Upon the far side of the two broad-spreading, blue-uniformed backs he had seen from the passage, there stood, his arms upraised, a small and dark and, for the nonce at least, furtive-looking little man. One of the blue-uniformed figures was still bent in a slight rigid arc as he patted and probed in pockets upon the small figure’s right-hand side. But the other—Jeffson—who had, apparently, been patting and probing upon the left-hand side, had suddenly straightened itself with an air almost comically blent of alarm and triumph …
And in his right hand Jeffson held something aloft.
At the moment when Pike made his entry, no sound had, as yet, escaped the three actors in this small drama; but there was in the air, already, a certain exciting and terrific tension …
Pike leapt forward. He snatched at Jeffson’s find …
He found himself staring at a square, yellow envelope upon which was written in a curiously backward-sloping hand and in thick, shining black ink:
The Chief Constable,
C/o Sergeant Jeffson,
13 Fourtrees Road,
Holmdale.
III
The small and furtive man from whose pocket Jeffson had extracted this envelope was Wilfrid Spring.
The two sergeants fell back. Pike looked at the envelope; twisted it this way and that between his fingers but never held more of it than its extreme corners. He raised his eyes and met those of Sergeant Jeffson. He nodded his head towards the prisoner.
‘Where?’ he said.
Jeffson stammered with astonishment. ‘I was just agoin’ to pass ’im out, sir, like all the others before, when I puts me ’and once more into ’is left-hand pocket ’ere and pulls out that.’ Jeffson pointed with a trembling thumb at the envelope. ‘Dunno ’ow I come to miss it the first time ’cept that it must of been fixed against the wall of ’is pocket like.’
Pike looked once more down at the envelope; then up and into the eyes of the pale-faced Spring.
‘Well,’ said Pike, lifting the envelope upwards and outwards perhaps two inches. ‘What’ve you got to say?’ His tone was non-committal and passionless, but there was behind it a strange vibration.
‘What have I got to say!’ Spring, now that the opportunity for speech had been vouchsafed to him, shed much of his furtiveness. With his own words he seemed to swell. It was as if, with each of his sentences, he became more and more convinced that Wilfrid Spring, being a person of the very greatest importance, should not be thus mishandled by a parcel of policemen … ‘What have I got to say!’ said Wilfrid Spring and proceeded to say it. There was a great deal of it. It appeared that Mr Spring had no notion whatsoever of how the strangely qualified envelope had found its way into his peculiarly perverted pocket. And Mr Spring thought that it was carnally strange that some fool of an ensanguined policeman should have, even if the envelope was found in Mr Spring’s pocket, thought Mr Spring could possibly be anything so revoltingly unimportant as the Holmdale Butcher …
That, it seemed, was what really injured Mr Spring’s feelings, the thought that a Personage such as himself, one of the best known—if not the best known—Director in England (or anywhere else for that matter) should be considered as having either the time or inclination to go about murdering people.
‘Good God, man!’ said Mr Spring, now fully himself again. ‘What the hell do you take me for?’
Pike looked at him in silence. Pike’s face showed nothing of the bewilderment which raged behind his brow. For Pike was puzzled. Was this bluff? Or was it righteous innocence, however unpleasant? Or was it that this man suffered from that peculiar form of amnesia which permitted a person to perform a deed quite foreign to his usual nature and then have it, by the grace of God or devil, completely expunged from his mind. And, anyhow, what about the weapon and its absence?
‘Besides,’ Mr Spring was saying with vehemence, ‘I can easily prove that I didn’t leave The Market from the time I came into it until the time when your blasted fellow shut the door.’
Pike shrugged. ‘If you can do that, sir, of course …’ He left the sentence in mid-air.
Jeffson was still staring at the envelope in his superior’s hand. His eyes were wide and staring and his hair, quite literally, seemed to be standing up. ‘Kor!’ Jeffson was saying. ‘Kor! Ooever would of believed it!’
