They came unobtrusively into London in the days when Sergeant Peter Dunn was newly come to the Criminal Investigation Department and was sitting at the feet of Inspector Sam Allerway, learning his business.
There were quite a number of people who thought that when he succeeded to his title and fortune, he should have retired gracefully from the force.
A certain lordly relative once expressed this point of view, and Peter asked:
“When you became Lord Whatever-your-name-is, did you give up golf?”
“No,” said the staggered aristocrat.
“Very well then,” said Peter.
“I really don’t see the connection,” said his baffled lordship. “Police work isn’t a game?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Peter.
And here he was, learning his business from Sam Allerway.
There was nobody more competent to teach a young officer than Sam. He was a great detective, the greatest in our generation. He might have reached the highest rank, but he drank a little, gambled a lot, and was notoriously in debt, and therefore suspect; though Sam had never taken a cent from any illicit source in his life.
There is a popular delusion that high officers at Scotland Yard own rows of houses and have considerable investments. No doubt very large presents have been made and accepted by grateful citizens who have benefited by the genius and prescience of men at Scotland Yard. It is against all regulations, but it is not against human nature.
Perhaps, if Sam had been offered some big presents by the law-abiding people he had helped, he might have accepted them, but all his offers had come from the wrong end of the business.
“You can’t learn this too soon, Peter,” he said. “The crook’s money has got two hooks to it—and those hooks never come out! This doesn’t affect you, because you’ve got all the money in the world, and I know just what’s going to happen to the bird who tries to slip you a monkey for giving him five minutes to get out of the house.”
Sam Allerway was never a popular man with his superiors. His acid gibings made him no friends. He had a trick of summarizing the character and the disposition of his chiefs in one biting and uncomplimentary phrase, and, but for the fact that he was a brilliant thief-catcher, he would never have progressed as far as inspector.
One of the few people who respected him and understood him was a certain J. G. Reeder, who at that time was associated with the Bankers’ Trust as their private detective and investigator; but as Mr. Reeder does not come into this story it will be sufficient to sum up the character of Sam Allerway in his words:
“The criminal classes would be well advised,” he said, “and be giving no more than what is due, if they erected a statue to the man who—um—introduced old brandy into our country.”
Old brandy was Sam Allerway’s weakness. But he was perfectly sober on the night the Canadian Bank of Commerce was robbed of 830,000 Canadian dollars.
The robbery was effected between five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and seven o’clock on the Sunday morning. Three men had concealed themselves in an office immediately above the bank premises. The Canadian Bank of Commerce was situated in a large corner block facing Trafalgar Square.
The lower floor and the basement were entirely occupied by the bankers, the five floors above being given over to various businesses, that immediately above the bank premises being occupied by an insurance company. The block had been specially built and was the bank’s property. Between the insurance office and the banking department was a concrete floor which was further strengthened by an iron grid set in the centre of the solid concrete.
On the day of the robbery Trafalgar Square was filled with an organized demonstration of the unemployed. Parties arrived from various parts of London, each headed by a band and carrying their banners and slogans. All the police reserves were gathered to deal with possible disturbances.
Another favourable circumstance for the burglars was that a section of the roadway before the bank was being torn up to deal with a faulty gas main. All that afternoon with the indifferent music of the brass bands there had mingled the staccato rattle of automatic roadbreakers.
There could be no question that pneumatic drills were also used by the burglars, and that they synchronized their operations with those of the workmen outside. The concrete dwelling was broken through immediately above the manager’s office, which was locked, and to which the two watchmen on the premises had no access.
As to whether there were two watchmen present or not when the floor was pierced is a question which has never been satisfactorily settled. Both men swore they were on the premises, but it is almost certain that one of them went out for an hour, and during that hour the thieves got into the manager’s room, unlocked the door on the inside, slugged the one remaining watchman, whom they surprised as he was looking through the plate-glass window at the demonstrators, and tied him up.
The second watchman was knocked out near the side entrance of the bank, in circumstances which suggested that he must have come in from the outside at some time in the afternoon, since there was no hiding place where his attackers could wait except behind the door.
The two men were blindfolded before they were tied up and gagged. They were unable to give any description of the burglars, and, but for the circumstance that the first man had been blindfolded with one of the robber’s own handkerchiefs, which bore a laundry mark, no evidence at all might have been secured that would convict them or even give the police a reasonable clue.
The three men had an excellent kit of tools. They were able to open the vault door, cut through the bars of an inner grille, and remove every scrap of currency in the vault.
Every hour the bank was closed a patrolling policeman, passing the side entrance of the bank, pressed a small bell push and waited till he received an answering clang from a bell set in the wall. Evidently the thieves knew the bank method thoroughly, for he and his relief received all the signals until eight o’clock. At that hour, when the policeman pressed the bell, he received no answer. He tried again, but with no further success, and in accordance with practice he reported the fact to headquarters at Cannon Row, which is Scotland Yard.
