The Toff Breaks In

by John Creasey

  He father had been worried of late, although he had scoffed when she had said so.

  And Chamberlain, the man she had never liked, had sent him to the house.

  Chamberlain …

  Panic threatened again when she thought of the negro and the Chinaman, but either she was too physically exhausted for it to gain a complete hold, or her strength of will was enabling her to visualise it without losing her self-control. She could remember every word the men had said.

  ‘We’ve found yuh, okay.’

  Had they been looking for her father?

  Had they known beforehand where he was likely to be?

  Or had the Rolls-Royce been followed?

  She tried to think of what would happen. No one knew where they had come that morning, as far as she was aware. Except Chamberlain, of course. But her father had been killed, the police would discover that, and she …

  They must find her.

  She shivered as the possibility that they would not passed through her mind. Then she tried to imagine why she should be kept there, whether she played any part in the conspiracy against her father. It seemed quite certain that she had been living with him without realising that he was in danger, that his murder had been the result of a gradual building-up of circumstances. An odd, uncommunicative but lovable man, James Sanderson.

  She bit her lips suddenly, felt tears rising to her eyes.

  She did not know how long she cried, nor how many minutes or hours passed before the door was opened, and a man whom she could see only vaguely because of the semi-darkness released her hands, let her drink water, put sandwiches of some kind on a chair next to the bed, and then went out. Her hands were free, but ominous in her ears was the sound of the key turning in the lock.

  That silent visit made the room more uncanny, more eerie, and it increased her fear. But by bringing her face to face with the danger that might threaten her it dimmed the horror of the murder, although she did not fully realise it just then.

  The affair of the murdered tramp – ‘tramp’ assumed by the police and the Press, even if the Toff was still inclined to his own theory, and doubted whether it was the body of a vagrant – was one, the Toff would say, of delayed action. Not his first nor his last of the kind, although usually he sailed into his opponents earlier in the chase. Having no known opponents was a distinct disadvantage.

  Some hope came with the call of Bill, from the Putney garage, late on the evening when he had cried off the match at Hersham. Jolly, who appeared to consider some of the Toff ’s friends as proof that the Toff ’s soul was in jeopardy, announced a Mr. Smith gloomily.

  ‘Usher Mr. Smith in,’ said the Toff.

  Bill advanced, mufflered and breezy, shook hands heartily, and yet sat on the edge of a chair.

  ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ he said when the Toff suggested beer. ‘Um. You know a thing or two, you do. That didn’t come out of no four-ale bar.’

  ‘A compliment for you, Jolly,’ said the Toff, and Jolly – standing by the door – forgot himself so far as to grimace. ‘Jolly looks after all the beer here, Bill. I look after the wines.’

  ‘Ain’t got no time for short drinks,’ said Bill with complete aplomb. He refused a Virginia 3, and rolled shag in a soiled cigarette-paper. ‘I bin snoopin’, sir.’

  ‘And I gather with purpose.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bill, and lit his cigarette with enjoyment. ‘Dougall an’ ‘I Ling, that’s them.’

  ‘“Them” being who?’

  ‘Darkie an’ the Chink,’ said Bill with satisfaction. ‘I noo I’d find ’em if you wasn’t imagering them. They ’angs out at the ‘Steam Packet’ a lot by night. Coupla nasty bits o’ work, I believe. Nigger Dougall, they calls ’im. Come over from the ’Ook some munce ago, an’ they’ve bin layin’ low.’

  The Toff translated silently.

  Nigger Dougall and Hi Ling spent a considerable time at the ‘Steam Packet’, an East End pub of unsavoury reputation and notorious friendliness towards wanted men. They had reached this country from Holland, and for some months they had not been active – as far as their few acquaintances knew.

  ‘Bill, you’re a treasure,’ praised the Toff. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘’Ow much do you want fer yer pint?’ demanded Bill, grinning and revealing the gaps between his strong but yellowing teeth.

  ‘Make it two pints,’ said the Toff. ‘So that’s the lot?’

  ‘On the up-an’-up, I don’t know anuvver thing.’

  ‘Right,’ said the Toff. ‘Keep that ear to the ground, and now run along and try to make the engine of that Vauxhall go everytime you press the self-starter, instead of once in three.’

