Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  “It’s all right criticising,” said Solly. “Where d’you keep your stocking, Peggs, my boy?”

  “Ah,” said Peggs. “One or two people might like to know that. I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t keep it in the safe. And I don’t keep it in the shop. And I don’t keep it under my bed.”

  Petrella, from his post of vantage in the passageway behind the bar, thought that Peggs was doing it very nicely. Not too obvious. Just indiscreet enough to sound natural.

  He cast an eye round the bar. Many of them were regulars, and he acquitted them at a glance. Nor did he think the Nipper was a woman. In theory there was nothing to prevent a woman taking to burglary, but as yet it didn’t seem to be one of the fields in which they had started seeking equality with men.

  There was a youth with red hair and large hands, vaguely attached to a girl, whom he might have brought with him or might have picked up. There was an old man with a white beard, nursing a single half pint of mild in the corner. (Was he as old as he looked? The hand which raised the glass was very steady.) And a clerkly person, sipping a lager, whose eyes flashed round keenly behind a pair of rimless glasses. Nothing to choose between them really.

  “Did I do all right?” asked Peggs an hour later. He was mixing himself a powerful sedative.

  “Bang on,” said Petrella. “If the Nipper was there he’ll be after your life’s savings next.”

  “You think he’ll work it out?”

  “Bound to. Not in the shop, not in a safe, not in your bedroom. Really speaking that only leaves the living room.” He cast his eye round the homely apartment. “And it won’t be too difficult for him to get in. There’s a side door in Exeter Street. Easy lock. Then straight up the stairs. Then he’s got a choice. Could be this room, or the room opposite.”

  “That’s the bathroom. Wouldn’t keep money in the bathroom.”

  “Agreed. Now, whereabouts in this room? I’d say the sideboard was the obvious place. Strong doors. And a nice lock. That’s the place all right.”

  “All right,” said Peggs. “So that’s where I keep my money. Now what? I’m willing to help, but I’m not going to spend three weeks hiding behind a curtain waiting for a little perisher to come and help himself to it.”

  “Nor you shall,” said Petrella. “In fact, it’s quite obvious that he won’t come near the place until he’s seen you safely out of it.”

  “Are you going to hide here, then?”

  “No one’s going to hide,” said Petrella. “It’s a little irregular, but this is how I thought we’d do it.”

  “When you say it’s irregular,” observed Chief Inspector Haxtell next morning, “what exactly do you mean?”

  “I thought, perhaps,” said Petrella, “that it might be better if you didn’t know about it.”

  “Why?”

  “In case it goes wrong.”

  “And what happens if it goes wrong?”

  “It’s just possible,” said Petrella, cautiously, “that the Nipper might nip no more.”

  “You mean it might kill him?”

  “It’s possible, sir.”

  “I think I’d better know about it,” said Haxtell.

  “Well – you know how you pick a lock.”

  “Roughly. But you can tell me again.”

  “It’s more or less the same process, whatever sort of lock it is. You use two picks, one in each hand. The first one’s the ‘lifter’, the other’s the ‘shifter’. You feel for the retaining spring – that’s the spring that puts the weight into the lock. Once you can raise that, the job’s more than half done.”

  Unconsciously, Petrella was demonstrating as he spoke, and Haxtell watched him, half interested, half amused.

  “You ought to have been a burglar yourself,” he said. “All right. I’ve got the idea. What next?”

  Petrella explained.

  “It’ll be a lot cheaper than keeping someone on watch,” he said. “After all, he mayn’t try it for months. . .”

  Actually it was three weeks later that Councillor Hayes was walking home down Exeter Street. He was returning from a most interesting council meeting at which he had delivered an address on the subject of inefficiency and dishonesty in the police force. He was reflecting on the pleasures of democracy and free speech when he heard, quite close to him, a piercing shriek.

  He looked up. It seemed to come from a darkened first-floor window. Murder? Assault? Bodily harm? Where, oh where, were the police? There was a thudding of feet on the stairs, a door swung back and a figure burst forth. It came straight at him.

