The assistants’ arms were upraised. They moved toward one another in shuffling obedience. Their eyes were furtive, startled. The grey-haired one flung himself on the alarm with the sublime élan of a Nijinsky – a movement that would have been impossible to him five minutes earlier. The jangle was deafening. But the thickset man still continued methodically stowing jewels into his open-jawed black bag for another fifteen seconds.
“For Christ’s sake!” said Rats.
The thickset man turned to go. One of the assistants moved. And Rats fired, winging him. Outside, people were running up. The thickset man was on the pavement, in the car, and Rats was at his heels. “Beat it, Jack!” he said, as they scrambled in. As the car sprang forward, a youth boldly leaped on the running board. Rats screwed down the window and just tapped him on the forehead with the butt of his revolver. His scream came faintly back to them as he fell away.
Two streets away a police car waited to intercept them. They rode out at the Packard, and to avoid it, the Packard without losing speed mounted the pavement, bumped a lamppost, swerved, and knocked down an old man.
As they tossed away over the curb they could see through the back window people gathering about the old man on the ground. They weren’t picking him up.
The thickset man kept muttering: “Faster! Faster, can’t you!” but the driver did not bother to reply. They were going like hell already, through the traffic and jumping the lights, but the police kept close on their tail. At the Paddington wharfs they abandoned the car and separated, running between the warehouses, dodging for shelter among the high blank walls.
It was Stop Pressed in the noonday editions: Bandits £20,000 jewel haul in daylight raid West End. Jeweller shot.
The police had of course several unreliable eyewitness accounts of what the men looked like; but they also had the abandoned Packard, and they hoped to get quite a few ideas from that. It did not take them long to find out it was stolen; but it seemed to the divisional inspector highly curious that the theft had not been reported. So it was given some cunningly evasive publicity in the press in the hope that it would elicit some useful response.
Edmund saw it, which is hardly surprising since he was on the look-out for it. It was almost a relief to read that it had been found, the anxiety of waiting had been so great, though it could scarcely have been connected with worse circumstances. There was no mention of the trunk. He took that for a good sign. If they had found it there would certainly have been an outcry. Still, he must find somewhere safe to lie low.
He had gone from Victoria Station to the Piccadilly Palace Hotel, as a suitably busy place where visitors could arrive at any unreasonable hour without comment. He withdrew a couple of suitcases from the Left-Luggage to provide himself with a solid appearance; they were of no use to him of course, because they only contained Genevieve’s clothes.
He arrived there in the early hours of Thursday morning (the same day as the raid), but it was not until Saturday morning that he connected it up with the stolen car that the paper was writing about at such length that morning. He realized that he must go to earth for a time. He had on him just enough cash to pay his bill at the hotel. He must not cash a check, they were too easy to trace. And then he recalled that he had pushed Genevieve’s handbag into one of the suitcases—she always carried a lot of ready money on her. He scrabbled through it eagerly. There were nearly seven pounds. There was also a gold compact and cigarette case. A lot of other junk of course, such as all women carry...
Among the old letters was one un-posted one. It was addressed to Prescott & Kale, the estate agents. He remembered that she had heard from them on Monday, inquiring whether she wished to take up her option. She had written to say she would like to renew her lease for a further three months. She had told Edmund she had. And after all she had not sent it. She had not sent it, he repeated to himself, and in a week or two the lease would run out.
It was useless to send it now, because she would not be there to sign the agreement when it came. He shuddered. He had, then, perhaps a week, perhaps more, in which to make his getaway.
He had already had to do a little shopping: toothbrush, razor, clean shirts and socks; now he bought a second-hand raincoat and snap-brim hat and a pair of glasses with heavy dark rims. Having his hair darkened, too, made a difference. Bottled suntan obscured his freckles. He found a room of sorts in a dingy house in Delancey Street, Camden Town. It smelt abominably and the whole house was alive with curious sounds at night, but he felt safer, much safer.
