Dishonour Among Thieves

by E. C. R. Lorac

  “The road’s lousy with police,” he thought, and wondered if the fell side would shortly be too. Not that he bothered a great deal about an immediate search; he was too well concealed and he could see without being seen—an enormous advantage. If pursuit came his way he could crawl up the gully to the crest of the fell before anybody could reach him, and once over the top—well, he knew the ground and he counted on being able to get away, or to take cover in the gullys which sloped down to the next small valley. The fell side, which looked an unbroken stretch, covered with last year’s heather and grasses, was cut up by small ravines or ghylls, and offered a lot of excellent cover.

  The fugitive stayed for a long while in his pit, comfortably aware of the crevices into which he could crawl if any pursuit occurred; he had known his hidey hole for a long time, and no one had ever found him once he had taken to this particular burrow. He watched until he saw the two men leave High Garth and then he risked creeping on. The sun was going down now, and soon the evening shadows would crop on. He hauled himself over the lip of the pit and crawled up one of the dry ravines to the ridge immediately above him. Beyond that there was a dip in the ground and beyond that dip the fell side rose again steadily to the ridge which formed the skyline to the south of Fellcock and High Garth. He was now nearly half a mile from either house, too far away for any observer in either house to see him, but he still kept to his cautious mode of progress, crawling, face to the ground. It would be dark soon, and then he could make a break and stretch himself. There was no hurry, he wanted darkness to carry out the plan he had in mind. “Wait till they’re all asleep,” he said to himself. “Blokes who’ve been working hard all day, like them poor devils do, don’t wake up that easily.”

  Darkness came at last and he stood up thankfully, cramped and cold. He had been sweating when he started his escape and the crawl had been hard work. Now the night wind cut through his sweat-drenched clothes and he shivered. Glancing back, all he could see was a light shining in the kitchen window of Fellcock. High Garth was in total darkness and he could not even make out the black bulk of the house. Not that he wanted to see it, he hated the house anyway. An idea flashed across his mind: he could fire the place, the old house and its old furniture would burn like a bonfire, and even if the valley fire brigade came up, there was no pressure of water for their hoses. It was an idea he had often toyed with: “Burn the bloody place. I’d like to see that bum.” But caution prevailed again. He’d done pretty well so far, he was as good as clear. He had come over the fell by devious routes that afternoon, to “have a look see,” to consider getting into the house and setting fire to it. It was generally solitary enough, he knew that, apart from the chap who came to fodder the beasts in the shippon. But today it had not been solitary. He had seen Mr. Brough walk across from Fellcock, and had not worried. The old farmer often came up to look at his beasts: he never bothered about the house. Mr. Brough had been followed by the blighter from Fellcock. The fugitive had heard about Macdonald’s purchase of that property and had not liked what he had heard. This afternoon the fugitive had seen the two men approach the kitchen door and then unlock and unbar it and go inside, and fear had taken hold of him, for he knew what they would find there. With knees shaking and heart pounding he had fallen flat on his face, crouching in a terror which robbed his limbs of strength, his mind of the power to think. He had lain there and then, at long last, lifted his head because he had to see, something impelled him to look. It was a mistake and he knew it, but panic had possessed him. Then he crawled away, back behind Fellcock, and only then had he stood up, to get away more quickly. He’d been a fool, and he knew it, but it hadn’t turned out so badly. He was all right now, no one could ever catch him on the fell side in the dark. With the kindly darkness all around him, he swung his arms to get the circulation going, and then, half crouching, he set about the climb to the final ridge; it was stiff going. He paused at times to get his breath—and to listen; but there was no sound save the night wind, and he felt better now that exercise had subdued the rigor of cold which had unmanned him. A chilled man shivers, a frightened man shivers, and the fugitive knew from experience that the rigor of cold can pass all too easily into the rigor of fear. With bent knees and hunched shoulders he made his way up the ridge—it was steep, but the effort warmed him. He had put about a mile between himself and the two farmsteads, and he had about four miles to go to carry out his plan, and plenty of time to do it. Remembering that there was another crevice ahead, he promised himself a cigarette. He could lie flat and conceal the flicker of a match with his own solid body. There was no one nearer to him than the folk in the farmhouse below, he knew that because he had listened, ear to the ground, for following footsteps.