  Councillor Hayes threw up his arms in a token gesture of self-defence. The next moment they were entangled together in a milling heap on the pavement.

  It was at this moment that the bright light of a torch illuminated the scene and a voice said, “Now then. What’s all this?”

  The police had arrived.

  At Crown Road Police Station some sorting out took place. Councillor Hayes was recognised and apologised to. His opponent, who turned out to be a young man with red hair and large feet, was asked for explanations, which he found it embarrassing to give. His case was prejudiced from the start by the fact that during the struggle, an undoubted set of picklocks had fallen from his coat pocket. The fact that he was wearing cotton gloves and rubber-soled shoes might, of course, have had some innocent explanation; but, having extracted his name and address, Haxtell thought it worth detaining him whilst he sent a man round to his lodgings, where a number of very curious objects came to light including a complete set of key blanks, a high-class set of metal saws and more used one-pound notes than any young man starting out in life ought to possess. Faced with this fresh evidence, the young man decided, at a latish hour that night, to come clean. The Nipper was caught.

  The publicity and prestige which Councillor Hayes derived from the matter was so considerable that there seems no doubt that he will be Mayor next year. There was even talk of a public subscription. Had he not, single-handed, succeeded where the whole police organisation had failed?

  Haxtell decided, on reflection, to say nothing at all. He was thus spared from having to explain that Petrella had carefully wired the lock mechanism in Pegg’s sideboard to the main electricity supply of the house, ensuring an extremely severe shock to anyone who tried to pick it.

  Anyway, it would have meant bringing Petrella back from Barcelona where he was enjoying a well-earned holiday.

  Source Seven

  How curious, and how different, are the threads which form the pattern. A titled woman who died in the gutter of Soho; a drunken crane driver at Tilbury Docks; a pink-cheeked young man fishing off the south bank of the Gironde; a middle-aged gourmet with a house of rose-coloured brick in the hills above Maidenhead. . .

  On a fine morning in September, Superintendent Costorphine was studying the entries in his ledger, under the cross-reference of Diacetylmorphine, better known as heroin. The book lay open at a page headed with the numeral “7”.

  Scotland Yard has no separate Narcotics Bureau. Nevertheless, there are men in the Central Office – and Costorphine was one of them – who have come, by accident or design, to specialise in the ramifications of the drug traffic. They are coordinators. They work hand in glove with departments whose special interests are Undesirable Aliens, Unlawful Night Clubs, Prostitution, Procuration and Assault with Violence; occasional flowerings of the same shoot.

  Superintendent Costorphine was tall, thin, white and untidy – “like a wax candle in a draught,” said Superintendent Hazlerigg, who admired, but could not love him. He had the mind of a chess master and the patience of Job. Which was well, because he was fighting a battle in which victory was impossible and the most that could be looked for was a measure of success.

  He was speaking to Hazlerigg of this.

  “The real trouble,” he said, “is that the stuff is no longer manufactured in England. It was tried, in the twenties. Morphia, heroin and cocaine. When we put Eddie Manning, the Negro, inside, they p
acked it up. It’s all made in the Middle East now.”

  “Why do you class that as a trouble?” asked Hazlerigg. “I should have thought it was a good thing.”

  “No,” said Costorphine. “If you can hit the producer you can stop the line once and for all. Now we can’t touch the producer so we have to spread our efforts and go for the carriers. A lot of them are little men – stewards and deckhands and lascars. They’re a plague, but they never carry more than tiny quantities. It’s the big, regular sources that matter.”

  He looked down at the ledger open in front of him. It was called “Costorphine’s Source Book” – or, by the young and irreverent members of the department, “Mother Costorphine’s Cookery Book”. In it, numbered serially, could be found set out all the known details of ways and means in which supplies of unlawful narcotics were entering – or were thought to be entering – the country. About some of these sources everything was known, and in these cases a neat red line drawn at the foot of the page indicated one more chapter closed and one more hole stopped.

  About other sources, information varied from the moderately complete to the extremely sketchy.

