Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  He himself found her.

  She was sitting quietly in the corner of the saloon bar of The Gatehouse, a big, newish establishment at the junction of the High Street and Trinity Road.

  There was no convenient snack bar this time; there was very little cover at all. The best he could find was a trolley-bus shelter. If he stood behind it, it did at least screen him from the door.

  The minutes passed, and added up to a quarter of an hour. Then to half an hour. During that time two people had gone in, and three had come out, but none of them had aroused Petrella’s interest. He knew, more or less, what he was looking for.

  At last the door opened and a man emerged. He was a thick, well-set-up man, dressed in a close-fitting flannel suit which was tight enough across the shoulders and round the chest to exhibit his athletic frame. And he was carrying a canvas bag, of a type that athletes use to hold their sports gear.

  He turned left, and swung off down the pavement with an unmistakable, aggressive masculine stride, a mature bull of the human herd, confident of his strength and purpose.

  Petrella let him have the length of the street, and then trotted after him. This was where he had to be very careful. What he mostly needed was help. The chase swung back past the Underground and there he spotted Wilmot and signalled him across.

  “In the grey flannel suit, carrying a bag,” he said. “See him? Then get right after him, and remember, he’s got eyes in the back of his head.”

  Wilmot grinned all over his guttersnipe face. He was imaginatively dressed in a teddy-boy suit and he fitted into the South London streets as easily as a rabbit into a warren.

  “Doanchew worry,” he said, “I won’t lose him.”

  Petrella fell back until he was a hundred yards behind Wilmot. He kept his eyes open for Mote. The more of them the merrier. There was a long, hard chase ahead.

  He noticed Wilmot signalling.

  “Gone in there,” said Wilmot.

  “Where?”

  “Small shop. Bit of the way up the side street.”

  Petrella considered. “Walk past,” he said. “Take a note of the name and number on the shop. Go straight on, out of sight, to the other end. If he goes that way, you can pick him up. If he comes back I’ll take him.”

  Ten minutes went by. Petrella thought anxiously about back exits. But you couldn’t guard against everything.

  Then the man reappeared. He was carrying the same bag, yet it looked different. Less bulky in shape but, by the swing of it, heavier.

  He’s dumped the hat and coat and the remains of the suitcase at that accommodation address, thought Petrella. Even if we lose him, we know one of the Ponting hideouts. But we mustn’t lose him. That bag’s got several thousand pounds’ worth of stolen jewellery in it now.

  Would it be best to arrest him, and give up any chance of tracing the receiver? The temptation was almost overmastering. Only one thing stopped him. His quarry was moving with much greater freedom, as if convinced that there was no danger. Near the end of the run he would get cautious again. For the moment there was nothing to do but follow.

  The man plunged back in the Underground; emerged at Waterloo; joined the queue at the Suburban Booking-Office. Petrella kept well clear for he owned a ticket which enabled him to travel anywhere on the railway.

  Waterloo was a station whose layout he knew well. By positioning himself at the central bookstall, he could watch all three exits. His quarry had bought, and was eating, a meat pie. Petrella was quite unconscious of hunger. His eyes were riveted on the little bag, swinging heavily from the man’s large fist. Once he put it down, but it was only to get out more money to buy an orange, which he peeled and ate neatly, depositing the remains in one of the refuse bins. Then he picked up the bag again and made for his train.

  It was the electric line for Staines and Windsor. He went through the barrier, and walked slowly up the train. There were very few passengers about, and it must have been near enough empty. He walked along the platform, and climbed into a carriage at the far end.

  Some instinct restrained Petrella. There were still five minutes before the train left. He waited. Three minutes later the man emerged from the carriage, walked very slowly back down the train, glancing into each carriage as he passed, and got into the carriage nearest to the barrier. The guard blew his whistle.

  Two girls who had been sauntering towards the barrier broke into a run – Petrella ran with them. They pushed through the gate. The guard blew his whistle again; they jerked open the door of the nearest carriage and tumbled in together.