Spring, suddenly losing his small temper, exploded. He pointed an irate finger at Jeffson. His horn-rimmed spectacles slipped awry on his nose giving him a peculiarly comic and inefficient look in direct contrast to his impassioned words. ‘That’s the sort of bloody fellah,’ said Spring, ‘that makes this country the impossible place to live in that it is—’
‘That’ll do, sir!’ Pike’s tone was smooth enough but very firm. ‘That’ll do! You’ll quite realise that I’ve got to detain you … Jeffson, put this man on one side.’ He swung round on the other sergeant. ‘And you carry on with the job. Detective Officer Curtis here’ll help you. Carry on, Curtis.’
IV
It was three o’clock when, outside the white-fronted Cottage Police Station, Wilfrid Spring entered the police car and was driven away to the county gaol. There were left in Jeffson’s room, the Chief Constable, his satellites Farrow and Davis, Detective Officers Curtis and Blaine and Superintendent Arnold Pike. All these looked at each other. The room seemed full of them as indeed it nearly was.
The Chief Constable broke the silence. ‘I think,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘that that’s our man.’ He looked first at Farrow, then at Davis. He missed out Curtis and Blaine and looked last at Pike.
Pike shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t agree. In fact, if I may put in bluntly, I wouldn’t have held him. Not after those statements we’ve got from his wife and from The Market assistant.’
Tempers were on edge this afternoon. The Chief Constable exploded. ‘But blast it, man, a fellah of your experience ought to know by this time—damn it, you ought to!—that a fellah’s wife isn’t evidence—’
Pike interrupted. The interruption was courteous-seeming, but interruption nevertheless. ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but we’re not talking about evidence. This isn’t a Court of Law, you know, it’s a police station and because we’ve got extraordinary powers we’ve been able to put that man into gaol … But I don’t think he’s the man. If I was a betting man, I’d lay you twenty to one that he isn’t. I don’t say that I’d actually oppose your holding him for the time being—though if I’ve read the gentleman correctly, there’ll be a heavy claim for compensation when we let him go—but I do say, and mean it, that by this time tomorrow he’ll be out. We’ve only got to collect these other witnesses he spoke of and we’ll know he was speaking the truth because these others’ve got no interest in him whatever. Can’t have. No, sir, you’ll find he’s not our man.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. The Chief Constable, very red about heavy face and thick neck, seemed several times upon the verge of speech but, perhaps fortunately, restrained himself …
V
It was four o’clock when a massed meeting of Holmdale citizens, rapidly, and, as it were, almost spontaneously convened, took place on the wide, tree-lined grass plot opposite the northern aspect of The Market.
A wild meeting this and as foreign to Holmdale and its ways as had been the demonstration to Pike which had taken place outside Miss Marable’s house.
It was dusk and nearly dark when Inspector Farrow, with not only a posse of rather ineffectual specials but also no fewer than eight regular constables and two mounted policemen, dispersed this meeting.
There had been much talk by this person and that. There had been wild, fierce speeches against the police and their lack of training, method, initative and morality. There had been, throughout these speeches, roared ‘Hear-hears.’ There had been a movement, put to the meeting by the most impassioned speaker—a part time socialist orator—and carried unanimously, to the effect that the citizens of Holmdale should take the law into their own hands. What, quite, th
ey were going to do with the law when they had it, was left, as it generally is, in the thinnest of thin air …
But they were all—and with some excuse—much moved. They were all, for the moment, fire-eating, fire-breathing hard cases. They were all, for the moment, ardent disciples of Judge Lynch. They were for somebody’s blood, preferably, of course, the Butcher’s, but if the Butcher’s were not available, then for the blood of those responsible for this terrible delay in bringing the Butcher to book.
Arms were brandished. Voices were raised. Threats grew hoarse and eyes were fierce. Some of the more youthful components of the crowd—it must have numbered three hundred at least—procured from somewhere—in the way that such crowds magically will—fuel for a bonfire which, as Farrow and his men came up, was no longer belching clouds of white smoke but sending shooting tongues of red and yellow flame twenty feet into the air …
An impressive scene. And, at least to the members of the crowd, a most meaning one.
