Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  Near each bus stop a man and girl were talking. Opposite the Underground a pair of workmen sat, drinking endless cups of tea. In a side street two taxis waited, a driving glove over the meter indicating that they were not for hire. A small tradesman’s van, parked in a cul-de-sac, acted as mobile headquarters to this part of the operation. It was backed halfway into a private garage, chosen because it was on the telephone.

  Mrs. Coulman proceeded placidly to the far end of Bond Road, waited for a gap in the traffic, crossed the main road, and turned up a side road beyond it.

  An outburst of intense activity followed.

  “Still going west,” said the controller in the van. “Making for Highside Park. Details one to eight, switch in that direction. Number one car straight up Loudon Road and stop. Number two car parallel. Details nine and ten, cover Highside Tube Station and the bus stops at the top of the hill.”

  Mrs. Coulman emerged, panting slightly, from the side road which gave on to the top of Highside Hill, paused, and caused consternation in the ranks of her pursuers by turning round and walking back the way she had come.

  Control had just worked out the necessary orders to jerk the machine into reverse when it was seen that Mrs. Coulman had retraced her steps to admire a flowering shrub in a front garden she had passed. Looking carefully about her to see that no one was watching, she nipped off a small spray and put it in her buttonhole. Then she turned back towards Highside Hill and made, without further check, for the Tube Station.

  Details number nine and ten were Detective Sergeants Petrella and Wynne. They were waiting inside the station, at the head of the emergency stairs, and were already equipped with all-day tickets. When Mrs. Coulman reached the station entrance, therefore, she found it deserted. She bought a ticket for Euston and took the lift. A young man in corduroys and a raincoat, and an older one in flannel trousers, a windcheater and a club scarf, were already on the platform, waiting for the train. They got into the coaches on either side of her.

  Above their heads the machine jerked abruptly into top gear. A word was exchanged with the booking-office clerk and two taxis sped towards Euston.

  Mrs. Coulman, however, had disconcertingly changed her mind. Euston, Warren Street, Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road – station after station came and went and still she sat on. Her seat had been chosen to command the exits of her own and the two neighbouring carriages. She seemed to take a close interest in the people who got on and off. But if she noticed that the men who had come from Highside were still with her, she gave no sign.

  It was nearly half an hour later when she quitted the train at Clapham Common Station and made for the moving staircase, looking neither to right nor to left.

  Petrella had time for a quick word with Wynne. “It’s my belief the old bitch has rumbled us,” he said. “Get on the blower and bring the rest of the gang down here, as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to keep on her tail.”

  This proved easy. Mrs. Coulman walked down the street without so much as a backward glance, and disappeared into the saloon bar of The Admiral Keppel public house. Petrella made a detour of the place to ensure that it had no back entrance, and settled down to watch. It could hardly have been better situated for his purpose. The doors of its saloon and public bar opened side by side on to the same strip of pavement. Opposite them stood a sandwich bar, with a telephone.

  “I don’t think we ought to crowd the old girl,” said Petrella into the telephone. “It’s my impression she’s got eyes in the back of her head. If you could send someone – not Wynne, she’s seen too much of him already this morning – and put a man at either end of the street, so that we don’t have to follow her immediately as she goes—”

  The voice at the other end approved these arrangements. Time passed. Petrella saw Detective Constable Mote ambling down the pavement, and he flagged him in.

  “She’s been there a long time,” he said. “It must be nearly closing time.”

  “Sure she hasn’t come out?” said Mote.

  Petrella looked at his little book. “Two businessmen,” he said. “One youth with a girlfriend, aged about seventeen and skinny. One sailor with a kitbag. That’s the score to date.”

  The door of the public bar opened and three men came out and stood talking to the landlord, who seemed to know them. The men went off down the road together, the landlord disappeared inside, and they heard the sound of bolts being shut.

  “Hey,” said Petrella. “What’s all this?”

