The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  “Where are we? And how did we get here?”

  “If you ask too many questions,” said the doctor, “you’ll put your temperature up again. We’re in a stretch of water called the Long Neck, just below Walton. We came here via Greenland Dock, Russia Dock, Lavender Pond, and the open river. Now go to sleep.”

  When Petrella woke next morning, he felt ravenously hungry and knew that he was well again. After breakfast the doctor went ashore to dispatch a telegram to Colonel Montefiore, at Blagdens Wake, Nettlebed. He wrote it out and handed it, with some misgiving, over the counter of a tiny village shop which called itself a sub-post office. His misgivings were entirely justified, for it never reached its destination, though a Colonel Mountferry of Nettlebed House, Bannockburn, did receive, some weeks later, a telegram which said:

  Taken ill suddenly. Will write. Patrick.

  The six days that followed were, without any exception, the best that Petrella could remember.

  He was steady on his feet by the evening of the first day, and strong enough next morning to help the doctor about the simple manoeuvres of his craft.

  He learnt to operate lock gates with a handle like a huge grandfather clock key which lived in the barge’s engine room, to steer for long, slow miles through a forgotten waterway, where they might not see a house for hours at a stretch, and their only visitors would be the bullocks who would gallop to the hedges when they heard the Journey’s End coming, and stand, breathing hard and rolling their frightened, curious eyes until her iron bulk vanished round a bend or under one of the low, stone bridges which had so little headroom that it seemed impossible she should squeeze through them at all.

  He learnt to tend the wants of the diesel engine which drove them forward, to trim and fill the paraffin lamps, and to peel potatoes. But it was the evenings he enjoyed most. When the barge was safely tied up, and the lamps were lit; when supper had been eaten and washed up and stacked away, and they settled down to talk before going to bed.

  He heard from the doctor something of his curious life. “I was fifty,” said the old man. “It was actually my fiftieth birthday, when I stopped being a doctor and became a bargemaster. I’d made quite a lot of money. Those were days when your patients came to you because they liked and trusted you, not because the Government told them to, and a man who was successful in his line could make a reasonable amount of money. I was unmarried, and I calculated that I had enough banked away to keep a man of my frugal habits in comfort for the best part of a century.

  “That day I was called to the house of a man I knew well. He was a businessman. Not a tycoon, you understand, just a pleasant person who worked and worried from morning to night to support an expensive wife and three gold-plated children.

  “When I reached the house he was dead. Thrombosis. A less fashionable complaint then than it is now. I shut my surgery that very day, sold my practice, and bought the Journey’s End.

  “It’s the only decision in my life I’ve never regretted. I make enough by doing odd jobs to cover running expenses. Sometimes I hear from my stockbroker that my investments have gone up again. I never touch them. When I die they’ll go to my old medical school.”

  It wasn’t until the evening of the fourth day that Petrella thought to inquire where they were going. He discovered that their destination was some miles short of Basingstoke, where they were delivering a grand piano, and some harvesting machinery, and picking up two ponies.

  It was on the way back that Petrella told the doctor the whole story of the Borners and Roper from beginning to end, and the old man listened in absorbed and judicious silence. He interrupted only once to say, “I knew Copper. He helped me with the barge. He was a nice boy, but too easily led.” And at the end of it all he said, “You sound bitter about it. Why?”

  “I did feel bitter about it,” said Petrella. “I’m all right now. It was just that in the police we do a lot of work, and take a few risks and a few knocks in the interests of law and order, and one would think the law would be on our side.”

  “The law’s on no one’s side,” said the doctor. “Once it’s on anyone’s side, it stops being law at all and becomes something cooked up by the politicians.”

  “Yes, but—” said Petrella.

  “If you had the law behind you in the sense that it supported you whatever you did, right or wrong, you’d degenerate into a state security force. Like the Gestapo.”

  Petrella said mutinously, “I bet when the Gestapo caught half a dozen dangerous thugs the magistrate didn’t let them out on bail.”