He would have felt considerably less at ease if he had realized that the police had found his battledress and the calico mask, where he had bundled them behind the back seat of the Packard.
The battledress was put through the usual routine and was traced, rather disappointingly, to a Major Campion of a little village called Hawkswood Bottom in Kent. However, a man went down there, merely to tidy up that end of the affair. He naturally checked up with the local police before he went to Hawkswood house and was surprised to find that the inspector there rather thought they had got something.
“But we can’t tell you where he is,” the inspector said. “We should very much like to know ourselves.”
Mrs. Wragg, who owned the little newsagent’s next door to The Condemned Man public house, identified the mask by her private mark still visible inside the cheap cotton “form.” Old Mr. Marriot up at the house had bought the last (it being really a Christmas novelty line, and just one or two left over from last year’s season) a few months ago for his grandson’s birthday.
Inspector Trevor gingerly tried it on, and stared at himself in the mirror. He put on his hat and pulled the peak low over his brows, shading its fixed imbecile smile and horribly blank blue eyes.
No wonder the child had screamed. Not nice to think you saw your father, and then discover he had quite another face – a red grinning face like a ventriloquist’s doll, fixed in a false leer.
Not nice at all.
CHAPTER 12
Mr. Roderick of Prescott & Kale, the estate agents, naturally wrote to the tenant of the Brook Street flat before the lease ran out, to ask whether she wanted to renew. He was surprised not to receive an answer. The following day he tried three times to get her on the phone, and thereafter left instructions with the office girl to ring that number whenever their phone was disengaged until she got a reply. It is contrary to the agreement of furnished premises for them to be left unoccupied by the tenant without due notification to the agent or owner; there was always the risk, for instance, of pipes bursting, taps left running, electric fires not switched off and so on. It was this that worried little Mr. Roderick, not the rent, which had been paid in advance to the end of the quarter.
So he went around with his duplicate keys to exercise his right of entry. Being an American she might not know the laws existing between tenant and landlord, she might not have read her lease attentively, and she might without thinking have gone away for a few days without telling the agent. He expected it to be something of the sort. He was thunderstruck to find she had apparently packed all her traps and left the place for good.
It was while, again in the apartment, he was checking the inventory that he saw the sealed cupboard in the bedroom; and what is more, Mr. Roderick did not remember it being sealed when he had taken the inventory in the first place. What was especially curious was that it was sealed with tape all the way round the edge. It took him quite a time to get it off. And then he had to find a key that would unlock the door (he had far too much regard for his clients’ property to think of smashing the lock; but one cupboard door key is not unlike another.
When he got the cupboard open, the poor little gentleman fainted.
*
The papers called it: MYSTERY WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN WEST END FLAT. It read this way:
A dark-haired woman in her twenties was found in the sealed cupboard of a top-floor Brook Street flat by Walter Roderick, estate agent, who had gone t
here to see the tenant of the flat. He was astonished to find the tenant had apparently left and taken all her things with her; and it was while he was checking the inventory that he noticed the sealed cupboard. Mr. Roderick could not identify the dead woman, who was wearing a red silk dressing gown, but he affirmed that the dead woman was not Mrs. Hamilton, the tenant of the furnished apartment. Mrs. Hamilton he described as a blonde about thirty years old, and a citizen of the United States. The police are anxious to trace Mrs. Hamilton, as she may be able to identify the dead girl. The garage, where she kept her car, state that Mrs. Hamilton took it out Wednesday morning. She did not mention that she would not be bringing it back. The car, a 1942 café-au-lait Packard with a New York number plate, was noticed outside the building until a late hour Wednesday night. A man who is believed to have visited her was seen to drive away about seven P.M. that evening in a Daimler car.
