For instance, Mrs. Ireland had been sitting at her window, which overlooked the point where the side street joined the main. Although she might be deaf, she certainly wasn’t shortsighted and she happened to have been keeping her eyes open for the postman. She was prepared to swear that Mr. Mountjoy had neither passed the end of the side road nor gone down it.
Suppose, therefore, he had turned to the left outside his front door? But Mr. Crump in No. 12 and the barber in No. 8 had both been in their shops the whole time and were positive that he had not gone past them. Had he gone back into his shop or the living room behind it? But these were most undeniably empty, and had, besides, the sort of “packed up” appearance of rooms whose owner has left them deliberately. The gas and electricity were turned off, the larder was empty.
There was a door leading into the garden, and this was locked. That, by itself, didn’t prove anything, of course, but the garden was a dead end. There was a very high, glass bottle-topped wall on the street side, the blank elevation of another house at the end, and a garden full of little Crumps on the right.
Mr. Mountjoy, in fact, had walked into the street, pinned up his famous notice, and then dematerialised.
But, unlike the conjurer’s lady assistant, he not only disappeared, he stayed disappeared. And that is not such an easy thing to do – not in this country, anyway, especially when the police are on the lookout for you and have your full description.
However, as with everything else, Mr. Mountjoy managed it competently enough.
The police force, like the Army, believes in moving its executives around, and it wasn’t until well over four years later – nearly five – that I found myself back at the same North London police station, attached this time to the plainclothes branch.
One of the first places I visited was Malpas Street, and there, still, was the notice: BACK IN FIVE YEARS.
In a district like that you’d have imagined that it would have been torn down long ago. But it hadn’t.
I gathered, in fact, that it had become a sort of local tradition. Mr. Mountjoy had always been a mystery man to the neighbourhood, and his reputation had been nowise diminished by his dramatic disappearance and the interest of the police in his whereabouts.
There was a strong local feeling, amounting almost to an obsession, that five years after his disappearance (on the very day and at the very hour) Mr. Mountjoy would reappear and take that notice down again.
What would happen then no one could suggest.
I asked the station sergeant about the place. For instance, why hadn’t it been re-let or taken over by the authorities? Mr. Mountjoy, I gathered, owned the building but the taxes must be mounting up and anyway it was a nice little shop and living quarters. We didn’t talk about requisitioning in those days, but we had some powers. Apparently, however, all this had been foreseen by Mr. Mountjoy.
The day before he disappeared he had handed Mrs. Ireland a sum in notes (genuine ones this time) sufficient to deal with all foreseeable expenses for exactly five years. At the end of that time, he said, if he hadn’t come back she could sell the house and keep the proceeds. And he had even executed a legal document enabling her to do this.
In short, she was to wait for him for five years, and at the end of that time, like the frog in the fairy story, she was to have her reward – unless the fairy prince had reappeared to claim his own.
It sounded pretty fantastic to me.
The next thing that happened, about three weeks later, was the arrival at the station of a badly worried Mr. Crump, with a tale that No. 14 was haunted.
He was so clear about it that we gave more attention to his story than the police usually accord to psychic manifestations. Also, of course, we were interested in that particular house.
“Scraping, cutting, and emery-papering,” said Mr. Crump, his great red face moist but earnest. “Every night – about midnight or one o’clock. Just like he used to. I don’t like it. Nor the wife don’t like it. She’s talking of moving if it isn’t stopped.”
“Did you go down and look in?” I asked. “Was there a light on in the shop?”
“Of course there wasn’t no light on,” said Mr. Crump. “Hasn’t the electricity been cut off? I’ve told you, it’s not yooman, this noise isn’t.”
When I suggested that it might be rats, I thought Mr. Crump was going to detonate, so I hurriedly promised him that we’d look into it and he departed.
