Stay of Execution

by Michael Gilbert

  “Harbord,” said the Assistant Commissioner softly to himself. “It’s not a common name. I’m absolutely certain I’ve heard it before. But where? And when? And in what connection?”

  He was still sitting in the dusk, thinking, when his secretary came in to turn the light on . . .

  It was on the following morning, the sixth of his liberty, that Harry had an odd experience. He was walking along a dimly lit corridor on the second storey of the West Wing of the Courts, rendered even dimmer by the fact that a rainstorm was blackening the summer sky outside. He was planning to look in on Appeal Court 3, where an interesting divorce appeal was in its third day.

  At the far end of the passage, silhouetted against the light from the stairhead, a man was standing. He was facing away from Harry, and he was holding his umbrella behind his back, swinging it from side to side. The similarity to a squat animal, threshing its tail, was quite remarkable.

  He suddenly remembered Miss Huckstep, who had given evidence, though ineffectively, on his behalf. Had she not described to the Court how she had passed the entrance to Sandpit Cottage at eleven o’clock on the fatal night and seen a man – a sinister-looking man – standing there, swinging his umbrella ‘like a great tail’?

  A conviction gripped him that the murderer of Janine Mann was standing in front of him. As the thought passed through his mind, the man swung on his heel and walked briskly away. Determined not to lose him, Harry broke into a run.

  This was a mistake. Startled by the sound of someone running after him, the man swung round.

  Harry found himself face to face with Mr. Beeding.

  The recognition was immediate, and mutual.

  There was an instant in which neither man moved or spoke. Then Harry turned on his heel and ran off in one direction. After a moment’s hesitation, Mr. Beeding doubled away in the opposite direction.

  “You’re sure?” said Superintendent Lacey.

  “Absolutely certain. He’d shaved off his beard, and dyed his face brown. And done something to his hair. But it was him, all right. And he recognised me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? Because he ran away.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Five minutes I’m afraid. Perhaps more. The telephone I went to first was being used. I’m speaking from a box in Carey Street.”

  “All right,” said the superintendent. He spoke on the office line, and two car-loads of men were moving in a matter of seconds. They would be too late. But he couldn’t afford to take any chances. Even if they didn’t catch Gordon in the Court building, he might be somewhere in the streets outside. He picked up the telephone again, and spoke to ‘A’ Division headquarters.

  Chief Superintendent Mace sounded sceptical.

  “If that’s right,” he said, “he hasn’t got very far in six days.”

  “Exactly what the A.C. said yesterday,” said Lacey.

  “But I don’t think this one’s a false alarm. The man who tipped us off was his own solicitor.”

  “Queer sort of solicitor. Giving away his own client.”

  The same thought had, in fact, occurred to Lacey. “Perhaps he thought his duty to the public came before his duty to his client.”

  “It’d be a nice change,” said Mace, “if more solicitors thought that. Yes, of course I’ll help. I’ll put men on to combing all the streets and shops and restaurants in that area. All the same, I don’t imagine he’ll hang around now.”

  “We thought that last time,” said Lacey. “Remember?”

  When he reported the development to the Assistant Commissioner, which he did at the first opportunity, the Assistant Commissioner said, “Ah, that’s it,” as if an elusive memory had come home to roost. He approved, though absent-mindedly, the precautions which Lacey had taken, and as soon as he had departed, rang the bell for his secretary.

  “It was a capital case,” he said. “At the Bedfordshire Assizes. Bellamy took it. Almost his last big trial. That would make it 1936, or perhaps early ‘37.” He added certain further details. “See if you can unearth the file. And hurry, there’s a good chap . . .”

  When Mr. Harbord got back from lunch he found someone waiting outside the locked door of his room. It was a thick-set man, in his middle fifties, with a prow of a nose dominating a strong, clean-shaven face. Mr. Harbord, as he opened the door and ushered him in, thought that the face was familiar to him. A solicitor or a barrister, possibly.