  “We nearly left that too late,” said one of the girls. Her friend agreed with her. Petrella thought that they couldn’t have timed it better. But he didn’t say so. He was prepared to agree with everything they said. It was the quickest way he knew of getting on with people.

  The girls were prepared to enjoy his company too. The dark vivacious one was called Beryl and the quieter mousy one was Doreen. They lived at Staines.

  “Where are you getting out?” asked Beryl. “Or is that a secret?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” said Petrella.

  Beryl said he was a case. Doreen agreed.

  The train ambled through dim, forgotten places like Feltham and Ashford. No one got out and no one got in. Petrella heard about a dance, and what had gone on afterwards in the car park. He said he was sorry he didn’t live at Staines. It sounded quite a place.

  “It’s all right in summer,” said Doreen. “It’s a dump in winter. Here we are.”

  The train drew up.

  “Sure you won’t change your mind?” said Beryl.

  “Perhaps I will, at that,” said Petrella. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that his man had got out and was making his way along the platform.

  “You’d better hurry up then. They’ll take you on to Windsor.”

  “That’d never do,” said Petrella. “I forgot to warn her that I was coming.”

  “Who?” said Doreen.

  “The Queen.”

  His man was safely past the ticket collector now.

  “Come on,” said Beryl. They went past the collector together. “Wouldn’t you like some tea? There’s a good place in the High Street.”

  “There’s nothing I’d like better, but I think I see my uncle waving to me.”

  The girls stared at him. Petrella manoeuvred himself across the open yard, keeping the girls between him and his quarry. The man had set off up the road without, apparently, so much as a backward glance, but Petrella knew that the most difficult part of the chase was at hand.

  “I don’t see your uncle,” said Beryl.

  “There he is. Sitting in that taxi.”

  “That’s just the taxi driver. I don’t believe he’s your uncle at all.”

  “Certainly he is. How are you keeping, uncle?”

  “Very fit, thank you,” said the taxi driver, a middle-aged man with a brown bald head.

  “There you are,” said Petrella. “I’ll have to say goodbye now. We’ve got a lot to talk about. Family business.”

  The girls hesitated, and then withdrew, baffled.

  “You a policeman?” said the taxi driver. “A detective or something?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “Following that man in the light suit? I thought as much. Very pretty, the way you got behind those girls. As good as a book.”

  His quarry was now halfway up the long, straight, empty road, which leads from Staines Station to the riverside. He had stopped to light a cigarette, and in stopping he half turned.

  “Keep behind my cab,” said the driver. “That’s right, well down. He’s getting nervous. I’d say he’s not far from wherever it is he’s going to. Good as a book, isn’t it? Do you read detective stories?”

  The man was walking on again now. He was a full three hundred yards away.

  “I don’t want to lose him,” said Petrella. “Not now. I’ve come a long way with him.”

  “You leave it
to me,” said the cab driver. “I’ve been driving round here for forty years. There isn’t a footpath I don’t know blindfold. Just watch which way he turns at the end.”

  “Turning right,” said Petrella.

  “All aboard.” The taxi shot out of the station yard, and the driver turned round in his seat to say, “Might be making for the High Street, but if he wanted the High Street, why not take a bus from the other platform? Ten to one he’s for the ferry?”

  “I say, look out for that dog,” said Petrella.

  The driver slewed back in his seat. Said, “Effie Muggridge’s poodle. Asking for trouble,” and accelerated. The dog shot to safety with a squeal of rage.

  “Got to do this bit carefully,” said the driver as they reached the corner. “Keep right down. Don’t show so much as the tip of your nose, now.”

  Petrella obeyed. The taxi rounded the corner, and over it, in a wave, flowed the unmistakable smell of the river on a hot day – weed and water and tar and boat varnish.

  “He’s in the ferry,” said the driver. “Got his back to you. You can come up for air now.”

  Petrella saw that a ferry punt ran from the steps beside a public house. There were three passengers on her, standing cheek by jowl, and the ferryman was untying and pushing out. He realised how hopeless he would have been on his own.