He then made his way to the front of the bank and peered in. Two lights were burning, as usual, and there was no sign that anything was wrong. He rapped on the front door, received no answer, and waited here until a squad car came from headquarters, carrying his immediate chief, and, what was more important, duplicate keys of the bank, which were kept at Cannon Row in a case, the glass of which had to be smashed before they could be taken out.
The discovery of the robbery was immediately made. One of the two watchmen was sent off to hospital in an ambulance, the second taken to the station for questioning. Within half an hour the big chiefs of Scotland Yard were at the bank, making their investigations, and Allerway was allocated to the case.
“This is not an English job,” he said, when he had made an inspection of the tools. “It is a Yankee crowd or a French crowd, and it’s nine to one in favour of America.”
“I suppose,” said his chief, who did not like him (he was afterwards dismissed for incompetence by the Kenley Commission), “you’re going on the fact that the tools are American made? Well——”
“They’re English made,” said Allerway, “as you would have seen if the Lord had given you good eyesight and you weren’t too lazy to look.”
Allerway used to talk like this to chief inspectors, and that was why he was not particularly popular.
He began his search like the workman he was. By the Monday morning he had identified Red Fanderson as the owner of the handkerchief. He had a room off the Waterloo Bridge Road, and a search of this led Allerway to a very high-class hotel in the West End and to the discovery of a gentlemanly guest who had left on the previous day after ostentatiously labelling h
is baggage for Canada.
Here Allerway had a lucky break. There had been staying in the hotel a southern European royalty, who had been photographed by a newspaper man as he left the hotel one morning. Quite unconsciously Mr. Lee Smitt, who had also chosen that moment to leave the hotel, had appeared in the background. With him had vanished his valet, Joseph Kelly, pleasantly spoken, a favourite in the couriers’ room, and quite a modest personality.
The police throughout the country were warned. A week later Sam picked up a new clue. A man answering Lee Smitt’s description had purchased a second-hand car and had it registered in the name of Gray. He had chosen an American car of a very popular make.
“The number plate——” began the garage man.
“You can forget the number plate: he’s got another one by now,” said Sam.
It was Peter Dunn’s first big case, and he was thrilled. He hardly got any sleep in the first week of the chase, and on the night the three men were located he was ready to drop; but the news that the car had been seen passing through Slough galvanized him to life.
It was a foul night; rain was pouring in buckets, and a gale of wind was sweeping up from the southwest. They picked up the trail at Maidenhead, lost it again at Reading, cut back to Henley without any greater success. At six o’clock in the morning the car was seen at Andover and a barrage laid down, but Lee doubled back towards Guildford. It was on the Guildford Road that they came head to head, the squad car and that which carried the wanted men. Lee tried to dart past, but the squad driver rammed him.
There were in the police car, besides the driver, only Peter Dunn and Inspector Sam Allerway, but the three men offered no resistance.
Peter took charge of the prisoners, and Sam drove the car back. They stopped at a little wayside inn, and here Sam searched the car. He found nothing in the shape of property. There were two suitcases, containing the belongings of the prisoners, but no money.
It was curious, the number of people who had seen Lee Smitt and his three companions, if not leaving the bank carrying a suitcase, at least in the vicinity of the bank. Yet they might have escaped conviction on the ground of insufficient evidence if Sam Allerway had not dug up from a railway luggage room a duplicate set of bank-smashing tools. It was on this evidence that the three men went down for twelve years.
It was this evidence which spurred Lee Smitt to make his remarkable statement, that in the car when he was captured were four packages of Canadian currency value, $60,000. Smitt told the judge that Sam had promised to make it light for him if he could slip these in his pocket and forget them. It was a crude lie. Peter Dunn stood in the court raging. But it was one of those lies which had possibilities. People read the account and said: “Well, I wonder…?” There was a departmental inquiry. Sam Allerway was crushed, beaten. He turned up for the meeting of the board, drunk and truculent, and was dismissed from the force.
A fortnight later they picked his body out of the Thames.
Two years after that Peter Dunn was the principal witness at another staff inquiry, and the chief inspector who had been responsible for Allerway’s ruin was dismissed with ignominy and narrowly escaped a term of imprisonment.
Where was the bulk of the money taken from the Canadian Bank of Commerce? Scotland Yard thought it had been sent abroad, divided into thousands of small sums and sent through the post to an American address. It was a simple method of disposing of paper currency, and practically undetectable.
Interrogated at intervals at Dartmoor, Lee Smitt hinted that this had been the method of disposal. But there were shrewd men at Scotland Yard who pointed out that at the time the money had been stolen the men had been fugitives, and that there had been a special watch placed by the post office on all bulky packages addressed to the United States.