We had the keys of the shop, so I let myself in that evening, going after dark to avoid causing any undue stir. I took a torch and made a thorough investigation. It was obvious no one had been there. The dust was inches thick over everything, and the place – well, it smelt deserted, if you know what I mean.
When I came out I found half Malpas Street gathered outside armed with sticks and bottles. Apparently a small boy had seen my torch flashing and the crowd were just summoning up courage to break in and lay the ghost when I stepped out.
After that, of course, there was no stopping the stories.
Mr. Crump appeared about a month later with an ultimatum.
Either the police “did something” or he was going to clear out himself. He couldn’t stand it any longer. His wife had already gone on an indefinite visit to her married sister and trade was falling off. The sinister reputation of No. 14 was beginning to corrupt No. 12.
“All right,” I said at last. “I’ll come long myself tonight and we’ll both listen.”
When I came off duty at about half past ten that evening, I walked along to Malpas Street and Mr. Crump let me in. We sat in his parlor, which was on the first floor overlooking the street, and we drank beer and talked for a bit, and at midnight, at my suggestion, we turned the lights out and made ourselves comfortable in chairs near the window.
After a bit I must have dozed, because I woke up to feel Mr. Crump gripping my arm.
He said nothing, but I gathered from his breathing, which he was trying to control, that something happened.
Then, in the stuffy blackness of the room I heard it, too. It was a thin intermittent burr, which sounded like a very sharp edge cutting across some tough substance. Then came the sound of scraping, and then the cutting started again.
I jumped up, leaped at the door, nearly broke my neck on the stairs, and three seconds later I was out in the street. I had my key at the ready and I snapped open the door of No. 14 and switched on my torch.
There was no one there. Nothing had been disturbed at all. There wasn’t even the trace of a rat or mouse paw in the dust. I hadn’t thought that there would be. There had been something indefinably human about that sound.
When I got back to Mr. Crump, I found he had turned on the light and poured out some more beer. He seemed much more cheerful. I think that half his trouble had been that no one believed his story.
Also, as we were finishing our beer, he said something which surprised me.
“Thanks be,” he said. “I’ve only to put up with it for one more week.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Work it out for yourself,” he said. “It’s the seventeenth of June. Four years and 51 weeks ago he left. Said he’d be back in five years. Very methodical man was Mr. Mountjoy.”
I could find no comment to make.
It was quite illogical and fantastic, and I felt that we were making fools of ourselves, but in the end I agreed, weakly, to post two sergeants to watch the back of the house while I kept an unobtrusive eye on the front.
If Mr. Mountjoy was going to maintain his reputation for punctuality he was due in the street at four o’clock in the afternoon. Accordingly, at five to four I turned the corner at the far end of the road and started strolling nonchalantly towards No. 14, stopping every now and then to look in at the various shop windows.
It was a true midsummer day, warm and windless, and the children were still in school, so that by Malpas Street standards it was almost quiet.
I looked at my watch and saw that it was just short of
four o’clock. And Malpas Street was still most definitely empty.
At that moment, in the warm summer silence, I heard it again. I want to be quite clear about this. It was exactly and undeniably the same sound that I had heard that night when I sat up over Mr. Crump’s shop. But it did not come from No. 14.
It was from the same side of the street but much lower down.
I moved cautiously along until I could locate it. It came from the barber’s shop at No. 8, where Toni Etrillo, the barber, was shaving one of his swarthy compatriots. The burr and the rasp as the razor passed across the strong black stubble – these were unmistakable.
And in that moment the secret of Mr. Mountjoy’s disappearance became as abundantly clear to me.
The first thing I did was purely symbolical. I took out my knife and levered out the tack which held up that notice. I was about to tear it up but thought better of it and dropped it in my pocket.
Conscious that a dozen pairs of eyes were watching from curtained windows, I went round into the side street and rang Mrs. Ireland’s doorbell.
When she opened the door I didn’t do anything dramatic; I just beckoned her out into the street and signalled to one of the sergeants to accompany us, and we all walked back to the police station.
