Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  The young man hardly seemed to have moved in his seat. He handled his car like a craftsman, insolently exact, both meticulous and careless at the same time.

  “Right fork ahead. He’s going up to the Heath, I think.”

  “His neck’ll be for sale if he does much more of that,” said the young man, calmly. The blue saloon had pulled out, charged past a bus, and only just got back again ahead of the oncoming lorry.

  “I say,” said Petrella, “you can drive.”

  “Done a good deal of it,” said the man. “Rally stuff mostly, a bit on the track. Name of Blech.”

  Petrella placed him then.

  Time came, and time went, and they were off the Heath and making for the maze of small streets which fills the triangle between Hampstead, Regents Park and Camden Town.

  “I’m a bit too light to ram him,” said Blech. “No need, really. All we have to do is keep in sight. He’ll do himself soon.”

  It happened, as he was speaking. The road went up in a hump over the canal. The blue saloon hit the rise so fast that it almost took off, came down threshing and screaming, and went into a long, sideways skid, hit the low parapet, and toppled over.

  Blech came neatly to a halt, and Petrella was out, and running again.

  The blue car was standing on its nose in three feet of water and mud, sinking ponderously. Petrella got the rear door open and pulled. Behind him, Blech pulled. As the car fell away from them, the bulk of Rick Harrington tumbled back on top of them.

  Petrella seized him by the hair and hammered his head on the towing-path.

  He felt a restraining hand on his arm, and the mists cleared again for a moment.

  “I think,” said Blech, “that you’re being rather too – er – vigorous with him. What he wants is first aid, really.”

  “Sorry,” said Petrella. “Not thinking very straight. Fact is, I think I’m a bit concussed myself.”

  “That makes two of you. If you helped we might get him into my car.” They did this, between them. The street slept in a timeless summer’s evening doze. From first to last no other person appeared on the scene.

  “Where to now?”

  Petrella tried to think. Harrington was out. There was a big purple bruise on one side of his forehead, and an occasional bubble formed in the corner of his open mouth. He was a hospital case. But no hospital would take him in without explanations. Nor would any other police station.

  “Home,” he said. “The way we came. It’ll be quicker in the long run.”

  They drove home decorously, back up on to the Heath, and west, with the setting sun in their eyes. For a few seconds Petrella dozed. That wouldn’t do. No time to sleep. Job not finished. Better talk and keep awake.

  “It’s very good of you,” he said, “to take all this trouble.”

  “Enjoyed it,” said Blech. “What is he?”

  “He’s an escaped convict,” said Petrella. “Called Harrington. Not a pleasant character.”

  “How did you cotton on to him?”

  How had he? It was so many years ago. A great gale was singing through his head. A mighty diapason of sound, that came and went. “It was Rossetti put me on to him,” he said, as the gale dropped for a moment.

  “Rossetti? The Blessed Damozel—”

  “Not Dante Gabriel. Christina. ‘Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. But when the trees bow down their heads the wind is passing by.’ Fork left here.”

  “That’s nice,” said Blech. “Is there any more of it?”

  “‘Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you. But when the leaves hang trembling, the wind is passing through.’” (That was it! Hang trembling. It was the children that had made him certain. Sitting there like drugged mice.)

  “I must remember that,” said Blech. “Here we are. You’d better get some help with your passenger. And then you ought to lie down or something, I think.”

  Chief Inspector Haxtell reckoned that he was beyond surprise, but the events of that evening tried him hard. First there came two stalwart constables, supporting the drooping figure of a convict of whose escape on transit from one prison to another he had been notified only an hour previously; secondly a diffident figure, whose face he vaguely recognised from the columns of the popular press; and, bringing up the rear, his shirt torn open to the waist, his face rimmed with blood and dried dripping, Detective Petrella.