  Finding his sheltering crevice, he crouched in it and lighted a cigarette. Still with his face to the ground, his cupped hands concealing the tiny glow of his fag, he drew the comforting tobacco smoke into his lungs; it was better than food. Now that he was warm and had had a smoke, he felt his own man again, something quite different from the shivering terror-stricken fugitive of an hour ago. Things were in his own hands now, he told himself. He knew just what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. Only a short way ahead, on the top of the next rise, he would be able to see where he was going.

  He got to his feet again and strode up the slope: at the top he gave a gasp of satisfaction. That was it, way down there, and it was fine to see lights and signs of life again after the blanketing darkness and loneliness of the fell side. He was looking down on the pipe-line encampment and he knew each of the blocks from which the lights shone out. The men’s common room, the small canteen. All the chaps would be snug down there, listening to the radio, watching TV, playing cards, reading papers, enjoying a cup of char in the small canteen. He picked out the windows of the manager’s office and he knew that some of the smaller windows were the men’s sleeping quarters. To the right of the main buildings, he knew, was an open space, concreted, where the lorries were parked. Even as he watched, he saw another line of light, which seemed to stretch out right across the distance, and he said to himself, “Boy, that’s it, the railway—not so far away, neither. That’ll suit me fine.”

  He would have to wait, he knew, until all those lights in the huts were put out, until total darkness indicated that everybody was asleep. There were no guards posted down there and he knew it. He thought of his route, not the main track, the concreted road which had been laid so that supply vans and the engineers’ cars could reach the camp from Oakham in the valley far below. It would be a mug’s game to take that road, he could be pursued by any fast-moving vehicle, pursued and caught. He meant to take the rougher track which followed the pipe line itself; it would take him three miles. If he managed to get “one o’ them bleeding lorries” started up, he could follow the track, even bump over the fell, until such time as he judged it wiser to jump and let the lorry wreck itself on the incline, so that it looked as though the driver—who had disappeared—must have been killed. They could waste time looking for his body and he would be hurrying across towards the railway line which would take him to the anonymity of industrial cities. No one had seen him, he argued to himself, only that old “b——” who came hurrying away from High Garth, and he wasn’t going to do any talking yet a while.

  Stretching out on the ground again, the fugitive watched the lighted encampment and noticed that some of the lights were no longer shining. It was after ten now, and the men were generally early to bed, dog tired after their heavy working day.

  2

  In the big hut, the men had ceased talking; several of them were half-asleep already, lulled by the croon of the radio. They had been talking, inevitably, about the news from High Garth and about the police officer who had come up to the camp with old Mr. Staple.

  “We was in luck, if you think it out,” said Barney White to Tom Martin. “ ’Tisn’t many afternoons the gang bosses can swear there wasn’t a chap missing from the job, and that Lawley, he�
�s a truthful cove, he’d never swear to what he wasn’t sure of, not even to help a pal out of a difficulty.”

  “True enough,” agreed Martin. “The cops can’t pin this job on any of us.” He sat in silence after that, thinking hard. He was thinking of the man who had attacked the farmer on the fell side, and got clear away, seemingly.

  “I wonder which way he went,” pondered Tom Martin. “He’d never have gone down to the valley. There’s always chaps working on the land, and they’re quick to spot a stranger if so be he was a stranger, and if he wasn’t he’d have been careful no one set eyes on him: and that road down there in the valley, ’tis a busy road, cars passing all the time and mostly local folks in the cars. Reckon he didn’t go down to the valley. If he wanted to beat it, safer to come up the fell, this way. Once the whistle’s gone and work’s finished, there’s no one around here and after dark he could walk miles, knowing no one could see him.”

  “Walk miles,” he echoed to himself; “it’s miles right enough.” Then he remembered the lorries, parked on the clearing beyond the huts. “If he’s smart with engines, one o’ those lorries would just suit him,” thought Martin. “It’d be worth watching out in case he tries to be clever. You never know, this may be journey’s end and quite time, too,” he added to himself.