On the outskirts of the crowd, Dr Reade stopped his Chevrolet two-seater and listened to the crowd’s uproar with a sardonic smile distorting his heavy face.
The Reverend Rockwall passed by quickly, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
Far away from the crowd, Mr Wilfrid Spring was turning over in his mind, seated upon the edge of a government-issue truckle bed, the possibilities of a great publicity campaign when he should be free.
Separated from him by nine inches of stone wall, sat Mr Percy Godly in an exactly similar position … But Mr Percy Godly was thinking only, with tears in his eyes, of the cruel devil in blue which so smoothly and so often refused his bribes and prayers and pleadings for ‘just one little one.’
In the centre of the crowd stood Miss Ursula Finch, her umbrella clamped firmly beneath her left arm, shouting hoarsely with the rest, but with her keen little mind taking mental shorthand notes for a more startling issue of the Clarion than even she had ever conceived.
Behind the crowd, Mr Israel Gompertz fed the bonfire with boards from a heaven-sent packing case.
In the front ranks of the crowd, Mary Fillimore, her usually soft blue eyes hard and staring, found suddenly that she had no more voice left with which to shout.
In the centre of the crowd, Mr Colby turned with excited gratification to his neighbour, saying: ‘Thank God! Thank God! … High time more sensible men took matters into their own hands.’
Upon the first-floor balcony of his pleasant house, The Hospice, stood Sir Montague Flushing looking out with troubled face and rather frightened eyes at the leaping, starting glow of the bonfire. From where he stood the roaring snarls of the crowd smote his ears like a menace …
‘Terrible, terrible business!’ thought Mrs Rudolph Sharp as she tried to extricate herself from the fringes of the crowd, but could not.
… And then, as the thin jet from a fire extinguisher slays apparently unquenchable flame, the mere voices—throaty and assured and virile—of the maligned police plucked from this wild and bloodthirsty mob all their frightfulness. Among them, a few policemen moved solid and immovable and very, very permanent.
‘Move along there. Move along!’ said the police. ‘Get along out of this. This has got to stop,’ said the police.
And the bonfire died down. And the crowd moved along. And the units of the crowd dispersed.
VI
Pike, as he had been a few nights ago which seemed as many years, was kneeling on the window seat of his bedroom in Number Twelve Fourtrees Road. He was thinking about Wilfrid Spring. He was regretting that he had not been able, without open breach, to prevent the Chief Constable of the County from incarcerating Wilfrid Spring. He did not object, upon humanitarian grounds, to Mr Wilfrid Spring’s incarceration, because he thought that incarceration for eighteen hours or even as many months would do Mr Wilfrid Spring a great deal of good, but he did object to the odium which must necessarily fall on to the police from the pens and mouths of the press and public. It all seemed so futile. Here they had, in gaol, a drunkard and a film director. What a pair, would press and public say alike, to pick upon. Could there be any two more unlikely to be this homicidal pervert than a man whose ambition was to crowd into his bladder as many drinks in a day as was possible and a man whose ambition in life was to produce as many flickering ghosts as possible? The one would be too busy with his alcohol; the other too busy with his ghosts. The one would be able to satisfy in his fuddled brain any latent impulse to horrid violence and the other equally able to do so (as indeed he seemed to have done) with his puppets. A drunkard, Pike thought … and a film director …
‘I wonder,’ Pike thought, ‘what sort of job that is … a film director’s. Must feel like a sort of god making men and women do, not what they want to do, but what you want ’em to do. Funny things, pictures. Some people like ’em, others don’t. Some would walk forty miles to see Lilian This and Percy That in Love’s Ashes. Others shuddered at the very name of Lilian or Percy … Great invention though … marvellous, when you came to think of it, to be able to show exactly what people did. Think of slow motion, for instance. Why, with a slow motion camera you could tell what a man did even if he didn’t know he’d done it himself … and how useful it ought to be in the future—though it was doubtful whether anyone could put it to this use—in teaching history. By Jing, if they took films of all the historic happenings—or happenings likely to be historic—which took place, and did ’em from now on, why, the kids in about a hundred years’ time would know more about us than we knew about ourselves …’
Yes, odd things, films! Very useful in all sorts of ways—all sorts of ways—they’d even been useful to scientists … No reason really why they shouldn’t be useful to the police …
‘Good Lord Almighty!’ said Pike aloud.
