Mister Big

by Gerald Verner

  “Oh, I don’t know. We’ve got Sullivan an’ Davis. Sullivan was a sort of chief-of-staff, I think,” said Mr. Budd.

  “Sullivan ought to know the identity of Mister Big?” put in Gordon.

  Mr. Budd shook his head.

  “He doesn’t. He’s never seen him!” he answered gloomily. “There are two things that I haven’t told you yet. We found a concealed telephone in the warehouse room. It was a private line . . .”

  “I say, that’s something, surely?” interrupted Colin excitedly. “Where to?”

  “To a room in another warehouse,” growled Mr. Budd. “This feller seems to have got rooms in half the street. It’s only a ramshackle place an’ it’s empty! I’m goin’ along there in a minute. You can come along, if you like.”

  “You bet we will,” said Colin. “What was the other thing?”

  “The identity of the feller who attacked Stayner,” said the stout superintendent.

  “Who was it?” asked Gordon.

  “A man named William Sutton. He left his dabs on the handle of that knife an’ C.R.O. traced ’em. Twenty years ago he was tried for the murder of a man named Paget. The jury disagreed. There was no doubt about his guilt but they thought there were extenuatin’ circumstances. Instead of bein’ hanged he was sentenced to twenty years. He was released five days ago.”

  “Why should he want to stab Stayner?” demanded Gordon.

  “You can search me!” said Mr. Budd. “Unless he was actin’ for Mister Big. Somebody could’ve met him from prison an’ offered him the job. If the money was good he’d probably have jumped at it.”

  He got up laboriously.

  “We’ll get along to this warehouse,” he said. “I must get back here by twelve to attend a conference.”

  A police car took them to Upper Thames Street and set them down at the narrow passage along which Sullivan had carried Eileen Barnard. A constable was on guard at the door to the warehouse and saluted Mr. Budd as they entered.

  Colin and Gordon stared round the bare room rather disappointedly.

  “Nothing much here, is there?” said the reporter after Mr. Budd had shown him the telephone. “Is the rest of the place the same?”

  “Practically. I hadn’t time for more than a quick glance round. That’s why I’ve come now.”

  They went over the whole building but found nothing to reward their diligence. The upper floors were as bare as the lower.

  It was not until they had returned to the ground floor, and Colin was searching among a pile of broken packing-cases that they made any fresh discovery at all. And then, moving a crate full of rotting straw, he saw the outline of a trap-door in the floor.

  His exclamation brought Mr. Budd and Gordon over to his side.

  “There’s a cellar or something under here,” cried the reporter. “Help me move this rubbish.”

  They pulled the pile of old packing-cases and crates away from the corner and revealed an oblong trap with a rusty iron ring.

  “This has recently been used,” grunted Mr. Budd breathlessly. “There’s no dust where the ring rests.”

  He grasped the ring and pulled. The trap came up easily and without noise. When it was fully open they saw that the hinges were thick with grease.

  A flight of wooden steps led downwards into darkness, but the air that came up to them was fresh and clean-smelling. Mr. Budd pulled out a torch and directed the light down into the darkness. They saw that the wooden steps ended on a stone floor. Leaning over the edge of the trap he was able to make out a large cellar-like room with walls of brick.

  Getting up he began to descend the steps with Colin and Gordon behind him. They found themselves in a huge low-ceilinged room that was almost the same size as the ground floor of the warehouse above. Beneath their feet was concrete and the roof was formed of the beams that supported the floor of the room overhead.

  Along one wall ran a bench, obviously recently put in because the woodwork was new, and on this were a collection of glass vessels, flasks, retorts, test-tubes, condensers, all the paraphernalia of the chemist.

  “Why the place is a laboratory!” exclaimed Gordon. “Look at all those bottles on that shelf above the bench.”

  “And a bedroom too, by the look of that,” said Colin, pointing to the narrow camp bed in one corner.