  Page seven was practically blank.

  “By the way,” said Hazlerigg, his mind reverting to the reason that had brought him in to Costorphine’s room. “We’ve found a lot of that jewellery.”

  They had been discussing a titled woman, in whom they shared an interest. She had disappeared from her family home three months before, with some of her own and some of her family’s jewellery, and had just been picked out of the gutter in Dean Street.

  “She’s been selling it and pawning it,” he went on. “She didn’t get much for it but the transactions were honest as far as they went. I expect the family will buy it back. She’d no money on her at all. I don’t think there’s much doubt how she spent it, poor girl.”

  “No,” said Costorphine. He himself never said things like “poor girl” or “poor man” about the victims of drugs; any more than he said “poor fellow” when he captured an unwary chess opponent’s queen. “What was the cause of death?”

  “Exposure and weakness.”

  Costorphine pinched his long upper lip. “I’ve an idea,” he said, “that the heroin in her handbag came through Source Seven.”

  “It’s a marvel to me how you keep ’em apart,” said Hazlerigg.

  “Changes in manufacturing methods, chiefly. This stuff was made almost exactly two and a half years ago. It started to appear on the English market last month. That’s always been the peculiarity of Source Seven. A time lag of twenty-seven to thirty months between manufacture and disposal. It’s very odd, that. Usually, they’re only too keen to get it on the market, you know, and pick up their profit.”

  “Is Seven a big source?”

  “Big enough to be worth stopping,” said Costorphine. He was not given to over-statement. “By the way,” he added, “did you hear that we had found Thomas?”

  “Thomas who?”

  “Tiny Thomas.”

  “Oh him,” said Hazlerigg. “When you say ‘found’ I suppose you mean—”

  “Yes. Quite dead. He’d been strangled.”

  That is where the drunken crane driver came in. His name was Ricketts and he had been celebrating the return home of his eldest son from Korea; celebrating with such serious concentration that when he came on duty next morning he was not only still drunk, but too drunk to realise it. With the result that he had succeeded in dropping a steel girder weighing five tons from a height of sixty feet. Fortunately no one was underneath it at the time, but the loading jetty had disintegrated as if a bomb had hit it.

  Two days later a diver had gone down to assess the damage. While he was down there, he had observed what looked like a roll of cable wire. The scour was carrying it slowly along the river bed towards him. Fearing that it might run foul of him, he had stopped to push it to one side and had noticed two feet projecting from one end.

  But for this chance, the little fish and the crabs would have had time to finish what they had begun, and in the end there would have been nothing left but a cocoon of rusty wire, rolling backwards and forwards as the tide ebbed and ran.

  As it was, the police were able, with some difficulty, to reconstruct and identify the remains of Tiny Thomas, who was a vendor of newspapers and, in addition, a most useful and successful police informer.

  There the matter might have rested, but for the fact that when the experts examined Thomas’s coat they took particular care to look out for a secret pocket which they knew it contained. In it they found a sodden piece of cardboard which, under the influence of oblique photography, yielded the single word, “POYAK.”

  Since Thomas was known to have been working for some time on Source Seven – to which he said he had some sort of lead – the matter was referred to Superintendent Costorphine.

  “What does it mean?” asked Hazlerigg, when all this had been explained to him. “It sounds like a racehorse.”

  “No one knows what it means,” said Costorphine. “It’s evidently a name that Thomas heard – or most likely misheard – and since he thought it important he wrote it down and cached it in his inner pocket.”

  “Po-yak,” said Hazlerigg. And then, “Poy-ak.” It sounded equally silly either way.

  “My first idea was that it might be the name of a boat, or a bungalow on the sea or river. Any of those would have made sense against a smuggling background.”

  “Have you got anyone particular on it?”

  “I haven’t been able to spare anyone at the moment,” said Costorphine. “Why?”

  “I thought it might be something for Petrella to get his teeth into.”

  “Hmph,” said Costorphine. “Well, it would do no harm, I suppose.” He didn’t sound very grateful.

