The Whisper in the Gloom Page 3

  “Oh, I’ll just disappear for a day or two. He won’t notice.” In which Foxy spoke truer than he knew.

  “What about the money for the adverts? How much do you have to pay?” inquired Bert.

  “Just mention my name, or my Dad’s, and they’ll give you a reduction.”

  “Give me?—I say, I can’t go round—”

  Foxy explained patiently that it must be Bert, as the enemy would very likely ask the stationers who had paid for the adverts, and would suspect a trap if it turned out not to be the boy whose boat they had tried to buy. Bert fancied there was a flaw in this logic, but Foxy could be as persuasive as the Tempter himself when he was in the mood. Half a dozen cards were written out, Bert polishing the English of the advertisement, and the committee got down to finances. Foxy had inherited his Dad’s business acumen and made plenty of pocket money during the holidays by more or less dubious transactions in the Portobello Road. Bert was his widowed mother’s only child, so he did pretty well too. The poorest of them was Copper.

  “I can manage a bob,” he said. “But we’ll get the money back, won’t we?”

  “Get it back? No soap.”

  “Why not? Aren’t we going to sell them Bert’s boat?”

  A gleam came into Foxy’s eyes—large, innocent green eyes which could sell a pup to Cerberus. Then it faded.

  “They wouldn’t buy it if they found the bit of paper was gone.”

  Copper surpassed himself. “Give ’em a bit of paper. Write out some message, in guarded language, and put it inside the boat.”

  The three looked at one another, put up their thumbs in unison, and went off into witch-like laughter.

  The plan was now altered. If either of Bert’s two men turned up at the rendezvous, Bert would emerge from hiding and attempt to sell them the boat with a fake message in it; the man would then be trailed to his lair by the other two.

  Bert started off on his round of the shady stationers recommended by Foxy, at the hour when Nigel Strangeways entered New Scotland Yard and was taken to Superintendent Blount’s office. He had rung up Blount yesterday evening, and what he had to say obtained him an interview. Blount was looking more worried than Nigel had ever seen him. He greeted Nigel with “I want you to tell your story to Wright here. He’s the D.D.I. in whose manor this stabbing was done.”

  Blount introduced Nigel to the rangy, saturnine Inspector who was leaning against a filing cabinet, and whose eyes never left him till he had ended his account of his meeting with the terrified boy in Kensington Gardens. Inspector Wright then glanced at the Superintendent.

  “It adds up, sir.”

  “Aye, it does.” Blount sighed heavily, massaging his bald scalp. “I’d be obliged, Strangeways, if ye’d give us a detailed description of this wee laddie, and the two men. Here you are.” He indicated a dictaphone and switched it on. When Nigel had finished, he sighed again. “It’s the boy we want, and you make him sound like a hundred thousand other wee boys. Gray shirt and shorts, brown eyes and hair, about twelve years old, spectacles, a protruding forehead, grammar school type but no school tie or blazer to narrow it down. Ah weel. What about the men, Wright? Do you know them?”

  “I don’t think they’re locals, sir. But there’s been a lot of moving about lately, especially in the Notting Dale area.”

  “Don’t I know it. And we’re stretched thin, vairy thin, just now.”

  “Poor old C.I.D. Making the way straight for the Russians, eh?” said Nigel.

  Inspector Wright’s piercing gaze seemed to pin Nigel to the wall, like a butterfly captured for his collection. Blount said, “The Tito visit was a picnic by comparison.” He scratched his chin. “You’d best tell him, Wright. Strangeways has ideas, now and then.”

  “Very good, sir. An eyewitness told our chaps that the murdered man, just before he died, gave a boy a piece of paper to put in the model boat he was just launching.”

  “I see. That explains it.” Tilting back his chair, Nigel studied the ceiling. “Now it’s your turn, Blount. Yonder dead man, who was he? where and what his dwelling?”

  “He was an ex-pickpocket and ex-lag, name of Dai Williams, last domiciled in Easington Crescent, Notting Dale.”

  “An enlisted man, I take it.”

  Blount gave Nigel his blankest stare.

