by John Creasey
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that curly-haired man told me.’
Rollison thought: ‘Barrow, by George!’ and took his foot away. The door slammed, and darkness fell about him again.
Chapter Nineteen
Once More — Cold Shoulder
‘Sergeant Barrow,’ mused Rollison, as he left Milch Street and turned left, for it was quicker getting to the main road that way, and he had no desire to stay too long in the side-streets. The memory of the clatter as the knife had hit the wall was all too vivid. In the past he had known danger in these parts often enough, this was no different from a hundred other journeys he had made – except that now he could expect no help, no warning, from those once well-disposed. ‘I would very much like a word with Sergeant Barrow’ he added to himself.
He turned a corner; and two men fell in by his side.
They did not speak, but walked alongside him, matching their pace to his. Though they made no immediate attempt to touch him, Rollison knew that he could not get away without risking a fight.
The three of them walked on steadily until they reached the next corner, when one of the men went ahead to reconnoitre. He beckoned. They passed the corner, and the manoeuvre was repeated at the next. Only then did Rollison realise the truth: Ebbutt had sent him a bodyguard.
Ebbutt, then, knew that there would be trouble.
The attack came when they were in the middle of that street. One moment the only sound was of their footsteps, and the next the street seemed full of running men. They dived from doorways and archways and Rollison found himself in the middle of a gasping, struggling, heaving mass. They were trying to get at him, they had no other purpose. He felt a sharp pain in his arm; a razor cut. He struck a man beneath the chin and saw him rocket back on his heels. He saw Ebbutt’s men laying about them with short sticks. A knuckle-duster glistened in the street lamp. Rollison swerved to avoid it. Another struck him on the shoulder. As one of the men closed in for a vicious attack, Rollison had a strong feeling that he had seen him before; but there was no time now to speculate. He wished he had a weapon. His arm was painful, and his shoulder throbbed. Although he had felt so sure this attack would come, it had, in fact, taken him by surprise.
One of Ebbutt’s men went down.
Rollison saw three men coming at him in a concerted rush. There were others behind.
He went forward, as fast as he could go, and the force of his counter-attack took them by surprise. One man fell and another tripped over him. But those from behind were very close to him now.
The shrill peeeeep! of a police whistle screeched above the thud of feet, then the headlights of a car shone along the street. Two or three of Rollison’s assailants took to their heels. Others turned to run as the car pulled up with a screech of brakes.
A man swept Rollison’s legs from under him as the police leapt from the car. One of them bent over Rollison.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Rollison. ‘A bit swimmy, that’s all.’
The man helped him up. ‘It’s Mr Rollison, isn’t it?’
Rollison nodded.
‘They don’t often treat you like this,’ the man said.
‘Nothing’s certain,’ Rollison commented, ‘in a very uncertain world,’ He pressed his hands against his forehead, which was aching dully. He was aware, too, of pain in his left arm and shoulder. As he stood up, he saw that Ebbutt’s men had left him.
Ebbutt had given them a distasteful task, and they had carried it out without question and done it well; but they wanted no truck with the Toff. It was a heart-breaking situation, the silence of those two men bringing the truth home vividly to Rollison.
The police seemed to notice nothing strange. The one prisoner caught was taken to the local station, while Rollison, insisting that there was nothing much the matter with him, was taken to Scotland Yard. Once there he was found to have a two-inch razor gash in his right arm, and a badly bruised shoulder. Other than that, and abrasions left by a knuckle-duster, there was not a great deal wrong. As an attendant ministered to him, he was thinking again of Barrow, and of the man whose face had been familiar among the assailants. Where had he seen it before? A thin, ugly face, with a broad mouth.
Rollison could not place him.
He asked for Grice.
‘I don’t think he’s here,’ said the attendant. ‘He’s working much harder than he should be, you know.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ admitted Rollison. ‘I’ll go up to his office,’
Grice was not in the office, but Inspector Ridgley, who was in charge of the Benson case as part of his responsibility for the night club in the West End, was sitting at his desk. Ridgley was a middle-aged, good-looking man. He lacked a sense of humour; but perhaps that was an asset in his particular work. He looked up as the door opened, and when he saw who it was, his expression changed – hardened, thought Rollison, and he was reminded again of Bill Ebbutt.