  “Give the boy a run,” said Hazlerigg. “It’ll be better than leaving him to get stale. I won’t let him do anything drastic without asking you or me first.”

  Detective Constable Patrick Petrella was something of a joke at Headquarters. Hazlerigg had arranged a three-months’ attachment for him to Scotland Yard – a welcome respite from his work in North London – when he discovered that he spoke Arabic. He had used him as interpreter in a piece of business he was engaged on in the docks and had discovered that his youthful-looking assistant had other accomplishments. Son of a Spanish policeman and an English school mistress he had started life with the advantage of being bilingual. At the University of Beirut he had learned to speak and read Arabic. After that, at a College of rather peculiar Further Education in Cairo, where most of the teaching was done in French, he had learned, among other things, how to judge wines and pick locks. At Scotland Yard he had come under a certain amount of fire from the old hands. He had accepted the leg-pulling with the same equanimity that he accepted everything else.

  “Do some thinking first,” said Hazlerigg to this young man. “If you strike a line, hunt it yourself, and report results. There’s a Thames Conservancy list of motor boats and motor cruisers which you might start on. If you get hold of anything, tell Superintendent Costorphine or myself before you do anything silly.”

  Petrella saluted gravely and withdrew.

  He was back the next morning. “Could you find out, sir,” he said, “whether Source Seven could have anything to do with France?”

  Hazlerigg telephoned Costorphine. When he had done, he said, “Yes. The stuff starts in the Levant, but there are indications that there is an intermediate stage in France. Why?”

  “Po-yak,” said Petrella. “It’s what an Englishman might make of Pauillac, if he overheard it.”

  “Yes,” said Hazlerigg. “So he might. Is it on the coast?”

  “In a way, sir. It’s on the south bank of the Gironde – that is, the mouth of the Garonne. Quite large boats go past it, I believe, on their way up to Bordeaux. I don’t think they stop there. It’s not a large place. Perhaps if I could go and have a look round. . .”

  The thought of sendin
g a very junior detective constable direct to Bordeaux had not even entered Hazlerigg’s head. He opened his mouth to say, Certainly not, and then closed it again.

  “I’ll speak to Superintendent Costorphine,” he said at last. “Meanwhile, get checking those motor boats.”

  Surprisingly, Costorphine supported the idea.

  “Normally,” he agreed, “we should ask the French police to cooperate. But what exactly are we going to ask them to do? Go to Pauillac and look for – what? If there’s anything actually sticking out they’d have noticed it before. Unless we can give them rather more to go on, I’m afraid it’ll be a routine enquiry and a nil return.”

  “All right,” said Hazlerigg. “Let him go.”

  And to Petrella, he said, “Look here, son. You’re going as a tourist. You’ve got a fortnight to produce some return for the public money that’s being spent on you. I’ll give you an introduction to the Commissaire at Bordeaux, but don’t use it unless you have to. Behave like a tourist – have you got any hobbies?”

  “I used to fish quite a bit.”

  “Excellent. Take a fishing rod. It’ll be a boring existence but I expect you’ll survive. And just what are you looking so pleased about?”

  “The finest claret in the world, sir, comes from Pauillac.”

  “Well, you won’t be able to buy much of that on your allowance,” said Hazlerigg. “Keep your eye on the fishes.”

  Which brings us to a young man fishing on the Garonne.

  Patrick Petrella never before remembered such a feeling of entire and absolute contentment. He was seated in a clump of reeds. It was not a very good place for fishing, but it was an excellent place for observation. Already he was in love with the misty greys and greens of the Medoc and the broad silver-grey river which ran past his feet. Away, across the river, on the extreme right of his view, were the church and citadel of La Blaye. In front of him spread the willow-covered flats of the Ile St. Louis, with its cheerful-looking lighthouse, like a single-funnelled liner. On his left lay Pauillac jetty, with the mast and bridge of the steamer sticking out of the water exactly as the Germans had left it when they had sunk it as a final act of spite in 1944.