For the greater part of the way we were silent, but I felt, in justice, that one thing had to be said.
“A marvellously well kept-up impersonation, Mr. Mountjoy. It’s nothing new for a man to dress as a woman, and I have even heard of cases before where a landlord became his own lodger. But – it’s a great mistake for any man to do his shaving last thing at night.”
John Bull, December 18, 1948.
A NEAT, COLD KILLING
ON THE NIGHT OF MARCH 15TH, a night of fog, Lou Rowley (whose other name was Cab Rowley or Rowley the Roller) was shot down in a street in Islington.
A constable who heard the shots, but arrived too late to do much about it, got on the telephone and a squad car brought Inspector Hazlerigg from Barley Lane Police Station. Hazlerigg was the Divisional Detective Inspector of Q Division at that time and all crimes in Q Division were his crimes.
He had the head lights of the car turned on the sprawling body and saw that Rowley was still, incredibly, alive. He also saw that it would be impossible to move him far, and the police doctor, who arrived a few minutes later, supported him. Rowley was therefore carried with minute, painstaking care into the nearest house and placed on a sofa.
Four bullets had gone through him, two under the stomach and two through the chest, and one of them had almost severed the spinal cord paralysing speech and movement, so Lou Rowley lay for six hours, impotence and hatred in his eyes, unable to speak or write the name of the man who had shot him.
The tips of his fingers scrabbled once or twice against the rough sofa cover and the detectives and the doctor leaned forward hopefully, but that was all.
Just before three in the morning he died.
The Superintendent went home to bed and Hazlerigg started a search for the ejected cartridge cases. The street had been cordoned, and he found them all in the end, and took them down himself to the laboratory at Scotland Yard where the experts did a lot of work on them.
The bullets, in fact, were almost the only thing they had got to work on. It was a quiet, neat, cold, professional killing, with no loose ends at all.
“Rowley was in the stolen motorcar game,” said Hazlerigg later to his assistant, Detective Sergeant Pickup. “There were at least three competitors in the business, any of whom could have wanted to cut him. I think we’ve checked them all three pretty thoroughly—”
“Ernie Morris was at the cinema – so he says. Heinie Jacobs was having supper at home with his wife – so he says, and so his wife says. Smiler Martin was playing cards with two friends – so they all say.”
“In fact, it might have been any of them,” agreed Hazlerigg.
And there the matter rested. The case was not closed because murder cases are never closed, but life went on in Q Division and a certain amount of dust gathered on the file.
Every police division in London has its great grandfather criminals, oldest inhabitants in the world of crime, rather pathetic figures, grizzled and broken by repeated descents into the grey undersea of penal servitude; men who have still not learned, despite a lifetime of object lessons, that crime is a disease and not a vocation.
Slater Joe was such. Though police records usually referred to him as Joseph Slater, in fact he had no surname, or if ever he had one he had lost it, with other things, in the far-off days of his infancy. “Slater,” as will appear hereafter, was by way of being a reference to his professional activities.
Hazlerigg, on one of his endless rounds of routine visits, found the old man on his bed in an attic in Tool Street.
“Howde, Inspector,” said Slater, “what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, Joe. Just keep on the straight and narrow.” His eyes wandered speculatively round the room. There were hardly two sticks of furniture.
“My nose is always clean,” said the old man. “I’ve never once been inside but I’ve been jobbed.”
“How many times have you been inside, Joe?” asked Hazlerigg curiously.
“Thirty-nine times. Plants every one of them. I’ll make it forty yet,” he added illogically.
Hazlerigg said nothing. It was clear to him that the man was dying.
Late that night he had cause to think of Joe again, when he was called from his bed by an urgent message from the police station. Hazlerigg had the bottom floor of a small house in Carver Street. It was connected with Barley Lane Police Station by two lines, one of which the ill-disposed cut from time to time but the other of which was so deeply buried that they never got down to it.
