Gideon's Fire

by John Creasey

  1. P.C. Jarvis arrives, on foot, and takes up a position in the tenement doorway, apparently as a point of observation.

  2. Jarvis lights a pipe, or cigarette - she believes a cigarette.

  3. A cyclist passes between her and Jarvis, a man whose name she does not know but who often passes the house at about half past three at night.

  4. A man appears from the doorway of the tenement, two doors removed from Jarvis’s point of vantage. This man walked towards the shops.

  5. Jarvis followed this man and called out to him after the man mounted a bicycle. The only word that the woman heard clearly was “lights” - from which it may be inferred that a cyclist was riding off without lights on his machine.’

  ‘Following further close questioning of this witness,’ the report went on, ‘we are using all endeavours to find out the identity of the two men. The first cyclist she saw and who passes along Gill Street every morning, appears to be the most likely source of information.’

  Gideon finished reading, looked up, and saw that Bell was glancing through some other reports, but obviously with only half of his attention, for he also looked up.

  ‘That’s the second ugly customer we want badly,’ he said. ‘Funny thing how often these bad shows come in pairs.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Gideon, and nodded.

  ‘Lot of things we want on this one. Identity of each man - how did petrol get into the apartment - anyone hate the Millers?’

  He drew in a hiss of breath. ‘Could anyone hate a family enough to want to wipe them all out? Doesn’t make much sense, but there was the Manuel case. We need the motive, we need . . .’

  He talked as he made notes on a desk pad, and at the same time reminded himself that this was Manning’s job, and that as a uniformed officer from the QR Division was dead or dying, the whole of that Division would be on its toes; there was no need to push Manning yet. He, Gideon, simply wanted to jot down the questions which occurred to him while the news was fresh in his mind; if there was any delay in catching the man who had started the fire, he could go over his notes with Manning.

  A telephone rang on his desk; another, on Bell’s. Each man lifted a receiver in a single swift, mechanical motion. Gideon heard Bell say: ‘Soon,’ and ring off, and then the operator said: ‘Can you speak to Mr. Manning of QR Division, sir?’

  ‘Put him through.’

  ‘Yes, sir . . .’

  ‘Hallo, George,’ said Manning, in a rather high-pitched voice which sounded slightly affected. ‘I thought you’d like to know we’ve found that cyclist. A Soho waiter, named Callini, Guiseppe Callini. He’s on his way to the station.’

  ‘Might help,’ said Gideon. ‘Anything more about Jarvis?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Manning, and his voice seemed almost a falsetto. ‘He passed away, twenty minutes ago. I’m just going to see his widow. George, read my report like Hawkeye, won’t you? There’s no one like you for seeing points that others miss and I want to catch this bastard in a hurry.’

  ‘I’ll try not to miss anything,’ Gideon promised.

  He rang off, made one or two more notes, studied the first page of the report, then put it away from him, glanced at Bell and asked: ‘Was that Riddell?’

  ‘Yes. Steaming.’

  ‘Let’s have him in first,’ said Gideon, and Bell pressed a buzzer.

  Almost immediately the door opened, and Riddell stalked in. He was tall, well built, a little on the big side, immaculate in a smooth-textured brown suit, with sleekly brushed brown hair, highly polished brown shoes, a business executive of a man. There was a haughty expression in his face, too, a face which somehow missed being handsome although all the features were good. Obviously he found it difficult not to protest that he had been waiting for so long.

  ‘Sorry, Rid, we’ve got two bad ones in this morning,’ said Gideon quickly. ‘And that chap Jarvis died.’ He took it for granted that Riddell knew what he was talking about, and Riddell openly thawed at this friendly approach. ‘Take a pew. I’ve been thinking about your three corpses in the same home-made grave. Think you’ve got a mass murderer?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Riddell, sitting down. ‘As a matter of fact, I think I may be on to the chap. The two bodies at the bottom of the grave haven’t been identified yet, but Sibley says they’re about the same age, late twenties, and one probably died a year before the other. I’ve had him on the phone. The top one’s the same kind of age, but she’s only been dead about three weeks. We’ve traced her. Girl named Florence Denny, had a little flat of her own in Brighton, secretary to an accountant. He got a telephone message a month ago, saying she was going to move to London because her parents were getting old and she had to look after them. Chap thought it a bit queer, but she was a flighty piece, always out late at nights and seldom early in the morning, so he was glad to let her go. Didn’t ask about her, just sent her insurance cards and a week’s wages to her flat - generous enough in the circumstances.’