  “Oh, come now, you know what I mean. You’d enlisted him in the forces of law and order. He was a nark, nose, snout, grass, squeaker, or whatever coarse word is current for it just now.”

  “You see, Wright, Strangeways does have ideas.”

  “Who’d you put him onto? Or was it a roving commission?” persisted Nigel.

  Superintendent Blount pushed back his chair, walked over to the window: for a minute he brooded on the great sunlit panorama of London. Half to himself, he presently said, “I suppose a battlefield always does look peaceful, if you’re far enough up above it. I was reading The Dynasts a month or two ago.” His powerful shoulders braced, as if to resume a burden, and he turned to Nigel. “I’ll give you the picture; and if you’re in the habit of talking in your sleep, you’ll just have to do without sleep for a while.”

  It was a fortnight ago, he said, that Scotland Yard became aware of abnormal activity in the underworld. Just as, through aerial photographs, raids, captured information, a general may discover the large-scale movement of enemy troops and know that a major offensive is impending, so Scotland Yard had got wind of coming trouble. At first it was no more than something in the air—a matter of rumors, whispers, little thrillings of the grapevine. Contacts in the underworld had grown shy, evasive, or had disappeared. The seedy cafés, where you could always hope to pick up a useful tip, had, so to speak, drawn down their blinds. Something, beyond that, was brewing up—something bigger than normal. The delicate instruments by which Scotland Yard gauges the activity of its eternal enemy, the whole complex organization of routine reports, unorthodox feelers, unobtrusive surveillance, was now vibrating to a violent pressure—the precursor, it was judged, of a crime wave which might build up to tidal-wave dimensions.

  It took no great intelligence to deduce that this would be timed to coincide with the Russian visit. Although reserves had been drafted in from the provinces, the police were still woefully undermanned for handling the elaborate precautions which the visit entailed, and at the same time coping with an outbreak of ordinary crime. Political malcontents, home-grown or alien, had to be watched; new arrivals at ports and airports screened: every route along which the Russian Minister and his colleagues would drive must be swept clean just beforehand—empty buildings examined, vantage points quietly occupied, an unremitting vigilance maintained over every yard and minute of the delegation’s movements.

  And it was not only assassination which must be guarded against. As Blount gravely pointed out, a few organized demonstrations, if successful, could do almost as much harm as an attempted assassination, in the present ticklish state of international affairs. The Soviet suspicion and touchiness, overcome to the extent of sending this delegation of V.I.P.’s, would be revived in full force if the patient work of diplomats were ruined by a bad reception. So the police had to be ready to break up any hostile demonstrations along the route.

  Even this was not all. The Home Secretary had expressed great anxiety about the effect which a crime wave, breaking out during their visit, would have upon the delegation. Their naïve ideas of the decadence of the West would be confirmed. They would see Britain as a country where gangsters and bandits flourished, and this might influence their attitude toward the delicate negotiations for which they had come.

  “So there you have it,” said Blount, sitting down again at his desk.” “And I’d give half my pension to know we’d get through this week without trouble.”

  He glanced at his wristwatch. “They’ll be here in four hours’ time.” He was like a general whose plans are all made, his troop movements and supply lines organized, and who can only sit back now waiting for zero hour.

  “T
his crime wave,” said Nigel. “Don’t tell me the Master Criminal of fiction has really turned up at last.”

  “Och no. I wish he had. I’d sooner have one big hole to deal with than stopping up dozens of little leaks all over the place.”

  “I’d hardly call that bank robbery last night a little leak.” As Nigel said it, he was aware again of Inspector Wright’s eyes upon him; they had a keenness, a sort of frosty, scintillating excitement in them.

  “Aye, it was a bold business. Well organized, too,” said Blount. “Now, this Dai Williams. We were—e’eh—in touch with him. No a bad wee fellow, but he couldn’t keep his fingers out of other people’s pockets. He was keeping his ears open for anything he could pick up about a character called Sam Borch. A versatile lad, Borch. He has a string—”

  “Prostitutes?”

