The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  “Does it extend to helping them into this country?” said Mercer.

  Parker said, “That’s a question I’ve never asked. And if I did ask it, I wouldn’t expect it to be answered.” He refilled both their glasses. “About that matter we were discussing I’ve been making a few inquiries. There might be something in it for both of us. We’d have to give Arnold a cut, of course – he’d be organising the import.”

  The conversation became technical and commercial. It was around eleven o’clock and Mercer could hear, from downstairs, the sound of the landlord encouraging the last of the drinkers to leave when another sound obtruded itself. It was a tiny sound, but significant – a click as though someone was turning the handle of the door with caution. Parker did not seem to have noticed it; perhaps his attention was entirely devoted to Nahmal who had got bored with sitting on a hard chair and was now sitting on Parker’s lap.

  Mercer shifted his own chair very slightly, so that he commanded an uninterrupted view of the door.

  Gently, gently, the handle completed its rotation; then the door blasted open and a big brown-faced man came into the room and made straight for Parker. He was carrying a long knife which might have come from a ship’s galley.

  The speed of Parker’s reaction suggested that he too had been forewarned by the click of the door handle. With his left arm he swept Nahmal onto the floor. His right hand grabbed the table and jerked it directly between himself and the newcomer, who was unable to stop and fell across it, face downward, dropping the knife as he did so.

  Nahmal screamed, “Ramesh!”

  The knife slid across the floor. Mercer, without getting up, put one foot on it. He did not think Parker was going to need any help and observed his technique with interest.

  His first move was to grab Ramesh by the hair and crash his head down twice onto the table top. As Ramesh twisted himself free, Parker, now standing, grabbed the table with both hands and drove it into Ramesh, hitting him just below the breastbone. Ramesh fell onto his knees. Parker abandoned the table, grabbed one of Ramesh’s wrists, and twisted his arm behind his back. The leverage he exerted lifted the Pakistani onto his toes. Blood was running down his face from the cut on his forehead.

  “What I ought to do,” said Parker, “is feed your face into that fire.”

  Ramesh said nothing. He was gasping for breath and there was white froth on his lips. Parker jerked his captive arm savagely. Ramesh opened his mouth wide, but no sound came out of it.

  “Try anything like that again and you’ll end up with two broken arms.”

  He let Ramesh go. The Pakistani backed away. He had no eyes for anyone but Parker. He said, between gasps, “For that – you will be sorry – I promise you.” Then he turned round and went out, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “Now I wonder what he meant by that,” said Mercer mildly. Parker had resumed his seat. Nahmal climbed back onto his lap. She was shaking. Mercer thought he would leave him to comfort her. The landlord saw him off the premises, saying, “Mr. Parker having some trouble up there?”

  “Nothing he couldn’t handle,” said Mercer.

  In the weeks that followed, Mercer appeared to spend most of his daylight hours wandering round the docks and the streets that lay behind them, eating in small cafés and talking to the Indians and Pakistanis who used them. His friendship with Shallini gave him the entrée to this tight little circle.

  Most evenings he ended up at the private room behind the China Clipper and drank with Arnold Rowe and Parker. On one occasion he asked whether Ramesh had given any further trouble.

  “Ramesh,” said Mr. Rowe. “He’ll give no trouble. He’s back at sea.”

  “A long trip,” said Parker. “He won’t be back until Guy Fawkes’s day.”

  The two men looked at each other and laughed. Mercer could tell that there was something behind this exchange, but he did not pursue the matter. He did, however, raise it with Shallini later that evening.

  She said, “But of course. Ramesh has to do what Mr. Henderson tells him.”

  “Mr. Henderson?”

  “I mean, Mr. Rowe.”

  “You didn’t say Mr. Rowe. You said Mr. Henderson.”

  “It was a mistake,” said Shallini, “I did not mean to mention his name. Please do not ask me any more.”

  “I should like to meet him – Mr. Henderson, I mean.”

