Ransom Town

by Roderic Jeffries

  The extendable ladder was up on the roof rafters and without the door being open it was a difficult struggle to get it down, but he finally succeeded. He pushed it through the broken window.

  He placed the ladder, extended, against the wall beneath the back bedroom window and climbed up. As he reached the top, the glass of the window shattered and flames leapt out, missing him only because they were sucked upwards. No one inside could still be alive.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fusil stared at number one, Hatton Close. From ground level outside one saw shattered windows and smoke-stained brickwork, but that was all. Yet a twelve-year-old boy had been burned to death inside.

  Basil had been one year older than Timothy. What if he were looking at his own home, knowing it was Timothy’s grave . . .

  ‘What a bastard!’ said the assistant fire investigating officer, a tall redhead who had the look of a basset hound about him. ‘The kid never had a chance because the place went up like a rocket.’

  ‘So was it arson?’

  He hunched his shoulders to raise the collar of his mackintosh higher. ‘A sudden, violent fire, probably with two seats, very thick, acrid smoke . . . There can’t be much doubt.’

  ‘When will you know for certain?’

  ‘Maybe when we can get inside. But I reckon you can take it now that it was firebombs and petrol. One of the troubles will be that petrol doesn’t normally leave any traces unless there’s an unburned edge formation around the place where it was sprinkled.’ He suddenly slammed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. ‘Didn’t the bastards give a damn that there was a kid of twelve inside?’

  A child’s life meant nothing to them when it was stacked up against millions, thought Fusil with fierce hatred.

  ‘Are you getting anywhere in identifying them?’

  ‘Not so far. Every bloody lead finishes in a dead end.’

  ‘Then the money’s got to be paid.’

  Fusil was silent. Now they were eyeball to eyeball with the impossible dilemma which always faced the law when men without pity blackmailed it.

  Two hoses had been used to cool down the interior of the house and now one of these was turned off. A fireman climbed over the window-sill of the sitting-room and they watched him as he carefully picked his way over the burned-out rubble.

  ‘How long after the fires have the letters been arriving?’ asked the assistant fire investigating officer.

  ‘It’s always been the following afternoon.’

  ‘So there could be one this afternoon?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Can’t you trace them back?’

  ‘Cheap mass-produced paper and envelopes. They’re sold all over the country. The same typewriter, an Olympia, typed all three, but that’s useless information until one has a machine for comparison tests. Postmarks were Newcastle, Fortrow, and London: if there’s a meaningful pattern there I can’t see it, unless it’s the obvious, negative one of using different places to prevent pinpointing any one.’

  ‘Someone outside the mob must know who they are.’

  ‘There’s five thousand on offer for the first grasser to come in with hard news: most grassers would sell their sisters into a harem for half that. So the fact there hasn’t been a useful whisper means we’re up against a mob with really tight security who probably haven’t ever before pulled a job remotely like this one.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone see them setting fire to the place?’

  ‘Door to door questioning is going on now, but I wouldn’t give a tinker’s spit for the chances of learning anything really useful.’ With that last sentence, his voice expressed all the angry, bitter frustration which he was experiencing.

  *

  To many, D.C. Smith seemed a man who could look on tragedy without any emotion other, perhaps, than a faint curiosity. But this was an entirely false picture. When young he’d been brought up by foster parents who’d believed that children were possessed of a devil who could only be driven forth by harsh discipline and so he had learned to keep his emotions very well hidden: a habit which had never left him.

  He spoke quietly to the couple who lived in number twelve, Hatton Close. ‘Were you awake at all during the first part of the night?’

  The husband answered first. ‘I don’t know about Pam, but I did wake up once. I checked the time, saw it was half two and just turned over and went back to sleep.’

  ‘And you, madam?’

  ‘I slept through until the fire engine arrived. Then we both got up and looked out. The Roskills’ place was in flames. God, it was awful!’

  ‘Who was outside in the street when you first looked?’

  ‘There were just a few people by the front garden. David and Evelyn were running backwards and forwards . . .’ She moved close to her husband, seeking his assurance that nothing so terrible could ever happen to them. He put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Did either of you go out?’

  ‘I did,’ the husband answered. ‘I made Pam stay because it was horrible enough inside, let alone out there hearing the noise, feeling the heat, and seeing David and Evelyn . . . I thought I might be able to do something. Of course, I couldn’t do a bloody thing.’

  ‘How long did you stay outside?’

  He spoke to his wife. ‘How long d’you reckon I was out?’

  ‘It must have been about an hour.’

  ‘I suppose you talked to people in the road?’ asked Smith.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Was there anyone there you didn’t know?’

  He looked puzzled.

  ‘The reason for asking is that sometimes a fire is started by a person who’s queer enough to get his kicks from watching it, so he stays around.’

  ‘There wasn’t anyone I didn’t recognize except one man and he was talking to the Patricks who obviously knew him.’ The husband hesitated, then said: ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I was due at the office half an hour ago. If there’s any way I can help, any way at all, I’ll stay on and ring and tell ’em I won’t be in. But if there isn’t, I ought to get moving.’

