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

by John Creasey

  ‘Money,’ said Kenyon, simply.

  ‘Money,’ Craigie agreed grimly. ‘It isn’t inconceivable to picture a Cabinet and Government composed almost entirely of men with the mark. Remember, at the election only the New Age candidates will get the New Age vote. Now half a dozen men—the men who are running this—can do exactly what they like with the country’s money. For two or three years they could hide their activities, and in two or three years they would have all they want.’

  ‘If the New Age Party wins the next election,’ Kenyon summed up slowly, ‘and you think the election will be in a couple of months’ time—we’re for it.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Craigie. ‘And now you know how we’re being handicapped. You can take it from me that every permanent official likely to create any fuss and bother about the Cabinet’s actions has been drugged. We can’t move—officially.’

  Kenyon was very still. He was sure he had a glimmering of Craigie’s idea, but he wanted to hear it in full.

  ‘But then,’ Craigie’s voice was very grim: ‘we—the Department—are used to working unofficially. Hitherto, of course, if we’ve run risks by going against regulations, we’ve been able to pull the necessary strings. Now, we can’t. Every member who takes on this job is doing it completely at his own risk. We’ll get no help from the police; no help from anyone. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kenyon. The big man’s face, tanned dark, was set in hard lines. But there was a curve on his lips and a light in his eyes. His jaw was thrust forward, and he looked capable of anything—everything.

  ‘My unhappy job,’ Craigie continued, a little wistfully, ‘is to wait back here and report everything I want to do to the Cabinet. I’m going to stick to that, because those gentlemen will then think I’m acting on instructions. But you’ll be out in the field, with the others. Timothy and Toby, too—Dane, Trale, Curtis, the whole crowd. I’ll give you a list of names. Every one of them knows someone else on it, so you’ll have no strangers. Your men will work in pairs, as always. Meanwhile, I’m sending a code letter to all of you. You’re to leave the job you’re working on and drop back into private life. The code letters will be read and decoded by our friends of the Cabinet, and their friends in turn, and it will be believed that I’ve taken the warning to heart. It will be up to you to draw your men together.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea,’ said Kenyon, with a sudden grin, ‘if I organised a cricket match.’

  Craigie chuckled, then was serious again. ‘There’s one other thing. Several overseas appointments are being changed, mostly of those who are friends of Hugo Rensham.’

  ‘You mean Randall,’ Kenyon said, very quietly.

  ‘Sir Michael Randall’s coming from Paris,’ agreed Craigie, ‘and Howe from Berlin. I’m not sure of our American man, Sladen.’

  ‘What’s the excuse?’ demanded Kenyon.

  ‘Ill-health.’ Craigie smiled drily. ‘You’ll probably find all three of them useful, because they’ll be fuming. Only be careful—don’t talk to anyone you’re not sure of. And remember, a man without the mark isn’t necessarily safe.’

  ‘Meaning,’ Kenyon hazarded, ‘that you think the V.I.P.s are immune?’

  ‘Whoever’s behind this,’ said Craigie, ‘is sane—brilliant, and sane. And no sane man drugs himself.’

  15

  Arnold Serle Again

  ‘Now what the blazes,’ Timothy Arran demanded of his twin, ‘does that mean? Only yesterday we were bang in the middle of it, and now it’s dropped!’

  Timothy was angry, his drawl forgotten, while Toby’s machine-gun conversation became scarcely intelligible.

  ‘Ruddy fool,’ he snorted. ‘First time… wait till I see Kenyon…’

  The telephone bell rang, and Timothy answered it. He was still smarting under the grievance caused by a letter from Craigie, telling him the present job was being dropped. ‘Yes?’ he grunted.

  ‘Not Timothy!’ gasped Kenyon in affected horror, at the other end of the wire.

  ‘So,’ said Tim, his expression sharpening, ‘it’s you, is it? I’ve been waiting for you…’

  ‘Heard from G.C.?’ demanded Kenyon.

  ‘G.C. must be mad,’ Timothy retorted bitterly.

  ‘Charity, charity!’ chided Kenyon. Then added a cheerful: ‘I’m getting married.’

  There was numbed silence from Timothy Arran. He had expected many things, but not that. He did his best to show interest.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Good man. Mary, I suppose? Toby, Jim’s getting…’

  ‘In a month’s time,’ Kenyon elaborated.