  “Naturally you cannot meet him. If he should wish to see you, he will send for you.” She was standing beside the bed as she spoke, wearing a thin pair of cotton pyjamas, and it may have been because she was cold that she gave a little shiver.

  Mercer said, “He sounds an interesting sort of man from the little I’ve heard about him. No one seems anxious to talk about him.”

  “No one talks about him,” said Shallini.

  Nothing more happened for a month. As far as Mercer could tell, he was not followed. Either Superintendent Browning had lost interest, or the observation was being more discreetly arranged.

  It was an early November morning of bright sun and blue sky. Mercer was walking up Maze Hill, on his way to Blackheath when the long snout of an Aston-Martin drew level with him, passed him, and stopped. The driver was a boy in chauffeur’s uniform with a snub nose and impertinent eyes. He rolled down the window of the driver’s seat, leaned out, and said, “Mercer?”

  Mercer looked at him coldly and said, “Mr. Mercer.”

  “Okay, okay,” said the boy. “Be like that. Only hop in quick. We haven’t got a lot of time.”

  “I’ve got all the time in the world,” said Mercer.

  “Well, I haven’t. And Mr. Henderson doesn’t like being kept waiting.”

  “Ah,” said Mercer. It sounded like the full stop at the end of a long and complicated sentence. He opened the door and stood for a moment before getting in. “You seem to know my name,” he said, “but I haven’t the pleasure—”

  “That’s all right. My friends call me Bobby.”

  “You must let me know when I have the privilege of joining that exclusive circle,” said Mercer.

  Bobby said, “Sarky, eh?”

  He drove in exactly the manner suggested by his name and appearance, impudently, cutting every corner and extracting himself adroitly from every tight squeeze. They kept to the small streets on the South Bank, crossed the Thames by Vauxhall Bridge, and drew up finally in front of a house at the corner of Wilfred Street and Buckingham Gate. Bobby used his own key on the front door and showed Mercer into a room on the ground floor at the back of the house.

  It was one of the most perfectly conceived rooms that Mercer ever remembered being in. The floor consisted of narrow strips of wood with a reddish tinge. There was one large rug in the centre which his experience in the East told him was either an Isphahan or a Qum. The walls were papered in neutral grey which made a perfect background to the framed prints hung on them. They were mostly military subjects and the scarlet uniforms blazed from the dull gold of the frames. The large fireplace was built into a surround of grey slate into which had been set twelve tiles, painted to represent the twelve months of the year. On the mantel over the fire stood a set of small silver gilt cups with spindly legs.

  Bobby, watching him from the doorway said, “Don’t try putting one of them in your pocket. We’ve counted them” – and disappeared quickly. Mercer continued his inspection of the room. He decided that it was the deliberate creation of a fastidious, but masculine taste and had just reached this conclusion when the door opened and Mr. Henderson came in.

  Mercer saw a tall thin man, with the look about him of an Army officer in plain clothes or maybe the headmaster of a very exclusive preparatory school. The only sign of his age was that his neatly clipped moustache was grey. He said, “Sit down,” and walked across and sat in an upright chair behind the table. Something that Mercer noticed about him was the way he controlled his body. When he moved it was with conscious elegance. He sat like a coiled spring.

  Mercer slouched across to one
of the easy chairs and fell back into it – a piece of defensive counterpropaganda which Mr. Henderson noted without apparent resentment. He said, “You do not seem to have made a great success of the last two years of your life.”

  “It depends what you mean by success,” said Mercer.

  “After being dismissed from the Metropolitan Police for an assault on a prisoner who was in your custody, you were given a fresh chance by being allowed to join the Police Force of the Ruler of Bahrain. You were dismissed six months later after charges of bribery and extortion were preferred.”

  “But not pursued.”

  “No. You were allowed the alternative of dishonourable dismissal. You then came back to England and worked for a time as a labourer. You were dismissed from that job for assaulting a foreman.”