  Unknown to Petrella, while the Journey’s End was nosing her calm path among the water lilies of the Basingstoke and Southwestern Canal, in South Borough events were on the move.

  On the morning following Petrella’s departure, Mr. Wetherall called on Superintendent Benjamin.

  “Patrick and I are great friends,” he said. “And I knocked on his door this morning to see if he’d gone. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find him laid up. He hasn’t been looking at all well lately. His room was empty, but there was a suitcase, which he’d obviously been meaning to take with him, on the floor, half packed.”

  Benjamin had troubles of his own. He said, “He may have been short of time. Suppose it was a question of coming back for his bag or catching the train? Or something like that.”

  “It doesn’t sound like him,” said Wetherall. “The breakfast things weren’t washed up, either.”

  “If you’re really worried,” said Benjamin, “I could get in touch with the people he’s meant to be staying with. He left a telephone number.”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” said Mr. Wetherall.

  However, no one was put to any trouble. For at that moment, Colonel Montefiore came through himself.

  “Mistake?” he said. “Of course there’s no mistake. Patrick told us exactly which train he would catch. I assumed, when he failed to arrive, that he must be ill in bed at home. I think someone should go and see.”

  Benjamin said he would do what he could, and turned a now worried face to Mr. Wetherall. “There’s quite a few things might have happened,” he said. “His holiday’s his own affair. He could have changed his mind about where he was going. I’ll have inquiries made, but we don’t want to start a fuss about nothing. Things are rather upset round here as it is.”

  Mr. Wetherall swears that he said nothing. On the contrary, he asserts that it was one of his own boys that told him the news.

  “You know that Inspector,” said Martin, who was head of the school that year, and a privileged character. “The young one – Petrella. I heard the Borners done him. They coshed him the night before last. And dropped his body in the canal.”

  “Where on earth did you hear that?”

  “Everyone knows it,” said Martin. “What we reckon is, they’ll be after Mike and Terry and the others next. Bound to be. After all, they’re witnesses, too, aren’t they? Some of the boys are forming a vigilant committee – a sort of escort – to protect them till the trial comes on. A good idea, I think, don’t you, sir?”

  “Good heavens,” said Mr. Wetherall. “It’s a terrible idea.” He cast his mind over the names of the boys concerned. Of the six who had come forward, the leaders had been Mike O’Connor and Terry Shane, both Irish boys, and both members of the large Irish colony which centred on Stafford Street, Latimer Street, and Cutaway Lane.

  He remembered hearing that there had been bad blood, even before the Roper killing, between the Borners and the Irish. Something that someone had said in a pub, which had ended in broken glass and blood, and had been stored in the retentive Irish memory. If the Borners and their supporters got it into their heads that O’Connor and Shane were giving evidence out of spite – and if the school got involved – he pictured a battlefield strewn with South Borough Secondary School corpses, and hurried round once again to the police station.

  He found that the news had run ahead of him.

  “I can
’t get anything reliable,” growled Benjamin. “There’s talk of him being seen in Childers Road, and I’m having the bank of the canal there searched. As a precaution, you understand.”

  “But it’s four days now,” said Mr. Wetherall. “And he’s not what you’d call an inconsiderate young man. Even if he’d gone off—” Then he saw that Benjamin was as worried as he was.

  That afternoon a police constable picked up a paper bag, with six handkerchiefs in it, on the wharf at the end of Childers Road. The handkerchiefs were new, and there was an invoice with them, and the invoice had a number on it which indicated the assistant at Spinks’ who had made the sale. She remembered Petrella and described him with an accuracy which suggested she had looked at him more than once. “Dark black hair, young-looking, a brown face, very deep blue eyes.” She also remembered the raincoat he was wearing; and the fact that he had looked a bit under the weather.

  Benjamin gave orders for a search of that section of the Surrey Canal. And sent an urgent message to Chief Superintendent Thorn at District. Dragging operations were carried on by arc lamp all that night; and the next morning a team of frogmen was called in.

