“But the house agent—”
“Exactly,” said Hazlerigg. “So I took the trouble to find out who had acted in the renting of all these flats.”
“And they were all handled by the same firm?”
“Not quite,” said Hazlerigg. “It was three firms. All North London firms, it’s true. But not connected with each other, so far as I know. Start and Baxter of Hornsey, Croppers of Highgate, and Shaw, Shaw, Shaw and Shaw of Hampstead. I’m on my way to see Croppers now.”
Messrs. Croppers (If You Want a House of Character Come to Croppers) have their estate agency on Highgate Hill. It possesses a low entrance, a step down from the pavement, and black beams alternating with cream plaster: all of which are well known to be signs of Character in a House. Even Mr. Cropper, who wore a Victorian frock coat, had a certain old-fashioned grace about him.
Inspector Hazlerigg introduced himself and explained a small part of what was in his mind. Mr. Cropper said: “We are always very friendly with Start and Baxter – a very nice little firm. But as for Shaw and Shaw, well, you know, Inspector, they’re hardly in our line. In fact, they’re hardly the sort of firm I’d care to—”
“Of course.”
“I should describe them,” said Mr. Cropper, “as modern. We here at Croppers have certain old-fashioned traditions, certain prejudices as to what is fair dealing . . .”
Half an hour later Hazlerigg was seated in the chromium and art-leather interior of Messrs. Shaw, Shaw, Shaw and Shaw’s estate office in Hampstead. The senior partner, after glancing cautiously at the Chief Inspector’s card, said: “Yes, I know Croppers very well. We have as little to do with them as we can. This is an up-to-the-minute business and we try to run it on up-to-the-minute lines.”
He glanced complacently at the six huge olive-green steel filing cabinets. “I can’t think of any possible—er—line of connection between us. I don’t even recollect that we’ve ever taken on one of their employees. Nor, so far as I know, have any of our employees stepped—er—down to join them.”
Mr. Baxter, of Start and Baxter, a little sandy-haired man who worked in a three-room office in Hornsey, proved the most helpful and the easiest to deal with; and in return Hazlerigg told him a great deal more of the truth than he had exposed to either of his rivals.
“Let me see,” said Mr. Baxter. “We got your flat for you, didn’t we? I thought I recognised you—yes—well, now about those other firms. I don’t really have a great deal to do with them—now.”
Hazlerigg looked up sharply.
“It used to be different – just after the end of the war, when everybody wanted flats and houses, and people were lining up for anything and everything. There used to be a certain amount of splitting commissions, among the established firms, and I worked in with the Shaws and Croppers on one or two deals. The idea, from our point of view, was to keep the mushroom business out of it – and it suited the public too. It meant that they could use two or three different firms to sell their houses without the risk of having to pay two or three commissions.”
“But you didn’t work together over all these jobs—” Hazlerigg pointed to his list.
“Oh, Lord, no,” said Mr. Baxter. “In fact, I don’t think any of those were joint jobs. That arrangement was really mostly confined to outright sales.”
“I see,” said Hazlerigg. “Now about the keys—”
“Well, you’re quite right there, too, of course. House agents do hold the keys in nine cases out of ten. It’s one of the risks you have to take. We’re as careful as we can be in picking our assistants. I’ve just got my son here and one other, and I’d go bail for both of them. But in a big firm like—well, never mind names. In a big firm, I don’t say you mightn’t get a bad ‘un.”
“But so far as you know,” said Hazlerigg, “no one person, principal or employer, could have had all the keys on that list.”
“You can bet your life on that,” agreed Mr. Baxter.
And yet the idea was there.
It was based on something that he had seen or heard when he was completing arrangements for the lease of his own flat. Hazlerigg knew better than to try to force these ideas. Instead, he went home early and had a good night’s rest.
It was on the top of the bus, on his way to Scotland Yard next morning, that it clicked.