‘No Grice?’ asked Rollison, brightly.
‘He’s out.’
‘So I observed,’ said Rollison. He sank into a chair, feeling more shaky than he cared to admit. ‘Have you any idea when he’ll be back?’
‘No,’ said Ridgley, pointedly. ‘Have you got a card?’
‘Card?’ echoed Rollison.
‘Yes, a card. You take too much for granted,’ went on Ridgley, gruffly. ‘When people come in here they need a card unless they’re members of the C.I.D. or the uniformed branch. Didn’t you know that?’
Rollison looked at him curiously. ‘Now you come to mention it, I did know it,’ he admitted, ‘but somehow no one has ever insisted that I should go through the formalities.’
‘It’s time they did,’ said Ridgley, abruptly. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, since you are here?
Rollison got up slowly.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. Unless you can tell me the name of Benson’s murderer.’
Ridgley looked at him with transparent dislike.
‘Perhaps you can tell me why we weren’t warned that Benson was in danger until an hour or more after he’d been killed,’ he said. ‘And perhaps you can explain how the Hammer got away from Milch Street. Come to think of it,’ he went on, heavily sarcastic, ‘there are a lot of questions I could ask you, Rollison, although that’s Grice’s job. I hope he does it,’ he added, tartly.
A retort rose hotly to Rollison’s lips, but he forced it back. What was the use? He had met too much open dislike and disapproval in the last few hours for it not to have had some accumulative effect.
He went out.
The stone corridors of the Yard struck cold; he had not noticed that when he had come in.
He passed men in the passages. One or two nodded, most of them looked away, yet all of them knew him by sight and normally they would have spoken.
Was Barrow behind it? But why should Barrow go out of his way to discredit him?
Rollison understood, now, why Grice had not been in touch with him that day. Grice might easily believe that he had deliberately let the Hammer go. It would be enough to cause ill-feeling. At the beginning of the case, Grice had been more than helpful, eager for co-operation. Now, a successful effort had been made to antagonise both police and East Enders.
That thought stuck in Rollison’s mind.
At the flat, Jolly’s eye immediately pounced on the bandaged arm.
‘It’s all right,’ Rollison told him, a little impatiently. ‘There are more serious things to natter about than that. Listen, Jolly; the Yard’s now developed as big a grudge against me as that held by the East End.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘For all the good we’re doing we’d better go back to Bournemouth.’
‘There might be something in that, sir,’ murmured Jolly.
Rollison frowned. ‘Now what are you driving at?’
Jolly said: ‘Well, sir, you would be able to take it easy for a few days, and I don’t think that a rest would do you any harm. In fact I think it might clear your mind of a
great deal of confusion.’
‘Go on,’ encouraged Rollison.
‘You see, sir, I have noticed a cooling off, if I may put it like that, in the attitude of the police since we engaged Mr Higginbottom. I think that was the beginning of it. In the past Mr Grice never hesitated to confide, up to a point, but since Mr Higginbottom has been here, he has been more careful. Then again, sir, I took the liberty of telephoning Scotland Yard this evening, and I spoke to Inspector Ridgley. He was not friendly. I have never had much regard for that particular officer,’ went on Jolly, with dignity, ‘but previously I had not found him impertinent. It gave me an inkling of this change in the official attitude, and after I heard what Mr Higginbottom had discovered this morning, I set to thinking, sir.’
‘Produce the jewels of thought.’
‘I would not myself, class them as jewels, sir,’ said Jolly modestly, ‘but one thing does stand out. It is this: a deliberate, and calculated attempt is being made to discredit you among your friends. But this affair did not begin as an attack upon the Hammer. You had no malice towards him. It was not, if I may say so, a matter of attempting to cleanse the East End of some of its unsavoury characters. Such a crusade, one could imagine, might well have incurred the disfavour of the Hammer and supporters of the Hammer, but not this particular case. Do you see the point I am trying to make, sir?’