  “What can I do for you?” he said. “Do sit down.”

  “You are Mr. Harbord?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Charles Harbord your brother?”

  Mr. Harbord looked at his visitor in blank astonishment.

  “It’s an impertinent question, I agree. But the name isn’t a very common one.”

  Mr. Harbord said, “Before I answer any questions at all I should like to know who you are.”

  “Very reasonable. My name is Anderson. I was junior counsel for the defence in the case in which your brother was convicted of murder. I have never ceased to believe that he was wrongly convicted.”

  “It’s a quarter of a century too late,” said Mr. Harbord, “to do anything about it, isn’t it?” The words were spoken gently, but there was a hard core to them.

  “That’s true,” agreed his visitor. As he spoke his grey eyes were quartering the room. They lighted on the great stack of files in the corner. Yes. That would be the place. Obvious, if you knew, but an excellent hide-out if you didn’t. He added, “But all the same, the lesson I learned there has stood me in good stead since.”

  Mr. Harbord nodded. He seemed, thought his visitor, perfectly relaxed and absolutely at ease. He wasn’t acting, either. Of course he would long since have cleared away any trace of Harry Gordon’s presence. There would now be nothing at all to connect him with the matter.

  “Particularly,” the visitor went on, rising to his feet, “in my present job. I have never allowed myself to feel complacent about a capital conviction. I have never allowed a charge to be preferred unless I was convinced – personally convinced, I mean, not legally – that the man was guilty.”

  “And were you convinced in the case of Harry Gordon?”

  “Yes. I was.”

  “Are you still?”

  “That is a very leading question.”

  “So long as your mind isn’t closed on the subject,” said Mr. Harbord. “So long as it’s open to honest conviction, then I should say that he still had a chance.”

  His visitor looked at Mr. Harbord with a smile. What had really amused him was that, in spite of being given two chances to do so, he had not bothered to enquire what job his visitor did. Clearly an unusual man, thought the Assistant Commissioner, as he closed Mr. Harbord’s door behind him and walked slowly away down the passage . . .

  While a large force of uniformed and plainclothes policemen combed the alleyways and shops between Chancery Lane, High Holborn, Kingsway and the Strand, Harry was ensconced in a barber’s chair. When a policeman poked his head in at the door Sam Cox, the owner of the shop, was busily applying lather and addressing the recumbent figure as ‘Colonel’. The policeman withdrew.

  “I don’t suppose they’ll bother us again,” said Sam. “You can stop in the back room all night if you like.”

  “No,” said Harry. “It’s very kind of you. But I’m not risking anyone else’s neck for my own. You and Mr. Harbord have helped me enough.”

  “No risk. Slip the window catch. If they cop you, say you broke in. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “They might fall for it,” said Harry. “But I’ve got a feeling they wouldn’t. They’d assume you’d been hiding me for the last six days. And the shaving and the haircut would both point straight to you.”

  “Have you got anywhere special in mind to go to?”

  “Yes. I think I know where I want to go next . . .”

  Superintendent Lacey was unhappy. He had a feeling that answers to several of t
he questions which were puzzling him lay close to his hand. And most of them seemed connected, in a curious way, with Mr. Beeding. He had accepted his explanations about the cigarette box, but a further curious fact had now come to light and he felt keen to hear Mr. Beeding’s explanation of it.

  He found the solicitor behind a desk piled high with papers and files.

  “Sorry to disturb you again,” he said.

  “I’ll not pretend I’m glad to see you,” said Mr. Beeding. “Without Mr. Henry to help me, I’m getting hopelessly behind.”

  “This won’t take a minute.”

  “Then if you’ll leave us, Miss Avery.”

  “Don’t bother about her,” said the superintendent. “There’s nothing confidential about this. You remember that cigarette box we recovered through a pawnbroker – a Mr. Samuels. This morning he sent us another item. It had been deposited by the same customer. And it had occurred to him that if one item was stolen this one might be, too.”

