John Creasey Box Set 1: First Came a Murder, Death Round the Corner, The Mark of the Crescent (Department Z)

by John Creasey

  Horace Miller was at the other end of the line.

  “Any luck?” asked Beresford.

  “We’ve found the Daimler,” said the Superintendent. “At least, I think it’s your bus, and there’s a smell of cordite in the back of it.”

  “Call it ours,” grunted Beresford. “Where was it?”

  “On Clapham Common. A Daimler hire-service car, taken out yesterday afternoon—by a woman.”

  “A woman?” Beresford’s voice went up.

  “A middle-aged woman,” affirmed Miller, and Beresford felt absurdly glad. For a moment he had seen the face of Valerie Lester, and his blood had gone cold.

  “We can’t kick back on that,” the Super went on. “She was dressed in black, wore a wig, and paid a deposit in gold sovereigns.”

  “Gold, did she?”

  “Yes—and snubbed the hire people when they remarked on it, so they asked no questions.”

  “Humph,” grunted Beresford. “That’s another dead end. Anything else?”

  “Rogerson’s been over to Chelsea—he’s there now, in fact. So is the gun.”

  “There you are!” said Beresford, with a chuckle. “I told you so and you didn’t believe me. You’ll get that lined up with the bullet?”

  “Which bullet?”

  “Blockhead!” snapped Beresford. “The one that killed Williams.”

  Miller hesitated for a moment, and then went on:

  “Yes, of course I shall. I’ll ring you if the gun and the bullet fit.”

  “Still think I’m dreaming?” chuckled the big man. Then his voice dropped, and Miller could hardly hear him, while Josiah Long, who had been listening and blinking throughout the conversation, Beresford’s end of which conveyed its drift, could hear nothing at all. “Did you ring Craigie?” he demanded finally.

  “Yes,” said Miller. “He said he’d be over right away. Hasn’t he been?”

  “No-o.” Beresford scowled into the telephone. “He’ll be here any minute, I expect. By the way—you’re having that Wapping place watched?”

  “Yes. But if Long’s what you say he is——”

  “We’ll wait until we hear from U.S.A. before we’re sure of that,” grunted Beresford. “Meanwhile, keep someone on the tail of the Higson woman. And, Horace——”

  “What?” grunted Miller, who was not always impressed when Beresford used his Christian name.

  “Be a sweet man,” said Beresford, with a grin, “and see that your ugliest and most efficient ‘vec keeps an eye on the Chesters’ house at Regent’s Park. There’s a certain young lady there——”

  “What am I going to be?” demanded Horace Miller with a rare touch of humour. “Best man?”

  “Horace,” said Beresford reproachfully, “you have no fine feelings. Good-bye, Horace.”

  Beresford replaced the receiver thoughtfully, and did not notice Josiah Long’s inquiring gaze for several seconds. Beresford was puzzled about Craigie. Twenty minutes should have been ample time for the Chief to have come from Whitehall to Auveley Street, for Craigie rarely lost time when there was work to do. Moreover, Department Z’s Number One was worrying himself grey over the Gorman business.

  “Say!” Josiah Long’s nasal twang jolted Beresford out of his reverie. “Can I sleep here, buddy, if it comes to it?”

  “Rather that,” said Beresford bluntly, “than let you out of my sight until I’ve tested your story.”

  “Beresford,” said Josiah Long with sincerity, “I like yuh better every time yuh talk—say! Do yuh like dat telephone?”

  The Englishman scowled. He was suspended between a standing position and his chair, but jerked back to his feet suddenly, and said that he didn’t. He lifted the instrument off its platform, and told the Exchange operator that he would certainly hold on for the Paris call that was coming through for him.

  “Long-distance?” inquired Josiah Long, blinking.

  “How did you know?” demanded Beresford, who had not mentioned the word Paris.

  “I kinda guessed,” said Long, and Beresford told himself that Josiah Long was clever. In some things perhaps too clever.

  A moment later, however, he forgot Josiah Long, and forgot everything but the fact that Timothy Arran was on the other end of the line, speaking from the Hôtel Royale in Paris. There was an urgency about Arran’s voice which made Beresford stand by for trouble. The big man’s eyes narrowed as he listened.