He leapt up and backwards from the window seat as if a bullet had narrowly missed him. Under the light he feverishly fumbled for the small notebook he always carried in a waistcoat pocket. He flicked over the leaves with an abandoned impatience utterly foreign to his nature. He found what he wanted—the address of Curtis’s billet …
Before he had knelt upon the window seat, he had taken off, as he was used to do in his Kennington flat at about this time of night—it was after eleven—his collar and tie. The boots with the very shiny toe-caps were no longer upon his feet, which were thrust into soft slippers of red brushed wool—a present to him by an elderly aunt one Christmas. A large calabash pipe had its stem clamped between his teeth and the bottom of its curve brushed against his long chin. But of collars and slippers and pipes he thought nothing. He made one stride of it to the door and five strides of it across the landing—past the door of the room where Molly Brade lay moaning, with a nurse in attendance, with an ice pack about her head. He went down the stairs in two silent leaps.
He slammed the front door behind him. He ran, having turned right, up to Marrowbone Lane and then turned right again. By sight he knew Curtis’s billet and, having consulted his notebook, now its number. He found it without difficulty. There was a light in an upper window and at this window he threw a handful of gravel plucked with almost crazy fingers from the garden path. By chance the lighted window was Curtis’s own and it was Curtis who leaned out gruffly demanding: ‘What the ’ell?’
‘Pike here,’ said Curtis’s superintendent. ‘Come down! Urgent!’
Curtis came down. Into the narrow passage Pike pushed his way.
‘Where can we talk?’ he said.
Curtis threw open a door in the right-hand wall of the passage and snapped on a light.
Pike sat in an armchair of curious shape composed, apparently, of bentwood and turkey carpeting. He looked at his subordinate with pleasure, for Curtis, as yet, was completely clothed. Pike said:
‘You’re to come back with me, get out the car and take it straight back to the Yard. Drive like smoke. While you’re starting I’ll ring ’em and tell ’em you’re coming. If necessary, ring Mr Lucas and get authority, but I think I’ll be
able to fix that for you before you get there.’ He whipped the notebook again from his waistcoat, tore out a page from it and, as he went on speaking, wrote upon the small paper with a meticulous pencil. He said: ‘What you’ve got to do is to get down here before seven tomorrow morning, thirteen cinematograph cameras with an operator—two, if you like—to each. When I say you’re to bring them down here, I don’t mean it. I mean you’re to take ’em to Batley and stow ’em away there somewhere quiet not showing their cameras and not talking and then ring me. By that time I’ll have got the information I want and I’ll come along and we’ll post ’em … And don’t forget this, my lad: on no account whatsoever, if you value your job or even your bally life, are you to say a word about this stunt inside Holmdale nor are the men you bring down to say a word inside Batley. I don’t care who it is, if it’s the Chief Constable or the Archangel Gabriel, you know nothing. Mind you, I don’t see how you can be asked because nobody knows there’s anything to be asked about, still I’m telling you. Get that?’
Curtis nodded, once.
Pike jerked to his feet. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘Ready to start?’
Again Curtis nodded. But this time he spoke. He said: ‘What’s the stunt, air?’
For an instant, Pike smiled; such a smile as Curtis knew from the past, but had not seen all the time they had been in this place.
‘It’s good!’ said Pike. ‘I want thirteen cinematograph cameras and operators, Curtis, because there are thirteen pillar boxes in this god-forsaken imitation suburb. Don’t you see, Curtis, that the Butcher’s bound to write to us again. And don’t you see, Curtis, that if, as from tomorrow, there’s a secret twenty feet of film taken of every person that posts a letter everywhere, we shall be able to narrow down our field after we’ve got the next Butcher letter.’
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