The Tiger In the Smoke (34 page)

Luke had been working. As he sat, his dark head resting on his hands, he reflected that they could put that on his tombstone: ‘Thickheaded but Thorough. R.I.P.' He had taken the church apart and the crypt, with its clear evidences of recent occupation, had been gone over with a tooth-comb. The miserable Sergeant Picot, still weaving slightly from the drug (and what a fantastic crazy piece of bad luck
that
had been!) had found the way out through the coal-cellar of the cottage.

As Luke sat staring red-eyed at the notes before him he checked every point, his own slightly racy language colouring the dark list.

Ma Cash was in a detention cell downstairs, held on an accessory charge. She had refused to speak all yesterday and he was giving her until zero-hour, just before the mid-day meal, before he tried her again. What a flinty old besom she was! As he considered her, his diamond-shaped eyes widened and there was a gleam of unwilling admiration in their depths. ‘I don't know. I can't help you. Find out.' That was all she had said to every question, just like the gangsters in the movies. Not a bad line either, he conceded, except that there were no smarty lawyers around to bung in a writ of habeas corpus, so the old lady could sit there while the police asked for her case to be remanded for a week or two.

Luke did not think she would crack yet awhile, if she did at all. There was something very strong in that bright flat face with the knowing eyes. He was not at all sure even now that there had not been something in his substitution of the child theory, after all. Mrs Avril could have been mistaken. Something certainly was giving the wicked old girl in the cell a remarkable amount of courage.

He sighed. All this was getting him nowhere. Routine, that was the only thing. Well, that was going on steadily and relentlessly, despite the help from the public which was no help at all. Two men for whom he could have found better employment were needed to control the traffic in St Petersgate Square this morning. Mercifully, old Sam Drummock was good with reporters, and Miss Warburton too, when she could be prised away from the hospital, she showed a lot of common sense. He thanked his stars that the other four were out of the way, and allowed his mind to wander to them briefly on their treasure hunt.

He expected to hear from them any minute now. There had been some delay in the crossing. That was all he had gathered so far. And it was curious in a way, because he had wired, and yet Meg Elginbrodde had not telephoned about her father.

He returned to his list. ‘The cottage'. There the routine had all but taken the paper off the walls. Havoc's prison clothes, or what was left of them when they had been shovelled out of the back of the boiler, had gone down to the Forensic Science Laboratories at Hendon. They would provide sufficient evidence to take care of the old lady for a while or he was a Dutchman. Then there were the cash memorandum books. They were the only hope. Thirty-four in all, little fat black books hidden under a loose board in the bedroom. Picot had brought them to the station in a borrowed suitcase, and four experienced men had spent the best part of yesterday on them.

By six in the evening they had brought him their little list, three hundred and twelve names and addresses of men and women who still had outstanding reasons for hesitating to refuse to do Mrs Cash a favour.

The Chief Inspector's brows had risen several times on his dark forehead as he had read. Little things which had puzzled him about some of the most respected residents of his district suddenly became plain. An attempted suicide which he had never understood emerged as almost reasonable. One of his own men, now on leave, became due to make some explanations.

The lodging-house keeper who had visited Havoc in prison appeared prominently on the list, but the favour she had done Mrs Cash had been investigated already, so that her name could be eliminated.

That left three hundred and eleven and, just after seven o'clock five picked officers, which was more than could be spared, had set out from Crumb Street to visit and question each one. They were still at work and so far none of their reports, which had come in at three-hourly intervals all through the night, had contained anything helpful. It was slow work but it had to be done. In the end the result would be worth the delay.

Delay. The word hung in Luke's mind. That was the keynote of the whole inquiry. From the start there had been a perverseness in the whole business. Little snags had developed at every weary step, and although on the face of it the thing was inevitable it was taking its own time and nothing and nobody, it seemed, could hurry it. As his own old grandmother would have said, it was as though the devil had got into it. He grunted. A fat lot of good that was. The Assistant Commissioner didn't believe in the devil.