  When he had sorted things out a bit, he sat down to make his report. Plainly it was a case which reflected the greatest credit on all concerned. And a lot of it must, and should, go to Petrella. And, according to Petrella, Blech had behaved very well. A German, but a good chap. So far, so good. But what the Inspector couldn’t make out was exactly what credit was to be given to a person called Rossetti. Sounded like some sort of Italian. Further enquiries needed there. His pen scratched busily. . .

  The Prophet and the Bird

  The Prophet appeared on an evening of late summer. He drifted along the sun-warmed pavement of the High Street, dressed in the remains of five good suits clobbered together with string. His beard, which veiled the area between his lower lip and his top waistcoat button, was the colour of badly worn snow. Across his shoulder he bore a staff, to the upper end of which was tacked a disc of plywood. On one side, red letters on black, said, “Smite and Spare Not.” On the obverse was, “Suffer Little Children,” in yellow on blue.

  The Prophet was suffering little children. A small group was following him, open-mouthed, up the pavement. Every few minutes he would stop to address them, and the children would retreat, their mouths hanging open. They were not out to annoy him. They were just waiting for him to do something.

  Detective Constable Patrick Petrella was on his way to keep an appointment when he saw the Prophet. Like all detectives he had his own private, hardly acquired, scrupulously guarded, never-to-be-mentioned, list of informers. Useful contacts: some in the underworld, some on the fringes of it; some quite respectable, but with a talent for meddling or a spiteful mind. A few of them sold information coldly, for money. But the payment was so small and the risks were so great that some more complex motive than greed must have been at work in their dark minds.

  So that he should never slip into mentioning their real names, Petrella spoke and wrote and thought of them by nicknames. There was the one-legged paper-seller (Peg-leg) and the big, tawny doorman at the local cinema (Leo); and there was the Bird. The Bird was the best of the lot, the only one, so far, who had never let him down.

  It was the Bird he was meeting that evening at ten o’clock in a cul-de-sac off the less frequented end of the High Street. If the Bird was willing to sing both loudly and clearly, then it was possible – just possible – that a nasty little collection of thugs, who wore black pantomime masks and carried fish-hooks in their cuffs and called themselves the Cats, might be put where they belonged for a year or two.

  The Cats were specialists in shop robbery. They attacked old women in backstreet shops, the sort which stayed open until all hours; small dark shops in small dark streets, which often had a surprising amount of money in the till.

  He was in plenty of time. The gate in the wall had been left unpadlocked and he eased it open, slipped through, and shut it behind him. It was a small timber yard, on the slope which ran down to the railway, and it was well situated for such meetings. Good contacts could never be hurried. Petrella spread his raincoat and sat down on it. He had spent some hours the previous evening with a nice old lady who had had her face pulled open by the Cats’ claws, and for a chance of getting back at them he was prepared to wait a long time.

  An occasional electric train curled sparking up out of the mist, oddly silent, teetered on the points and disappeared like a cheerful ghost under the road bridge where the High Street crossed the line. Petrella lit his pipe. An increase of noise on the other side of the fence suggested that the pubs were shutting.

  It was at about this time that the landlord of the Feathers looked at his clock and made a sign to his assis
tant. The assistant read the sign correctly. It meant, “Any trouble, you slip out and fetch a policeman.” The assistant edged towards the serving door.

  “Now gentlemen,” said the landlord. “For the third and last time.”

  There were five of them at the table in the window. The one they called Len was, perhaps, thirty. He had a hard, white, Londoner’s face, sloe-black eyes, and a lack of expression which was more frightening than the animation of the four youngsters with him. They were all drinking whisky. Even Timmy Harrington who hardly looked his sixteen years.

  “Don’t you hear the gentleman, Len? He says it’s time.”

  “See if you can get another round, Timmy,” suggested Len, calmly.

  The boy gathered the five thin glasses together in his right hand, a finger in each, and drew them together with a crack. Holding them so, he walked to the counter, stretched out his hand, and opened it. The glasses clattered down on the polished wood. For a moment after he had dropped them, his hand remained, the fingers bent, like a big claw.

