Leadenhall Street appeared to be a street of bank head offices that shaded off into a street of shipping offices, and the police car drew up exactly where it became confusing. There was a stationery shop and a café on either side of the building which they went into. They asked for the area manager, because Charlie Vosper believed in avoiding directors and company spokesmen.
‘Your name, sir?’ asked the uniformed attendant.
‘Inspector Vosper and Mr Temple.’
They stood and watched the staff on the ground floor watching them while the attendant made a series of muted telephone calls. Charlie Vosper looked, even in his smart grey civvy suit, like a policeman. Paul wondered what they thought he was. The bustling room was divided by partitions into about thirty sections, telephones rang in every corner and messengers carried papers from sections and customers and disappeared through doors. Paul turned his attention to the notice which offered five hundred pounds reward to any person giving information that would lead to a conviction for bank robberies.
‘If you’ll come this way, gentlemen. Mr Joseph Jeffcote will see you.’ He showed them into the lift. ‘Mr Joseph Jeffcote is one of the bank’s directors.’
Charlie Vosper grunted unhappily.
It was a massive office on the fifth floor, flanked with secretaries and other directors’ offices. Oak panelling and solid banking respectability. Mr Joseph Jeffcote wore a black jacket and pin striped trousers. A large man with a face flushed with capillary veins. He reminded Paul in some respects of Joe Lancing, but the voice was noticeably different.
‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ he barked. ‘I’ve sent for the area manager, he won’t be a moment. Delighted to meet you. Temple? Well, well, I saw you on television, and I tell you that as it’s my bank’s branches that have been robbed I don’t agree with you that things should be made easier for the criminals.’ He laughed inappropriately. ‘I’d send them to gaol for thirty years.’
‘I think you must have misunderstood what I said,’ Paul murmured.
Mr Joseph Jeffcote spoke with spasmodic and forceful bursts of words, like a man who has overcome a stammer. ‘Ah, Benson, come in. These are the lists, are they?’ He took them and started to read them.
The area manager had turned to leave.
‘If Mr Benson could stay,’ Vosper said courteously. ‘He might be able to help.’
‘Benson?’ He clearly thought it unlikely. ‘As you wish. Can you spare us a moment, Benson?’
He could.
‘Inspector Vosper,’ Jeffcote said as he surveyed the lists, ‘I must be under a misapprehension. These lists concern our head office staff. Are you not investigating the robberies in our south-west-midlands area?’
Vosper shook his head. ‘The south-west-midlands area man is Inspector Manley. He’s in charge of the case out there, but I’m helping him with the London end.’
‘And what might the London end be?’
‘We think somebody in this building tipped off the bank robbers about times and the movements of money which the banks would be handling.’
‘It’s unheard of.’
Vosper smiled unpleasantly. ‘I often hear about things like that. So could I see the lists? We think it quite probable that the inside man left these offices about a month ago. Perhaps he was transferred to a branch or even sacked.’
Paul moved in closer to Vosper and peered over his shoulder. There had not been a great deal of staff movement. Adams, Jarvis, Miss Pinkerton, Sampson, Wilks. And three people had been transferred by way of their promotion. The Miss Pinkerton had left to be married.
‘Sampson,’ Paul murmured. ‘Is this Tony Sampson?’
Mr Joseph Jeffcote looked enquiringly at Benson.
‘Mr Anthony Sampson, yes, sir. He was in the accounts department, but we suggested he might find a position that would be more congenial. He wasn’t quite the type.’
Paul smiled. ‘What type is that?’
‘Well, sound, you know, solid. Sampson wasn’t my sort of chap at all. He always needed a haircut and his clothes were what I can only describe as sharp. We have to watch things like that, you know. Besides, he had a drink problem and apparently frequented rather dubious haunts in his spare time.’
‘We dispensed with his services?’ asked Jeffcote.
‘I used my own initiative, Mr Joseph. There were some very strange rumours, and one of the girls claimed she saw him copying out the security van’s delivery schedule. We couldn’t have that kind of information spread around.