  “I tried to get Craigie,” said Timothy Arran rapidly, “but he’s not in his office, so I came through to you Tony——”

  “Get it out!” snapped Tony Beresford.

  Arran paused, and Beresford had an idea that he was swallowing hard at a lump in his throat. At last:

  “Lavering’s gone,” said Arran.

  Beresford’s fingers tightened round the telephone.

  “Gone? You mean disappeared?”

  “No.” Arran’s voice was as cold as death. “I mean he’s dead. The nursing-home was burned down, and everybody inside went with it!”

  For a moment there was no sound on the line. Beresford’s tongue seemed to cleave to his mouth, and his whole body was rigid. From his chair, Josiah Long stared at the big man, wide-eyed, expectant.

  CHAPTER XV

  NO NEWS FROM CRAIGIE

  BERESFORD broke out of the mental paralysis which had gripped him after Arran’s bald statement, but his voice was harsh and unnatural, and his limbs were still tensed.

  “No chance at all?” he demanded.

  “I can’t see any,” said Arran.

  Beresford pulled himself together with a physical effort.

  “Listen, Tim,” he said. “Go to Marshant at the Embassy, tell him I sent you and that it’s the same game as I saw him about yesterday. Tell him to get the Sûreté moving quicker than it’s ever moved before, and to find the crowd who fired that nursing-home if it’s the last thing they do. Got that?”

  “All right,” said Arran, who sounded lifeless. “Anything else?”

  “No, but get back to London, with Toby, on the first ’plane. I’ve something here to keep you busy.”

  “All right,” said Arran again. “Chin-chin.”

  Beresford dropped the telephone on to its platform, and turned round towards Josiah Long. Josiah Long was a nuisance now. He was in the way, and for the time being he couldn’t be trusted.

  “Buddy,” said Beresford laconically, “I’ve got a nasty shock coming for you.”

  “Yeah?” Long’s eyes widened, and for once he did not blink. “Let’s have it, big boy.”

  “I’m going to jail you,” said Beresford. “Sorry, but it can’t be helped. I’ll let you out at once when I get an O.K. from the powers-that-be. Ready?”

  Josiah Long, his full lips pursed thoughtfully, heaved himself from his chair and reached for his hat, which was on the table. He was about to speak, but the kitchen door opened suddenly and Tricker, still bandaged, poked his head into the room.

  “When’ll you eat, Mr. B.?”

  “Sam,” said Beresford, drawing a deep breath, “I don’t know when and I don’t know where. Is that guardian angel of yours coming here to-night.”

  “Wot, Maria, Mr. B.? I——”

  “Anyhow,” grunted Beresford, “even if she is she isn’t. This place isn’t likely to be healthy to-night, Sam. Stay here yourself until Horace Miller or one of the Arrans comes, and then take your pet to the pictures. Deliver her afterwards to her home, Sam, and then park yourself at a temperance hotel for the night. Do you get that?”

  “You don’t want me to stay here to-night, Mr. B.?”

  “I don’t, Sam, unless you want to take a chance on getting a bigger wallop than you had the other night.”

  “O.K., Mr. B.”

  Beresford grinned fleetingly, then slipped into a mackintosh, and escorted Mr. Josiah Long out of the flat. As they climbed into the Lancia, still standing at the kerb, the big man grinned again, but there was a whimsical gleam in his grey eyes.

  “You’re takin
g it all very calmly, O Josiah.”

  The American grunted.

  “I got to,” he said logically. “If I make a break for it, I’ll have a posse of yo’ cops on my tail, and dat won’t give me my dinner. How long,” he added, as the Lancia moved off, “will it be before you can give me a pass out? Days or weeks?”

  “Hours, with any luck,” said Beresford. “I’ll get a call through to Washington and have a talk with your boss—what’s his name?”

  “Yuh just say who you’re asking about,” said Long cautiously.

  Beresford grunted, and swung the car into Bond Street, turning right towards Piccadilly and zig-zagging through the traffic until he turned into Whitehall. He pulled up outside Scotland Yard, and Josiah Long opened the door and climbed out.

