Seven Days to Death

by John Creasey

  She was nervous of him, almost frightened.

  He supposed she was twenty-one, certainly not much more. Her brown hair was a feathery kind of cluster, her eyes were light blue. She had on only a trace of lipstick, and her lips were set tightly, as if she was afraid that if she opened her mouth the muscles would take control and she would burst out crying.

  Gideon knew that the sergeant and a constable on duty were watching her as intently as he.

  There might be a lot of doubt about what to do later, but for the moment he had just to set this girl at ease and smooth out that tension. So he hardly paused as he moved toward her, but maintained his pleasant smile arid offered her his hand. With two or three words, too, he did the thing which mattered more perhaps than anything: He gave her a sense of his omniscience.

  “Hallo, Miss Rose,” he said. “I didn’t know you were a friend of Pru’s, so many things one’s daughter doesn’t tell one about.” Her hand was cold, but the quick nervous pressure told him that he was already making an impression. “I didn’t keep you waiting, I hope.”

  She managed to say: “No, I – no.” She bit her lip, and he saw tears were stinging her eyes. She couldn’t find words, now that she was here; all her strength had gone, on finding the courage to come and ask for him.

  He took her arm, much as he would Pru’s.

  “We can go along here and sit down,” he said; and as he led her toward a small waiting room just along the passage, he added to the sergeant, “How about some tea, Matt?”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “Say ten minutes,” Gideon said.

  The room was a small one, with a window overlooking the barracks-like square, where the squad and other cars were parked. The window was barred, because occasionally they had a tough customer in here. It had been freshly painted, the walls were a shiny green below and yellow above, there were two armchairs, some upright chairs, a table, ash tray, and the inevitable wall decoration at the Yard - photographs of sporting giants or teams of the past.

  The girl probably noticed nothing of this.

  The touch of Gideon’s big hand and the minute’s walk to this room had helped her. She didn’t fight so hard to keep back tears, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and then blew her nose. Was she a smoker? Gideon took out a fat cigarette case, which he carried only to be sociable.

  “No – no, I don’t smoke,” she said, looking at him intently, and speaking huskily but without a quiver in her voice. “How – how did you know who I was? I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “You’re very like your brother,” said Gideon, “and I remembered your name, from the A.C.’s report: Mary.”

  That remark stung her, and she had to turn away again, but only for a moment.

  “Yes, I am,” she said stiffly. “He – he didn’t kill Winifred.”

  “Didn’t he?”

  “No.”

  “Positive?”

  “He couldn’t have,” William Rose’s sister said.

  She said it in such a way that Gideon felt a current of warning; this wasn’t going to be just the sentimental, emotional appeal which might have been expected. She was a courageous little customer - hadn’t she proved it, by getting him to come and see her by using Pru’s name?

  “If you’re sure he couldn’t have, can you help us to prove it?” Gideon asked, watching her very closely. She was no longer looking away from him; her eyes were wide open and steady, shining with a kind of defiance. He went on in the same quiet and convincing voice. “The last thing we want to do is to hold an innocent man and make him go through this kind of ordeal.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “It’s what I mean.”

  “Well, the men who arrested Will didn’t behave like that; they took it for granted that he was guilty from the beginning,” the girl said hotly. “I was there when they came to see him, and then took him away. The way they talked to me was just the same. They even told me not to waste any time in lying to try to save him!”

  Gideon thought: Oh, did they? But he wasn’t wholly surprised. The Superintendent at H5 was coasting along toward retirement, and the Division wasn’t running as smoothly as anyone outside, it would have liked - or many inside it, for that matter. And as often happened when there was any kind of weakness, two or three of the senior men had become a bit too big for their boots, showing a kind of truculence, a hardness, almost a callousness which didn’t do anyone any good. You might talk to an old lag as the police had obviously talked to young Rose, but not to a boy without a record, who was one of a closely knit family, who ...

  “Perhaps they felt quite sure that he did kill this girl,” Gideon said quietly.

  “But he couldn’t have!”

  “Why not?”

  “I was with him at the time he was supposed to have been with her,” said Mary Rose.

  “Were you?” asked Gideon, slowly.

  He didn’t believe her; and now he understood why the H5 men had been impatient. If she had attempted to give her brother an alibi, and they had reason to think that she was lying - well, they’d soon get annoyed. Policemen shouldn’t but they did. He could applaud the girl’s effort and her spirit and at the same time feel desperately sorry for her, because she wouldn’t have a chance to fool him or anyone else. She was as transparent as a mother trying to save the life of her child.

  “Yes, I was,” the girl said, more tensely. “We went to the pictures together.”

  It was building up to form. She claimed that they’d been to the cinema at a time when the house was crowded, throngs waiting to go in, no one able to pick out two youngsters from the hundreds of couples who had been moving to and fro. The pattern of this kind of alibi was so clear that Gideon - and the H5 men - could almost put Mary’s words into her mouth.

