. But it never does. You know that as well as I do, Charles. But what you don't know is why I've come traipsing down here, splashing the beautiful motor-car with which a thoughtful Police Council provides me, so that the shabbiness of my clothes doesn't undermine my authority.'

He paused, and Campion, who had been watching his old friend curiously, became aware that the new thing about him was that he was embarrassed. This was so very unlike him that the younger man was astounded. Clearly the old man had something on his mind of which he was more than half ashamed.

Meanwhile the Assistant Commissioner leaned back in his hard chair, his legs stretching out across the room.

‘I received the two reports side by side, and then I had a word with Yeo and he told me what had come through from here on your interview with Duds this afternoon. I thought it over and presently I thought I'd come down myself. Havoc, I remember Havoc. Everyone is looking for him and the chances are that he'll be pulled in in two or three hours, but if he's not, then I think you'll be finding traces of him here in your manor, and I thought I'd like to talk to you about him. Both you and Campion were overseas when we jailed him last and so you missed him. You missed quite a phenomenon.' He repeated the words softly. ‘Quite a phenomenon.'

Mr Campion found himself fascinated. Oates was stepping right out of character. No one in the world had spoken with more force or at greater length on the stupidity of creating a legend round any wrongdoer. It was a creed with the old man and he preached it freely. His theory was that every crook was necessarily a half-wit, and therefore any policeman who showed more than a kindly contempt for any one of them was,
ipso facto
, very little better. This was a new departure with a vengeance.

Oates caught his expression and met it steadily, if not with ease.

‘Havoc is a truly wicked man,' he said at last. ‘In all my experience I've only met three. There was Harris the poisoner, a fellow called Timms whom I don't suppose you've ever heard of, and this fellow Havoc. I thought at one time that Haigh was going to qualify, but when I met him and talked with him I decided he didn't, quite. He was mentally deformed. There was a sense missing there. The thing I'm talking about is rather different. I can't describe it but you'll recognize it when you see it, if you have time. It's like seeing Death for the first time. Even if it's quite new to you, you know at once what it is.'

He laughed to and also at himself. ‘I know what I'm talking about,' he added, and Campion, who had never known a time when he did not, was prepared to believe him.

Charlie Luke had not known his chief so long. He was far too intelligent to appear sceptical, but he hastened to bring the conversation on to a more specific basis.

‘Are you saying he's a born killer, sir?'

‘Oh yes.' The heavy lids flickered up and the old policeman's chilly glance rested on his subordinate for a moment. ‘He kills if he wants to. But he's not casual about it like your gangsters. He knows exactly what he's doing. For a crook he's unusually clear-sighted. Take this latest performance of his. If Sir Conrad Belfry is dead – '

Campion sat up. ‘C.H.I. Belfry?'

‘That's the man. Distinguished doctor. About half past six tonight Havoc throttled him and slid off down the fire-escape without the warder, who was sitting outside the door of the consulting room – strictly against regulations, by the way – hearing a sound.'

‘Good lord! Where was this, sir? Not
at
the Scrubs, surely?' Luke was describing the narrow proportions of a cell window in the air.

‘No. In a second-floor consulting room in Wimpole Street. After badgering the authorities for months, Belfry had got Havoc out for an experiment.' Oates leant forward as he spoke. ‘This will give you some idea of Havoc. It's taken that man three years of careful self-discipline to get his nose outside prison wails, and I'll lay a fiver he's done it just exactly as he intended to do it from the moment the idea entered his head. Sir Conrad's murder was planned before Havoc even knew the man existed. When Havoc was sentenced he was sent first to Chelmsford, where his conduct was bad, and he got moved to Parkhurst. No one but a mug tries to break from there because of the water, and for a time he seems to have attempted to work his ticket to one of these new-style open prisons. But his record didn't fit that bill.'

‘So he went sick and got pushed up to the Scrubs hospital, I suppose, sir?' Luke could not help making a leap in the story, but his eyes were bright with interest.

Oates remained unruffled. He was studying his own notes on the back of the police slips.

‘You're under-estimating him, Charles, my boy,' he said. ‘I thought you might. He went sick, but in a most ingenious way. Three years ago he developed a – where is it? Oh, I see, a compulsive neurosis concerning the number thirteen.' He lifted his eyes, caught sight of Luke's expression, and laughed outright. ‘I know. It was so hopeless, so damned silly and forlorn as a lead-swing that in the end he got clean away with it. His performance appears to have been amazing. Apart from his “little trouble” he became a model prisoner, and for the first year,
year
mind you, it got him exactly nowhere. He did the thing not only thoroughly but progressively. He went sick on the thirteenth of every month, and later on the twenty-seventh. Thirteen letters in twenty-seventh. When he found his cell number added up to thirteen he starved himself until they moved him. He was always polite and apologetic, and also, as far as anyone could see, puzzled. He explained he knew he was being silly, but said he couldn't help it. Of course, the idea spread – you know how it does in a prison – and there were signs of mass hysteria developing. Then the M.O.s got interested. It's a well-known buzz-bug, I understand.' He looked at Campion inquiringly.