  “I ain’t never been in here,” he started. “I——”

  But Beresford didn’t hear what he was going to say.

  The big man was sliding along the seats to get out of the Lancia on the on-side of the car, and he was looking at the long bonnet. As he looked, the bonnet seemed to bulge outwards. For a split second Beresford saw that crazy bulging, and then with a bellow of warning he dropped below the dashboard, squeezing himself as low as possible. Even as he moved, and as Josiah Long, with astonishing agility, skipped away from the car, the bonnet burst with a deep-toned roar which filled Whitehall with rumbling echoes, making a thousand people stop dead in their tracks. Yellow sheets of flame shot upwards and outwards, and the engine of the Lancia burst into a thousand pieces which went into the air like a cloud of shrapnel.

  People shouted, women screamed, men swore. The flames developed into a roaring inferno, gaining a hold with frightening rapidity. About Whitehall, pieces of steel and iron thudded against the pavement, into the macadam-topped surface of the road, against the walls of the great buildings on either side. Windows went inwards, shivering beneath the impact of those pieces. The driver of a London Transport omnibus, turning his head instinctively towards the explosion, was met full face with a flying piece of steel which smashed into his eyes. The man screamed, and his hands left the wheel. The bus skidded, crashing into a small car and squashing it against a wall; of the driver of the car there was nothing but a stomach-turning wreckage. The din of shrieking passengers added to the bedlam, and the bus rocked to and fro, as if it must crash over on one side; but it righted itself miraculously, although its windows were splintered and fire started in its engine.

  And all the while the flames about the Lancia grew more vicious, and the front part of the chassis was white-hot metal.

  Tony Beresford, squashed down beneath the dashboard, caught between the wood of it and the upholstery of the seats, contracted his muscles all he could, but was ready to see death. It seemed to leer at him, but it passed him by. Head first, he wriggled out of the Lancia, through the door which Josiah Long had left open, and willing hands dragged him to safety in the teeth of the flames.

  Superintendent Horace Miller leaned against the window of the Police Commissioner’s office at Scotland Yard, while Sir William Fellowes, who until recently had been unique as a Commissioner of Police without a title, sat at his desk and listened grimly to Tony Beresford.

  Fellowes was a stony-faced man who looked incapable of humour but was in fact a specialist in dry and caustic wit. At that moment, however, there was no humour on his lips nor in his hard grey eyes.

  “We’ve got to get Gorman on some charge or other,” said Beresford, and it seemed to him that he had been saying that at regular intervals for the past four days. It was like a refrain in his mind. If they could only hold Gorman, they would have time to breathe, time to catch up with the man’s game, time to smash it. But while he was free he was two moves ahead of Beresford and Department Z and the police. “Can’t you get him on a small count of some kind?” Beresford demanded. “If we could only work without him on our tails for twelve hours we might get through.”

  Fellowes drummed on his desk with his fingers.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t touch Leopold Gorman. Craigie asked me to this morning, and he saw Mannering——”

  (Sir David Mannering was the then Premier.)

  “What did Mannering say?” Beresford asked.

  “He said,” muttered Fellowes, hard-voiced, “that if we tried to hold Gorman on any charge that we couldn’t prove up to the hilt, we’d smash ourselves. Gorman’s not in this on his own, Beresford; he’s got powerful backing, and we can’t touch him—yet.”

  Beresford swore.

  “Where is Craigie? Do you know?”

  “No idea,” said Fellowes.

  “I spoke to him when you telephoned,” Miller interjected from the window. “That’s the last we saw or heard of him. An hour and a half ago now, and he’s not been to your flat yet—I telephoned five minutes ago.”

  Beresford pushed his hand through his hair. He was pale, grimy from his contact with the burning Lancia, and his right hand was badly burned. At that moment he was prepared to believe the worst about anything, and to be pessimistic as to the reason for Craigie’s ‘disappearance’.

  “You can’t call it that yet,” said Fellowes. “He might have gone over to Paris, after learning about the fire.”

  “Arran couldn’t get at him to tell him,” grunted Beresford.

  “Craigie learns things from more than one source,” said the Commissioner. “God, Tony, you’re not getting beaten by it, are you?”