  Gideon didn’t intend to.

  “Mary,” he said, and the Use of her Christian name startled her again, “have you made an official statement about this to the police?”

  “No. No, I...”

  “Well, you’ll have to,” Gideon said briskly. “I’ll arrange for someone to come and take the statement down, and then you can come back this afternoon, read it, and sign it. I don’t want to miss the slightest clue, the slightest piece of evidence; but I can’t do all these things personally, you know, and I haven’t been dealing with the case myself.”

  “If only you would!” she cried.

  The truth about Mary Rose, Gideon realized as he studied her, was that she was a young woman, not just a girl. Girls didn’t have a figure like that: She was almost fully mature. She had the freshness which no man could fail to approve, and a simplicity which carried her to the point of naivete. In an idle moment he would run his gaze up and down her figure, from her nice legs to her high bosom, and get that rather warm feeling that the sight of someone so young and desirable always gave. He didn’t think she knew that her “If only you would!” might have come from the most disingenuous woman of the world; she probably didn’t know just how much she seemed to be intent on flattering him.

  “Well, the case is under my authority and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t look into it,” he said practically, “but I’ve got to do what every other detective has to do: look at the evidence. That’s the thing that matters, you know - evidence. Like your statement. When you’ve signed it, we shall have it as evidence, and if this case comes before the judge and jury, then you’ll have to stand up in court and swear, on oath, that the statement was true in every detail.” This was where she should begin to wilt, of course, but she didn’t. “Then, if the jury believes you - well, that would be that. The verdict might depend on whether there is any contradictory evidence: if someone else saw your brother in a different place about the time...”

  “They couldn’t have, he was with me,” said Mary Rose, quietly.

 
For the first time Gideon began to wonder whether he could have been wrong, whether he was doing a Lemaitre by jumping to any kind of conclusion.

  “And you’ll make that statement and sign it?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Good,” Gideon said, more briskly. “I’ll bring a sergeant along; but before I do, tell me why you lied about being a friend of my daughter’s, will you?”

  He looked very stern, then; as he might with Pru.

  The girl flushed a little, not very much. “Well – well, it wasn’t really a lie,” she asserted. Under his gaze, she turned a deeper red, but stuck to her guns. “I do know Pru, slightly. We met at the Guildhall School of Music when I was studying the piano. She used to tell me - she used to tell us,” Mary corrected, and now her face was almost scarlet, “that she was absolutely sure you wouldn’t lie about a case. She – well, we used to ask her about you; because you were interesting. Everyone’s fascinated by a real detective. We used to egg Pru on to talk about you, and—and in a way we – I seemed to know you.”

  Now Gideon had to hide a smile; she was-laying it on with a trowel, yet obviously didn’t realize it; and she had a case.

  “I see,” he said. “That explains it.”

  She went on very quickly: “And when this awful thing happened and the other police wouldn’t listen to me, I remembered everything Pru had said and just had to come and see you. I didn’t think you’d see me if you knew who I was, but a friend of Pru - well, I had to see you.”

  “You know, Mary,” Gideon said prosaically, “anyone who has a good reason for wanting to see me or anyone else at Scotland Yard can always come. You don’t need special influence. And whether your brother is guilty or not, we want to help you and your mother and...”

  He broke off.

  Tears had filled the girl’s eyes again, and suddenly she seemed more heavily burdened than at any time since they had come into this room. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She just sat there, hands gripping the arms of her chair, head turned toward the barred window, lips so tight together that he knew she was trying to keep back an outburst of tears. She wasn’t just a nice kid fighting for her brother; she was a young woman keyed up to a terrible pitch of emotional tension; her nerves were as taut as nerves could be, and Something had twanged them. Gideon wasn’t sorry that there was a tap at the door, and the constable came in with the tea and some biscuits.

  “Put that down here,” Gideon said to him, and then in a low-pitched voice: “Have a policewoman here in ten minutes, tell her to bring some aspirins.” The policeman nodded, and Gideon turned round to the girl, then poured out a cup of tea, and went on: “Better have this while it’s hot, Mary.”

  Now she looked at him, but made no attempt to take the tea.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said drearily, “no one believes me, but it’s true, it’s absolutely true. We were at the pictures. Will had had a quarrel with Win and was ever so upset. He hadn’t any money, and I—I treated him. But no one will believe me.”

  If she’d added, “And I’m so frightened,” she would have told Gideon everything.

  It was certainly time he went to see young William Rose.

  The policewoman, who wasn’t so much older than the girl, took over; she didn’t need telling what to do. Gideon sent for a stenographer to take down the statement, and hovered between thinking that he was a fool to be half-persuaded, and that he was a hard hearted cynic not to take Mary Rose at her word.