  Mr. Budd’s eyes narrowed as he saw it. Without comment, he went over and stood looking down at the heap of untidy blankets that lay on the hard mattress.

  “Somebody’s been livin’ here,” he grunted.

  “You don’t require much imagination to guess who,” said Colin. “See that?”

  He nodded in the direction of a long steel chain attached to a staple in the wall, on one end of which was circle of steel like a large handcuff.

  “This is the place where Jameson was kept prisoner,” he continued. He bent down and examined the manacle. It had been eaten away in one place by some strong acid. “If you think it’s just a coincidence that this place is fitted as a laboratory remember that Jameson was a chemist.”

  “What was the object of keeping him here?” asked Gordon.

  “I should say it had something to do with those experiments he was carrying out in West Germany,” said Colin. “Let’s see if the apparatus will help us. I used to know a smattering of chemistry.”

  He went over and searched among the glass vessels on the bench, and peered at the rows of bottles on the shelf. Finally he shook his head.

  “I can’t tell much from this,” he admitted. “There is nothing to show what he was working at.”

  “There’s some drawers here,” said Mr. Budd, stooping down. “Perhaps there’s somethin’ in them that’ll help.”

  He pulled one out. It was long and shallow and contained only a number of small black notebooks, filled with figures and chemical formulae.

  “These don’t mean a thing to me,” he declared after a quick glance through them, “but I expect our experts at the Yard’ll be able to tell us what they’re all about.”

  He put them down on the bench and opened the other two drawers. One was full of glass rods, filter papers, spatulas, platinum wire and various odds and ends. The other contained a shallow wooden box and nothing else.

  Mr. Budd raised the lid. It was full of a white powder that glistened in the light.

  “Looks like salt,” he said.

  “Just a minute,” said Colin. He thrust a bony finger into the powder and cautiously applied it to his tongue. “That’s cocaine!” he announced and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. “There’s enough to . . .”

  A loud thud drowned the rest of his words. The trap had shut with a bang. Mr. Budd turned his torch towards the steps as Gordon ran over and hurried up to the trap. He pressed with all his strength against it but it was immovable!

  Somebody had shut it and fastened it! They were prisoners!

  Chapter Fourteen

  Colin joined Gordon on the steps and together they thrust at the closed trap. But it would not budge an inch.

  “Who the deuce shut it?” demanded Mr. Budd. “It couldn’t have been the constable . . .”

  “Somebody’s not only shut it but fastened it,” panted Gordon. “It won’t shift.”

  “Let’s bang on it,” suggested Colin. “Perhaps the constable will hear.”

  They tried. They banged on the wooden trap and shouted but there was no sound from above. At last, tired and hoarse, they stopped for a rest.

  “It looks as if we’re going to be cooped up here for some time, unless we can make that constable hear,” said Colin.

  “Surely we made enough row to attract his attention,” grunted Mr. Budd.

  “It looks suspicious to me,” said Colin seriously.

  Gordon looked at him quickly.

  “You don’t think . . .?” he began.

  “That trap didn’t shut and fasten itself,” broke in the reporter. “I think someone has deliberately trapped us.”

  “But the constable . . . How did the
y get past him?” demanded Gordon.

  Colin shrugged his shoulders.

  “Maybe they didn’t!” he replied significantly.

  “Well, whatever happened,” put in Mr. Budd, “we’d better try an’ find a way out of here.”

  He began to make a close inspection of the cellar in the hope of finding some other way out but he was disappointed. There was a small ventilator but it was only eight inches square.

  While he was thus engaged, Colin and Gordon had tried another onslaught on the trap but the wood was thick and solid and withstood all their efforts.

  “No good!” grunted Colin. “The thing’s made of solid oak. We’d need a battering ram to get through it.”

  He stopped suddenly and sniffed.

  “Can you smell anything?” he asked.

  Mr. Budd raised his head in alarm. An acrid, burning smell reached his nostrils. It was faint but unmistakable. The smell of smoke!

  “Listen!” he said.