  “He was a real swine.”

  “Your reputation by now was such that you found it impossible to get any legitimate work, so you turned to crime – in particular to trading in hard pornography. You took no direct part in this yourself, but acted as protector to men like Leo Chance and Victor Amesbury.”

  “And boy, did they need protection.”

  “I would rather you didn’t interrupt me.”

  The words were spoken quietly but Mercer was conscious of the authority and the threat behind them. He had known, from the moment he came into the house, that its owner was no ordinary man.

  “I happen to be a friend of Leo Chance. I have been able to do him a number of good turns in the past, for which he felt he owed me favours. One of these favours was to give me a very full account of the events which took place one evening last winter in Barkhurts Mansions. A full account, with the names of the two relevant witnesses, who have not, of course, seen fit to open their mouths, but could easily be induced to do so if necessary. You understand me?”

  Mercer said nothing.

  “I am telling you this so that there will be no possible misunderstanding about our relative positions. It might otherwise be thought that what I am now doing is to offer you a job. I am doing nothing of the sort. I am enrolling you to fill a necessary position in my organisation. Arnold Rowe, who has charge of my operations in the Dockland district, is forced to work with somewhat volatile material.”

  For the first time a very faint smile touched Mr. Henderson’s thin lips.

  “You have met Arnold and will appreciate that although he has many excellent qualities, he is not a pugilist. That was the reason we gave Parker a fairly nominal job in his office – to look after the welfare of Arnold Rowe.”

  “Where is Parker?”

  Mr. Henderson considered the matter. He said, “It is a difficult question to answer without a precise knowledge of tides and the current in the Thames. But I should surmise that he will have reached Tilbury by now.”

  Mercer received this news without obvious signs of interest. He was seated at such an angle that the right side of his face was away from Mr. Henderson, who was thus in no position to notice that the white scar down that side of his face had changed colour.

  He said, “Oh? Why did you kill him?”

  “Kill is the wrong word. It suggests something accidental. I had him executed. He made the mistake of antagonising Ramesh. These people have their own methods of ferreting out secrets which people wish to keep hidden. He was able to confirm, without any possibility of mistake, that Parker was working for Customs and Excise. He was like yourself, an ex-policeman. It had sometimes occurred to me that we were allowed, rather easily, to discover the trivial smuggling offences Parker was said to have committed. That was why he was only taken into our organisation on probation.”

  Mercer said, “The one time I saw him in action I thought he might be a pro.”

  “We have a number of professionals working for us too. They had no difficulty in overpowering Parker. We then thought it appropriate that Ramesh should be allowed to execute him.”

  “And how did he do that?”

  “He shot him six times at fairly close range. The first two or three bullets went into his stomach. Ramesh enjoyed that, I am told. It was only the last of the six that killed him.”

  “I imagine you’re telling me all this as a sort of cautionary tale,” said Mercer easily. “There’s no need. I’m not working for Customs or the police or anyone else. I’m working for myself.”

  “You are wrong,” said Mr. Henderson gently. “You are working for me. Arnold will give you your instructions. There is a Ford Consul motor car outside. It was used by Parker. You can consider it our property. Bobby will give you the keys and the logbook. He will also show you the catch of an ingenious locker, built into the thickness of the offside door. It is useful for a number of purposes. I doubt if we shall see each other again, so I will wish you good day.”

  In the course of the next few weeks Mercer discovered two things. The first was that “volatile” was an inadequate description of the employees of Arnold Rowe and Company and the clients of the employment agency. They were Pakistanis or Indians of both sexes and were found working either in Arnold Rowe’s office or in and round the ships that he serviced. Mercer confirmed his suspicion that their entry into the country had been illegally organised and that this fact was used as a threat to bind them to the service of the organisation.

  Beyond that he could come to no definite conclusion, since his second discovery was that certain rooms in the Office and the Agency were barred to him. It was in these rooms that the real work of the organisation was carried out. He guessed that the stewards and deck-hands might be being used to carry abroad gold and precious stones and to bring back the money realised by their sale on the Continent.