As soon as he reached his office he got on the telephone to Mr. Rumbold of Wragg and Rumbold, Solicitors.
“Can you tell me,” he said, “when you acted for me in the lease of my flat – what did we get?”
“What do you mean?” said Mr. Rumbold cautiously.
“What papers did we get? I seem to remember signing a document of some sort which had to be handed over. Did we get anything in exchange?”
“You signed a counterpart lease,” said Mr. Rumbold, “and received the original lease for yourself.”
“Have you got it there?”
“It’s in my strong-room,” said Mr. Rumbold.
“Then get it out, please,” said Hazlerigg. “I’m coming round to see you.”
Half an hour later he was in Mr. Rumbold’s office in Goleman Street, and he and his solicitor were examining an engrossment.
“Is there anything that strikes you as unusual about this lease?” asked Hazlerigg.
Mr. Rumbold picked up the four pages of heavy parchment, folded bookwise, and ran a conveyancer’s eye over them.
“No,” he said at last. “There’s certainly nothing irregular about it, if that’s what you mean. In fact,” he went on, “it’s rather a conscientious piece of work.”
“Rather unusually conscientious?”
“By present-day standards, perhaps, yes. It has a large-scale plan, showing each individual room – that is perhaps a little uncommon in a lease of house property.”
“And that schedule thing?”
“Most leases of furnished flats have schedules of contents,” said Mr. Rumbold. “Then if any question of dilapidations arises—”
Hazlerigg ran his eye down the schedule.
“One sideboard with two drawers and two cupboards (locked),” he saw. This appeared to decide him.
“Look here,” he said. “Can you get hold of some of the other leases of flats on this list?”
“Well—yes. I might,” said Mr. Rumbold. “I think I acted for Mrs. Frobisher myself – and Colonel Davenant goes to Lathoms – they’d lend me the lease if I gave some reason.”
“Make up anything you like,” said Hazlerigg. “I promise you your professional reputation won’t be compromised. But collect as many of them as you can.”
“It’ll take a bit of time.”
“One other thing,” said Hazlerigg. “When you’d actually completed the arrangements for my lease, you yourself handed me the keys. That was the fact that stuck in my memory. Now, how did you get them? What was the routine? Who gave them to you?”
“The solicitors on the other side, I should imagine,” said Mr. Rumbold. “They handed them over at completion.”
“Is that usual?”
“In the sale of a freehold property, yes. In the lease of a flat it’s more usual, perhaps, for the house agent to hand them direct to the incoming tenant.”
“But a solicitor is perfectly within his rights in asking for them, so that he can hand them over himself?”
“Certainly, yes. I should say that was the proper way to do it.”
“I see,” said Hazlerigg. As, indeed, he was beginning to.
Mr. Rumbold was better than his word. Two days later he had six leases spread out on his desk when Hazlerigg called. He was examining them with the beginnings of a frown on his plump face.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he said, in answer to the Inspector’s first question. “They were all drawn by the same man. As you know, a solicitor doesn’t actually put his name on an engrossment, but there are so many points of similarity. You see – the same large-scale plan. The same detailed schedules of furniture. But it isn’t only that. Look at that
last clause—”
When Hazlerigg had deciphered the script he threw back his head and laughed aloud.
“Genius,” he said. “That’s genius – the genuine unmistakable touch. Now for it. Who drew these leases?”
“That’s an easy one to answer,” said Mr. Rumbold. “If the same firm acted for all the landlords, I can find them by turning up your file. Incidentally, that explains the agents, too. If we’re dealing here with only two or three groups of landlords or estate corporations who employ the same solicitor, they would naturally use the same two or three agents – there’s usually some sort of professional tie-up.” He was opening the file as he spoke.
“Henryman and Bosforth,” he said. “I don’t know much about them. Their office is just off Bedford Row.”
A little later that morning Inspector Hazlerigg was shown into the outer office of Henryman and Bosforth. Inspector Pickup was just behind him, and Sergeant Crabbe loitered unobtrusively on the opposite pavement.