  “It’s all right. There’s still someone in the saloon bar,” said Mote. “I can see the shadow on the glass. Seems to be knocking her drink back.”

  “Slip across and have a look,” said Petrella.

  Mote crossed the road lower down and strolled up past the ground-glass window of the saloon bar.

  “It’s a woman,” he reported. “Sitting in the corner, drinking. I think the landlord’s trying to turn her out.”

  As he spoke the door was flung open and the last of the customers appeared. She was the same shape as Mrs. Coulman, but she seemed to have changed her hat and coat, and to have done something to her face, which was now a mottled red.

  She stood on the pavement for a moment, while the landlord bolted the door behind her. Then she ploughed off, straight and strong up the street, dipping very slightly as she progressed.

  A thin woman coming out of a shop with a basket full of groceries was nearly run down. She saved herself by a quick sidestep, and said, in reproof, “Carnchew look where you’re goin’?”

  The massive woman halted, wheeled, and hit the thin woman in the eye. It was a beautiful, co-ordinated, unconscious movement, as full of grace and power as a backhand passing shot by a tennis champion at the top of her form.

  The thin woman went down, but was up again in a flash. She was no quitter. She kicked her opponent hard on the ankle. A uniformed policeman appeared, closely followed by Sergeant Gwilliam, who had been waiting round the corner and felt that it was time to intervene. The massive woman, thus beset, back-heeled at her first assailant, aimed a swinging blow with a carrier bag full of bottles at the constable, missed him, and hit Sergeant Gwilliam.

  Some hours later Superintendent Palance said coldly, to Chief Inspector Haxtell, “I take it that Sergeant Petrella is a reliable officer.”

  “I have always found him so,” said Haxtell, equally coldly.

  “This woman, to whom he seems, at some point, to have transferred his attention, is certainly not Mrs. Coulman.”

  “Apparently not,” said Haxtell. “In fact she is a well-known local character called Big Bertha. She is also believed to hold the woman’s drinking records for both draught and bottled beer south of the Thames.”

  “Indeed?” Superintendent Palance considered the information carefully. “There is no possibility, I suppose, that she and Mrs. Coulman are leading a double life?”

  “You mean,” said Haxtell, “that the same woman is sometimes the respectable Mrs. Coulman of Bond Road, Highside, and sometimes the alcoholic Bertha of Clapham? It’s an attractive idea, but I’m afraid it won’t wash. Bertha’s prison record alone makes it an impossibility. During the month you’ve been watching Mrs. Coulman, Bertha has, I’m afraid, appeared no less than four times in the Southwark Magistrates Court.”

  “In that case,” said Palance reasonably, “since the lady under observation was Mrs. Coulman when she started, Sergeant Petrella must have slipped up at some point.”

  “I agree,” said Haxtell. “But where?”

  “That is for him to explain.”

  “It’s a stark impossibility,” said Petrella, later that day. “I know it was Mrs. Coulman when she went into the pub. There’s no back entrance. I mean that, literally. It’s a sort of penthouse, built on to the front of the block. The landlord himself has to come out of one of the bar doors when he leaves. And our local people say he’s perfectly reliable. They’ve got nothing against him at all.”

  “Could she have done a
quick-change act? Is there a ladies’ lavatory, or some place like that?”

  “Yes. There’s a lavatory. And she could have gone into it, and changed into other clothes which she had ready in her suitcase. It’s all right as a theory. It’s when you try to turn it into fact that it gets difficult. I saw nine people coming out of that pub. The first two were business types from the saloon bar. The landlord didn’t know them, but they seemed to know each other. And anyway they just dropped in for a whisky and out again. Then there was a boy and girl in the public bar. They held hands most of the time and didn’t weigh much more than nine stone nothing a piece.”

  “None of them sounds very likely,” agreed Haxtell. “And the three workmen were local characters, or so I gather. That leaves the woman and the sailor.”