  “Same again, chum,” he said.

  “It’s ten minutes past time now.”

  “Len,” said the boy over his shoulder. “Gentleman says no.”

  “Ask him if he wants that luvverly new window of his pushed in,” said Len. “Tell him I might lean against it on the way out.”

  Where the others had drunk themselves gay he had drunk himself quiet and ugly.

  The landlord looked quickly over his shoulder and his assistant ducked through the door. But Len saw him go.

  He climbed to his feet, walked across to the bar, and said, “The boyfriend’s gone for help? All right. Don’t bother about that drink. We’ll put it on the slate this time.”

  He shook his sleeve, then drew his hand twice, firmly, across the bar counter. The landlord was still staring at the cross, cut a clean half-inch into the polished wood, when the door slammed behind the last of the boys. He wiped his forehead with the beer cloth, and breathed out deeply.

  On the pavement the little army gathered itself together.

  “Blow me down,” said Timmy, “there’s that Prophet. We oughter do something about that beard of his. Can’t be healthy. What say we trim it for him, Len—?”

  He broke off. Len wasn’t looking at the Prophet. His eyes were on a spot, in the shadows, ten yards along the pavement. He moved quickly. The woman looked over her shoulder, seemed half inclined to run for it, then stopped.

  Len walked right up to her. She stepped backwards, into the deep doorway of a shop. Len continued to advance until his face was almost touching hers.

  “Who’ve you been drinking with tonight?” he said.

  “I never.”

  “Soon as my back’s turned, you’re out of the house with some pretty boy.”

  “I came out to buy some cigarettes.”

  “Two hours after the shops shut?”

  “From the machine.”

  “Who’ve you been with?”

  “I haven’t been with anyone.” Her head was twisting from side to side, hopelessly. She was not looking for help. She was nerving herself for what was to come.

  A sudden, wicked, stinging slap on the side of the face. Then another. She shook her head. There was a small, dark drop of blood where Len’s ring had cut her cheek open.

  “Are you going to talk?” said Len. “Or do you want I should use the knuckles on you?”

  “Leave that woman alone,” said a deep voice.

  The Prophet loomed in a doorway.

  Len looked up. The madness slowly left him. “You go and chase yourself,” he said. “She’s my wife. I can talk to her if I want.”

  “I say you shall not strike her,” said the Prophet.

  “Fix him,” said Len shortly.

  It was a good fight, while it lasted. One against five is long odds, but the Prophet had a staff and knew how to use it. His first, scything movement cut the nearest boy’s legs from under him and his second put Timmy Harrington backwards into a shop window. After that he used the point. When the police arrived, and the boys scattered, he was still on his feet.

  Petrella, aroused by the sound of breaking glass, had climbed on to a crate and watched the proceedings over the fence. He saw no reason to interfere. When it was all over he collected his raincoat, came softly out, and went home to bed.

  He realised that it was no use waiting any longer for the Bird that night.

  The Cats hung out in a loft above a junk store in Parson Street. It was a good place for them, because it had six different ways in and out. And they knew them all. Here Len dispensed justice and wisdom to his followers.

  Sober, he was something of a tactician. Under his rule the Cats had learned to steal only money. And to spend it steadily, not in sudden, suspicious bouts of affluence. He had taught them that the clinching argument was a blow. You go in, he said, and you ask for sutthink that costs a few bob and you give ’em a pound note, see? That means they got to open the till. Right? Then you smash ’em, grab what’s in the till, and beat it. No clever stuff. Under his guidance they had prospered.

  Until recently.

  Then came the carefully planned combined operation against a larger shop, with a manager and two girl assistants, which might have been black disaster. At the very last moment, warned by some underground sense, Len had called it off. He had then scouted round by himself, and spotted the police tender parked behind the hoarding across the way.

  He had also seen something else. A John the Baptist in beard and rags, motionless at the end of the street.