“It’s about the lease of my flat,” he said to the girl. “Start and Baxter of Hornsey are the agents. They told me—”
“Oh, yes,” said the girl. “That’ll be our Mr. Copley. He does all that. Would you wait in here for a moment? I’ll send him down. Are you—?”
“The other gentleman is with me,” said Hazlerigg vaguely.
They sat in the small waiting room. Five minutes passed.
“You don’t think he’s walked out on us, do you?” said Pickup anxiously.
“Grabbe will pick him up if he has,” said Hazlerigg. “There’s only one way out. No, here he comes.”
There was the sound of light footsteps tripping down the stairs and a little man came almost dancing in. Just inside the door hung a huge framed advertisement of the Consequential Insurance Company, its glass shining. As he passed it the little man paused for a moment to straighten his perfectly straight tie.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I am Mr. Copley. I am very glad to see you.”
“Mr. Copley,” said Inspector Hazlerigg, “you are not nearly as glad to see me” —Pickup slid unobtrusively between him and the door— “as I am to see you . . .”
I heard the whole story from Inspector Hazlerigg some time later.
“What was it you spotted in the leases? What did they all have in common?” I asked.
“Well, it wasn’t a pinch of dust,” said Hazlerigg.
“All right,” I said, “don’t rub it in. What was it?”
“They all had a clause,” said Hazlerigg, “forbidding the tenant to keep a dog.”
The King in Pawn
The Queen’s Own Royal South London Rifles has its depot in Southwark High Street and has long recruited both its regular and territorial regiments from the young toughs who live thereabouts. How Detective Inspector Petrella became an honorary member of this excellent regiment and a welcome guest at its functions is a story which has never been fully or truthfully told.
It started on a blustery evening in March. It had been a tiresome day. There had been a case of shoplifting, rendered more unpleasant than usual by the fact that children had been trained to do the stealing; there had been three larcenies from parked cars, a case of organised pocket-picking in a bus queue and, that the measure should be pressed down and overflowing, a little matter of defalcation from the police canteen at Gabriel Street itself.
“Is everyone incurably dishonest?” said Petrella to Superintendent Benjamin.
“Lucky the canteen fiddle wasn’t one of our boys,” said Benjamin. “I never trusted that civilian caterer.”
“Most of the people we’ve had in today didn’t need the money. Not really need it. Those dreadful women, smoking like chimneys, dressed up to the nines, training their own kids to lift stuff—”
“Opportunity,” said Benjamin, “makes crime. Cut down the opportunities, you’ll cut the crime. You know who I’d like to put inside, Patrick? Receivers. Shut one of them up and you stop a hundred crimes that haven’t been committed.”
Petrella had heard all this before and knew it to be true. But it had been too hard a day for easy optimism.
“Receivers are like the hydra,” he said. “Cut off one head, and a hundred more spring up.”
“Little men,” said Benjamin. “You’re talking about little men. People who’ll hide a carton of stolen cigarettes in the washtub and sweat every time the doorbell goes. I’m not talking about little men, Patrick. I’m talking about the two or three who matter. You know you did your best job the first month you were here, when you ran in old Bonny. Pick up the King, and you can claim your pension.”
Pick up the King, thought Petrella, as he left Gabriel Street that evening. He had one more call to make, in the Pardoe Street area, and then he was going home. Pick up the King. It sounded easy, when you said it. And some day, no doubt, somebody would do it. Even the smartest criminals made a mistake in the end. But the King had had a very long run.
His name had been spoken in South London for twenty years or more. It had been whispered among informers, the little spreading grass roots of the underworld.
The King was older than the oldest detective in X Division. He dealt in jewellery, in precious stones, and metals of all sorts. So much was known.
A man who pulled a job of this sort had only to wait for a telephone call. Sooner or later it would come. Be at a certain place at a certain time. The place was somewhere, anywhere, in South London. The time was after dark. A car would draw up, a gloved hand hold out a packet of notes. The same hand would receive the parcel of stolen goods. The car would drive off.
