The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  “I see, sir. You mean the man who killed Rowley was too fond of his gun to chuck it in the Thames. He hid it, as he thought, in a safe place.”

  “That’s it. Some special hiding place, right in among the rafters. You’d probably never find it, from underneath. But old Joe, on one of his nightly prowls, ripped off the lead from on top.”

  “Then if we knew where Joe was that night.”

  “We do,” said Hazlerigg. “We do. He was on the Foreigners.”

  “What’s that, sir? Thieves slang? What does it mean?”

  “I haven’t the least idea.”

  “We might put a ghost in to try and pick it up.”

  “I think you’ve got something there,” said Hazlerigg.

  Thereafter a number of strangers came and went in that district. They blew up tyres at garages and carried trays in tea shops and one of them spoke at great length on street corners about the new Millennium and the Fascist State. They all seemed well supplied with money for the buying of rounds of beer and they were good listeners. Reports from them reached Inspector Hazlerigg from time to time.

  “I think Heinie Jacobs is out,” he said to Pickup. “The other two, Smiler and Ernie Morris, have ganged up on him. They’ve beaten hell out of one or two of his employees and he’s shut up shop.”

  “He still might have shot Rowley before he went out of business.”

  “Well, he might,” agreed Hazlerigg. “But I think it was one of those two strong-arm merchants.”

  At about this time, too, Ron Atkins appeared. His record in Q Division was short but colourful. He was charged with driving at excessive speed down a one-way street and, having apparently no money to pay his fine, took seven days. On the afternoon of his release a constable cautioned him for parking a lorry on the wrong side of the road, whereupon he got out and hit the constable in the eye. Reward, one month, without any option this time. When he came out from this he drifted by easy degrees into bad company and was seen going about a good deal with Lefty Moran and Tom Collins, two lesser members of Smiler Martin’s happy family.

  One night in late November some months after the events narrated above, Atkins was sitting in the saloon bar of the Green Man, drinking with his friends. Apart from Lefty and Tom there was present a certain Charlie Lewis, who was known to the initiated to be Smiler Martin’s second-in-command. No doubt it was the result of the general bonhomie inspired by the presence of such a distinguished person which emboldened Atkins to make a suggestion to his friends. The question had arisen, as it will arise sooner or later in the best drinking parties, as to whether a change of scene might not be a good idea.

  Various possibilities were examined and it was then that Atkins put forward his contribution.

  “Why don’t we have the next one at the Foreigners?” he said.

  The silence which greeted this innocent suggestion was remarkable. It was Charlie Lewes himself who finally answered, and it might have been observed, had there been anyone else in the saloon bar to observe it, that his right hand was in his jacket pocket as he spoke.

  “Quite an idea,” he said. “Yes, why don’t we?”

  “We’ve got a car outside,” said Lefty Moran thoughtfully.

  “What are we waiting for then?” said Lewes.

  A small person in the four-ale bar, who had been listening to this conversation through a convenient crack in the partition, slipped out at the same time and made his way hastily to a call box.

  “They’ve got Pollock,” said Hazlerigg.

  There was a hastily summoned conference in his room. Two Flying Squad cars were standing by in the alley outside.

  “He’s been calling himself Atkins. He was getting in very nicely with the Martin crowd. Apparently tonight something went wrong. I’ve just had Mousey Williams on the phone.”

  “Has he been followed?” said the Superintendent.

  “We had him covered, sir,” said Hazlerigg. “But they took him off by car. Our man was shaken off here.” He put a finger on the map. “They were making for the canal.”

  “So you don’t know to within six streets each way where they’ve gone to earth.”

  “We could comb that area, but it might take twenty-four hours.”

  “If I know Martin,” said the Superintendent, “Pollock will be past caring by then, even if you did find him.”

  It was at that moment that Hazlerigg had his inspiration.

  He said to Pickup, “Get a list of all the cafés, shops, and public houses in those streets.”