  4. Benson

  Benson was with a man twelve years younger than himself, named Freddy Tisdale.

  Their partnership had been decided upon at the time of the original plan for the prison break. It hadn’t originated in Benson’s mind, but in the agile mind of Jingo Smith, the ideas man for the gang which Benson had led for several years before they had run into trouble, Gideon, and the immutable forces of the law.

  There had been an early winter fall of snow, about the middle of December, and Jingo Smith had seen what might happen if there should be another heavy snowfall and a high wind. In fact, he remembered from the previous year that some of the drifts in the prison yard had been so high that, when frozen hard, they made a sloping bank from the yard itself to the top of the wall. The warders, of course, were well aware of it; and at times when there were big snowdrifts, the watch was doubled and the drifts cleared quickly. But Jingo had talked about this to Benson and Wally Alderman, and slowly and patiently they had developed the plan.

  It had meant using trusties, of course. It had also meant the connivance of a warder - not to help in the escape, but to give one or two of the trusties special privileges which had enabled the plans to be laid. The conditions required had been quite apparent: a heavy snowfall, a high wind, and a disturbance in one part of the prison to enable the escapers to win their chance. At first they had planned for six of them to break out. Two more had been added to the list; and, at the last moment, a ninth man had discovered what they were planning and had strung along with them.

  If they hadn’t let him come, he might have squealed. Benson had no faith at all in honour among thieves.

  The actual break-out had gone perfectly, conditions being absolutely right. The disturbance had been a fire which had broken out in the laundry, compelling the warders to pay special attention to that part of the prison. The escapers had been in the library, which was on the first floor overlooking the prison yard. A file, smuggled in from the shoemaker’s “shop, and a cobbler’s hammer had enabled them to break the iron bars and the toughened glass. They’d got out, nipping across the six inches of snow and up the slope as swift as antelopes. The librarian and die two other warders with him had been overpowered and trussed up; and no other prisoners had been in the library at that time.

  All had gone perfectly.

  That was partly because Benson, having accepted the idea, had worked it out.

  That day, with Freddy Tisdale, he hid in a house not a mile from the prison.

  And he was ravenously hungry.

  Benson wasn’t a big man, just average. He did not seem exceptionally strong, although he was. He looked hard. He had sharp, chiselled features and pale blue eyes which could look at a man squarely even though everything he himself was saying was a lie. Hoping for the blizzard, he had made most of the escapers avoid having haircuts, on one pretext or another; only the last-minute man had a prison crop. That was the kind of detail that Benson excelled in, and was why he had been one of the most successful criminals in England for nearly fifteen years.

  He had overlooked only one detail, the one that had sent him to jail. He had forgotten that his wife, having learned to hate him, might give the police the evidence they needed.

  She had.

  She was probably the only person in the world whom Benson really hated.

  There was no room for strong emotions in him, beyond that. He had always approached every job, from burglary to smash-and-grab, from beating-up to murder, quite cold-bloodedly, being concerned only with what he might get out of it. The two men he had murdered had died simply because they could have named him and brought his career to an abrupt end. He hadn’t hated them; he had had no feeling of any kind toward them.

  He had never really loved, but his wife’s beauty had bowled him over when they had met fifteen years ago. He had been proud of her for some time, until he had taken up with another girl who had no children to look after.

  Benson’s children, a boy and a girl, had meant little to him. It had never occurred to him that indirectly they had been responsible for his long prison sentence. Anxiety about the possible influence of a hardened criminal father upon the children had been the chief cause of his wife’s “betrayal.”

  Now, Benson was on his way to see his wife.

  He had arranged the pairing of the escape party, and had chosen Freddy Tisdale because Freddy had certain qual
ities which were the envy of almost everyone in the prison, and many hundreds outside. For one thing, he was double-jointed. For another, he was probably the finest locksmith in the country on the wrong side of the law; there was hardly a lock he couldn’t force. And for the third, he looked such a kid. In a way, he was: just twenty-four. He was in prison because he and three other men had been caught red-handed in a fur salon, the locks of which Freddy had forced with insolent ease, and all four of them had beaten up a night watchman who had surprised them. They had been caught by police in a patrol car, while running away. The night watchman hadn’t been badly hurt, and Freddy’s share of the proceeds of the haul had been seven years.

  Benson had realized that, behind the boyish, friendly face and the apparently resigned manner, there had lived in Freddy Tisdale the escape bug. You had it or you didn’t have it. Nine men out of ten at Millways, the Moor, or any other prison, would no more dream of trying to escape than they would of spitting in the Governor’s eyes. They knew that the prisoner was always caught and sent back, that he lost all his remission, made life much tougher for himself, and often faced a longer sentence because of new crimes committed while free. Perhaps one prisoner in ten would ignore these cold facts and long only for escape.