by John Creasey
“Not yet.” Smith’s mind was obviously quite made up. “First, I want to know if anyone else is putting heavy money on Barnaby Rudge. Barnaby Rudge,” he repeated, in a puzzled way. “Isn’t that name familiar?”
“You could read a chap called Dickens,” Filby said drily. “All right, I’ll keep my antennae out, and pass on any news.” Their drinks had been set down as he spoke and he handed Smith his and then raised his own. “Cheers. How’s the money shaping, on the Derby?”
Smith frowned. “Damn queer about that, too,” he complained. “Something’s up.”
“That’s what my scouts and my books keep telling me.” Filby squinted at his glass, then drank deeply. “And that’s very worrying, Archie — that could really take us. If you ask me . . .”
CHAPTER THREE
The Old Steps
The Old Steps, at Limehouse, was one of the most celebrated and popular public houses in the East End of London, for at least three reasons. It was in Wapping High Street, overlooking the Thames-not far from the Headquarters of the Thames Division of the Metropolitan Police — and a very old, very narrow alley which ran down beside it to steps and a jetty contributed to an ‘atmosphere’ of gas-lit eeriness.
Indeed, by night the approach at least was gas-lit, for the publican retained the gas lamps in the alley and over the doorways. It was a ‘free house’: not tied to a brewery or chain, but independently-owned and so able to dispense every conceivable kind of beer and spirits. What was more, it boasted a pianist: one of the best in London. He was young, but adept in the tradition of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages, and every night was chorus and sing-song night. The pianist, a pale, hunched little man, could play almost any’ tune by ear or from long practice, with the kind of beat which made everyone join in the singing: he himself seemed to put every ounce of energy into his playing.
He was at the piano when Chief Superintendent Lemaitre entered, that evening, to a roar of voices singing: “. . . give me your answer, do!”
Lemaitre began to hum as he pushed his way through the smoke-blue haze towards the saloon bar. No one appeared to take especial notice of his progress, but at least three pairs of eyes turned towards him, half-furtively. Lemaitre was quite aware of it. He looked like an ageing sparrow in his pale brown suit and spotted red and white bow tie; thin-faced, spare-boned, his sparse, dark hair slicked down. Without appearing to notice, he knew that one expert cracksman, one well-known shop-lifter and a man who made his living by stealing fruit from the wholesale markets, was in the saloon. Two were alone, one was with his wife. In a far corner were two detective-sergeants from the Thames Division, and one raised his hand. Lemaitre gave him the thumbs-up sign, and began to hum:
“I’m half-crazy, all for the love of you! . . . Half of light, Joe . . . It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carnage .., My old dutch been in?” he wasn’t expecting his wife, but he wanted the barman and everyone within earshot to think that he was. “. . . upon the seat of a bicycle built for two . . . ! Ta.”
“Ain’t seen her,” grunted the barman.
“Out with her latest and finest, I suppose,” said Lemaitre. “Women!” He tossed down half of the beer. “Cheers.”
He looked about the crowded room at fifty or sixty faces, but could not find the man he had come to see: the ‘accidental’ meeting had been arranged by telephone. He had no doubt that his informant, a man named Charlie Blake, knew what he was talking about. And tonight he was to pass on the names of the people planning the doping of Derby runners.
Charlie wasn’t among the crowd, now clapping and cheering as the pianist took first a bow and then a drink from a pewter tankard on top of the old, burl walnut piano. People were calling out:
“Give us another, Tommy!”
“How about a bit of pop, for a change?”
“Never heard of the Beatles, Tommy?”
“Give us ‘My Old Dutch’,” one old woman called. “Me and me old china’s bin married fifty years.”
“You never got married in your life!” another oldish woman yelled, and the resultant roar of laughter was almost deafening. A man’s voice sounded above the din.
“Her six kids’ve got something to complain about, then!”
There was another eruption of laughter, everyone joining in. The-potmen moved about, carrying trays crammed with glasses and tankards, showing unbelievable balance and dexterity. The bar itself was so crowded that Lemaitre was pressed hard against a corner. He lit cigarette after cigarette from the previous butt and kept glancing at the door, ostensibly on the look-out for his wife. But Charlie Blake did not come.