  More than a hundred South Borough boys were late for school that morning, having stopped to watch the operation, and in the first break O’Connor addressed a mass meeting of his school fellows. He was a thick, stocky, snub-nosed boy with sun-bleached hair, and like all Southern Irishmen he had a grasp of the essentials of mob oratory.

  Mr. Wetherall read the portents, and telephoned Superintendent Benjamin, who was even then in conference with his superiors.

  “There’ll likely be trouble,” said Dory, a slow-spoken man, who was in charge of the whole of the Division, both uniformed and detective branches. “We’ll need a few extra men to carry out a proper search for Petrella. I think I’ll ask for them now, just in case.”

  “It’s the boys,” said Benjamin. “They’ve got it into their heads that the Borners have knocked off Petrella to stop him giving evidence. It’s a short step from that to the idea that they’re planning to knock off the other witnesses too.”

  “And you don’t believe it?” said Thorn.

  “No, I don’t,” said Benjamin. “It’s out of character. I’m afraid something may have happened to Petrella. He was looking pretty rotten. Suppose he passed out and slipped into the canal. Or he may just have lost his memory. But I don’t believe anyone, even that gang, would be silly enough to knock off a witness, in cold blood. And remember, to make sense of it they’ve got to get rid of seven or eight boys as well.”

  He wondered, afterwards, if he had been arguing to convince himself.

  It was on the following evening, the sixth after Petrella’s disappearance, that the fight occurred in Basset Street. No one quite knew how it started. The fact that it was half past nine suggested that Copper Dixon and Curly had been drinking, but the provocation seemed to have come from a group of schoolboys who had no business to be out at that hour. It ended in Copper losing two teeth from a thrown milk bottle and Terry Shane breaking his wrist in the scuffle that followed. A car load of policemen cleared the streets.

  Terry Shane’s father was not the person to allow an assault on his son to go unanswered. Micky Shane had had a distinguished career in the all-in wrestling ring, where his speciality had been bouncing his opponents on their heads. He was now growing fat, and a little out of training, but he commanded a considerable following in the Stafford Street area, and on the following evening a party consisting of eight or ten Irishmen paid a visit to the Six Bells, in Carver Street, which was known to be a stronghold of the Borners. Copper, who was the only one of the gang present, got out by a back door, and the Irishmen spent a pleasant ten minutes wrecking the saloon bar.

  It is just possible that, left to themselves, the two factions might have felt honour was now satisfied, and called it a day.

  The Borners and their mob of followers were beginning to show signs of nervousness. As long as the mob was in being, a powerful and flourishing entity, people had touched their hats to it out of fear of reprisals. Under the stress of circumstances, it was beginning to fall apart.

  Had the boys of South Borough Secondary School been prepared to let the matter drop, it might have simmered down. But they were not. On the contrary. Like harbingers of strife, the black-and-red caps blew before the storm, and where they went, fresh trouble was born.

  The ninth evening after Petrella’s disappearance was warm, even for September. Quiet, overcast, and still. Sammy Borner thought that he would pass the time with a game of snooker with the boys at Charley’s. He left his car in the back street outside the entrance to the club, which was in a basement, and approached by a flight of iron steps. When he came out an hour later he found that all his tyres were flat. Not just one, but all four. He also observed five or six boys, one of them a chunky youth with light hair, standing on the pavement, their hands in their pockets, looking at nothing in particular.

  “You do this?” he inquired.

  “That’s right,” said the chunky boy, and added, “bloody murderer.”

  Sammy hesitated for a moment, but the arrival of his friends, Harry, Curly, Copper, and Nick, who were leaving the club at the same time, gave him a feeling of solidarity.

  The opposition, after all, was only five schoolboys. They had earned a lesson. Sammy ducked into the back of the car, picked up a jack handle, and moved forward. The chunky boy whistled shrilly, and the next moment the street was full of boys and men.