After a long pause, Rollison said: ‘Yes, Jolly, I think I do. Carry on.’
‘Well, sir, if we recall the events since Miss Lancaster first came to see you, we find that first Mr Drayton disappeared, then a body which might or might not have been that of Mr Drayton was found. Nothing happened thereafter until the behaviour of Colonel Horniman became remarkable. This eventually took us to Bournemouth again. After the incidents in Bournemouth, we returned to London. You made a call on Dr Finnigan, with the disastrous consequences that we know, and—’
Rollison snapped his fingers, ‘Got him!’ he exclaimed.
Jolly raised his eyebrows.
‘I don’t quite understand you, sir. Whom have you got?’
Rollison laughed. ‘There was a particularly nasty-looking specimen among those johnnies who attacked me tonight,’ he said, ‘I knew I’d seen him before, but couldn’t place him. It’s just come to me. He was the man who tried to get the brief-case away from here! So the attack was not a spontaneous anti-Toff demonstration at all. Thanks, Jolly, you’ve certainly given me something to think about.’
‘I am glad to help clear up even the most trivial mystifications,’ Jolly said, primly. ‘It does seem to me, sir, that the wise plan would be to try to do that one by one, going over all the old ground, as I have been attempting to do. Shall I go on, sir?’
Rollison nodded thoughtfully.
‘You made personal, calls, then, on Dr Finnigan and Mrs Willis, and you saw Mrs Lenwell when you called on Ethel Kent. You also had Lenwell followed on his round of visits to the other people concerned in Horniman’s projected company. Now, sir, this is what seems apparent to me. Something which happened at that time, and what it is I cannot imagine, made you particularly dangerous to the people concerned. From that moment onwards, these attempts to discredit you began. I am right, am I not?’ he asked, a trifle anxiously.
‘I believe you are,’ said Rollison, thoughtfully. ‘There’s something in it, anyhow. But Ebbutt was friendly enough until last night, it was the Hammer incident which changed him.’
‘That was a consequence of what had gone before, sir.’
‘I’m not so sure. There would have been no trouble with the East End if I hadn’t forced Ethel Kent to name the Hammer. But when the hammer was thrown in at the window, the Hammer – proper noun! – was also thrown at me. It was too obvious, Jolly.’
‘I can only agree with you there, sir.’
‘And then there’s the matter of the police change of attitude,’ Rollison went on. ‘That had nothing to do with the Hammer at first. It began with Higginbottom, and was natural enough, I suppose. But I don’t see how either of those things tie up with anything that happened in Bournemouth or what I did in London when I first came back.’
Jolly said slowly: ‘And yet I feel there is a connection, sir. It has happened before, as you are aware. You have, I think, made a discovery of importance without realising the significance of it. And I cannot help feeling that the period while you were in Bournemouth is the important one – that, or the few hours immediately following your return.’
After a pause, Rollison said: ‘You may be right. I’d better sleep on it, I think. Barrow worries me most, you know. Both transformations started with him.’
Jolly smiled rather sourly. ‘I don’t think you need pay much attention to Sergeant Barrow, sir,’ he said. ‘He is merely a conceited, swollen-headed young officer, in my opinion, who has made progress too quickly and resents your interference. He thought he would get the Hammer last night, and had to blame someone for missing him. So, he blames you.’
Next morning, Rollison’s arm was swollen and inflamed so badly that he allowed Jolly to send for a doctor. He was told that the arm must be lanced and that he would have to keep it in a sling for at least a week. The operation was painful. After it was over, Snub came in and commiserated with him and, when Rollison told him to sit down and stop looking sheepish, he confessed that it seemed to him that these troubles had started with his arrival, and that he was doing more harm than good. He wished he had been with Rollison the previous night; then they would have caught more than one of the blighters.
‘As for the Hammer,’ he added, gruffly. ‘That man’s poison, Mr Rollison.’