  “Uh-huh. And other interests. We suspect him of receiving, but we’ve not quite been able to pin anything on him yet. Now, a couple of days ago, one of our chaps—e’eh—happened to come across Dai in a café. Dai said he’d got a new lead on Sam Borch, which he was following up. He was just beginning to say something about a piece of toffee, when they were interrupted.”

  “A piece of toffee?”

  “That’s their argot for a toff, sir,” said Inspector Wright.

  “Dai ducked out of the café. Someone’d come in he didn’t want to meet, not in company with a dick no doubt. That was the last contact we’ve had with him, alive. We’ve searched his lodgings. Nix.”

  “Just how was he killed?”

  After a glance at Blount, Inspector Wright handed Nigel the police-surgeon’s report.

  “H’mm. Quite a professional job. Haven’t you got a line here?”

  “Maybe,” said Wright cautiously. Then he expanded. “That sort of a weapon—we haven’t one chance in a million of finding it. We’ve radioed an appeal for eyewitnesses. You wouldn’t believe it. It must have happened somewhere between the bandstand and the Round Pond, but with all those crowds nobody saw anything. Whoever did it was a slick operator. It wouldn’t be either of the chaps you saw. They’d be there to cover the murderer’s retreat, if there was any trouble. The murderer himself wouldn’t risk that business with the boy afterward.”

  “The boy. Yes—” said Nigel slowly. “Isn’t he the one you should be making a radio appeal for? If Dai Williams discovered something so vital that they had to kill him, and presuming he passed it onto this boy—”

  “That’s just the trouble, sir. If we broadcast an appeal for the boy, these criminals will realize that we set great store by the bit of paper. And that’d be the end of the boy.”

  “Unless we found him before they did,” said Blount, polishing his pince-nez and rather noticeably avoiding Nigel’s eye.

  “You are the only person,” said Inspector Wright, “in a position to identify him.”

  “Ah. The sales talk begins.”

  The Inspector’s thin mouth twitched at one corner. His sallow hatchet face seemed to be aimed at Nigel like a cutting edge. He said, “There’s another point too, sir. The criminals saw you in company with the boy. He called you ‘Uncle Tom.’ They may have good reasons to suppose that he has showed you the piece of paper, or told you what was written on it.”

  “The disagreeable inference being that I had better find the boy before they find me?”

  Inspector Wright rose, came to Nigel’s side and put his hand a moment on Nigel’s shoulder. “The Superintendent has told me about you. I’d like to have you with us, sir.” His sudden smile was unexpected, lively, extraordinarily appealing. “And you do live in my parish.”

  “All right, vicar, all right. I’ll look for your waif and stray. But how the devil do you expect me to find him?”

  Blount relaxed in his chair, blowing out a hugh sigh. “I knew he would. You can’t keep Strangeways out of mischief….”

  Three hours later, the big black Daimlers swept into London from the airport. The route ahead of them had been cleared; the traffic lights were cut off, and point-duty policemen had taken over. A screen of goggled men on motorcycles, looking like the death riders in Cocteau’s Orphée, headed the convoy. The arterial road was thinly lined with spectators, kept well back on the pavements, or leaning from the windows of suburban villas, decorated here and there with red flags or union jacks. There was a feeling of incredulity, unreality almost, about the whole affair. After so many false alarms and false dawns, the public seemed apathetic, beyond hope or fear. They knew they were witnessing a historic event, but they’d had an overdose of history during the last twenty years.

  “Makes ’em feel at home, all this lot,” said a bystander, as the para-military convoy swept past.

  “Show ’em we can do it better than they can,” said his companion.

  “And they call it a free country,” remarked a third. “Ain’t it lovely?”

  At Shepherds Bush a smoke bomb was thrown in front of the leading car. The thrower was instantly removed, as if by some sleight-of-hand, and plain-clothes men politely confiscated the camera of a press man who had snapped the incident, handing it back empty. A police official riding in the first car said to his companions,

  “Lucky for us that wasn’t a real bomb.”

  The first two cars were, in fact, decoys. “Minesweepers,” their occupants called them. At an interval of several hundred yards, three more followed, escorted in front, on the flanks and in the rear by another buzzing cloud of motorcycle police.