  Just for a moment the two men stared at each other, hard-eyed. Fellowes knew his man, and knew, too, that the Valerie Lester element had not helped Beresford to keep his mind clear. But he expected what he got. Beresford’s eyes lost their stoniness, and his lips curved.

  “Sez you!” said Beresford. “All right, Bill—thanks.”

  Fellowes smiled, and proffered cigarettes.

  “We ought to get the call through from New York at any time,” he said. “If Long’s O.K. that’ll be a big help.”

  Beresford said nothing, but thought of the American with mixed feelings. Certainly Long had saved him from the machine-gun affray, but the little (not so little, Beresford corrected himself; Long’s guise as a middle-aged and somewhat corpulent bachelor made him look shorter than his five-feet-nine) American was what he would probably have called ‘in it bad’ with Leopold Gorman and that powerful financier’s ‘big shots’.

  Prior to his visit to Chelsea, Beresford had not been attacked since the first night’s escapades in Auveley Street. In the five hours since he had seen Long for the first time to know him as Josiah, there had been the machine-gun outrage and the Lancia trick. That meant, Beresford reasoned, that Gorman was prepared to do anything rather than allow the Englishman and the American to join forces. Singly they were dangerous; together, thought Beresford, Gorman considered them an even greater threat to his immunity from trouble. The big man wondered what would be the result of the wireless-telephone inquiry concerning Josiah Long which had been put through to New York by Sir William Fellowes, and which New York Headquarters had promised to answer as quickly as they could make inquiries at Washington. Would the result confirm Long’s apparent genuineness?

  Beresford was waiting for the reply from New York with more anxiety than either of the others realized. The result of that message would explain many things to him, but just then he was not prepared to pass his theories on to Bill Fellowes or the phlegmatic Horace Miller.

  A telephone-bell whirred out suddenly, and Beresford’s eyes widened. Fellowes shook his head as he heard the voice at the other end of the wire.

  “From Jennings,” he said, as he replaced the receiver. (Jennings was a police expert on arson.) “About your Lancia.”

  “Dodo Trale’s Lancia,” grinned Beresford. “What’s the report?”

  “He’s coming here to tell us,” said Fellowes.

  Jennings arrived—a small, sallow-faced man with a wall-eye. A rogue to look at, Beresford grinned to himself, if ever there was one. He spoke with obvious knowledge, however, and even hi
s low-pitched voice demanded respect.

  “I don’t think there’s much doubt as to how the thing started, sir.” Jennings spoke to Fellowes while looking every now and again at Beresford. “An asbestos container holding nitro-glycerine was fastened to the inside of the radiator. The container was sealed, but became unsealed after some manipulation, and the heat of the engine—or a spark—sent the engine sky-high. That’s all, sir.”

  “All!” muttered Beresford. “I should say it was a whale of a lot! But how was the container opened?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Jennings. “The container itself is hardly damaged, but the lever or wire which was used to open it is burnt. I’d imagine,” he added, taking courage from Fellowes’ nod, “that the thing was timed to open after you had applied the foot and handbrakes, sir.”

  “Not the door?” Miller snapped the question from the window. Horace Miller was frequently wide awake when he looked asleep.

  “I shouldn’t imagine so,” said Jennings, turning towards the Super. “The door might have been opened and closed several times while the car was still standing—I mean, before it was put into motion after the trap had been set. So the container would have opened earlier——”

  “Possibly before Mr. Beresford got in,” muttered Miller.

  “Or the other gentleman,” said Jennings, thinking of Josiah Long, who at that moment was in Jennings’ office, waiting patiently for the report from America.

  “Ye-es,” Beresford said, after a pause. “Besides, the engine wouldn’t have been hot enough at the start of the journey, and the door would have been opened and shut before I started the engine—or it might have been.”

  “Exactly,” said Jennings, eyeing Beresford with fresh respect.

  “All right, Jennings,” the Commissioner said, after a pause. “Keep at it, though. If you can find just how the container was operated it might help a lot.”

  Jennings did not say that the mechanism of the trap had been blown sky-high, and that even if it had not been burned it was probably littering Whitehall. He went out of the office quietly. Beresford started to speak, but the telephone-bell cut into his words.