  3

  The fugitive waited until nearly midnight before he closed in to the encampment; every light was off now, the place in total darkness. The sky was clear and a moon was shining from the south, so that he had no difficulty in making his way round die angle of the big hut and on to the concrete where the lorries were parked. He went down on his hands and knees here and kept in the shadow of the lorries, because he realised that when he was upright the moon threw his own shadow, surprisingly black, on the white concrete. Not that he thought that anybody would be looking out from one of those black window spaces—“too tired, poor beggars,” he meditated. He crept up behind each lorry in turn and examined its registration number in the faint light reflected up from the surprisingly light concrete. He knew exactly which lorry he wanted. Months ago he had driven one of those lorries and he had pocketed the ignition key before he left, one of those pieces of forethought of which he was capable. He had been completely silent in his movements up to now, and there was silence all around him, not a soul stirred. He crouched down by the bonnet of the lorry for a few moments and felt it with his hands. It was warm, his luck was in. The engine would start at a touch and then he would let in the gear and plunge off, over the concrete, across the road which led direct to the valley, to that other track he knew about, and then—pound over the fell for a bit before he abandoned the old vehicle in the quarry pit over yonder.

  With thumping heart, he raised himself and got into the driver’s cab. He had no idea that someone had crept up behind the lorry, someone who moved as silently as he did himself. The other man stood there, quite still, with one hand on the edge of the lorry’s body, one foot pressed against the backboard, poised, ready. He never stirred until the driver was in the cab and had pulled the self-starter. The noise was surprising in the stillness and still more startling was the roar of the engine as it fired. The man at the rear gave one heave of his supple body and then he was up, balanced on the tailboard and then over into the empty space of the lorry. The driver could hear nothing, he jerked into gear and the cumbersome vehicle lurched off, clear of the concrete, across the official road and on to the bumpy track and the cover of the hilly fell side. The driver said, “I’ve done it . . . I’ve done it.” He had no inkling that he had a passenger behind, still less that the passenger might well be named Nemesis. The passenger crawled forward until he was close against the driver’s cab. Over one arm hung a coil of rope and he knew just what he meant to do with it.

  4

  Lawley was the first person to wake up when the noise of the engine shattered the silence. He heaved out of bed, heavy with sleep, and went along to Wharton.

  “Hear that, Chief? Someone’s made off with one of the old lorries.”

  Wharton sat up and stretched. “We shall have to chase him. I’ll get my car out, it’s faster than any of the lorries.”

  “No go, Chief. If you catch up in a car, he’ll be able to smash you off the road, whoever he is. A car can’t argue with a lorry. I’ll get the new lorry started up, that’s faster than the old ones. One thing, there’s only the one road, it’ll simply be a matter of tailing him until we reach a main road or a telephone.”

  “All right, Lawley, I’ll be with you in a brace of shakes. Better get some clothes on, it’s pretty nippy. Who the hell do you think has played us this trick?”

  “None of our chaps. More likely something to do with the High Garth story. Well, the only thing to do is to chase him, and ram him when we catch up. I’ll get Weldon to come along with us. O.K., I’ll just get the new Bedford started up.”

  Chapter Eleven

  MACDONALD DROVE to Leverstone early the next morning, leaving the investigation in Lunesdale to be pursued by Bord and his men from Camton. At the C.I.D. headquarters in Leverstone (a gloomy building in a gloomy industrial city), Macdonald was welcomed by Chief Inspector Tring, an experienced investigator of forty-five, whose eyes were lively and youthful, despite his greying hair.

  “I’m right glad to see you, Super,” said Tring. “You’re one of the chaps I’ve long wanted to meet. As it happened, when you’ve been on the job in this country before, your cases had no connection with our city and so we didn’t happen to meet. This time, the reverse is true. The man whose body you found (in a derelict farmhouse, I understand) was a criminal we’ve been trying to trace for months. The pathologists sent his fingerprints along, and though circumstances didn’t permit of first-rate impressions, the dabs and the general description of physical traits leave no room for doubt. Your man was known to us as Wally Millstone, a chap with a lifetime of thieving behind him, who’s been ‘inside’ time after time.”