And so on. There were in fact two mystery women. Because where was Mrs. Hamilton? Although that aspect was not stressed in the papers, the police, from Mr. Roderick’s information, believed there was something decidedly queer about her disappearance. It was so sudden. It was considered highly probable that she could answer a great many questions about the dead girl: not only who she was and what she was doing in the cupboard, but why she was wearing an expensive dark red brocade housecoat over tattered rayon underwear and cheap walking shoes and lisle stockings. Her nails were painted, but her hands were the hands of a girl accustomed to rough work. The housecoat bore the label of a noted American house. There was a theory that she might have worked for Mrs. Hamilton as a maid, and when her mistress was out, put on, as maids will, her mistress’s housecoat in which to make an impression on her boyfriend – and then something happened and she was killed. She had been strangled.
From there it was an easy link-up with the stolen Packard of the jewel robbery. So that meant that wherever Genevieve Hamilton had disappeared to, it was not in her car that she had gone.
But there of course they were mistaken.
Dr. Paul came forward and told the police that he had visited Mrs. Hamilton by appointment, professionally, in the flat in Brook Street and had left in his Daimler a little after seven. He described her. There appeared to be no one else in the flat; she opened the door to him herself, and herself fetched glasses and so forth when he accepted a sherry before he left. He said he had met the husband on a previous occasion (this was the first the police had heard of a husband; the flat was in her name; however, they encouraged the doctor to talk). “They were only engaged when first I met them,” he said. “Hamilton was a rather stocky, red-haired chap, as I remember, but I couldn’t pretend to an accurate description.”
He laughed wryly; it had just occurred to him that they might not have been married, after all; she had an excellent reason for calling herself Mrs.
The man in the antique shop on the ground floor said the American woman had a boyfriend; he had seen him nearly every day, a rather pale-faced, soldierly looking man with leaf-brown hair and a surly expression. One or two of the girls from the Russian milliner’s workrooms also remembered seeing him on the stairs sometimes.
So it was mentioned in the papers that the police wanted to see a red-haired man in connection with the disappearance of Genevieve Hamilton from the flat where the brunette was found murdered.
Actually they knew who the brunette was now, but they chose to keep the information to themselves for a little while. The milkman knew all about the dark-haired maid in the top flat. Alice Cole her name was. Came from the midlands, Derby, or somewhere. He believed her parents lived there still. Father was a cobbler, he remembered that.
The police found her parents and she was officially identified. Once Inspector Trevor saw the significance of the anonymous khaki and the carnival mask, he handed over the Campion dossier to Scotland Yard. It was more than ever necessary to find Edmund Campion. That these curious articles were found in the Packard pointed to this being “the fabulously rich American woman” he was reputed to be in love with. They had apparently disappeared together, that seemed plain enough; and if they were in a hurry to get away (and they certainly would be in a hurry if he had just killed his wife), that would account for them not daring to report the theft of the car in the normal way. It would be wiser to lose it and save themselves alive.
There were three separate fields of inquiry: The search for the jewel thieves, who had stolen the Packard or received it knowing it to be stolen, wanted also for robbery with assault, use of firearms, manslaughter, and, very possibly, the murder of the woman Cole. There was the search for Genevieve Hamilton, who had unaccountably disappeared. And there was the search for the missing husband of the dead Linda Campion. The photograph which used to stand on Linda’s dressing table was printed off and circulated to all police stations. Even if Edmund had known this, it is doubtful whether it would have agitated him unduly. The photograph was six years old and he considered that his dark disguise radically altered his appearance.
All the same, he scarcely went out till nightfall. The papers alarmed him. He was horrified to learn that Alice Cole was found so quickly. He had reckoned on at least a month’s security from that quarter. Bad luck seemed to dog him in this affair. He felt like a fly in a spider’s web; the effort to free one limb entangled another more securely. It was horrible. And most terrifying of all to him was that no mention had been made of Alice Cole’s trunk having been found in the boot of the Packard. He could not understand why the police should keep quiet about it if they had discovered it.
It did not escape repulsive old Mrs. Sailor’s notice that the new lodger – George Hallam, as he called himself – was a devoted newspaper reader.