  Bill departed, confiding to Jolly that he was a card, he was, and the Toff looked at his watch, to find that it was half past eight. He called the Yard, and learned that McNab had been working late. Yes, he would see Rollison, but not to dispense free drinks.

  The Toff had already made a tentative inquiry about Arnold Chamberlain. Some folk would have been surprised that he kept in such close touch with the police, but that was his practice unless he had good reason to believe that he could get better and quicker results. He was allowed to walk unattended to the Chief Inspector’s office, to find McNab, of the four usual occupants, the only one on duty. McNab pushed back a file of papers.

  ‘An’ what now, Rolleeson?’

  ‘Anything of the negro?’ asked the Toff.

  ‘Not a thing. Are you sure ye’re talking of folk who really exist?’

  ‘Reasonably sure, Mac. A Sussex policeman saw them, when all’s said and done.’

  McNab’s grunt might have expressed his opinion of Sussex policemen.

  ‘You have’na yourself?’

  ‘I have not.’ Rollison hitched his trousers up as he leaned back in his chair, and went on, ‘You’ve been called in officially by the Sussex people, haven’t you?’

  ‘Och, yes, I’ve been there most of the day.’

  ‘Nothing new?’

  ‘Nothing. Why should they kill a tramp?’

  ‘Now come, that’s my question,’ protested the Toff. ‘What’s the medical evidence?’

  ‘The hands were done after death,’ said McNab. ‘It’s fairly obvious, Rolleeson, not that I think much of your Lowerby.’ He sniffed. ‘Lowerby had a London practice once, maybe you recall it.’

  ‘He was before my time.’

  ‘Maybe it was as well for him,’ said McNab. ‘’Tis a poor doctor that feeds himself with drugs.’

  So McNab knew that much, thought the Toff.

  ‘A poor one indeed,’ he agreed. ‘All right, Mac. Now, Chamberlain. Have you looked him up?’

  ‘Nothing against the man at all,’ said McNab, not without satisfaction. ‘He’s an American who has applied for naturalization papers, and gives a good account of himself in America. There are no black marks against him over there, ye ken. He’s managing director of a fur-importing company, and owns ninety per cent of the shares himself. A very straightforward gentleman.’

  ‘How long has he been trading over here?’

  ‘Ten months, and he bought the business as a going concern. He does most of his trading with Central Europe, Rolleeson, a little with Canada, and a wee bit with China and Japan.’

  ‘Quite cosmopolitan,’ reflected the Toff, and proffered cigarettes. ‘A good, profitable business, you would say?’

  ‘It appears so.’

  ‘Hmm. Lucky man who can make good profits out of trading abroad so much,’ reflected the Toff. ‘Central Europe—on a perpetual war basis. China and Japan, ditto. He must do a lot with Canada to make up for his losses! Don’t mind me, Mac, it’s just my naturally suspicious mind.’

  ‘I can see the point,’ admitted McNab, ‘but there’s nothing against the man.’

  ‘So I gathered. Ten months or so is a short time for an alien to stay here and start thinking of naturalization, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ye-es, but he’s been to and from England a great dea
l, and he’s none so poor. Mind ye, I’m not saying he’ll get his papers, but he’s applied for them, and there’s no known reason why he shouldn’t get through.’

  ‘Thumbs up for Arnold,’ smiled the Toff. ‘Odd thing. Mac, but I haven’t met the gentleman yet.’

  ‘I can’t imagine him being sorry about that,’ said McNab dryly.

  ‘Age is sharpening your power of rejoinder! Well—’

  ‘Why are ye so interested in Chamberlain?’ McNab cocked his head as the Toff pushed his chair back.

  ‘Because I’d a peculiar idea,’ he said, ‘that he might have been a friend of our tramp. And might not, of course. Have you learned anything about that poor beggar?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ said McNab. ‘We have’na his name, nor anything aboot him; he might ha’ been sent fra’ heaven to gi’ me a pain in the neck. Me and Dawbury.’

  ‘Now that,’ said the Toff, from the door and sorrowfully, ‘was very nearly blasphemy, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Will you meet me on a point of policy?’

  ‘I’ll promise ye nothing before I know what it is.’