Peter’s own report on the case is worth quoting:
“These three men arrived in England six months before the robbery, which was not only perfectly planned, but their getaway was as skilfully arranged. They had a car to take them to the coast, but this was damaged in a collision; otherwise the second car would not have been purchased. Lee Smitt is a man with an American police record: he was concerned in three bank robberies, was sentenced to from five to twenty years in Sing Sing, but was released on a technicality when the case went to the Appellate Court. He is a man of brilliant education, and there is no evidence that he had any confederate in the United States. Every important bank in America has complied with the request of Scotland Yard to render an account of suspicious deposits made by mail from England, and nothing out of the ordinary has been discovered.”
Nine years later the three men were released from Dartmoor, escorted to Southampton, and put on a boat bound for the United States. The New York police reported their arrival. And that, so far as Peter Dunn was concerned, was the end of the case.
2
It was in the late summer of the next year that he became acquainted with the Death Watch, and in the strangest and most unusual circumstances.
Peter Dunn was taking a vacation. His idea of a vacation was to hire a little cabin cruiser and move leisurely from Kingston to Oxford, camping at night by any promising meadow, stopping at the towns to purchase his supplies and, with the aid of a gramophone and a small library of books which he brought with him, pass the evenings that separated him from the morning’s plunge in the river and another day of progress through a procession of locks towards the historic city he knew so well.
Between Lockton and Bourne End the hills rise steeply. It is a wild and a not particularly cheerful spot in the daytime. He arrived at his anchorage late at night, tied up to the weedy bank, pulled down the fly-proof shutters of his cabin, and cooked his evening meal.
It was not a night which attracted holiday makers to the river. A drizzle of rain was falling; a chill wind blew down the river, and when the sun set he was glad to pull on an extra warm pullover. He did not know this part of the river at all, and had a feeling that it was some distance from a road. He neither saw motorcar lights nor heard the hum of engines.
Peter cursed the English summer, pulled close the door of his little cabin, and spent ten minutes destroying such inquisitive flying things as had found their way into the interior.
He was trying to read a German work on criminal practice, but found it difficult to keep his eyes open. At nine o’clock he got into his pajamas, extinguished the little reading lamp, and slipped into bed.
He was not a heavy sleeper, but certain notes woke him more quickly than others. He could sleep through the heavy rumble of traffic and the sound of deep-throated klaxon horns, but a shrill note amidst the noise would wake him instantly.
He was awake before he realized he had been asleep. It was a woman’s scream; there was no doubt about it. He heard it repeated and tumbled out of his bunk, listening. It was a scream of terror—somebody was in horrible fear.
He pulled a waterproof coat over his pajamas, pushed open the door of the cabin, and came out to the little well deck. Somebody was crashing through the undergrowth. He heard a woman’s sobs.
“Who’s there?” he called.
Going into the cabin, he found his hand torch and sent a powerful beam into the darkness.
The girl who was found by the light stood, terrified, staring towards him. She was in her nightdress and an old, discoloured robe. Her hair was awry. The round, moon-like face was distorted with fear.
“It’s all right,” said Peter.
Evidently something in his voice reassured her, for she came scrambling down the steep bank.
“Don’t come any farther. I’ll pull my boat in. What is the matter?”
She did not answer until he had grabbed the mooring rope and drawn the stern of the boat into the bank. The hand he took was deadly cold, and she was shivering from head to foot.
“Get me away out of here—get me away
quickly!” she sobbed. “That horrible thing…! I wouldn’t stay another night….I heard the death watch, too, and I told Mr. Hannay, and he only laughed.”
“You’ve seen something disagreeable, have you?” said Peter.
He had taken her to his cabin and put a rug around her. An unprepossessing young woman, he classified her without difficulty, and when she told him later that she was a housemaid he was rather surprised that she had attained even to that position.
He had some hot coffee in a thermos flask, which he had put away against his early morning breakfast. He gave her this, and she became more coherent.
“I work in Mr. Hannay’s house, sir…it used to be one of Diggin’s Follies. You know the place?”
“No, I don’t know the place,” said Peter. “Who is Mr. Hannay?”
She was very vague about Mr. Hannay, except that he was a rich gentleman “in the drapery.”
Apparently it was the death watch that worried her. She had heard it again and again. Two other servants had left because, when the death watch sounded, something always happened. She had heard the click-click-click of it in the wall.
“When you hear that, somebody’s going to die.”
“I know the superstition,” said Peter with a smile. “It’s a little beetle, and he’s quite harmless.”
She shook her head.
“Not here, sir.” She was very serious. “When you hear the death watch at Chesterford something always happens.”
Peter heard a voice hailing the boat from the bank and went outside. He saw a tall, thin man who carried a torch in his hand.
“Have you seen a girl?” asked a booming voice.
“I’ve got her here—yes,” said Dick.
“I’m Mr. Hannay, of Chesterford.” The voice had a certain pomposity and self-importance. “One of those stupid servants has been making a fuss because she heard the death watch and thought she saw something…she ran out of the house before I could stop her.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 167