Rollison raised his eyebrows. ‘You think the Hammer’s our man, then?’
‘I just can’t see anyone indulging in a lot of skullduggery on the one hand and shelling out fortunes on the other unless he’s making a good thing of it,’ said Snub. ‘I’ve got nothing to go on, of course, except what seems to me to be plain common-sense. Er—am I talking too much?’ he asked anxiously.
Rollison said slowly: ‘No, not a bit too much. The fact is, people do behave like that. Some of the most generous people in the East End are thieves. They spend freely and give freely after they’ve had a good haul. Not all of them, but enough to make the Hammer’s story just possible. Get me Grice on the telephone, will you?’
That done, Rollison took the receiver and said cheerfully: ‘Well, who’s on the black list today?’
‘You ought to know,’ said Grice. ‘I’m coming over to see you in about half an hour, let it keep until then.’
Chapter Twenty
Grice Rages
Grice arrived on time.
He came striding into the flat, his expression grim and uncompromising. It transpired that there had been more trouble with Meredith., but what had angered him most was the fact that Barrow was on the promotion list and thus in line for an inspectorship.
‘I’ve come to the conclusion that Barrow is the most inefficient man we’ve got at the Yard,’ Grice growled. ‘His earlier successes must have been sheer luck.’ He laughed at his own vehemence when he saw Rollison regarding him with mild surprise. ‘I suppose the truth is that at the Yard they’ve been so tormented by gibes and sneers because of the crime wave that they’re all on edge to snatch at the slightest chance to get the Hammer. Rightly or wrongly they now look on him as responsible for every murder and burglary in London.’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘And as for you, Rolly, you’re the villain of the century!’
‘What have I been doing now? asked Rollison.
‘The story is that when Barrow was tipped off about the Hammer’s address, he was also told that you had an appointment with the Hammer that night. Barrow’s convinced that you helped the Hammer to get away. The divisional people said there was no way in which you could have done that, but Meredith is looking for a scapegoat outside the Yard, and isn’t above hoping that you did help him.’ Grice paused, inquiringly.
‘Barrow saw everything that I did,’ Rollison murmured.
/> Grice looked at him for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘There’s no suppose about it. And there is a curious feature about Sergeant Barrow,’ remarked Rollison. ‘Far be it from me to suspect a policeman, but he’s not being very astute, you know. He gave Janet Piper to understand that it was I who tipped the police off about the Hammer.’
‘Is that the truth?’ asked Grice, in a strained voice.
‘Yes. But we’d better not assume the worst. Barrow’s given to wild statements and exaggerated claims, you know, and he loses his temper easily. That much I’ve seen. A few words flung over his shoulder in the white-heat of temper might have given Janet the wrong impression. It’s worth an inquiry, but no more.’
‘I’ll inquire all right,’ Grice growled.
‘Forgetting Barrow for the moment, what else have we got?’ asked Rollison. ‘One Hammer, or two – that’s the crux of the question. I plump for two. One emphasising the velvet glove, the other the iron hand. And there are other things we might consider,’ went on Rollison. ‘This fear of being seen: that’s clearly established. It might be the reason for the sudden crop of murders. Supposing, for instance, that Horniman, Finnigan and Benson had all three seen him, by accident if you like. Here was a man they knew, whose name they could give to the police, whom they could blackmail because they could disclose his identity. A good motive for murder, don’t you think?’
Grice nodded.
‘Then try this,’ said Rollison. ‘Would-be murder of Susan, of young Kent and, through framing her for Finnigan’s murder, Ethel Kent. Ethel had offended through me, but Susan and Kent hadn’t. Why are they dangerous? What do they know? We’ve said all this before,’ Rollison went on, ‘but we didn’t really believe it. I believe it now. Both Susan and Kent know something about the Hammer, iron-hand version, and I think the thing they know is what the Hammer looks like.’
Grice said: ‘I’m still not convinced.’
‘Nothing else tallies with the known facts,’ said Rollison. ‘Nothing we know—’ he broke off as Jolly came in with a registered package.