  “Millstone,” echoed Macdonald, and Tring rejoined:

  “You wouldn’t remember his name. He never hit the headlines, he was just one of those tiresome fools who never learnt by experience. But maybe you heard of the theft at Raine’s Wharf, a furrier’s warehouse down by the canal, when a night watchman was coshed.”

  “Yes. I remember that You caught one of the thieves and he was sent to Dartmoor, because he was given a long sentence.”

  “Ten years,” agreed Tring. “He was lucky—the night watchman didn’t die, or he might have hung for it. It was a dastardly business.”

  “And the man who was sent to Dartmoor was named Rory Macshane,” went on Macdonald, “and he broke prison last month and got clear away, but where does Millstone come into the story?”

  “There were three men associated in that warehouse theft,” said Tring. “We knew there were three, they were seen on the canal bank before they broke in. Three, but we only caught one—Macshane, and he took the rap. We found a set of fingerprints on a door handle, those were Millstone’s —your bloke. I always reckoned he made those fingerprints when he was getting away. The doorknob was stiff and he couldn’t turn it with gloves on, couldn’t get a grip, or that’s how I thought it was. He’d got gloves all right, we found the one he dropped. It looked to me as though he was in a panic and all he could think of was getting away; same with the second chap, whose identity we don’t know. They dropped their loot and got out on to the towing path, because we found their footsteps. As I see it, they realised that our chaps were at the front and sides of the warehouse, so two of them, Millstone and another, beat it by the back and got on to the towing path. They dropped their loot, because they’d coshed the night watchman, one of them, and they didn’t fancy being caught for that job. The only one who stood his ground was Rory Macshane, and we picked him up, just as the others made their getaway. Rory acted as cover to the others in a manner of speaking. I didn’t feel all that happy about it, Super. We had no proof that Rory had done the coshing, but he was there, with the night watchma
n at his feet, when our chaps got in—and that was that. He wasn’t easy to take either, they said he fought like a wild thing, which didn’t do him any good.”

  “What did Macshane say? Didn’t he give you a lead about the other two?”

  “He did not. He said he didn’t know them, and that’s all he ever did say. We advised him to turn Queen’s Evidence, but he wouldn’t utter. We couldn’t get a word out of him about himself, either. We didn’t know anything about him until he got away from Dartmoor, and then, when his photograph was published, a small cockney bloke rolled into his local police station with that photograph. ‘I know this chap,’ he said; ‘but he wasn’t called Rory Macshane when I knew him. He was Robert O’Hara in Stalag X, and he got away from there, escaped by cutting a hole through the cellar wall. He not only got out, he stayed out, they never caught him. He was the only escaper who ever got clean away from Stalag X. He got to Switzerland. He was a hero, Robert O’Hara was, and if I knew where he was right now, I wouldn’t give him away. No chap ever had a better pal than Robert O’Hara. And it was true in the main,” added Tring thoughtfully. “Rory Macshane was Robert O’Hara, and Stalag X was on the borders of Lower Silesia and Robert O’Hara walked to Switzerland.”

  “I don’t wonder he got away from Dartmoor then,” said Macdonald. “So far as escaping goes, he was an expert, he knew all there was to know.”

  “Admitted,” said Tring, “but why did a chap like that ever take to crime, he had a good army record and his escape from Stalag X was what you might call an escaping classic, a brilliant piece of work.”

  “You and I were never P.O.W.s in a German punishment camp,” said Macdonald. “I’m quite willing to believe it was an experience to develop the worst in human nature; it also developed the ability to steal and to hide things. Every potential escaper had to keep his eyes open for items which might aid his project, from concrete to electric flex, from ‘goon’ uniforms to passes and identity cards. Having acquired the necessary by skilful thieving, the escaper concealed his loot by taking advantage of any possible cover. Come to think of it, it was the sort of experience which might develop an antisocial habit of mind in any young, impressionable active fellow. Incidentally, what sort of character did the Dartmoor staff give Rory Macshane as a prisoner?”