  The superintendent put his hand into his pocket, pulled out a twist of tissue paper, and unscrewed it. A pair of thick gold cuff-links fell on to the desk. Mr. Beeding picked them up.

  “Do they mean anything to you, sir?”

  “Nice links,” said Mr. Beeding. “Solid gold. I’ll buy them myself, if they’re for sale.”

  “Then I take it they’re not your property?”

  “Never seen them before in my life. Why?”

  “If you look closely,” said the superintendent, “you’ll see there’s a monogram. Two letters, sort of twisted together. It looks like AB. And seeing that your Christian name’s Alfred it did occur to us—”

  “Do you think it’s AB? It looks like BR to me. Or it might be LR.”

  “It’s not very clear,” agreed the superintendent, wrapping up the links and dropping them back in his pocket. “It doesn’t signify. We shall locate the owner as soon as we’ve found out who took them.”

  “Will you be able to do that?”

  “Samuels gave us a good description. In fact, he thought he recognised the man. That’s why he was so careful. A character called Pokey Barret. One leg shorter than the other. Another thing, Pokey’s disappeared from his usual haunts lately, which could be connected with a housebreaking at Laleham. If we pick him up for that job we can soon sort out the rest.”

  As soon as she could get away, Bridget hurried across to the Courts. She told Mr. Harbord what she had heard.

  “It stuck out a mile,” she said, “that there’s something fishy about it. First, Mr. Beeding says the cigarette box was in the office and I know it wasn’t. Now he says those cuff-links don’t belong to him, and I’m pretty certain I’ve seen him wearing them. And when the superintendent mentioned Pokey Barret, and the burglary at Laleham – well, you ought to have seen his face.”

  “Even if you’re right,” said Mr. Harbord, “what connection has it got with the Harry Gordon case?”

  “I thought you’d be able to work that out.”

  “You flatter me,” said Mr. Harbord. “However, I can see one thing quite clearly. If there is a connection, only two people are likely to know what it is. Your employer, and Pokey Barret. I don’t suppose it’s any good asking Mr. Beeding. And Pokey’s wanted by the police, and on the run.”

  “It does seem hopeless,” agreed Bridget.

  “Not hopeless. Difficult. Our organisation has peculiar but effective methods of getting information, particularly in connection with criminals and legal matters. I shall have to make a telephone call. Not from here. From a public call box.” He looked at his watch. “Four o’clock. If the information’s available it won’t take above an hour or two to collect. The trouble is that I daren’t take the return call either here or at my home. I’m under a certain degree of suspicion.”

  “Under suspicion? How do you know?”

  “Immediately after lunch I had a visit from no less a person than the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the C.I.D. His name is Anderson. We had an interesting discussion – about old times.”

  “It was too late for him to find anything—”

  “He didn’t come to look for things. He came to confirm a private suspicion that this was where Harry Gordon had been hiding. And he confirmed it. He’s not a fool.”

  Bridget said, “I could take the return message. When I stay late at the office, to finish off some work, I get the exchange to leave a line through to my room. I’ll do that tonight.” She scribbled down the telephone number. “When I’ve got the reply, I’ll meet you – where?”

  “Outside the ticket office in Leicester Square Underground Station.”

  “All right. Then we can think what to do next.”

  She sounded so forlorn as she said it that Mr. Harbord was impelled to smile. “I’ve known worse tangles sort themselves out.” But not many, he added to himself, as he made his way down to the telephone.

  Bridget had no difficulty in persuading Mr. Beeding that she would have to stay late. The events of the last few days had so distracted the office that most of the routine work was behind. At half past five she settled down in her sanctum and started to type out the engrossment of a long lease. Only half her mind was on the keys of the typewriter; the other half was waiting for the telephone to ring, wondering what the message would be, wondering what Harry Gordon was doing.