  They listened with straining ears and they heard the faint sound of crackling.

  “It’s fire!” cried Colin. “The warehouse above!”

  The smell was stronger and a thin wisp of smoke filtered past the trap.

  Gordon ran up the steps and put his hand on the wood.

  “It’s hot!” he exclaimed.

  “I can hear the fire clearly,” said Mr. Budd. “It must be a pretty big one by the sound.”

  They listened. Added to the previous faint crackling was a roar, angry and menacing.

  “We’ll be roasted like hedgehogs in a camp fire unless we can get out!” cried Colin. “The only way, apparently, is through the trap.”

  “But how can we break it open?”

  Gordon looked round as he spoke and then hurried over to the camp bed. He pulled off the blankets and threw them on the floor. The bed was made of iron and he pulled and wrenched to get hold of something with which to attack the trap.

  Mr. Budd and Colin helped him and presently they managed between them to get hold of two stout pieces of iron that had formed the sides of the bed-frame.

  Carrying these over to the steps they tried to insert them between the edges of the trap and the floor above. But it fitted too closely.

  At the end of twenty minutes they were forced to stop. The atmosphere was getting unpleasantly hot and a faint, bluish haze hung in the air. The roar of the fire had increased. It would not be long before the floor above, which formed the ceiling of the cellar, was ablaze.

  The heat was getting stifling and the blue haze was rapidly increasing to a grey cloud that set them coughing.

  “I’m going to have another go at that trap,” said Colin.

  “You’re wasting your time,” said Gordon. “Nothing but dynamite would shift that . . .”

  Colin swung round.

  “Dynamite!” he cried, and there was sudden hope in his voice. “Quick! Bring the torch over here!”

  He ran over to the bench. Mr. Budd and Gordon followed him.

  “There isn’t any dynamite here,” grunted the stout superintendent.

  “No.” Colin was peering along the row of stoppered bottles on the shelf above the bench. “But we might be able to make a substitute. It won’t be a very good one but it might do the trick.”

  He took down three bottles.

  “Did you ever make gun-powder when you were a boy?” he asked as he pulled over a large bowl and a measure.

  “That’s an idea!” said Gordon. “Will it work?”

  “I don’t know,” said Colin. “It won’t be very powerful, but we’ll hope for the best.”

  He measured out the contents of the three bottles and began to mix them together in the bowl.

  “This must be mixed as thoroughly as possible,” Colin went on. “While I’m doing it see if you can loosen a brick in that wall.” He pointed to the wall facing the bench. “As far as I can calculate, it should be the outside wall of the warehouse.”

  “Why not try an’ blow the trap open?” said Mr. Budd.

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” said Colin. “There’s a raging furnace above. We should be cinders before we could get through.”

  He went on with his mixing while Gordon and the stout superintendent set to work to try and loosen the brick, attacking the mortar round it with a pocket-knife.

  It took them fifteen minutes to loosen it sufficiently to be able to lever it out and by the time they had done so, Colin was ready with a bowl full of black powder.

  In one corner of the ceiling the fire had already broken through and long tongues of flame were licking the heavy beams.

  “Let’s pray that this will work,” muttered Colin.

  He carried the bowl of powder over and began to press scoopfuls of powder into the hole left by the removal of the brick. He rammed it in tightly with the wooden end of a pestle from the bench. He had made a rough fuse of rolled up paper filled with part of the powder, and he inserted this well into the powder in the cavity. With strips torn from the blanket he wedged up the hole as tightly as possible round the projecting fuse.

  “There we are!” he said. “It may not work. We haven’t been able to mix the ingredients as well as they would be in a proper powder-mill and that’ll make a difference in the power. But we’ll hope for the best!”

  He took out his lighter.

  “Better get over there,” he said.

  They went over to the far corner and Colin snapped on the lighter and lit the fuse. It fizzed like a squib, and Colin ran over and joined the other two.

  The fuse burned quickly with a shower of sparks and then . . .