  “What do we do?” he said.

  “Over the road bridge, and back down the other side. Plenty of time, if we hurry.”

  “What were we doing just now?”

  The driver chuckled throatily. Petrella held his breath and counted ten, slowly. Then they were crossing Staines Bridge.

  “Not much traffic at the moment,” said the driver. “You ought to see it at weekends.” They did a skid turn to the left, and drew up in the yard of another riverside inn.

  “There’s two things he could do,” said the driver. “Walk up the towpath to the bridge. There’s no way off it. Or he could come down the path – you see the stile? – the one that comes out there. I’ll watch the stile. You go through that gate and down the garden – I know the man who owns it. He won’t mind. You can see the towpath from his summerhouse. If you hear my horn, come back quick.”

  With a feeling that some power stronger than himself had taken charge, Petrella opened a gate and walked down a well-kept garden, full of pinks and roses and stone dwarfs with pointed hats. At the bottom was a summerhouse. In the summerhouse he found a small girl reading a book.

  “Are you coming to tea?” she said.

  “I’m not sure,” said Petrella. “I might be going to the cinema.”

  “You’ll have to hurry then. The big film starts in five minutes.”

  Behind him a hooter sounded off.

  “I’ll run then,” said Petrella. He scooted back up the garden. The girl never raised her eyes from her book.

  “Just come out,” said the taxi driver. “Going nicely. We’ll give him twenty yards. Can’t afford too much leeway here. Tricky navigation.”

  He drove slowly towards the turning, and stopped just short of it.

  “Better hop out and look,” he said. “But be careful. He’s stopped twice already to blow his nose. We’re getting pretty warm.”

  Petrella inched up to the corner, and poked his head round the wall. The man was going away from him, walking along the pavement, but slowly. It was an area of bungalows, some on the road, some on the riverbank, with a network of private ways between.

  The taxi driver had got out, and was breathing down the back of his neck.

  “Got to take a chance,” he said. “If we follow him, he’ll spot us for sure. I’ll stay here. If he turns right, I’ll mark it. If he turns left he’s for Riverside Drive. You nip down that path, and you can cut him off.”

  Petrella took the path. It ran between high hedges of dusty bramble and thorn; hot and sweet-smelling in the sun. It was the dead middle of the afternoon, with hardly a dog stirring. Petrella broke into a jog trot, then slowed for the road ahead.

  As he reached the corner, he heard footsteps on the pavement. Their beat was unmistakable. It was his man, and he was walking straight towards him.

  Petrella looked round for cover and saw none. He thought for a moment of diving into the shallow ditch, but realised that he would merely be attracting attention. The footsteps had stopped. Petrella held his breath. He heard the click of a latch. Feet on flagstones. The sudden purring of an electric bell.

  The chase was over.

  “I’m not saying,” said Palance, “that it wasn’t a success. It was a success. Yes.”

  Haxtell said nothing. He knew just how Palance was feeling and sympathised with him.

  “We’ve got back the Alfrey diamonds, and we’ve got our hands on that man at Staines. An insurance broker, of all things, and quite unsuspected. Judging from what we found in the false bottom of a punt in his boathouse he’s been receiving stolen goods for years. And we’ve stopped up one of the Ponting middlemen at that tobacconist’s in Balham. A little more pressure and we may shop the Pontings, too.”

  “Quite,” said Haxtell sympathetically.

  “All the same, it was a mad way to do it. You can’t get over that, Haxtell. How long have you known that Coulman was a man?”

  “We realised that as soon as we started to think about it,” said Haxtell. “It was obviously impossible for a real, middle-aged buxom woman to turn into a convincing man. But, conversely, it was easy enough for a man dressed as a woman, padded and powdered and wigged, to whip it all off and turn back quickly into his own self.”

  “Then do you mean to say,” said Palance, “that the Mrs. Coulman my men were watching for a month – doing her shopping, gossiping, hanging out her washing, having tea with the vicar – was really a man all the time?”