  Police headquarters have odd but effective sources of information and in a few minutes the list was there.

  “‘Rising Sun,’ ‘Crown & Thistle,’ ‘Ace Café,’ ‘Domino Tea Shop,’ ‘The English Bard’ – There it is.”

  “English Bard,” said the Superintendent. “I don’t see—”

  But Hazlerigg was already halfway down the passage.

  The English Bard is a sordid remnant of what was once quite a nice little canal-side public house. In fact, it is half a public house, having been sliced in two by a bomb in 1943. The brewers who owned it had done some temporary repairs and then left it to rot quietly.

  It was easy to see how Smiler Martin, who was doing most of the talking, had acquired his name. He was a large, genial, blond person and the electric light glittered back expensively from his 18-carat smile.

  “Do you see the joke,” he was saying.

  “Not yet,” said Pollock.

  “About the name?”

  “In a way,” said Pollock. “English barred. Foreigners only. That sort of thing.”

  “The real joke,” said Smiler, “was how did you know about it? That’s the real joke.”

  “Oh, these things get round.”

  “Like hell they do. Only six people ever knew that name.” (Martin was wrong, of course; he had forgotten the late Slater Joe, who knew all the catchwords in the world of crime.) “When you came out with it like that – well, it was a plain tipoff, wasn’t it?”

  Pollock said nothing. He was listening, hard, to something that seemed to be happening in the room underneath.

  “You weren’t one of us.” Martin flicked an expensive cigarette lighter on and off thoughtfully. “So you must have been a nosey little slop. An undercover boy. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Pollock still said nothing.

  “Well, if you don’t want to talk,” said Martin, and his smile was broader than ever, “we could try a little of the well-known heat treatment.”

  “I wouldn’t do it,” said Hazlerigg from the doorway. “Really I wouldn’t. Now don’t start looking for guns. I’ve got fifteen men on the premises and another twelve on the street. The odds are too long.”

  Even as he spoke the room was filling with policemen.

  “Alfred Martin,” went on Hazlerigg, “I am charging you with the murder on the night of March 15th of Louis Rowley.”

  Which is really the beginning and end of this story.

  Reveille, January 27-29,1950.

  TICKER BATSON’S LAST JOB

  LONDON HAS BEEN THE SLOWEST to rebuild of all capital cities. Stand at the junction of High Road with South Street and you will still look over an area of devastation. Low walls of yellow brick, like the bases of demolished honeycombs, acres of bindweed, hiding the rusty metal.

  Among it all one freshly-painted notice still proclaims: BUSINESS AS USUAL. That is the High Road Safe Deposit.

  Nor is this “Business as usual” notice difficult to understand, since the essential portions of this undertaking – the guts, as it were – lie between 30 and 80 feet below the surface.

  Like the seven circles of Dante’s Inferno, the richest and most valuable deposits stand lowest in the descending scale.

  The bottom two storeys, which are mostly used by banks for the storage of surplus currency, were constructed with the additional protection of a subterranean “water jacket.”

  The cement walls that surround them were built “double” with a fair-si
zed hollow space between them. This space was then filled with water.

  At the height of the blitz the authorities decided that it would be safer to remove the water. It has never been replaced.

  Early this year Messrs. Up-to-Date Office Properties, who owned most of the surface space under which the safe deposits lay, started rebuilding.

  Early in the morning and late at night the automatic drills of their clearance squads beat out a devilish tattoo, and the steel fingers of their automatic excavators reached deeper and deeper into the earth – to the considerable satisfaction of Ticker Batson, king of the safebreakers, who was in favour of all the covering noise he could get.

  “Ticker” was a nickname he had had before the Army, but he had plenty of others. The one he liked least was Dynamite Bill. After all, as he said, a man has his pride. He had never in his life tried to blast a safe with plain dynamite – which would be a silly thing to use anyway.

  Undoubtedly, though, he understood the natures, the uses and the abuses of explosives.