  At six o’clock she heard Mr. Beeding’s door slam. At half past six the cleaning woman arrived, poked her head into Bridget’s room, and said, “Still here, dearie? I’ll do you tomorrow.” At seven o’clock the cleaning woman left.

  Bridget finished the lease and sewed it up, then knocked off two or three letters which she had in her book. Half past seven boomed out distantly from the Law Courts’ clock. Bridget decided to give it five more minutes. The silence in the office was complete.

  The shrilling of the telephone made Bridget’s heart rocket. She steadied herself and lifted the receiver.

  “Beeding’s,” she said. “It is Mr. Beeding’s secretary Miss Avery speaking.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then a very gentle voice with a slight North Country burr said, “Good evening, Miss Avery. I had a message for you. I’m afraid it’ll be a disappointment. Pokey Barret was picked up by the police this afternoon – for a job he did at Laleham. He’s being held at Cannon Row police station.”

  “I see,” said Bridget. “Well. Thank you very much.”

  The voice said, “I’m sorry.” There was a click and the line went dead.

  As Bridget replaced the receiver, the door opened and Mr. Beeding came in. He seemed to be smiling. “I didn’t know that you were interested in Pokey Barret,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That was—”she stopped. No convincing lie came to her.

  “I happened to be in my room. I couldn’t imagine who could be ringing us up at this time of night, and I was sufficiently curious to lift the receiver.”

  Bridget said nothing. Her one idea was to get out of the room, out of the office, into the open, where there would be other people. She jumped for the door. Mr. Beeding’s hand caught her by the arm, and spun her round.

  Bridget opened her mouth to scream, but the sound was still-born.

  Harry Gordon had come quietly into the room. He took a couple of steps forward, flung an arm round Mr. Beeding’s neck, and dragged him backwards. Mr. Beeding tried, ineffectually to turn. The arm round his neck was throttling him. He gave a choked scream.

  Harry dropped his arm and stood back. As Mr. Beeding spun round, Harry hit him. It was a flailing, unscientific blow. It landed flat in the middle of Mr. Beeding’s face, knocked his glasses off and sent him spinning. Harry jumped after him and gave him a push. Mr. Beeding tripped over the wastepaper basket and hit his head against the desk.

  It was unskilful, undignified and deeply satisfying to Harry, who now picked up Mr. Beeding by the arms and propped him in his chair.

  “What are you going to do?” said Bridget.

  Mr. B
eeding blinked and passed a hand across his eyes. Blood was trickling from one corner of his mouth.

  “I’m going to do what I came here for,” said Harry. “I’m going to have the truth out of him, if I have to kill him in the process. They can’t hang me twice.” He turned to Mr. Beeding and slapped him, hard, in the face with his open hand. “It’s up to you. Do you tell us the truth, or do I break every bone in your body?”

  “Neither,” said Superintendent Lacey. He was blocking the doorway, and there were uniformed policemen in the passage.

  “It was luck, really,” said Lacey. “One of my men happened to see Gordon actually going into Beeding’s office. He didn’t recognise him, but he didn’t think he had any business slipping into the office at that time of night, and told his sergeant – who happened to be talking to me. As soon as I heard it was Beeding’s office, I thought we’d better go and investigate.”

  The Assistant Commissioner said, “Most of our best results are luck. But you have to do the hard work as well.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “Legally, it’s a bit tricky. The hearing in the Appeal Court wasn’t concluded. They’ll probably have to start it all over again.”

  “We’ll have two men on the door this time,” said Lacey . . .

  Mr. Hargest Macrea, Q.C., leaned back in his chair and regarded his visitors with some astonishment. One he recognised as the attractive secretary of Mr. Beeding, Bridget something-or-other. A girl with brains as well as looks. The other, who had introduced himself as Harbord, was apparently an official of the Royal Courts of Justice.

  “It’s all quite irregular,” Mr. Macrea said. “I don’t know what my clerk was thinking of, letting you in.”