“Slater’s on the loose,” said the desk sergeant.
“Loose,” said Hazlerigg. “When I saw him this morning he didn’t even look road worthy.”
“He’s raising hell, sir, down in that lodging house—”
“Who do you think I am,” snarled Hazlerigg, “the district nurse?”
Nevertheless he climbed wearily into his trousers and, since it scarcely seemed worth calling out the squad car he rose round to Tool Street on his old pedal cycle.
He heard the noise from halfway down the street. When he got into the attic he was shocked at what he saw. Slater Joe, an unnatural flush on his cheeks, his thin white hair fuzzing up in streamers from his head, was being held, with difficulty, by two women. A young constable was trying to remonstrate with Slater, whilst making notes in a very new notebook. He was clearly out of his depth.
“—” screamed the old man,”—and—”
“Behaviour whereby a breach of the peace—” began the young constable hopefully.”
“—you and—you. You want me to smarten you up. You want an old timer like me to keep you on your toes.”
With a convulsive effort Slater freed his arms and jumped for the wash hand stand. He jerked open the drawer and as he swung round they saw he had a gleaming black Luger pistol in his hand.
The constable was plainly making up his mind to chance a heroic death when he felt a grip on his arm.
“Don’t do anything silly,” said Hazlerigg. “Your recruit training cost the state seven hundred pounds. You don’t want to throw all that away on a crazy old coot. You go round one wall and I’ll go round the other. Take it very steady.”
Slater, in fact, put up very little opposition to this pincher movement. The fire seemed to have died, and he dropped the gun just before Hazlerigg got hold of his arm.
“That wasn’t clever, Joe,” said Hazlerigg. He picked up the automatic. It was loaded all right, and the safety catch was off. “You’ll have to come along with us. It looks as if you may be making your fortieth trip after all.”
Hazlerigg, however, was wrong. Slater Joe was taken along and lodged in the police infirmary; and before Hazlerigg got up for his breakfast the next morning a judge more prompt than any Ju
stice of Quarter Session had called Joe to his account.
The office of a Divisional Detective Inspector is not likely to be a large or luxurious apartment. The whole Criminal Investigation staff at Q Division, Inspector Hazlerigg, Sergeant Pickup and two or three detectives (the number varied) lived, at that time, in two rooms and part of a corridor at the back of Barley Lane Police Station.
Nevertheless, to Hazlerigg the room was home. The scene of much routine work, many small triumphs, a few major disasters. The daily bread of a Divisional Detective Inspector. To this room he called Pickup a few days later and showed him a message. It was from Records at Scotland Yard, and like most communications from that august body, was brief and to the point.
“Test shots from Luger automatic handed in by you correspond in all particulars, striker point, striations and ejector marks with cartridges used in Rowley killing.”
“Do you mean to say,” said Pickup, “that that old goat—”
“No,” said Hazlerigg. “I think not.” He thought for a moment. “Have a word with the desk sergeant would you, and ask him if Slater said anything at all about that gun when he was brought in here to be charged.”
Pickup was back in five minutes. “Here it is, sir,” he said. “For what it’s worth. Accused when asked where he had obtained the firearm said well, we can leave out the first part, that’s just Joe’s usual bird song. Then he said, ‘On the Foreigners. I got it on the Foreigners.’ He said this twice. What does it mean, sir?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I know what it meant,” said Hazlerigg. “But I’m getting an idea about the shape of it. I’ve been doing some work on Joe’s records. Do you know what most of his offences were? Stealing out of empty houses. He was an agile old boy, and as often as not he went for the lead on the roofs – the gutterings – that’s how he got his name. Slater. You see it?”
“Not yet,” said Pickup.
“You saw that gun, didn’t you? It was a nice gun. A Luger Special, with the long twelve-bullet clip and night sights. It must have come home in someone’s kit-bag at the end of the war. The man who had a gun like that wouldn’t want to throw it away.”
The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries Page 2