Meanwhile there was plenty to do. His desk was stacked high with dockets. There were the Flying Squad's confidential memos, containing news and gossip from informers. The whole of the fraternity were leaving Havoc strictly alone by all accounts. The underworld had never liked him and now considered him dynamite.

There were copies of all the more hopeful telegrams from police headquarters all over the country, reporting suspicious characters observed or detained. There were details of every car theft reported in the Metropolis in the past three days. There were seven bona-fide ‘confessions' from people who were now being held for medical reports on the state of their minds. And there was one highly ingenious theory that the killer was a well-known politician masquerading as Havoc (who had been his first victim), offered in all seriousness by an expert just too eminent to be directly snubbed.

The maze of tinted paper towered in front of Luke's hot eyes, looking like the Blue Ridge mountains. He surveyed it thoughtfully and reached for another barley-sugar lump.

Andy Galloway, his clerk, an earnest youth who had served in the R.A.F., had been feeding him with this for days in the belief that it would keep him from dropping in his tracks. Luke reckoned he must have eaten four pounds of the stuff and wondered idly whose ration he was robbing.

His mind was off the main problem only for a second, but in that little pause the wheel turned and suddenly the long march of events began to race.

As he put out his hand the pile of paper on the right side of the desk toppled over and slid slowly to the floor. He dived after it, but one flying sheet eluded him and he had to lean over under a chair for it. As he fished it out to place it with the rest he glanced at it, and one paragraph caught his attention. It was a reply to a query of his own which he had put to Sergeant Branch while that officer had been reporting on Havoc's companions.

Why, Luke had asked, did two fishermen spend the war in the army when all such men had been directly instructed to join one of the two sea services? It was a minor point and he had forgotten making it, but good old Branch had been busy. After enormous difficulty he had identified the two as Roland and Thomas Gripper of Weft, near Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and the paragraph in his report which had caught Luke's eye said simply:

On leaving school the two brothers joined their father, Albert Edward Gripper, who owned a fishing smack, and worked for him until 1937 (December), when he was charged and convicted of various offences connected with the shipping of uncustomed goods. He received a sentence of twelve months' imprisonment and was severely fined. The boat appears to have been sold to meet these demands, and the brothers then left the district. Evidence points to the fact that they were simple ignorant men, most of whose lives had been spent on the water, and it looks possible that they felt it safest to disclaim any knowledge of their former calling, hence their appearance in the army soon after the outbreak of war. The father died in 1940 but a mother and sister still live at Weft.

As the Chief Inspector finished reading, the private telephone on his desk tinkled and Chief Superintendent Yeo's deep voice came through to him.

‘Charlie? Good. Listen. Canon Avril spoke to Havoc and told him (
a
) that the name of the place where the stuff was hidden was Sainte-Odile near Saint-Malo, and (
b
) that Geoffrey Levett had gone after it. That's all. Nothing else so far. The old gentleman is very weak, but they say he'll live. I shall be here for the next half-hour but I wanted you to have that information at once. Anything new with you? No? Very well, keep at it. Good-bye.'

Luke's hand was still on the receiver, and the expression of incredulity was still on his face when Picot appeared, looking as excited as anyone had ever seen him.

‘Chief,' he burst out as he slammed the docket on the desk, ‘here's a small van found abandoned at Tollesbury in Essex. First reported ten p.m. yesterday and just been traced to a family called Brown, who run a little bakery in the Barrow Road here. They're all at home and they're lost without the van for the business, and yet they haven't reported it. Old Mrs Brown, who owns the shop, is on Mrs Cash's books. She owes her three hundred pounds.'

Luke sat looking at him. ‘Tollesbury? Where's the nearest town to that?'

Picot's solid face flushed with disappointment. ‘You must know Tollesbury, Chief. Everybody knows Tollesbury.'

‘Never heard of it.' Luke uttered the blasphemy in all innocence.

‘But it's so near Town,' protested Picot earnestly. ‘A wonderful place. You
must
know Tollesbury! Yachts, oysters, fishingboats – '

Luke's sagging body jerked to attention.

‘Is it on the sea?'