  None of this worried him. He kept the simple record of jobs he was given, stood by when Arnold Rowe’s clients or servants threatened to be difficult, and dealt with the difficulty appropriately. It took one broken arm and one fractured jaw to convince people that he was not a man to argue with. After that he had little trouble.

  The year had turned the corner and it was early in March when he made a request which Shallini found curious. He said, “I saw an odd-looking knife in a shop in Charlton. It had a very thin wavy blade and the handle, I guess, was sharkskin or something of the sort. There were letters engraved in the blade, or it may have been pictures.”

  Shallini said, “From your description it sounds like a kotah-chil – that is, a girl’s knife. There are certain circumstances, you understand, when a girl has to defend her honour.”

  “So that if I was found with one of those sticking into me, it would be assumed that I had assaulted a girl and that she, or perhaps her lover, had used it on me.”

  “That would be the assumption. Do you wish me to get it for you?”

  Mercer considered the matter. Then he said, “Yes. But only if you can do it so cleverly that it will never be traced to you or me.”

  “It will take a little time then.”

  “Time is unimportant.”

  It was perhaps three weeks after this conversation that Ramesh came out of the Duke of Cumberland public house at closing time and started, alone, to walk back to his lodgings. It was a dark night with the wind driving the clouds steadily in from the east and bringing an occasional spatter of rain. He turned up the collar of his jacket and trudged on, unaware that he was being followed.

  His body was found by a patrolling policeman at three o’clock on the following morning The pathologist who examined him reported one curious fact. The dagger which was driven into his back was not the cause of death. His neck had been broken by a single savage blow from behind. The dagger had been driven in after the man was dead.

  “Indian dagger,” said Superintendent Browning. “Some sort of symbolism. A feud perhaps.”

  “I have no doubt it has a message for us,” agreed the pathologist. “If we were able to read it.”

  In spite of the thick carapace of his self-satisfaction, Arnold Rowe always went into the house in Wilfred Street with a sense of unease and breathed more easily when he got a
way from it again. He found Mr. Henderson in a thoughtful mood. He said, “Have the police made anything of the killing of Ramesh?”

  “According to our contact, no.”

  “Then I suggest we help them. Allow our man to find the gun with which Parker was shot. It is untraceable, I am sure.”

  “Certainly. But how will it help them?”

  “If you have preserved it in the careful manner I suggested, it will still have Ramesh’s fingerprints on it. They will be matched with the prints of the body and the solution will be clear even to the uninspired mind of Superintendent Browning. Ramesh killed Parker. One of Parker’s Indian friends killed Ramesh. Everyone will be happy. Our friend will gain kudos for discovering the gun. No one will bother further about the case. A grudge killing in an immigrant community.”

  “It might be the truth at that,” said Rowe.

  “It might be. But I am sure it is not. Ramesh was killed by Mercer. The leaving of the dagger was a diversionary tactic. It may have convinced the police. It did not convince me.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Mercer is a man who is capable of killing in cold blood. His record shows it. Such men are not common. Why he should have killed Ramesh is not clear. Possibly he had private reasons for doing so. Possibly he considered that Parker had been made to suffer unduly.”

  “If that’s true, do you think he himself might be—”

  “Working for the police?”

  “I must say, the thought had never entered my head.”

  “It entered mine,” said Mr. Henderson, “the first moment he appeared on the scene. It is right to be suspicious, but we must not let our suspicions run away with our common sense. I have checked and cross-checked every move he has made since he was thrown out of the Metropolitan Police two years ago. The accounts all agree. No, I do not think he is a policeman, but I think he is a very dangerous man. He will have to go.”

  “He’s been doing his work admirably. I hardly know who to put in his place.”

  “Loveridge? Manton? Banks? Straightforward hitmen, but hardly up to Mercer’s weight, I agree.”