  ‘No, I don’t think there’s anything more to ask you. Thanks for all your help.’

  Out in the road, Smith looked back at the fire-damaged house. If he could get hold of the men who’d set this fire, he’d hang them with his own hands, without a second’s thought or the slightest compunction.

  *

  In the brown-painted parade room at divisional H.Q., hung with photos of wanted men and snaps of local residents who were suspected of housebreaking, the duty sergeant said to the duty inspector: ‘I’ve had a word with all the men on night turn and especially with the P.C. who had Hatton Close in his beat. None of ’em noticed any car which aroused suspicion and two three seven says that he checked the Close twice and neither time was there anything there.’

  The duty inspector sighed. It had been a thin chance at best, but very occasionally thin chances turned up.

  ‘Nothing in from Traffic?’ asked the sergeant.

  ‘Nothing useful.’

  *

  The nurse said: ‘He got burned and quite badly bruised on his hip, but it’s shock which is affecting him most. He’s under sedation so you’ll find him a bit confused.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ said Campson.

  ‘He’s in the end bed, behind the screen. Keep the interview as short as you can and whatever you do, don’t get him excited.’

  Excited was a funny word to have used, thought Campson, as he walked down the ward: to him, excited suggested a pleasant course.

  He parted the curtains and stepped inside. Roskill’s head was bandaged, adding to the pallor of his face, and his eyes were underlaid by dark half moons of mental exhaustion.

  Campson sat. ‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Campson. I’m terribly sorry about what’s happened.’ He paused. ‘I’m afraid that now I’ve got to ask you some questions.’

  Roskill nodded.

  ‘Can you think of a
ny reason why someone should have set fire to your house?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You haven’t recently had a row with anyone? I don’t mean the kind you have with a neighbour when his dog keeps digging up your lawn, but the kind where people get really heated?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you run into trouble with anyone at work?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could anyone think he’s got a grudge against you because of money matters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let’s talk about the last few days. Have you seen any strangers around your house, or cars parked nearby, which you didn’t recognize? Have there been any odd telephone calls with the line going dead as soon as the receiver’s been picked up?’

  ‘No.’

  These were the answers which Campson had expected. If the fire had been set by the mob who were holding the town to ransom, then Roskill’s house would have been chosen completely at random.

  *

  ‘How long have we got?’ asked Menton, as he stood by the window of the room he was using. The strain under which he was working was making him look old and battered.

  ‘All we can do is guess,’ replied Fusil. ‘There was a gap of one day between the first and second fire, but those two were to convince us they meant business. There was a gap of two days between the second and this, the third one. You can see a sequence there and project it, but I don’t think that’s right. They’ve raised the ransom to four million. That’s a hell of a sum, but one or two crimes around the world have just about matched it. The next step is eight million. Can they really expect to go for that much?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain precisely, but I reckon there’s a point for most people at which large sums of money cease to be realistic. For me, eight million’s no longer realistic.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re ambitious,’ said Menton, with bitter sarcasm.

  ‘All right, sir, that’s hardly a definite point. So let’s move on to the threats. We’ve had a small fire, a bigger one, and a fatal one. Now the pressure’s really on, hard and biting. The public’s seen photos of a stretcher with a sheet over it being carried out of a burned-out building and they know there was a twelve-year-old corpse under that sheet. They can clearly visualize their own families under sheets and they’re really scared so they’re going to demand, and go on demanding, that the ransom’s paid and they can close down their imaginations. But if there’s another fatal fire, even if several people get killed in it, that pressure is ironically going to slip just a fraction because it will all have happened before and so it becomes familiar and what’s become familiar is part way to being accepted. Wars have proved that repeated horrors lessen their impact. So I reckon there’ll be a pause now to let the maximum degree of public pressure break us.’

  ‘In other words, you say we’ve got more time in which to track down these bastards?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But you could be wrong. And if we play with time which we haven’t got, there could be a fire with fifty, a hundred, people murdered in it.’

  ‘There’s always the possibility of being wrong.’

  ‘But not with such terrible results.’

  There was nothing more which could be said.

  Menton brushed his hair back from his forehead with the palm of his hands. ‘It’s the helplessness that’s choking me, Fusil. We don’t know a damn thing more about this mob than when we started.’

  ‘I know. I woke up in the middle of the night and went over and over the facts, trying to find out what we’d missed, what we weren’t doing which we should. I couldn’t think of a thing.’

  ‘And you didn’t get back to sleep either?’

  *

  The news was given out on the evening radio and TV broadcasts. Although the police had specifically asked that it be made clear that there was as yet still no absolute proof that the fatal fire had been the work of the blackmailing mob, the tragic incident was inevitably treated in a dramatic light and more than one commentator talked about the last warning before the threatened holocaust.