  “Certainly not,” said Haxtell. Observing symptoms of apoplexy, he said, “That was Mrs. Coulman. She had a brother – two, actually. One was killed by the Nazis. The other one got over to England. Whenever she had a big job on hand, her brother would come along at night. The house she lived in was at the end of the row. There was a way in at the side. He could slip in late at night without anyone seeing him. Next day he’d dress up in his sister’s coat and hat and go out and do the job. She stayed quietly at home.”

  “When you realised this,” said Palance, “wouldn’t it have been better to do the job properly? You could have had a hundred men if necessary.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked. Not a chance. You can’t beat a methodical man like Coulman by being more methodical. He’ll outdo you every time. The Underground, the change of clothes, the careful train check before he started for Staines, the long straight road, and the ferry. What you want with a man like that is luck – and imagination.”

  “Yes, but—” said Palance.

  “Method, ingenuity, system,” said Haxtell. “You’ll never beat a German at his own game. Look at the Gestapo. They tried for five years and even they couldn’t pull it off. The one thing they lacked was imagination. Perhaps it was a good thing. A little imagination, and they might have caused a lot more bother.”

  He sounded pleased, and had every reason to be. His own promotion to Superintendent had just come through.

  The Sark Lane Mission

  “You’re wanted down at Central,” said Gwilliam. “They want to have a little chat with you about your pension.”

  “My pension?” said Detective Sergeant Petrella. Being nearer twenty than thirty, pensions were not a thing which entered much into his thoughts. “You’re sure it’s not my holiday? I’ve been promised a holiday for eighteen months.”

  “Last month I saw the pensions officer,” said Gwilliam, “he said to me, ‘Sergeant Gwilliam, it’s a dangerous job you’re doing.’ It was the time I was after that Catford dog-track shower and I said, ‘You’re right, there, my boy.’ ‘Do you realise, Sergeant,’ he said to me, ‘that every year for the past ten years one hundred and ninety policemen have left the force with collapsed arches? And this year we
may pass the two hundred mark. We shall have to raise your insurance contributions.’”

  Petrella went most of the way down to Westminster by bus. It was a beautiful morning, with spring breaking through all round. Having some time in hand he got off the bus at Piccadilly, walked down St. James’s, and cut across the corner of the park.

  It was a spring which was overdue. They had had a dismal winter. In the three years he had been in Y Division, up at Highside, he could not remember anything like it. The devil seemed to have got among the pleasant people of North London. First, an outbreak of really nasty hooliganism; led, as he suspected, by two boys of good family, but he hadn’t been able to pin it on them. Then the silly business of the schoolgirl shoplifting gang. Then the far from silly, the dangerous and tragic matter of Cora Wynne.

  Gwynne was the oldest by several years of the Highside detectives, having come to them from the Palestine police. He was a quiet but well-liked man, and he had one daughter, Cora, who was seventeen. Six months before, Cora had gone. She had not disappeared; she had departed, leaving a note behind her saying that she wanted to live her own life. “Whatever that means,” Wynne had said to Superintendent Haxtell.

  “Let her run,” Haxtell had replied. “She’ll come back.” He was right. She came back at the end of the fifth month, in time to die. She was full of cocaine, and pregnant.

  Petrella shook his head angrily as he thought about it. He stopped to look at the crocuses which were thick in the grass. A starved-looking sparrow was trying to bolt a piece of bread almost as large as itself. A pigeon sailed smoothly down and removed it. Petrella walked on, up the steps into King Charles Street, across Whitehall, and under the arch into New Scotland Yard.

  He was directed to the office that dealt with pensions, allotted a wooden chair, and told to wait. At eleven o’clock a messenger brought in a filing tray with six cups of tea on it, and disappeared through a swing door in the partition. Since the tray was empty when he returned, Petrella deduced that there must be at least six people devoting attention to the pensions of the Metropolitan Police and he hoped that one of them would soon find time to devote some attention to him.