  The riot call reached Dory at Borough High Street Police Station, where he was in conference with Benjamin.

  “The Irish have got Sammy Borner and his friends holed up in a snooker cellar in Parton Street,” he said. “There’s been a bit of bloodshed. If they get their hands on them, in their present temper, they’ll finish them.”

  “And that,” said Benjamin, “would break my heart.”

  Dory was already giving his orders.

  Two squad cars and a tender reached the corner of Parton Street together. The air was full of the noise of battle and breaking glass.

  “Sounds quite a party,” said Dory. He marshalled his forces. “Ben, you stay here with four men, and keep them away from the cars.” And when Benjamin protested, “In a mess-up like this, a uniform’s worth more than a good character.” He arranged the eight men he had chosen into careful formation. “Front two link arms with me,” he said. “Use your feet if you have to. And keep together.”

  They went round the corner like a human tank. It took them sixty highly-coloured seconds to reach the billiard saloon, to push aside the table which was up-ended against the door, and to replace it behind them.

  They found four badly frightened men, and a fifth lying on his face in a pool of blood.

  “We’re in,” said Dory. “But that’s not to say we’ll get out again. They’ll be expecting us this time. Wainwright, go and see if you can find a back door or a window or something. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Curly,” said Sammy Borner. He looked as if he had been crying. “They’ve killed him. You’ve got to do something”

  “We’re none of us dead yet,” said Dory.

  There was a splintering crash from the street. The crowd had tipped Sammy’s car up on to one side and over into the mouth of the area. The smell of spilt petrol filled the air.

  “There is a window, sir,” said Wainwright. “But it opens into a sort of little closed yard.”

  “I don’t care if it opens into the back of beyond,” said Dory. “So long as it leads somewhere. Hughes and Gavigan, carry this man. And don’t drop him. We want him in one piece. Now let’s get going.”

  The window was barely large enough. As they manhandled Curly through, there came from the room they had left a muffled explosion followed by the white glare of detonated petrol.

  Dory reformed his force in the courtyard. “Soon as we get round the corner,” he said, “we’ll be in sight. Make straight for the cars, and don’t stop for anythin
g.”

  Once again the power of united effort, and the drive of a man who knew his own mind, prevailed against disorganised numbers. They tumbled into the cars.

  “Make for Gabriel Street,” said Dory. “It’ll give them farther to go if they come after us.”

  “They’re coming all right,” said Benjamin. “So’s the Fire Brigade.” As they rounded the corner, they heard the bells of the first fire engine.

  The Journey’s End tied up at the Camberwell basin and Petrella climbed ashore. The sky was coal black and threatening.

  “Lucky you’ve got a mackintosh,” said the doctor. “Rain soon, and plenty of it, if I’m any judge.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” said Petrella. “It’s been the finest holiday I’ve ever had.”

  “Nothing to thank me for,” said the doctor. “I’ve enjoyed having you along. Come again soon.”

  Petrella said he would; but he knew, even then, that no other trip would be quite like that first one.

  He climbed the steps from the dockside up to the level of the Camberwell Road. His first idea was to take a bus home. When he saw the glow in the sky to the northwest, and heard the sound of the fire bells, he changed his mind. He thought he would make first for Gabriel Street, to pick up the news. It was less than ten minutes’ quick walk.

  He had covered half the distance when, with spectacular suddenness, the heavens were opened and the rain came down. Petrella buttoned up the neck of his mackintosh, and broke into a jog trot …

  Benjamin and Dory were standing in the first-storey window of Gabriel Street, looking out at the crowd which filled the short approach road. The crowd was mostly men, with a scattering of boys.

  It was not doing anything in particular.

  “I hope they don’t try to get in,” said Dory. “That’d mean calling for reinforcements. We’ve handled them ourselves so far. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “They don’t know what they want,” said Benjamin. “It wouldn’t take very much to move them in either direction.”

  “Thank God it’s raining. That’ll wash the whisky out of them. What the hell are you laughing at?”