Charlie Vosper sounded slightly apoplectic. ‘She saw what?’
‘Copying the delivery schedules into his notebook.’ He rinsed his hands nervously. ‘Well, what would you have done?’
‘Changed the delivery schedule?’ suggested Vosper.
‘Oh.’ The area manager began to perspire. ‘You don’t think he –? I mean, do you suppose those bank robberies –? My goodness me!’
His address was in the staff records as Tite Street, Chelsea.
‘Isn’t that rather expensive?’ asked Paul. The only other fellow he could think of who had lived in Tite Street had died penniless in France, but that had been in 1930.
‘Very expensive. We paid Mr Sampson £1750 per annum, but I’d put his standard of living at five thousand a year minimum. He was, I think you would agree, flashy. Drove about in a white Jaguar. I knew I was right to dismiss him.’
Charlie Vosper was silent as they went down in the lift. He didn’t speak until they were in the police car and heading towards Chelsea. Then the inspector spoke a few terse words about banks who just ask to be robbed and clerks who think it will never happen to them.
‘By the way,’ he said nastily to Paul, ‘how come you knew of Tony Sampson? You didn’t mention him to me.’
‘Oh, he just cropped up briefly the other day. There was no reason to attach any importance to him then.’
Vosper coughed for a few moments. ‘I know all those files by heart, and I don’t think Inspector Manley refers to him. But that’s typical. Has Manley slipped up?’
‘No. Sampson belongs to your end, Charlie, the London end. The whole case has switched to you now.’
Vosper grinned. ‘It isn’t my case, Temple, not unless I solve it. Who is Tony Sampson, how did he crop up?’
‘He goes around with a girl from the club where Betty Stanway works, and he even seems to be acceptable to Tam Coley, the owner of the club. So there is a slight link with Desmond Blane through the Love-Inn.’
Tite Street, of course, had gone down in the world since 1894, and the houses had been renumbered. Seven people appeared to live in the one building, and Tony Sampson had flat number seven. But he wasn’t answering the bell that afternoon.
Charlie Vosper rang the other bells, and two or three voices answered through the grill. ‘I’m Jeremy,’ said Inspector Vosper, and a buzzer sounded mysteriously behind the door. He pushed and it opened. Charlie Vosper grinned at his own guile.
A selection of mail on the table inside the hall revealed a letter to Tony Sampson, which confirmed that he wasn’t in. But it was fourpenny post and had been posted the day before, so it wouldn’t have been delivered first thing in the morning. Charlie Vosper shrugged. He was still in a devious mood.
‘I think we have sufficient grounds for entering his flat,’ he murmured. ‘Reasonable suspicion.’
They went through the lushly carpeted hall and up the stairs to the second floor. Several doors opened as they passed, anxious people waiting for Jeremy, and the doors closed again at the formidable sight of Inspector Vosper. Flat number seven was at the end of a brief corridor.
Paul watched as Vosper applied a device on his key ring to the safety lock, and almost at once the door swung open. It was a luxurious flat for somebody earning £1750 a year; it had the hushed atmosphere of expensive carpets, tapestry and furniture. There was a colour television, a hi-fi set with stereophonic speakers, and other expensive electronic toys were around the room. The colour television set ha
d been left on, and a dazzling spectrum of colour flickered meaninglessly in search of a picture. The body of Tony Sampson lay on the sofa.
The kitchen was off the small entrance hall, a compact room in which even the onions were hung as decoration. This had been a man who preferred the best. He had the best of bedrooms beyond the sitting room, with a large bed and built-in wardrobes. The whole flat looked as if it had been designed by a stranger, and nothing of Tony Sampson except his conspicuous wealth came through.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ said Charlie Vosper.
It looked as though Tony Sampson had been watching television when his caller arrived. There was no sign of a struggle, and no sign of forced entry, so it must have been a friend of his who smashed open Tony’s head. The murder weapon was the poker which lay in the fireplace. The sickly smell came from the newly splattered blood on the sofa.
Charlie Vosper picked up the telephone to call his men into action.