  “Someone put the finger on us,” he said. “And I’m wondering just who.”

  “Must have been that flickering prophet,” said one of the others.

  “Could be,” said Len. “Might have been young Timmy.”

  They looked up to see if he was joking; his face was expressionless as a washed dish.

  “Why would it be Timmy?”

  “I didn’t say it was,” said Len. “I said it might be. He’s friends with that dick, ent he? I seen ’em talking the other day. He’s so young he doesn’t think what he’s saying, perhaps.”

  Timmy Harrington came in at this moment. He usually took the route across the roof and through the skylight, because he was still young enough to enjoy climbing for its own sake. This time he was in a hurry, so he came up through the trapdoor.

  “I did what you said,” he explained. “I watched the back door and slipped by when the old woman—”

  “Cut the narrative,” said Len. “Tell us what you found.”

  Timmy, deflated, said, “You know all that old clobber he wears, rags and pieces. Well, he’s got a nice suit in his wardrobe. And shirts and shoes and socks. And – and something else.”

  He held his right hand out and they crowded round him. It was the last, the ultimate argument. A small, old-fashioned, blue-plated pistol.

  “And it’s loaded,” said Timmy.

  “I’d better look after that,” said Len. No one demurred. He slipped it into his pocket. “What’s your idea about this geezer, Timmy?”

  “I think he’s a copper,” said Timmy. “You know – a ghost. Someone they’ve planted here. . .”

  There was an uneasy silence in the loft. It was exactly as if a shadow had stalked across the room.

  “What say we lie low for a bit, Len?” said one of the boys.

  “Nuts,” said Len. The weight in his pocket gave him confidence. “He’s no copper. He’s a cheap stoolie. When I’m finished with him he’ll wish he was back wherever it was he came from. First thing, we want to find out what he’s up to. Right? We take it in turns. One of us watch him all the time. Use your loaf. Keep out of sight. We’ll soon see what he’s at. Then we can fix him.”

  If the Prophet knew that he was being watched, he gave no sign of it. Most of his day he spent, as before, drifting quietly along the pavements of Pond End and Highside, going no further north than the Main Circular Road, sometimes dropping south as far as the railway terminal
s and goods depots of Sonning Town.

  But most of the time he spent with the children and they, with the instinct of the streets, seemed to realise that he meant them no harm. Hour after hour they would follow him, an early and unusual Father Christmas, carrying no sacks of toys, but big with infinite possibilities of mystery.

  “He talks to them,” said Petrella.

  “As long as he only talks,” said big Sergeant Gwilliam.

  “The matron of the Highside Children’s Home got a bit worried at first. He hangs round there a lot. But from what I can make out he does the children no harm.”

  “Loitering with intent?”

  Petrella considered the matter, but shook his head. Although, as a policeman, he had a well-founded distrust of any unknown character who hung about for long doing nothing, this didn’t make sense.

  “There’s nothing to steal,” he said. “The place is just full of kids and beds and bedpans.”

  “Different thing five years ago when it was a private house. Old Sir Louis Borderer. Then it would have been worth a go.”

  Petrella cast his mind back.

  “He was the collector wasn’t he? Died some years ago. A lot of his stuff went to a museum.”

  “That’s right,” said Sergeant Gwilliam. “It was before my time. I was in South London then. Why?”

  “Was there ever a burglary there? A big one?”

  “I expect so,” said Gwilliam. “There was plenty worth stealing. Records would be able to tell you. Why?”

  “Just an idea,” said Petrella.

  Sergeant Gwilliam looked at him suspiciously. He distrusted young detective constables who got ideas. Petrella went off to look for the Bird, who had been somewhat elusive lately. He had a feeling that some useful information might by now be forthcoming from that source.

  The matron at Highside Children’s Home was a single-minded extravert. A daily life spent in grappling with local authorities, keeping together an underpaid staff, and composing the difficulties of a hundred children left her with little time for reflection.