  ‘Ah,’ Timothy waited, uncertain.

  ‘But the announcement,’ Kenyon informed him—and from his tone Timothy became aware that the significance of the telephone call was almost reached—’will say that I’m being married tomorrow. Mary’s lent me her name for the deception.’

  ‘Hmmm!’ said Timothy, his eyes sparkling.

  ‘So to give me the usual farewell,’ Kenyon concluded, ‘a number of my friends will gather together at the Carilon Club. They will gather together tonight, and say what a good fellow I am. Tim…’

  ‘Yes?’ Timothy’s lips were dry.

  ‘Keep it right under your hat, old son. Not a word to anyone, Toby excepted. Because…’

  ‘Things are not,’ Timothy supplied, his drawl on full display again, ‘always what they seem. Eh, James?’

  ‘You’ve said it,’ said Kenyon.

  During the next hour he made many similar calls, altering his approach according to his knowledge of the men at the other end of the wire. By noon, he had placed a tick against the last name on the list of agents Craigie had given him, and he turned away from the telephone, calling for Stinger and tea.

  Tea finished, he left his flat and went to the Chesters’ house.

  A dozen thoughts occupied his mind.

  Primarily, he was worried about Mick Randall. There was no sign of him, and no message had been sent to Mary. Kenyon knew that the devotion of the brother to the girl was so sincere that only exceptional circumstances could have kept him from getting in touch with her.

  Another puzzling fact was the disappearance of Irene Scanling. While many people might have connected the two disappearances with an elopement, Kenyon didn’t. From Davidson and Curtis, he had heard of the fear glimpsed on the faces of the young couple when they visited Persian Sales.

  He was concerned about Sir Michael Randall, too…

  Mary’s father had taken his ‘release’ from the British Embassy in Paris to heart. He had good reason. On the day following Craigie’s discovery of the changes in the foreign embassies, Randall had returned to London and Howe had arrived from Berlin. The Chief of Department Z had confirmed, also, that the Ambassador to the United States, Sladen, was on his way.

  Kenyon couldn’t understand why.

  He could understand the ease with which Serle and his backers had gained a stranglehold on the police. The drug was obviously quick in its action. One day, certain august gentlemen might have pooh-poohed the suggestion that Craigie, for instance, was overstepping the bounds of discretion; the next, those same gentlemen would be amenable to the same suggestion. But why trouble to interfere with the overseas men?

  Mary was at the house, still worried, and concerned now for her father. This had at least taken her mind off Mick for a while, but Kenyon viewed it as a mixed blessing.

  ‘I suppose,’ he asked her, as they talked, ‘your father hasn’t any idea of what’s happening?’

  ‘I believe he has,’ said Mary. ‘I saw him last night, and he’s terribly worried. He’s meeting Sir Martin Howe some time this morning.’

  ‘Where’s he staying?’

  ‘The Magnum Hotel.’

  ‘I think I’ll look him up,’ Kenyon told her.

  As he made his way towards Piccadilly and the Magnum Hotel, he recalled the Department Z agent who had disappeared. What had happened to Ronald Knight? Had he, too, been a victim of the dark-faced
men whom Serle seemed to employ as part-time assassins?

  Memory of Knight’s cheerful face and nonchalance on the day of the fire and murder at Greylands came very vividly to Kenyon. Suddenly, viciously, the big man set the nose of his Alfa-Romeo between two lorries. The action evoked a blare of horns and a strident voice defining his probable genealogy.

  Relaxed again, he winked at the van driver—who, perforce, grinned back.

  He had needed something like that to jerk him out of himself; stop him from brooding. He had no time for brooding; no time for reflecting that of the people he passed, of the crowds surging along Piccadilly, a substantial proportion must be marked with the crescent—and that proportion increasing daily.

  But the fact remained….

  He was known slightly at the Magnum Hotel and a clerk took his name. Glancing about the foyer as he waited for word from Sir Michael Randall, he saw the broad shoulders of a man half-hidden by a newspaper.

  ‘God!’ he breathed, and his face set bleakly.

  He walked towards the man and jerked the paper down. There was an indignant splutter of protest. Then: ‘Well, well, well!’ murmured the reader.

  ‘So you’ve nerve enough to show your face, have you?’ Kenyon said, his voice like ice.