‘The estuary. Right out on the marsh, yet only forty-odd miles from London. It's littered with little sea-going boats, all of them out in the river well away from the village, and the dinghies lie around on the mud with no one to mind them. If anybody should want to pinch a sea-going craft it would be the one place on earth to get away with it. Chief,
suppose those lads tried to stage the raid again
.'

Charlie Luke, the Londoner, to whom all water-borne traffic was a holy mystery, stared at him in stupefaction, and Picot hesitated, trying to find some way of conveying the desolation of the grey-green expanse of marsh and sky and sea, where, in November, the black geese and great saddleback gulls seem to live alone.

‘The locals don't worry,' he went on, ‘because the place is the devil's own job to get away from if a man doesn't know the mudbanks. But any East Coast fisherman would know the lanes like his own backyard.'

Luke rubbed his eyes, one of his more ingenuous and endearing gestures.

‘Wait a minute,' he said. ‘There were just about three hours early yesterday morning when no cars were stopped on the Southend By-pass. There was the Pa and Ma of a smash between two milk lorries and an all-night coach, and all available men had to go down there. Havoc couldn't have had luck like that.'

‘He's had all the cards so far.' Picot was thinking of the milk-food.

The D.D.C.I. seemed still bewildered. ‘Anyone down there lost a – sea-going boat?'

‘Nothing's come through yet, sir, but it's early. People have to sleep, people other than us, I mean. I don't suppose a man would notice for twelve hours or so that his craft had gone, and then he'd think she had broken away.'

Luke stretched out a long arm. As in most other professions, the one certain way of cutting through red tape in police matters is to have a private word on the telephone with a very old friend in another department.

Once again the luck held. Superintendent Burnby of the Essex C.C. had walked a beat with Luke in the far-off happy days when they were both prepared to put the world right if given only half a chance and another sergeant, and within a few minutes, although it was such an awkward hour of the morning, the well-remembered voice was drawling over the wire.

‘Wotcher, Charlie boy, how are you? See you've kind of mislaid someone up there in the fog. It's funny where they get to, ain't it? Never mind, it's a nice drying day today. What? Boat from Tollesbury? That's a very strange thing, so that is now. Got it on my desk this minute. Just come in. What are you trying to do, confess?'

Luke spent a few precious moments in lucid explanation and the other voice lost its banter at once.

‘It could be,' he said briskly, ‘it well could be. You may be on to something. This is a smack of eighteen tons, the
Marlene Doreen
. Here it is: Lister diesel engine fuelled up for one week, stores on board, hatch possibly left unlocked (if it wasn't it wouldn't signify. Two little old girls could lift it off bodily), owner Mr Elias Pye. He saw her last lying out in the Fleet just before eleven p.m. the day before yesterday. His son missed her yesterday afternoon about three. Until dawn this morning they thought she must have fouled her anchor. They spent a bit of time thinking about that, and notified the Tollesbury Police an hour ago. Customs have been informed. Anything else you want? We can't always do it like this, so make the most of it.'

Luke mentioned the van. ‘Wouldn't five strangers be noticed on this marsh of yours?' he added.

‘Not on a November morning if they knew where they were going and drove straight to Woodruff and the yacht stores. Owners and their agents are always popping up and down that road.' Burnby's voice had not quickened, but some of Luke's own rising excitement was echoed in its drawl. ‘Charlie, I've seen that van. I've been down there this morning on some other business. That's why I'm so late. Lucky you rang me. It was a baker's van and quite empty except for one thing our chap happened to find on the floor. He showed it to me but we didn't think there was much to it. It was a lens out of a pair of dark glasses. It meant nothing then, but now you start me thinking. I thought it had dropped out of a pair of those sun shields, but our fellow showed me it was a real lens all right. I've seen your circular of course. Wasn't one of the five wearing dark glasses?'

Charlie Luke's spirits rose so violently that they took his breath away. The luck had come. He knew it as surely as the dairy hand knows that the cream in the churn has turned. For all the delays which had dogged him so far he had received ample compensation in the last quarter of an hour, when every minute thing which had emerged had dovetailed together and built up rapidly in his hands.