  “Right,” said Petrella. “And since we know that the woman wasn’t Mrs. Coulman, it leaves the sailor. He was broadly the right size and shape and weight, and he was the only one carrying anything. Thinking it over, one can see that’s significant. He had a kitbag over his shoulder.”

  “Just how is a suitcase turned into a kitbag?”

  “That part wouldn’t be too difficult. The suitcase could easily be a sham. A fabric cover round a collapsible frame, which would fold up to almost nothing and go inside the kitbag with the wig and hat and coat and rest of the stuff.”

  “Where did the kitbag come from? Oh, I see. She would have had it inside the suitcase. One wave of the wand and a large woman with a large suitcase turns into a medium-sized sailor with a kitbag.”

  “Right,” said Petrella. “And there’s only one drawback. The sailor was a man, not a woman at all.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely and completely sure,” said Petrella. “He crossed the road and passed within a few feet of me. He was wearing bell-bottomed trousers and a dark blue sweater. There are certain anatomical differences, you know. And Mrs. Coulman was a very womanly woman.”

  “A queenly figure,” agreed Haxtell. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “It’s not only that,” said Petrella. “A woman might get away with being dressed as a man on the stage. Or seen from a distance, or from behind. But not in broad daylight, face to face in the street. A man’s hair grows in quite a different way, and his ears are bigger, and—”

  “All right,” said Haxtell. “I’ll take your word for it.” He paused and added, “Palance thinks you fell asleep on the job, and Mrs. Coulman slipped out when you weren’t looking.”

  “I know,” said Petrella. An awkward silence ensued.

  Petrella said, “Will they keep up the watch?”

  “I should think they’d lay off her a bit,” said Haxtell. “It’s an expensive job, immobilising a couple of dozen men. And a dinosaur would be suspicious after yesterday’s performance. I should think they’d let her run for a bit. There’s no reason you shouldn’t keep your eyes open, though – unofficially.”

  Petrella devoted what time he could spare in the next three months to his self-appointed task. His landlady’s married sister had a house in Bond Road, so he spent a lot of time in her front parlour and, after dark, prowling around No. 35, the end house on the other side of the road. He also made friends with the booking-clerks at Highside station and Pond End station; and spent an interesting afternoon in the German Section of the Foreign Office.

  “One thing’s clear enough,” he said to Haxtell. “When she’s on the job, she starts on the Underground. Taxis and buses are too easy to follow. If you go by Underground, the pursuit has got to come down with you. Or guard the exit of every Underground station in London simultaneously, which is a stark impossibility. Anyway, I know that’s what she does. She’s been seen three times leaving Highside station, carrying that trick suitcase. She books to any old station. She’s only got to pay the difference at the other end. She’s a bit more cautious, too, after that last fiasco. She won’t get on to the train if there’s any other passenger she can’t account for on the platform. Sometimes she’s let three or four trains go past.”

  Haxtell reflected on all this, and said, “It seems a pretty watertight system to me. How do you suggest we break in on it?”

  “Well, I think we’ve got to take a chance,” said Petrella. “In theory it’d be safer with a lot of people, but actually, I don’t think it would work at all. That kind can always spot organised opposition. There’s just a chance, if you’d let two or three of us try it, next time we get word that she’s likely to be busy—”

  “We’ll see,” said Haxtell.

  Three nights after these words were spoken, on a Saturday, the redoubtable twin brothers, Jack and Sidney Ponting, made entry into Messrs. Alfreys’ West End establishment by forcing the skylight of an adjacent building, picking three separate locks, cutting their way through an eighteen-inch brick wall, and blowing the lock neatly out of the door of the new Alfrey strong room. When the staff arrived on Monday they found a mess of brickwork and twisted steel. The losses included sixty-four large rough diamonds deposited by a Greek ship-owner. They were to have formed the nuptial headdress of his South American bride.

  “It’s a Ponting job,” said Superintendent Palance. “It’s got their registered trademark all over it. Get after them quick. They’re probably hiding up.”

  But the Pontings were not hiding. They were at home, and in bed. They raised no objection to a search of their premises.