  Gideon nodded; but although he was looking at Riddell as if concentrating on every word, in fact he kept seeing the report from Manning, and picturing the burning torches of children; from there it was only a step in memory to the girl at Islington. Gagged, assaulted, strangled. Why strangle her? He must make a note to find out if there had been a light in the bedroom, or even one shining from outside, anything which would suggest that the child might have seen her assailant clearly enough to be able to describe or to recognise him. If there had been no light, why had the man strangled her? The gagging to keep her quiet, yes. The rape, yes. But to strangle her - why? It could be a case of sex perversion, or . . .’

  He made a surreptitious note on his pad. ‘Light.’

  ‘. . . and this chap Harrison, George Harrison, spent a lot of time with her, at dances, pictures, all the fun of Brighton Beach,’ Riddell was saying. ‘Married man, wife’s a bit of a drip, two children. And this Florence Denny was in the family way. The local police have had Harrison checked under suspicion of receiving, he’s clear on that but they’ve got a pretty full dossier on him. Saved me a lot of trouble. On the strength of what we know, I think we ought to bring Harrison in. It looks as if he gets tired of the girls, takes ‘em to a nice quiet spot for the usual, and strangles ‘em, with the grave nice and handy. The thing I can’t make up my mind about is, should we bring him in and try to make him talk, or would it be better to wait until we can identify the other two women, and prove that he knew them, too? If he did, the case is cut and dried. If he didn’t . . .’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ asked Gideon.

  ‘I’d like to have a go at Harrison. I think he would break down.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Gideon said. ‘See what you mean.’ Here was a clear case of a Yard man over-anxious to make sure that if anyone made a mistake, it was Gideon. Riddell wanted approval of a course of action simply as a measure of self-defence, whereas Lemaitre was bursting to catch his man. ‘Rid, if I were you I’d work on the identification of the other two bodies. It may take a few days longer, even a few weeks, but this Harrison is living happily enough with his wife, I take it?’

  ‘Outwardly, yes.’

  ‘Has he got any other girl friends?’

  ‘There’s a girl he’s just started going about with - a Chloe Duval. Can’t understand the set-up at all really. His wife doesn’t seem to care what he gets up to, provided he keeps her and the children in comfort. He’s a motor car salesman, and does pretty well out of it. Nice house at Rottingdean, and’ - Riddell saw Gideon glance down at the reports on his desk, and went on rather more hastily - ’I know you’re busy, but I don’t want to go wrong on this case, Commander. I’m having Harrison watched, and if there looks like any funny business with this new girl he’s tagging along with, we’ll be on to him. The identification of the others could take weeks.’

  ‘Why don’t you give it another week, and see what the position is then,’ suggested Gideon. ‘That will give you and the Sussex chaps time to dig pretty closely into Florence Denny
’s association with Harrison. Give you time to check back on Harrison’s life and girl friends, too - if you can find that a couple of them disappeared about the time these women were killed, then you might get your angle that way. Give it a week,’ he repeated.

  ‘Very well,’ said Riddell, obviously not too pleased with the decision. ‘You won’t mind if I get cracking right away?’

  ‘You get moving,’ urged Gideon. ‘All we’ve got to do is make sure he doesn’t get this new fancy of his out in that quiet spot. If he killed the others near there and got away with it, he’ll use the same place again.’

  ‘I’ll watch it,’ Riddell said, and went out; he let the door close behind him on its softly hissing hinges.

  Almost as it closed, a telephone rang on Gideon’s desk, and with the usual mechanical movement, he lifted it. ‘Gideon,’ he said, and amplified the noted word ‘light’ with a few scribbled words. ‘Who? . . . Yes, put him through.’ He mouthed to Bell: ‘Get this one.’ Bell lifted his extension telephone, and Gideon said: ‘Hallo, Mr. Carmichael, how are you these days?’