  Where the way narrowed, at the top of Holland Park Road, the flank escort dropped back; the cars slowed a little, but not much. The crowd was thicker on the pavements here. A small girl felt her doll being snatched from her hand, saw it falling through the air in front of the second group of cars. Ducking under the outstretched arms of the soldiers lining the route, she ran out into the road. Superbly driven, the car avoided her by a hand’s breadth, swerving and braking hard to a stop. A polite altercation was seen to take place inside this car. Then a small, white-haired, stocky man got out, and walking back, picked up the doll, handed it to the little girl, who was being led away by two soldiers. He stroked her hair, and spoke a few words to her, his dour face breaking into a charmingly unofficial smile.

  The crowd gave its first wholehearted cheer. The Russian Foreign Minister got back into the car, waving his hand to them. The Important Personage accompanying him covertly mopped his brow; it had all turned out for the best; but supposing the first hour of the Soviet delegation’s visit had been marked by the killing of a small girl?… Varium et mutabile semper, said the Important Personage to himself. He was thinking, not of the nature of woman, but of that equally capricious, unpredictable thing known as public opinion.

  3

  The Cannibal Party

  BREATHING HEAVILY, HIS two fellow Martians watched Bert write the message they had concocted. He wrote it, in shaky capitals, with indelible pencil, on the margin of last Sunday’s News of the World, tore off the bit of paper, squeezed it up, and put it in the hull of his boat. The message—a masterpiece of noncommittal ingenuity, they thought—ran as follows:

  Halibut twelve all set. X 520. Pass on

  The message ended with an artistic, jagged scrawl, as though the writer’s strength had failed him before he could write down the destination to which it should be passed on. “Halibut twelve” had been voted a judicious scrambling of the original message; “all set” made the thing sound both more business-like and more mysterious; “X 520” was, of course, the dead man’s code number in the Secret Service. The Martians raised their thumbs, cackling with witch-like laughter, and sallied forth toward the General Post Office.

  Notting Hill Gate was busy this Tuesday evening with people returning from their Bank Holiday excursions. Bert and Copper took up their position in the doorway of a shop diagonally facing the Post Office, whose clock said seven P.M. Foxy, wearing a large cloth cap to conceal his red hair, was sitting on his bike by the pavement opposite. The minutes passed. The crowds passed. B
ut neither of Bert’s two men was among them.

  “Bet they won’t come,” he said, not without relief. “They’re windy.”

  “Expect they haven’t heard about our advert yet. It only went up yesterday.”

  The clock hands in the Post Office moved to twenty-five past seven. Only five more minutes, Bert thought, and I can go home.

  “See that spiv there?” Copper indicated a character with an appallingly elaborate coiffure and a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, who was propping up a shop window next to the G.P.O. “He’s been there quarter of an hour. Go and give him a dekko of your boat.”

  “But he’s not—”

  “Who did you say was windy? They may have sent him.”

  Bert crossed the road and approached the undesirable character leaning against the shop.

  “You the kid put in that advert?” said the man out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes flickering over the passers-by to left and right. “Come on then. Kept me waiting long enough.” He began to move off toward the tube station.

  “Where are we going?”

  “See the gentleman who wants to buy your boat, of course.”

  Bert stopped dead. Panic had flooded back into him, though Copper was reassuringly in the offing.

  “Why couldn’t he come himself? How do I know—?”

  “He’s a busy man. You want to sell it, or not?”

  “I’ll sell it now,” stammered Bert. “I haven’t time to go with you. My mum’s expecting me home.”

  “Anyone come with you?”

  Bert shood his head, looking up at the man with what he hoped was a passable imitation of Foxy’s wide-eyed innocent stare.

  “Because you’d better not of brought no one,” the man went on. “Let’s see it, then.”

  Bert reluctantly held out the boat. The man inspected it briefly, took off the deck, peered inside. Even Bert, who was anticipating it, could hardly follow the swift movement with which two fingers tonged the little ball of paper and palmed it