  “It’s irregular,” said Sidney. “But what have we got to hide?”

  “You boys have got your job to do,” said Jack. “Get it finished, and we can get on with our breakfast.”

  Palance came up to see Haxtell.

  “They certainly did it. They most certainly did it. Equally certainly they’ve dumped the diamonds. And none of them has reached a receiver yet, I’m sure of that. And the Pontings use Mrs. Coulman.”

  “Yes,” said Haxtell. “Well, we must hope to do better this time.”

  “Are you set on trying it on your own?”

  Palance was senior to Haxtell. And he was longer in service, and older in experience. Haxtell thought of these things, and paused. He was well aware of the responsibility he was shouldering, and which he could so easily evade. Then he said, “I really think the only way is to try it ourselves, quietly.”

  “All right,” said Palance. He didn’t add, “And on your own head be it.” He was never a man to waste words.

  Four days followed, during which Petrella attended to his other duties as well as he could by day, and prowled round the curtilage of No. 35 Bond Road by night. Four days in which Sergeant Gwilliam, and Detective Constables Wilmot and Mote were never out of reach of a telephone; and Haxtell sweated.

  On the fifth night Petrella gave the signal: Tomorrow’s the day. And at eleven o’clock next morning, sure enough, the front door opened and Mrs. Coulman peered forth. She was wearing her travelling coat and hat, and grasped in her muscular right hand was the fabric-covered suitcase.

  She walked ponderously down the road. However acute her suspicions may have been, there was nothing for them to feed on. For it is a fact that at that moment no one was watching her at all.

  Ten minutes later she was purchasing a ticket at Highside Station. The entrance to the station was deserted. She waited placidly for the lift.

  The lift and Sergeant Gwilliam arrived simultaneously. He was dressed as a workman, and he seemed to be in a hurry. He bought a ticket to the Elephant and Castle and got into the lift beside Mrs. Coulman. In silence, and avoiding each other’s eye, they descended to platform level. In silence they waited for the train.

  When the train arrived, Sergeant Gwilliam hesitated. He seemed to have an eye on Mrs. Coulman’s movements. They approached the train simultaneously. At the very last moment Mrs. Coulman stopped. Sergeant Gwilliam went on, the doors closed, and the train disappeared bearing the Sergeant with it.

  Mrs. Coulman returned to her seat on the platform and waited placidly. By the time the next train arrived, the only other occupant
s of the platform were three schoolgirls. Mrs. Coulman got into the train, followed by the schoolgirls. Two stations later the schoolgirls got off. Mrs. Coulman, from her customary seat beside the door, watched them go.

  Thereafter, as the train ran south, she observed a succession of people getting on and off. There were three people she did not see. Petrella, with Mote and Wilmot, had entered the train at the station before her. Sergeant Gwilliam’s planned diversion had given them plenty of time to get there. Petrella was in the first and the other two were in the last carriages of the train.

  It was at Balham that Mrs. Coulman finally emerged. Two women with shopping bags, who had joined her carriage at Leicester Square, went with her. Also a commercial traveller with samples, whom she had watched join the next carriage at the Oval.

  Petrella, Mote, and Wilmot all saw her go, but it was no part of their plan to follow her, so they sat tight.

  At the next stop, all three of them raced for the moving stairs, hurled themselves into the street, and found a taxi.

  “I’m off duty,” said the taxi driver.

  “Now you’re on again,” said Petrella, and showed him his warrant card. “Get us back to Balham Station, as quick as you can.”

  The taxi driver blinked, but complied. Petrella had his eye on his watch.

  “She’s had four minutes’ start,” he said, as they bundled out. “You know what to do. Take every pub in your sector. And get a move on.”

  The three men separated. There is no lack of public houses in that part of South London, but Petrella calculated that if they worked outwards from the station, taking a sector each, they could cover most of them quite quickly. It was the riskiest part of the scheme, but he could think of no way to avoid it.