  Carmichael was the Chief Officer of the London Fire Service, an elderly man not far off the retiring age, who probably knew more about fire, its causes and effects, than any man alive, certainly more than any man in London. His senior assistants liaised with the Yard whenever arson was suspected; the fact that Carmichael had called in person suggested that he had something serious to say.

  Carmichael said: ‘Very well, Mr. Gideon, thank you. Can you spare me half an hour this morning?’

  It was a hell of a morning to be faced with that request, and Gideon knew that he ought to say ‘no’, and make it this afternoon, but the mental picture of those burning children was vivid in his mind, and he said:

  ‘Yes, of course. Half past twelve would suit me best, but . .’

  ‘Why don’t we have lunch together?’ suggested Carmichael. ‘I have to be at the Home Office at half past eleven. Supposing we meet at your office at half past twelve.’

  ‘Right,’ said Gideon. ‘Suits me fine.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about last night’s Lambeth fire,’ went on Carmichael. ‘There are one or two features about it and other fires which puzzle me. This will be quite unofficial for the time being, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gideon, very glad that he had made no difficulties. ‘Right you are, then. Twelve thirty, here.’ He rang off, and Bell put down his receiver and settled back in his chair, waiting for Gideon to make some comment. ‘Any idea what he might have in mind, Joe?’

  ‘No,’ answered Bell.

  ‘Well, get someone to go over to QR right away, will you, to dig as deep as he can. Ask Manning to be at the end of a telephone at twelve thirty, so that he can bring me right up to date. Don’t want Carmichael to think we’re slipping. Make sure Carson’s on the lookout for someone who knew Ivy Manson, and might have been recognised by her.’ He paused. ‘What do you think of Riddell?’

  ‘Came up last night so that he could spend a night at home, his wife still needles him if he’s away too much,’ said Bell. ‘He wanted to pass the buck, too. You’re going to find it pretty tight, aren’t you? The Old Man at twelve o’clock, then Carmichael, and it’s nearly eleven already.’

  ‘You fix the QR job,’ Gideon ordered, and lifted a receiver. ‘Ask Mr. Cornish to come in, will you?’

  There followed one of the periods which never failed to impress Joe Bell, although he had worked at the Yard for forty years and with Gideon, on and off, for twenty. Gideon in a hurry was an experience in itself. The most fascinating aspect was that although he obviously geared himself up to high speed action, he was able to approach every new subject with calm deliberation, as if warning himself that more haste really did mean less speed. He did not waste a minute and did not let any of the others, from superintendents down to detective inspectors, waste a second. Now and again he refreshed his memory of a case by looking at the reports in front of him, but whether he did that or not, he always seemed to be as familiar with the circumstances of a case as the man who was in direct charge of it. There was Cornish with his inquiry into the bank tunnelling job; Gideon remembered exactly who had been questioned, what tools had been used, how many hours must have been involved. Cornish had failed to trace the two missing men and the money.

  ‘Been thinking about that,’ Gideon remarked, ‘and I’ve got a feeling that it might be connected with the Bournemouth job two years ago. You were down there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cornish, a heavily built, solid, stolid man, ‘but I don’t see the connection. That wasn’t a tunnelling job, they broke through a reinforced concrete wall.’

  ‘Didn’t you say that in this job there were no fingerprints but a print of a little tear in a glove showed up.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Same at Bournemouth, surely.’

  ‘Blimey, I didn’t think of that,’ said Cornish lugubriously. ‘Teased us, that print did. Ta. I’ll get out the old photographs and check, George.’

  He hurried out.

  There was an embezzlement job, a few minutes with a man who was probing into the newest vice racket in the West End, as long over a smuggling ring suspected of bringing thousands of watches in from Switzerland, three cases of missing persons, one case of a stolen lorry load of cigarettes, three cases which were going through the courts, two of them at the Old Bailey, a case of the ill-treatment of children by a foster-mother, two cases of illegal abortion each resulting in a woman’s death, one of a diamond robbery from a Hatton Garden merchant on the boat from Harwich to the Hook of Holland - and with each of these Gideon dealt unhurriedly, and yet in the minimum of time. When he had finished, it was ten minutes to twelve.