  At first he worked almost exclusively with gelignite, which is rather like a mixture of dynamite and toffee.

  Later he became attached to commercial tonite. He said it blew a cleaner hole. It was with a single plastic charge of tonite that he took the lock out of the safe of the West London Ice Stadium two years ago.

  So certain and so professional had his touch been that Inspector Hazlerigg – he was D.D.I. of Q Division at the time – took one look at the damage and said: “That’s Ticker.”

  Now, determined to pull off one last stupendous job and retire on the proceeds, Ticker had hired an office near the High Road Safe Deposit (under the original name and title of “Jones, Agent”) which gave him sole use of a sub-basement storage room.

  Mr. Jones may not have appeared to entertain many clients in his office by day, but he certainly spent a lot of time in his underground store.

  On occasions, indeed – had there been anyone interested enough to observe it – it would have been noticed that he entered the room in the evening and did not emerge until the following morning.

  It was about this time that the U.0.P. discovered that it does not always pay to hustle.

  One morning – work had been in progress for about three weeks – a War Office shooting brake drove up to the foreman’s office and a Staff Officer got out. The foreman listened to the Staff Officer, hurried back into the hut, and made a telephone call.

  At the other end of the line a stout gentleman, who was about to go out for his morning coffee, swore when he heard the words “unexploded bomb,” and dialled a number.

  A director was contacted as he was leaving his house at Weybridge and in a surprisingly short time had been driven to the High Road site. The War Office car was still there.

  “I can’t understand it,” said the director. “Yes, I did know that you couldn’t excavate a blitzed site without a War Office clearance, but surely—”

  “Mightn’t it be a good thing to stop those drills?” suggested the Staff Officer.

  “Yes, of course.”

  The foreman left the hut and shouted an order. One by one the drills and the excavators slowed down and stopped. Even the picks and shovels ceased to ring. A great silence settled.

  “How long will you be?” asked Inspector Hazlerigg.

  “Difficult to say.” The speaker was a very young, very blond, very serious subaltern of Royal Engineers, who wore the Bomb Disposal flash on the upper arm of his neat battledress jacket.

  “How deep would she go?”

  “That’s difficult to say, too. If she went in close to that outer wall”—he pointed to the sheer concrete casing of the safe deposit which the excavations had laid bare—“she might go a long way. Once the earth’s been disturbed, you see …”

  “Twice as far as they’ve gone already?”

  “Might be.”

  “I suppose there’s not much chance she could be active after all that time?”

  “You never know,” said the subaltern. He thought for a moment and added: “I don’t suppose she liked all this drilling one little bit …”

  By nightfall the hole gaped blackly under the arc lamps, and the only noise was the clanking of the bucket hoist and a very distant, very quiet chink of steel shovel against stone. A head appeared.

  “We seem to be on to something, all right.”

  The subaltern sounded tired, but cheerful.

  “It’s quite a setup when you get down. There’s a sort of ledge – it’s a shelf really – running out from the foot of the wall. I thought at first we’d struck the actual foundation of the wall, but it can’t be that – it’s hollow.”

  Hazlerigg had his torch on a roll of plans which he had borrowed from the manager of the safe deposit.

  “I think you’re breaking into the old water jacket,” he said. “It’s all right. You’ll find it’s quite dry now. If the bomb went in there it shouldn’t be difficult to spot it.”

  There was a muffled cry from the bottom of the shaft and the subaltern bent his head to listen.

  “We’re in,” he said. “Get me one of the knotted ropes and a pick helve. I’ll go down first and poke around.”

  “Do you mind if I come with you?” asked Hazlerigg.

  “On your own head,” said the subaltern.

  After a breathless five minutes both men were standing inside the “water jacket.”

  It was like a narrow, very roughly finished, semicircular, underground subway. The floor was uncemented rubble. It was not exactly airless, but it had the unhealthy, breathless feeling of some old tomb unexpectedly thrown open.

  The subaltern had unconsciously lowered his voice.