  The explosion was not very loud or very powerful but it was an explosion. The ignition of the powder in the confined space of the brick had been sufficient to loosen the other bricks, as they found when they coughed their way through the pungent fumes that filled the cellar.

  With the iron parts of the bed, they attacked the wall and the loosened bricks fell, leaving a ragged gap through which cool, fresh air poured as they scrambled their way to safety.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The warehouse was blazing from ground floor to roof when they succeeded in making their way round from the crazy wharf on which they had emerged from the hole in the wall to Upper Thames Street.

  Fire-engines blocked the narrow thoroughfare and although jets of water were pouring on the holocaust from a dozen different points it was obvious that the old building was doomed.

  Mr. Budd found an inspector of the City Police, who listened in astonishment to what the superintendent had to tell him.

  “I thought there was something fishy about the fire,” he said when Mr. Budd had finished. “We found the constable in the alley-way with a broken head. Somebody had hit him pretty hard and the doctor says it’ll be some time before he’s able to talk, if he ever does. By then the building was alight in more than a dozen places. You had a narrow escape.”

  “You can say that again!” growled Mr. Budd. “If ever I get my hands on this feller, Mister Big as they call him, I’ll make it as warm for him, I can promise you.”

  He turned to Colin and Gordon.

  “What we need is a good wash an’ somethin’ to eat,” he said. “What are you lookin’ at?”

  The reporter was staring at the crowd watching the fire.

  “I was wondering if Mister Big was among that bunch,” answered Colin.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” snarled Mr. Budd. “But we shouldn’t know him, even if he was standin’ next to us. Come on, let’s go!”

  They moved away, forcing through the crowd. Somebody tapped Mr. Budd on the shoulder as they emerged on the outskirts, and he turned quickly. It was one of the men who had taken part in the raid on Mr. Jacobs’ office.

  “I was just going back to the Yard, sir, when I spotted you among the crowd,” said the man.

  “Any news?” asked Mr. Budd.

  “I was making a second search of Lubeck’s office when I found this, sir.” He took a scrap of paper from
a bulky pocket-book. “We missed it the first time. It was wedged in the back of a drawer.”

  Mr. Budd took the torn scrap of paper and read the three words on it:

  William Sutton released . . .

  The rest had been torn away.

  “That ties up Sutton with the Big Man,” he commented. “H’m! But how I don’t know.”

  He put the scrap of paper carefully away.

  “I don’t mind admittin’ that I don’t understand it,” he continued, frowning. “Apart from the murder of Jameson an’ the taxi-driver, there’s this attempt to kidnap Miss Stayner. Now here’s a man who comes out of prison and tries to stick a knife in her father. Mister Big killed Jameson an’ the taxi-driver, he tried to abduct the girl, but why does this chap, Sutton, try to knife her father?”

  “I think Sutton must have been employed by Mister Big,” said Gordon. “You suggested that yourself.”

  “Why should Mister Big want Stayner killed?” asked the superintendent. “Did you find anythin’ else?”

  The police officer shook his head.

  “No, sir. The office had been pretty thoroughly cleared out. There wasn’t anything else.”

  “We must be grateful for small mercies,” grunted Mr. Budd. “I must go an’ make myself presentable for that conference. I’d nearly forgotten all about it.”

  He left Colin and Gordon and drove back to the Yard in the police car which had brought them and which was still waiting further up the street.

  The conference was not a success. Colonel Blair was an outspoken man, and on the subject of Mister Big he spoke very plainly indeed.

  Mr. Budd returned to his office rather ruffled and subsequent events did nothing to improve his temper.

  He had barely settled himself behind his desk, and was contemplating the soothing influence of one of his thin black cigars, when a messenger entered with a note.

  Mr. Budd ripped open the envelope and glanced at the contents. They were brief and to the point:

  Pity you managed to escape. Next time you won’t. Keep out of my business while you’re alive—dead you will have no option.

  There was no signature but there was no need for one.