‘I might as well be going,’ said Paul. ‘You’ll obviously be tied up here for a while.’
‘Temple!’ Inspector Vosper’s tone had reverted to the brusqueness of a man on duty. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I thought I might take the rest of the afternoon off,’ said Paul, ‘you know, wander into a West End club and relax for an hour. I find the sight of so much blood disturbing.’ Paul smiled apologetically. ‘And this is the second man I’ve found with his head battered in like this. I’ll soon think I’ve become allergic to them.’
‘Keep away from the Love-Inn. I don’t want you frightening off our man, whoever he might be. You only confuse things with all your theories about whizz kids and grammar school boys.’ The inspector laughed unfairly. ‘I knew this poor bloody kid couldn’t be responsible for all that planning and organisation. Look at him. He’s been killed by an old-fashioned gangster working in an old-fashioned way.
Paul nodded. ‘They’ve grown panicky.’
Paul left flat number seven and closed the door behind him. In the corridor he paused to light a cigarette, and as he did so he realised he was being watched by the man from flat number five. A little man with bags under his eyes and a Vidal Sassoon haircut. He looked like a depraved adolescent, but on closer inspection he was probably forty-five and with it.
‘You must be Jeremy,’ he said precisely. ‘Is something wrong in there?’
‘The name is Temple. Why, did you hear something wrong?’
‘I never hear anything, duckie, I was well brought up. And anyway, there’s so much to hear in these flats it could become a full time occupation. I prefer to dabble in things.’ He smiled a dazzling white friendly smile. ‘I’m Butch Bendix, I model and things like that.’
‘Hello. Were you a friend of Tony Sampson?’
‘Not intimately. I sometimes took in his milk and said hello on the stairs. Why the past tense? Is he dead?’ His hands fluttered nervously to his dyed grey temples. ‘Oh my God! That must have been what the noise was about. I heard him screaming.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Mm? Yes, of course. It’s funny, you don’t look like a Jeremy really.’
‘The name is Paul Temple.’
Mr Bendix’s flat was identical to the one Paul had just left, except that he had different toys and there were flowers in vases everywhere and a window box in the living room had reduced the daylight to a green hue. He sat on a sofa with his legs curled under him and sighed.
‘When did you hear him scream?’ asked Paul.
‘About an hour ago.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘My dear Jeremy, what should I have done? I heard him scream, but of course I assumed he was probably having an extra good time. Would you have interfered?’
‘The name is Paul Temple. I might have peered through the letter box.’
Butch Bendix giggled. ‘I did that. But I frightened the wits out of myself. He was a big sulky looking man with black hair smarmed down with grease. A vicious looking fellow.’
Paul picked up the evening paper from the coffee table and pointed to the photograph of Blane on the front page. But Bendix only said that might have been the man he saw, or it might be the Prime Minister, mightn’t it?
‘Did Mr Sampson often scream in the middle of the day?’
Butch Bendix pouted. ‘No, he was such a dull young man, terribly conventional. He had a girlfriend who was all flesh and make-up. I stood in the lift with her once and the smell made me feel quite faint. So much scent that you wondered what she was trying to conceal. She looked like an all-in wrestler. I think her name was Gloria, which sounds like somebody with a lot of hair and a certain spirituality, don’t you think?’
‘Tony Sampson wasn’t conventional,’ said Paul.
‘He was something to do with banks.’ Butch Bendix grinned. ‘He said he provided inside information for bank robberies, which was a terribly sad thing to say. He was always trying to make himself sound interesting! He spent most of his day at home watching television and drinking from a grotesque cocktail cabinet. He had nothing else to do most of the time, and insufficient imagination to think anything up. Isn’t that rather conventional?’
Paul told him to read what it said under Desmond Blane’s photograph, and left the man to his studies.
‘Gloria what did you say her name was?’ Paul asked him at the door.
‘What? I’ve no idea. But this man is wanted for robbing banks! She was a dancer, which Tony Sampson seemed to think was important. A girl who would never have made it as a shorthand typist. Just fancy, perhaps I have been living next door to a man who gave inside information for bank robberies. What fun!’