‘I have heard of it.'

Luke's mobile lips moved soundlessly. He would appear to have remarked, ‘Cawdblimeah!'

Meanwhile the Assistant Commissioner went on placidly. ‘It took him another eighteen months to get himself moved up to the Scrubs, where they've got a psychiatry unit. There he came up against the experts, but by that time, of course, the thing was pretty well genuine. Anyhow, they kept him, and he was so docile and intelligent that they seem to have made a sort of pet of him. Sir Conrad had nothing to do with the unit, of course, but he'd got a favourite pupil who was the Consultant attached to it, and one day last month he went down there to see him and was taken round the exhibits. Havoc took his fancy and nothing would satisfy him until he'd got the man up to Wimpole Street to try out a new American machine he'd got over, a thing called an “Association Motor Apparatus”.'

Luke's glance turned to the man in the horn-rimmed spectacles and his brows rose inquiringly. Mr Campion, embarrassed to find himself considered an expert on a subject so highly suspect among his friends, nodded once more.

‘I see the Chief Inspector thinks that either we're barmy or he is,' Oates observed without malice. ‘I'm just giving you the facts. Sir Conrad got his own way in the end – they have a lot of pull, these fellows. Havoc was sent up to him in a cab just after six this afternoon. Two warders went with him, as decreed in the regulations, but one stayed in the hall downstairs and Havoc was not handcuffed to the other. For a time the second warder stayed in the consulting room, but Havoc appeared so eager to help and yet so oppressed by his presence that old Belfry at last persuaded the chap to sit outside the door. The rest of the story is just what you'd think. The doors in those houses are mahogany and very nearly sound-proof. By the time the wretched warder got nervous and made up his mind to take a look, it was all over. Belfry was lying on the floor, the window was open, Havoc had vanished.'

Campion frowned. ‘Are you absolutely serious when you suggest that the thing had been planned so long?'

‘I take my oath on it,' said Oates, ‘and it wouldn't surprise me if he had timed the attempt for November just on the off-chance of a fog like this.'

Charlie Luke threw away his incredulity with a generous gesture; indeed he appeared to wash his hands of it literally.

‘I suppose he has a sort of way with him, sir?' he suggested at last, favouring the two of them with the most winning of smiles. Unconsciously he had arched his lean stomach and might have been about to burst into musical comedy song. He had donned frank, open-hearted charm like a garment.

Oates regarded him with gloomy interest. ‘No,' he said, ‘nothing like that.'

Luke gave it up. ‘I'd like to see him.'

Oates hesitated. He looked a kindly man of vast experience.

‘I should like to see him dead,' he said at last, and in his mouth the words were simple and convincing.

Mr Campion was aware of a faint uneasiness between his shoulder-blades, and Luke, his sophistication pierced, was briefly blank-eyed and uncomfortable.

In the pause an apologetic sergeant came in quietly to whisper an inquiry. Luke glanced past him through the open doorway of the C.I.D. Room, where a grim-faced young man, dressed with all the careful casualness of the modern clerk, stood clutching his raincoat and folded evening paper. He was waiting before a desk, looking over his shoulder at the sergeant's back, and his savage resentment, together with the dull courage with which he was controlling it, were as vivid as if he had displayed them on a banner.

‘Who?' When lowered, Luke's voice was inclined to set the walls vibrating. ‘Duds Morrison's brother-in-law? No. No need for me to see him. What? Oh, the newspapers? Well, we'll do anything we can. Publicity can't be helped. One of those things.' He waved his subordinate away and the door closed, but Duds Morrison and the problems he had left behind him had returned to them.

‘Respectable relatives?' said old Oates with interest. ‘Funny how many of 'em have 'em. His sister's going to have a baby, I suppose? They always are.' He felt for his pipe. ‘Well, Luke, I think we've got on a bit, you know. Havoc is somewhere in this puzzle of yours, I think you can be sure of that. Havoc was the man Duds feared, but I don't see how he killed him. In fact he couldn't have done in the time, even if he'd known where to find him, which is unlikely.'

Luke said nothing and Campion, who was beginning to know him, recognized the shoot of his underlip. Despite his veneration for Oates, at that moment Charles Luke did not altogether believe in Jack Havoc.

The immediate development, therefore, gained considerably in drama. Police stations are as human as any other places of business, and, when it came, the wave of outrage spread through the new Crumb Street building in the same electric way in which it was later to spread through every newspaper office in the country. It began with a flurry of words in the outer hall, where the heavy sergeant who read the society journals in his spare time listened to a hatless, collarless elderly gentleman who had come bursting in on him, half inarticulate with shock and horror. From there it spread over the house phones and down the concrete corridors, gathering in speed and intensity until it culminated in Luke's little office a few seconds after Oates had finished speaking. The actual message arrived over the telephone on the clerk's desk in the corner, but afterwards not one of those three men, who knew more about giving evidence than anyone in London, could have sworn on oath that it had not been shouted in their ears.