There was no pause to check the jewellery; no time to count the notes. Each side trusted the other because, in the long run, it paid them to do so. Just once, soon after the war ended, Big Lewis had the idea of substituting a packet of inferior stones for the diamonds he had lifted from Gurlier’s. The real diamonds he had retained at home under a loose tile in the kitchen, with an eye to disposing of them subsequently at even greater profit. When he got home he found three plainclothes men waiting for him. They knew about the loose tile, too. The King was as quick as that.
It was from Big Lewis, who realised he had been shopped, that the police had most of their information about the King. It amounted to precious little. It was clearly a waste of time trying to trace him through the cars he used, for these would be ‘borrowed’ from a car park, and returned without the owners ever being aware of the use to which their property had been put. It was a method which left remarkably few loose ends.
The name itself might have some significance. In the curious warped humour of the underworld “names might have two or even three meanings. (Had there not been another famous receiver known as Treble Eleven, who turned out to be a middle-aged paperseller, a woman named Poppy?)
Petrella had his own ideas about the King. He thought maybe they were dealing with a dynasty. Not one King, but a line of Kings. The stock-in-trade of such a man was knowledge. Knowing who would be likely to pull certain jobs. Knowing the disgruntled deckhands and too-clever airline operatives who would carry the stuff out of the country; knowing the buyers in Paris and Amsterdam; knowing how to get the end money back to England. When the reigning King had made his pile, what was to prevent him disposing of this knowhow to a carefully chosen successor?
“A hydra,” said Petrella. “A dynasty of hydras.”
It was at this point in his reflections that a heavy brass ashtray came sailing through a window close to his right cheek, covered him with splintered glass, ricocheted from a lamp post and came to rest in the gutter with a sullen clang.
Petrella shook the glass carefully out of his raincoat while he considered the matter.
The window through which the ashtray had come belonged, he saw, to the private bar of a small public house, the Kentish Giant. He was aware of raised voices and stamping feet within. There came a further crash, a progression of crashes as though a child was dragging the cloth off a dinner table laid for twelve.
P
etrella opened the door and looked inside.
The fight was almost over.
In the middle of the room a subsiding group was composed of a stout man in shirtsleeves, a youth in an apron, a man in a blue suit, and a man in denim overalls. All of them were holding on to outlying portions of a fifth man, a large man with a red face, a shock of close-cropped hair, and a morosely pugnacious expression.
The large man heaved like a balloon at its guide ropes. His captors held firm. A steady flow of obscenity rose from all five; rose, mingled, and ascended with the dust of their stamping.
Petrella stepped cautiously past the overturned table and through the litter of broken glasses on the floor.
“Lay off, now,” said the stout man in shirtsleeves. “Lay off, do you hear, or we’ll do you proper.”
The red-faced man said an unprintable word and stamped on the stout man’s toe. The group swayed dangerously.
“Stop it!” said Petrella.
The note of authority was unmistakable. He added formally, “I’m a detective inspector, and I shall have to take you” —he addressed the red-faced man— “into custody for occasioning a breach of the peace.”
“You take him right away,” agreed the man in shirtsleeves. “Come in here, busting up my place, eh?”
“That’s right,” said the youth. It seemed to be the general view.
Petrella said, “Come with me.”
The man, unconstrained but unsupported, swayed on his feet and blinked at him.
“Right away,” said Petrella. He stepped up close, seized the man’s forearm just above the elbow, and started to push. Surprisingly, the man came.
There was no reason for him to do so. By any computation he was stronger and bigger than Petrella. But the fight seemed to be out of him. All the same, Petrella was relieved to meet a pair of patrolling policemen at the first corner.
He went with them to Southwark Police Station and saw to the formalities. The red-faced man, who gave his name as Albert Porter, retired to the cells.
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