Tony Sampson the neighbour had simply been another of the bed-sit people who spent most of his time killing time, a rich little bloke who watched too much television. He had a few friends and drove a white Jaguar, dressed quite sharply and said good morning on the stairs. He had aspired to a level of financial acceptability, and having achieved it made no impression. Butch Bendix had wondered why he had bothered.
Paul had left his car in the car park at Scotland Yard. He decided to leave it there and go straight to the Love-Inn. At least it wouldn’t be towed away from there. He nodded to the police driver on the pavement and went off in search of a taxi.
It was the rush hour and taxis were hard to come by; the streets were thronged with law abiding office workers scurrying to their law abiding homes in the peaceful suburbs. That was probably an illusion, but in the warm May sunshine they looked very harmless, and the dead bodies of bank clerks and bank robbers seemed highly exceptional. When the taxi pulled up outside the Love-Inn the place looked sadly uninteresting. Night and neon lights and football crowds were needed to provide the right atmosphere.
Paul went into the Love-Inn. It smelled of dust and plastic seat covers and yesterday’s greasepaint. The auditorium was empty and the bar was shut. Paul glanced at his watch and found that it was six o’clock; the afternoon show was over and the evening show did not begin until seven thirty. And May was a slack month. Paul went off in search of Tam Coley or Gloria, or anybody. He found Tam in the office.
‘Have a drink,’ said Tam.
Gloria Storm was the tall girl with the long brown hair who had slapped and tickled with Tony Sampson in the corridor. She shared the dressing room with Betty Stanway. She listened to Paul’s account of his visit to Tony Sampson’s flat with an aloof fatalism. Tam Coley was doing enough worrying for both of them.
‘What with Betty leaving suddenly, and the police in the club every night asking questions,’ he complained, ‘the Love-Inn is becoming too hot. I’m disturbed.’
Gloria was not surprised. ‘Tony Sampson was a prune,’ she said loftily. ‘He was always trying to impress someone, and now he’s succeeded. That’s what comes of trying for the big money.’ She spoke with the broken bottle accent of an expensive school. ‘I always told him that the only way to get rich was to have rich parents or a rich husband, but he wouldn’t listen. He wanted to do
it the hard way.’
‘I suppose that’s understandable,’ Paul murmured.
‘Why? He didn’t want to do anything with the money, except not work, and perhaps have a string of dancers at his disposal. That doesn’t do anybody any good: look what it’s done to Tam Coley.’
Coley grinned sheepishly at Paul.
‘Was he rich?’ Paul asked. ‘Until a month ago he earned less than two thousand pounds a year, and then he was fired.’
‘No, he wasn’t rich. The white Jaguar he drove was second hand on the never-never. He only talked big. He claimed to be in with a team of bank robbers, but I expect that was only bluff. Said that he was their financial adviser. You know what these men are like. He thought he was a great lover, but as soon as he had his trousers down –’
‘Mr Temple doesn’t want to hear about that,’ Tam Coley interrupted.
‘How long had you known Tony Sampson?’
‘About four months. He burst into the club with a shower of money, so of course Rita had to assign someone to him. That was me. I have a natural talent for helping men to spend more money than they can afford.’
‘I’m beginning to feel sorry for Tony Sampson.’
She smiled radiantly. ‘He was up to his ears in debt within a few weeks, but it was all in a good cause. It made Tam Coley that much richer, didn’t it, darling?’
‘I always say that a few debts are a spur to a man,’ Coley said with an attempt at humour.
‘It didn’t worry him. Tony always put on a show.’ Paul wondered whether her arrogance came from being the daughter of a bishop or of an innate conviction that all men were fools. She took personal pleasure in the fact that she had exacerbated Tony Sampson’s financial difficulties. ‘We threw a party on stage when he got the sack from the bank; it was terribly amusing. Tony got paralytically drunk.’
Paul didn’t need to know any more. He turned to Tam Coley. ‘Have you been in the club all day?’
Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery Page 10