  ‘My dear James,’ began Mr. Arnold Serle, cheerfully, ‘I…’

  ‘Let’s be formal,’ suggested Kenyon, coldly.

  ‘You don’t like me calling you James? A pity, a pity.’ Serle smiled, and on his face was an expression that held many emotions, one of which was certainly triumph. ‘I had hoped you and I would be friends again.’

  ‘Again?’ echoed Kenyon, and there was a bite in his voice.

  ‘Now, you’re bitter!’ protested Serle. ‘There’s no need to be. We played a little game, and for a while the odds were against me. The forces of law and order, you said…’ He broke off eloquently, his teeth gleaming.

  Kenyon itched to drive his fist into the fat face, but he forced himself to keep calm. Serle was taunting him. A fortnight ago the forces of law and order had been on his, Kenyon’s, side. Now…

  There was a touch of irony in the situation that appealed to Kenyon’s sense of humour. He laughed suddenly.

  ‘That’s much better,’ said Serle, proffering cigarettes. ‘Now if you take my advice, Kenyon, you’ll marry that nice little Randall girl, and take a trip abroad.’

  Kenyon shrugged. The fight seemed to go out of him, suddenly. His voice was expressionless, and his eyes seemed to hold frustration.

  ‘I am getting married,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow. But…’ his voice changed, hardened. His eyes glared into Serle’s. ‘One of these days I’ll get you, Serle.’

  ‘The future, the future,’ murmured Serle, deprecatingly. For a moment he had felt a rush of fear: Kenyon’s attitude had frightened him. But he was himself again, now. ‘I’m not going to worry about five or ten years’ time, my dear—I suppose you’d still rather I didn’t call you James?’

  ‘Much rather.’

  ‘A pity.’ There was a wolfish gleam on Serle’s face. ‘If I were you, Kenyon, I’d forget that I ever existed. By the way—didn’t I hear you asking for Sir Michael?’

  ‘You did,’ Kenyon agreed, and hoped he was as good an actor as Serle. He could have sworn the fat man’s surprise when he faced him had been genuine.

  ‘To—er—obtain parental approval, eh?’

  ‘It’s not usual,’ said Kenyon, ‘but it’s nice.’

  ‘These old, traditional courtesies should certainly be maintained,’ approved Serle. ‘And—I’m sorry to be repetitive, but—do take my advice, and leave England.’

  ‘That is one little matter you really must allow me to decide for myself,’ suggested Kenyon.

  ‘That would be very unwise,’ Serle told him coldly. ‘Especially if that decision did not agree with my own.’

  For a moment the two men stared at each other. Then Arnold Serle smiled, very slightly, and raised his paper. Kenyon walked away.

  ‘Sir Michael will see you, sir,’ the reception clerk told him. ‘Room Eighty-seven.’

  ‘Thank you—I’ll go up,’ said Kenyon.

  His mind registered the fact that Randall’s room number was the same as Mary’s had been but he was too preoccupied with his encounter with Serle to see it as more than the long arm of coincidence.

  So that he had tapped on the door of Room Eighty-seven and was actually opening it before he remembered, vividly, that on one occasion Arnold Serle and two of his gunmen had entered a similar room, and not by the door.

  ‘It’s any odds,’ he warned himself now, ‘that the conversation will be overheard.’

  But the moment he saw Sir Michael, he realised the impossibility of broaching the real object of his visit that day. Randall looked a broken man, incapable of acting, thinking, or talking reasonably. He greeted Kenyon nervously.

  ‘Glad to see you again, my dear fellow. I’ve heard about you and Mary, eh? If it wasn’t for this terrible thing, I could enter into it more thoroughly.’

  He shrugged his sparse shoulders in a helpless gesture, and Kenyon felt deeply sorry for him. But he wished the man had reacted differently. Mary would have.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Howe,’ Randall added. ‘From Berlin. Same thing has happened to him.’

  As he spoke, Sir Martin Howe rose from the depths of a large armchair, and offered his hand.

  A middle-aged, square-built man, with pleasant features twisted at that moment into a rather rueful smile, Kenyon liked him at once. He had that look which is called typically English.

  ‘I’ve been telling Randall it will blow over,’ said Howe. ‘He’s taking the whole thing too much to heart.’