  ‘After that lot you deserve a cuppa,’ Bell declared.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Gideon. ‘Ring the A.C.’s secretary and say I’m on the way. It won’t do Rogerson any harm to see me early.’ He stood up, pulled the knot of his tie straight, slipped into his coat, and smoothed down his wiry, iron grey hair.

  Bell said: ‘I don’t know how you do it, George, but you look as if you’ve had a morning’s rest.’

  ‘All went pretty smoothly, didn’t it?’ asked Gideon. ‘Don’t forget to check with Manning, and get me a report on the fire so that I can read it before I see Carmichael. Oh, and fix a table at the pub across . . .’

  ‘Carmichael’s secretary rang, and says you’re to lunch at his club, in Whitehall Place,’ Bell said. ‘I said it would suit you.’

  ‘It suits me fine,’ Gideon agreed, and went out, head thrust forward, big body moving in that deliberate and stubbornly aggressive way he had, face expressionless, well aware of the eyes at the doors, the whisper of: ‘Gee-Gee’s on the prowl,’ the general air of being on their toes. That was a good thing. They were a good lot of men. They had a hell of a lot to do. And today they had started two hunts which every man at the Yard and at the Divisions would slave over.

  Little Ivy Manson.

  And the seven dead Millers and P.C. Jarvis.

  The session with the Assistant Commissioner was about administrative matters, and at a quarter past twelve Gideon went to the cloakroom, washed and brushed up, and hurried along to his office. Bell had the wanted fire report ready. The only additional item was about the waiter, Guiseppe Callini, who said that he could tell the police only one thing: as he had cycled home, another cyclist had passed him at high speed, going towards the docks.

  ‘Pity there’s not a bit more,’ Gideon said, and glanced at the front page headlines of the London evening newspapers on his desk. Each one featured the Lambeth fire, one hinted at sabotage, all had pictures, and across the top of the Evening Globe were six photographs in all - of Miller, his wife, and the smiling children of their marriage.

  Smiling, happy children.

  The story about little Ivy Manson was on an inside page. Gideon glanced at it, and then went out, knowing that Carmichael would be punctual, wondering what the Chief Fire Office
r had in mind.

  Carmichael held the Evening Globe in his right hand, and Gideon judged from the expression on his rather pale, austere face that he felt a deep hatred for this firebug. It was on that instant, as Carmichael turned pale grey eyes towards him, that Gideon sensed what the other man had in mind; that this might have been one of several such fires and there might be others to come.

  ‘Seen this?’ asked Carmichael, and thrust the newspaper out.

  4 MEN IN FEAR

  ‘What a terrible thing,’ said little Mrs. Tennison to her boarder. ‘Just think, eight people burned to death, it makes you feel awful, doesn’t it?’ She was an untidy wisp of a woman with thin grey hair, thin and rather pointed features, many lines at her eyes, many bristly grey hairs sprouting at her chin. Her chest was as flat as a board, and some people found it almost impossible to believe that the photograph over the sideboard in the front room was really of her family; there were four girls and three boys. Mrs. Tennison would boast in a confidential whisper: ‘Every one of them breast fed up to eighteen months, as I stand here. I never could abide these stodgy new-fashioned foods, what with giving the poor little things wind and constipation . . .’

  The second remarkable thing about her was that she had been widowed for nearly twenty years, and that all of her carefully nurtured children were married or living abroad. Dotted about the mantelpiece were pictures of a bewildering number of grandchildren, all apparently taken at the same age, all plump and goo-goo eyed. It was like a child photographer’s shop.

  For years, Mrs. Tennison had lived by cheerfully accepting a weekly gift of five pounds from a common pool created by her family, by taking in boarders, and by shrewd picking of winners for modest sums. Just now, she had only one boarder - Mr. Brown. The moment she had set eyes upon Mr. Brown, she had felt sorry for him. He was such a timid, frightened little man, with a lost and forlorn look. She did not know a great deal about him, but he had told her that he had lost his wife and child in an accident, not long ago, and that he was ‘picking up the pieces’. In her spontaneous way, Mrs. Tennison’s heart went out to Mr. Brown, and she could have made very little profit out of the five guineas a week he paid for board and lodging. Meat twice a day was the rule, although when she had first coped with her family, fresh meat once a week had been the average.