  ‘That won’t take long. If Chamberlain’s as clever as I think he might be, he’ll smell a C.I.D. man a mile off, and I’d hate to think I’d given him cause to.’

  ‘Ye really think he’s in the business?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Toff without hesitation. ‘But it may be a very long shot. Too many mights and mays, I’ll agree, but there it is. If I knew anything I wouldn’t be telling you about it, and you’ve no official reason for going after him.’

  ‘That’s so. All right, Rolleeson, I’ll not have him watched.’

  ‘What more could I want?’ asked Rollison. ‘Speaking generally and not about this business, what’s causing the official mind the most concern these days?’

  McNab sniffed.

  ‘There’s more drugs about than we like, but there always is. Outside of that, things run quietly.’

  The Toff ’s eyes were brooding, for dope was the one thing which he detested most. A man who peddled drugs murdered and ruined lives more surely than any killer. And there was Lowerby, whom McNab did not know had once done more than take the stuff.

  He nodded, almost affably.

  ‘Business as usual then,’ he said. ‘We ought to thank our tramp for variety.’

  A moment later he was gone, and McNab had a memory of a brief wave of farewell and a smile at once genial and brilliant; and of the lean, confident figure of the Toff.

  McNab was a little uneasy, apart from the Toff.

  The underworld was rumbling like a volcano coming to life after years of quiet, although the volcano of human vice covered by the Wapping, Shadwell, Mile End and other areas had been quiet for only a few months. There was a threat of an eruption, a thing he could feel but not talk about, because it was not yet a fact.

  And then McNab glimpsed what the Toff had seen a few days before.

  The tide of crime had been at its lowest ebb, London had been sweltering beneath the summer heat, too indolently busy for serious crime – on the surface. But all the time the volcano had been rumbling the dope had been peddled, other things of the like nature had been brewing. With the spadework done so quietly that only the vaguest of rumours had filtered through to Scotland Yard, so quietly that even the Toff had heard nothing of it, the surface threatened to crack.

  Afterwards the Inspector was appalled by the accuracy of his thoughts that day. The Toff, without knowing it, almost made McNab feel fey.

  Meanwhile, and in spite of his apparent agreement, but because he was a policeman and policemen worked to routine, he put two of the Yard’s best men to shadow Mr. Arnold Chamberlain from America.

  Which was precisely what the Toff had wanted.

  Chapter Seven

  Delayed Action

  Nigger Dougall was the son of a negro sailor and a white woman, and he had inherited the vices of Africa and the West, plus not a few of his own invention. He was more black than white, a monster of a man, with a neck as thick as many men’s thighs, a pair of thick, wet and red lips, a flattened nose, tiny eyes with yellow ‘whites’, and the physical strength of a gorilla. His voice was thick and deep, typically negroid, and he claimed with some justification to have the cunning of a hundred foxes. He had once led a terror-squad in Chicago, until G-men days; thereafter he roamed many countries with one or two of his best men by him. In London he patronised the ‘Steam Packet’, which pub in Dockland he had bought with stolen money – a purchase so cunningly contrived that none knew him for the owner. Yet in London, until Chamberlain had come, he had felt his wings were clipped.

  Hi Ling, on the other hand, had never possessed wings.

  He had one thing in common with Nigger: a deceased white mother. His father had been a crafty Chinese merchant, so that he mixed the vices of the Orient and Occident, and needed no inventions of his own. His speciality was smuggling, but until the arrival of Arnold Chamberlain he had never smuggled dope into England. He realised that in the little island dope and a Chinaman were considered synonymous terms, and he had preferred to take smaller profits from safer game.

  Arnold Chamberlain, apparently fresh from America, with a firsthand knowledge of gunmen as good as Nigger’s, a ready-made business under his control, and a blameless reputation, had started to make big money, so he had said, by applying U.S.A. methods to U.K. prices.

  Actually he had not come from America.

  He had applied for naturalization in the name of a man who had died mysteriously, but that man’s death is no part of this story. He was phony from start to finish, but believed that no one in England would suspect that.

  He had learned of Nigger, and had hired him; he had thus heard of Hi Ling, and had chartered the Chinaman’s cargo-boats for the transport of furs, and for other things. He paid good money and he got good service, and until Lowerby’s visit he had been well content.