Edmund was perfectly aware of her inquisitive eye on him, but he rightly judged her to be suspicious by nature with a nosiness born of years of hard experience as a lodging-house keeper in a London slum. As he was naturally reticent it was not difficult for him to be secretive; he had no fear of giving anything away.
Nor would he have, if he had not seen two policemen on the doorstep as he leaned out of the window. One of them stepped back and looked up, as if to see whether it had stopped raining; and Edmund ducked quickly in again. He opened his door and, picking up his raincoat, tiptoed to the stairs. He heard Mrs. Sailor twang: “Well, come in, then.” And then those ponderous boots. And the front door slamming.
Beyond that he dared not wait. He had no time to lose. The fact is, he had lost his head, because he had the notion that policemen always went in pairs when they were going to make an arrest. He just took the time to lock his bedroom door, knowing that would hold them for a few minutes longer, and then he slid up the landing window and threw his leg over the sill. Below him a maze of grim washing hung on strings. He dropped onto the soot-black wall beyond which the goods trains shuttled purposelessly all day long. He slithered down onto the track, which rendered him liable to prosecution, and walked slowly in the direction of Mornington Crescent. He treated himself to a wash and brush-up at Dirty Dicks, thrown in for the price of a pint. The doors of the Gaumont were just opening. CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE was written in coloured glass letters across the porch. It was warm and dark inside, and he had such an embryonic longing for warmth and darkness. He pushed a shilling over the brass-topped desk and entered. He stayed there till ten-thirty that night chiding the notice of usherettes by the simple expedient of moving every now and again to different parts of the house.
He dared not wander the streets for fear of being picked up. He was afraid to go back to his lodgings. He found a doss in Bayham Street and paid in advance because he had no baggage. The bed was filthy and rats ran across the floor. He sat up all night. But at least he did not dream.
The policemen had called at the Delancey Street lodging house to check up on an alien who had tactlessly omitted to register his departure. Mrs. Sailor was a land lady who liked to keep on the right side of the police. “A woman alone...” she would begin morosely, inserting a
finger between the greasy wool turban and the matted hair and having a good scratch.
She soon noticed the draft from the landing window and wondered who the devil had had the bloody sauce to open it. And what for, she immediately asked herself. With her life, she was not slow to jump to the obvious conclusion. She had seen the top-floor go out very bright and early; he had come down to the basement to tell her, as if his own virtue astounded him, that he was going straight to the labour exchange. Wasn’t the whole performance a little over ostentatious? Might it not have been a ruse? And she rushed upstairs to see whether the top-floor had sneaked back to collect his things and clear. He had not. She came down more slowly and stooped to squint through Hallam’s keyhole. The key was not in the lock; that meant he was not in the room.
She turned the handle gingerly.
No, he’d locked it as usual and gone out – only that meant he’d managed to get out without passing her in the hall. So the cops had put the wind up him! She’d summed him up all right. “That’s right, ducky!” she commended herself, and vigorously scratched her poll.
When he did not return all night, she considered herself quite within her rights as a respectable landlady to have a poke at his luggage. He’d left a bottle of suntan behind him in his flight, she noticed. Even poor old Sailors-don’t-care, as her pals called her, knew enough to recognize the worth of the alligator case and the pigskin one. It was a pleasure for such a skilled workman as she was to pick their locks – it was one of the few things besides gin that she still enjoyed.
She gasped an obscenity at the sight of the furbelows within. Her filthy old hands lovingly stroked the satin, the chiffons clung to her roughened fingers. Oh, the lustful little nighties! Her imagination rioted squalidly. She went through everything methodically. Luckily for Mrs. Sailor’s moral welfare, Genevieve’s furs, Genevieve’s jewels were in the big trunk; the suitcases held mainly underwear, shoes, and bags. All the same, it was only uneasiness about their source that prevented old Sailors-don’t-care from secreting some of the things under her skirt before she went to the police. Because, as she said with plain logic, ‘What’s he doing with two cases full of women’s clothes, and not even a collar of his own?’
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