  ‘There’s something we don’t understand,’ Sir Michael insisted. ‘I wish to heaven we did!’

  Something he didn’t understand. The words, Kenyon remembered, that Sir Joseph Scanling had uttered, just before his death. ‘I daresay we shall, in good time,’ he said, with forced cheerfulness.

  Randall nodded, shrugged, and shook his head. Then he gave a sudden, brilliant smile that reminded Kenyon vividly of Mary. ‘But I’m too full of my own worries, young man. Youth must be served, eh? What can I do for you?’

  ‘Mary and I,’ Kenyon told him, ‘are rather anxious to get married right away. She’s run-down, and a trip abroad wouldn’t do her any harm. We’d rather like to go—er—together.’

  ‘Naturally, naturally,’ Randall murmured, and Kenyon had an impression that his prospective father-in-law’s mind was on something else. ‘You have all my good wishes, my dear fellow. I shall be seeing Mary tonight—it won’t be for a week or two, eh?’

  Kenyon looked, and was, uncomfortable. ‘We’d rather thought of tomorrow.’

  Randall nodded, absently.

  ‘Well, well, it’s up to you, both of you. If Mary’s happy, that’s all that matters… Oh, one thing—you haven’t seen Mick this morning, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Young scamp promised to look me up as soon as I arrived. Away playing cricket, I suppose. Cricket.’ Randall smiled vaguely and there was a far-away expression in his eyes. ‘Well, I suppose when the raw edge has worn off we shall settle down to our—er—exile. Eh, Howe?’

  If Sir Martin was embarrassed at being a third party in a discussion essentially domestic, he concealed it admirably. But there was a peculiar expression in his eyes as he looked, not at Randall, but at Kenyon.

  ‘It will blow over,’ he said. ‘A lot of idiocy, somewhere. Well, I must be going.’

  Kenyon accompanied him, leaving Randall absorbed in his worries and his unhappiness. No wonder Mary had been anxious about him.

  The two men walked towards the lift in silence, until Kenyon said: ‘He’s taking it very badly, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s never been the same man since the death of Lord Rensham,’ replied the other, bluntly. ‘And there’s something on his mind besides this sudden recall from Paris.’

  ‘Ye-es.�
�� Kenyon was thinking that indeed the whole affair was somehow connected with the murder of Lord Hugo Rensham—the murder which had been officially hushed-up.

  ‘I’ve heard rumours,’ Howe said, ‘that you know something about the Rensham affair and its complications.’

  ‘Have you?’ Kenyon parried.

  ‘Do you know anything?’ asked Howe, bluntly, and Kenyon made a quick decision.

  He liked Howe, and Craigie had given the man a good reputation. And there was no sign of the mark of the crescent on his square-tipped, well-manicured fingers.

  ‘A bit,’ he admitted. ‘And I’d like to know more. Will you be seeing a lot of the Foreign Office folk? Permanent officials as well as the others?’

  ‘Sure to,’ said Howe.

  Kenyon took a piece of paper from his pocket, drew a passable likeness of a hand, marked in the crescents at the tops of the fingers, and said: ‘I think Rensham died, Sir Martin, because he learned all that there was to know of these. I’d like you to make a note of the people you find with that mark on their fingers. The colouring is pink, but you can’t miss it if you look for it.’

  ‘I’ll do anything I can to help,’ Howe promised. That he showed no surprise could have been due either to a rigorous training in self-discipline, or because he felt none.

  It was possible, of course, that he was on the other side; in that case, he, Kenyon, had made a major mistake….

  Arnold Serle was no longer in the foyer and Kenyon wondered whether the fat man himself had been on the balcony, or possibly hunched over some listening device in the next room. That sense of frustration—the knowledge that Serle had been connected with at least three murders and yet was able to walk about without the slightest fear of reprisal—galled him more than anything else. It needed all his equanimity to accept this with outward calm. And it had happened almost overnight!

  But had it? Kenyon remembered suddenly that Fellowes and Craigie had been afraid of interference for some time past….

  He took his leave of Howe, who had refused the offer of a lift, and went to his car. He had climbed in and was about to let in the clutch, when he saw Serle again.

  The fat man was sitting in a taxi which was held up at the turning into St. James’s Street, talking to a man whose head and shoulders seemed familiar. Kenyon manoeuvred the car until he could see more clearly.