  The phones in the operations room were inundated with calls: at one point fuses blew in the main telephone exchange. Before there had been disquiet, now there was something very close to panic. An innocent boy had been burned to death and the law had been unable to do anything to prevent this: if it could happen to one boy, it could happen to a hundred shoppers, or two hundred dancers in a discothèque, or three hundred listeners at a concert. People telephoned in to demand special protection, to name suspects, to describe in the minutest detail events which they now considered unusual. . . . The police simply couldn’t keep up with the flood of information, despite the fact that many more men were drafted in to process and follow it up. And as the unchecked reports mounted in numbers, the detectives and uniform men vainly cursed because somewhere amongst those reports might lie the first lead they so desperately sought, yet by the time they came to it and recognized it for what it was they might easily be too late.

  *

  The mayor of Fortrow met the local M.P. in the latter’s home. The mayor was the son of a Cypriot immigrant, a conservative, and the owner of a drapers which made a steady but unspectacular profit; the M.P. was labour, a very large landowner, and his house was a Georgian mansion which had been built for one of his ancestors. Since neither man had a marked sense of humour, they both failed to appreciate the irony of the circumstances.

  The blue room at Veralem Hall, whose moulded ceiling had been designed by James Lunt the Younger, was the smaller of the two drawing-rooms. The furniture was early Georgian and very good, the five oil paintings were by a Victorian artist who had just come back into fashion, and in two large bow-fronted cabinets was the third best collection of seventeenth-century Japanese lacquer in the country. The enormous carpet was a rare Mortlake.

  ‘What I want to know,’ said the mayor, his voice roughly accented, ‘is what are we going to do.’

  ‘Quite so,’ murmured the M.P., who often had difficulty in concealing his sardonic contempt for the ordinary man in whose name he helped to rule the country.

  ‘It just ain’t no good going on and on waiting for the police – they aren’t getting anywhere.’

  ‘I really don’t think it’s fair to speak quite like that when . . .’

  ‘Fair or not, it’s a fact. I’ve had a word with that detective in charge: very smooth and full of flam. But all what he said didn’t add up to a damn thing. They’ve no idea who’s behind the arson and they can’t begin to guarantee there won’t be a terrible tragedy.’

  ‘We surely have to give them time?’

  ‘Then has someone told them murdering bastards they’ve got to give ’em time as well?’

  ‘Look, Alec, what I’m really saying is that at all costs we mustn’t panic. After all, that’s the whole object of the blackmailers: not to set another terrible fire, but to panic us into paying the ransom.’

  ‘Their last letter said there ain’t much time left.’

  ‘The police have repeatedly advised against giving in to the demand.’

  ‘What else d’you expect ’em to do? Admit straight off they can’t do their job?’

  ‘That’s not being fair to them.’

  ‘It’s their job to protect us from murderers and it’s clear they can’t. So that money’s got to be paid.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I did have a word with the Home Secretary over the phone on this point. Frankly, it’s not going to be all that easy. Remember, it’s not the country which is being held to ransom, it’s Fortrow. So there is a case for saying that if the ransom has to be paid, Fortrow must find the money and as that obviously would take time . . .’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Précising his circumlocutory style, yes.’

  ‘Then you get on back to that silly bastard and tell him to come and live in Fortrow for the next week and see if he still feels the same.’

/>   The M.P. smiled. ‘Rather too practical an exercise in politics for a man of his persuasion, I feel.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kerr walked away from the garage at which he had been talking to one of the petrol-pump attendants. The attendant had previously reported that a car owner had stopped and bought four gallons of petrol in two two-gallon cans. Wasn’t that unusual at this time of the year when no one was cutting grass or racing outboards? . . . He’d agreed, thanked the man for being so observant, and didn’t point out that perhaps the car owner had a chainsaw and made up his own two-stroke mixture or a four-stroke cultivator and a lot of land to work. The car number would be fed into the computer for identification, the owner questioned, and one more report dealt with.

  He came to a side road and stopped for the traffic and as he waited he noticed the nameplate – Bretton Lane: Mrs Prosser lived in this road. He hesitated, not wanting to ‘waste’ the time, but common sense assured him that it would take much more time to make a special journey here on some other occasion.

  It took him over half an hour, during which time he drank one gin and Mrs Prosser drank three and repeatedly informed him that he was the most handsome young man she had ever met, to discover that she could tell him nothing fresh about Albert Mickey’s financial circumstances: in so far as she had ever known, he’d never had any money and where the fifty-two pounds could have come from was a mystery.

  Kerr went up to the room in which Mickey had lived and Mrs Prosser followed him, telling him in a husky voice that she hadn’t the heart to clean out the place because the memories were still too painful. He suggested she return downstairs so as not to upset herself any further. For a while she was torn between the desire to see what was going on and to maintain the picture of a grief-stricken woman, then she finally left and went downstairs to the comfort of a fourth gin.

  If Mickey had put the black on someone, then it must have been a strong black or Mickey would not have been murdered. In that case, he surely wouldn’t have settled for a mere fifty-two pounds?