  On the morning following the visit to Oxford Street of Dr. Vincent Lowerby, Chamberlain went in his car to some Turkish baths in Aldgate, and left the premises five minutes later, minus horn-rimmed glasses and blue pince-nez, and wearing a tawny-grey wig. He travelled from Aldgate to Roger’s Comer, a tram junction near the ‘Steam Packet’, by tram. At the junction he alighted and hurried towards the docks and the ‘Steam Packet’, followed at a distance by the man with the squint. Mr. Chamberlain had not yet learned the habit of travelling unguarded.

  He pushed through the swing-doors of the saloon bar, ordered a whisky, grunted at the barman’s attempted pleasantries, and five minutes later left the squalid, low-ceilinged pub. The man with the squint was fifty yards along the road, and nodded as Chamberlain looked towards him, offering a clear bill. It was safe enough to re-enter the pub and to see Dougall and Hi Ling.

  Both of these gentlemen were waiting. The black, perspiring mountain of a negro and the thin, tall under-sized Chinaman presented a contrast in the absurd; although Chamberlain did not notice it.

  The room below the ‘Steam Packet’ was wide and airy, and a luxury hotel would not have scorned its pile carpet its lounge chairs, its oak-panelled walls. The two crooks liked comfort in their hide-out, and they had achieved it.

  The Chinaman, smiling and suave, dispensed whisky and bowed low as he lifted his glass, looking odd in his European clothes. Nigger, as always, seemed about to burst his seams. He spoke first, his voice thick and husky.

  ‘Well, suh,’ he said. ‘Yuh’ll be wanting us again?’

  ‘The last trip was quite satisfactory, yes?’ murmured Hi Ling. He was the quieter, more self-effacing man of the two – and infinitely more dangerous in a battle of wits.

  ‘Couldn’t have been better,’ admitted Chamberlain. ‘I’ll say you know your jobs. The furs were warehoused this morning, and the other stuff taken out. But I’ve not come on the usual line; I’ve got another job like Sanderson’s.’

  ‘So.’ Hi Ling was expressionless. Nigger’s tongue ran along his lips, not pleasantly.

&
nbsp; ‘Dat was a good job,’ he growled. ‘An’ easy. De tramp – I came behind him as he sat against a milestone in de half-dark, and I got behind him an’ grabbed him. De hands is always best, Mr. Chamberlain, yessuh, dey can’t squawk.’

  ‘Probably you’ll have another opportunity of using them,’ said Chamberlain gently, ‘and one even more important.’

  ‘You need have no worry,’ murmured Hi Ling. ‘Who is your friend, Mr.—’

  ‘Never mind the Misters,’ said Chamberlain. ‘I know you and you know me, and that’s okay by all of us,’ He leaned back, smiling. ‘Careful all the time, see, it pays.’

  ‘But de guy you want croaked?’ said Nigger.

  Chamberlain leaned back in his chair and eyed them evenly. He knew they represented the worst elements of London’s underworld, that although they had not ostensibly been busy they knew their ground from A to Z. He knew that both men had murders by the dozen on their consciences, that they snuffed out human life with as little concern as a candle; murder was in the way of business.

  Yet Lowerby had said they would shy from Rollison.

  ‘It is a man,’ said Chamberlain, ‘who has been proving a nuisance, and might prove more. I think—I’m not sure—that he has some idea that I knew Sanderson—’

  ‘Certainly he must go,’ murmured Hi Ling gently.

  ‘His name,’ said Chamberlain carelessly, ‘is Rollison or Rollson …’

  As he spoke, even as the name came out, while he watched the two men in front of him, he saw their expressions alter. He saw Dougall lick his lips furtively and the Chinaman’s suave smile disappear, as if a shadow entered those slanting eyes.

  The air of the room seemed chill,

  ‘The Toff!’ murmured Hi Ling, but his voice was very low. ‘I begin to see.’

  ‘I said Rollison,’ Chamberlain said.

  ‘De same guy,’ said Dougall. He poked a small cigar into his mouth and lit it, as if wanting something to do. He started to move about the apartment, looking everywhere but at Chamberlain. ‘See here, mistah, you are asking for trouble if you try and get that guy. The Toff ain’t so easy.’