  “What a hole,” he said. “And, my God, there she is.”

  The bomb looked enormous.

  It lay, half on its side, in a drift of rubble.

  “Must have gone clean through the casing into the drink.” Again it was the subaltern. Hazlerigg’s mouth was too dry for speech. “When they drained the water away it just came down on to its side.”

  Hazlerigg still found nothing to say. He was overcome by the mere bulk of the bomb. He had never looked at one before, not at such close quarters.

  “Funny to think” said the subaltern, “that we’re the first people to set eyes on her since she left her bomb rack in 1940.”

  The silence which succeeded this remark was unexpectedly broken. A quiet, a deferential cough sounded behind them. Both torches swung round. Seated on a pile of rubble, blinking up at them, was a little, dust-covered old man.

  Hazlerigg found his voice at last. “Ticker?”

  “That’s right, Inspector.”

  “What—?” The torch swivelled up the wall, and showed the newlycut entrance of the tunnel. “I see. Moling again.”

  “Just ferreting around,” said the old man. “No harm done, I hope.” The note of determined cheerfulness in his voice lowered the tension, and Hazlerigg grinned.

  “If that isn’t felonious intent,” he said, “then I’m the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis. Never mind that, I’ll think about you in a moment. We’ve got a job here.”

  “Beauty, isn’t she?” said Ticker.

  “Yes,” said the subaltern. He seemed quite disinterested in Ticker’s sudden appearance.

  “What would you guess she had inside her, Lieutenant?”

  “Ammonite, I expect.”

  “Surely, surely,” said the old man. “Ammonite B or Ammonite D, would you say?”

  “D, I expect.”

  “When was it dropped?”

  “December, 1940—”

  “Couldn’t have been D, then. Wasn’t in use till spring 1941.”

  “Nor was it, now,” said the subaltern. He looked at the old man thoughtfully. “Well if it’s B, so much the better. Less sensitive. One thing about these big fellows. They had to make the works on a large, simple scale. No funny jobs. It’ll just be a case of taking the fuse out. The locking nut’s rusted solid, of
course. We’ll have to cut that away.”

  He propped his torch on a ledge in the wall and took out of the haversack on his back an ordinary metal saw. “If you gentlemen are sure you want to watch …”

  Now that it came to the point, Hazlerigg wasn’t at all sure that he did. The size of the bomb in that confined space was overpowering. It was like sharing a bed with an elephant. The opposition, however, came from an unexpected quarter.

  “Lieutenant,” said Ticker, quietly, “you mustn’t do it.”

  The subaltern said nothing. He raised his eyes from an adjustment he was making to the saw.

  “I’ve been watching that bomb. I was alone with it more than an hour before you gentlemen came.” The old man lowered his voice. “That bomb’s angry,” he said.

  The subaltern still said nothing.

  “You know what ammonite’s like, sir. It hates heat and worse than heat it hates noise. Week after week they’ve been drilling and rattling up there, and now it’s thoroughly upset. I know. I’ve been handling explosives all my life.”

  The subaltern looked at Hazlerigg.

  “That last part’s true, anyway,” said the Inspector, absently. He was wondering whether he was going to be sick.

  “I see,” said the subaltern. “You think if I cut that bolt the friction of the sawblade may set her off?”

  “No ‘may’ about it.” The old man laid his hand almost affectionately on the plump flank of the bomb. “If you listen.” he said, “you can almost hear it making up its mind.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a chance I’ve got to take,” said the subaltern.

  He sounded neither convinced nor unconvinced.

  “All right. You take your chances. But don’t you bet against yourself. There’s no sense in that, is there?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  It was one consultant to another.

  “Ice,” said the old man. “Dry ice, and plenty of it. That’s the first thing.”

  “Where can we get ice at this time of night?”

  “I’ll have all you need here inside the hour,” said Hazlerigg. “I’ll get it from the refrigerators at Smithfield.” He hoped he didn’t sound too eager.