An hour earlier, Charlie Blake had left his tiny house in Whitechapel and started out for the Old Steps.
He was a man in his middle fifties, not unlike Lemaitre to look at, but smaller and more dapper, with thick hair, dyed jet-black, and slightly fuller in the face. A card-player of remarkable skill, he crossed the Atlantic two or three times each year, playing cards and making nearly enough money to live by. He made still more by picking up racing information and passing it on. He knew better than most people how much loose talk there was in the big smoking-rooms of the transatlantic liners, especially at the end of an evening of heavy drinking, and he made full use of this.
He was in many ways a nice little man. His wife was fond of him, although she entertained lovers quite shamelessly whenever Charlie was away. She kept his small but pleasantly-appointed house in good order, and fed him well. He was generous with the children of his neighbours -he himself was childless — and he greatly enjoyed walking.
On this hot summer night, he was dressed as coolly as anyone in London, wearing a beige-coloured linen jacket and tropical-weight trousers, with openwork brown-and-white shoes. Now and again he eased his collar: the heat always gave him a rash on the neck and he used a special ointment to soothe the irritation; but in such heat as this, the collar seemed to stick to the ointment. He walked quite briskly and it did not enter his mind that he was in any kind of danger.
Still less did the possibility of danger occur to him when he saw a taxi driven by an acquaintance pull up.
“Want a lift, Charlie?”
“I’m okay,” he said cheerfully. “My plates of meat are good for a lot of miles, yet!” He looked down at his
“Give yourself a rest,” urged the driver. “Hop in!”
He was at the kerbside, and it was very hot and although he would never have admitted it, Charlie’s feet were not as comfortable as usual. And free rides did not come every day. So he opened the door and got in — and stumbled over the leg of a man sitting tucked away in the corner behind the door.
“What the hell . . . I” he began, but before he could go on the man hit him a vicious blow on the side of the head.
He gasped and flopped down. In a flash, his assailant had his right arm twisted behind him in a hammer-lock, forcing him into a curious, half-kneeling, half-crouching position.
Charlie, sweating freely, tried to turn his head, but he could not see his captor’s face.
“What — what’s going on?” he squeaked.
‘‘Just answer a few questions, Charlie,” the man said.
“Who — who are you?”
“Never mind who I am. What have you been telling the cops?”
“I-I never tell the cops anything, I-God! Don’t!” The man had twisted his arm so hard that it felt as if it would snap.
“You’ve been talking to Lemaitre,” the man stated, flatly.
Charlie was so astonished that he did not even deny it.
“What was it about, Charlie?” The calm voice was very insistent.
“It-it wasn’t anything, I-don’t do that!” he shrieked. “You’ll break my arm!”
“That isn’t all I’ll break if you don’t tell me the truth!” threatened the man in the corner. “What did you tell Lemaitre about?”
“It-it wasn’t—” Charlie gasped again and then almost screamed, the pain
was great. “It was only a joke! I told him some Derby horses were going to be fixed-it was only a joke!”
“That’s one of the best jokes you’ve ever told,” the man said, and for the first time he sounded deadly. “What exactly did you tell him?”
“It was a joke! I never told him anything!”
“Who told you about the doping?” The tormentor demanded.
“I — I heard a coupla chaps talking on the QE 2. You know, the new Cunarder. But it was only a joke, I tell you!”
“Charlie,” said the other, “you’ve been nosing around one of Jackie Spratt’s shops for two days, picking up a lot of information about things you shouldn’t know about. Who’s going to dope the horses?”
“I-I don’t know, I tell you! I don’t know!”
“So why are you going to the Old Steps tonight? To see Lemaitre?”
“No! Oh, God, no!”
The taxi was bumping along a cobbled road, which told Charlie that they were among the docks and warehouses, probably near the Old Steps. Now and again another car passed, but there was little sound; few people came along here in the evening. The rumble of the bumping drowned other sounds and in any case Charlie Blake was in such a state of mortal terror that the words he uttered were little more than hoarse whispers. But there was a tiny segment of his mind not frozen by the terror, and all his thoughts passed through this.
Who had told this man? Who was he? Why had they been watching him? How did he know about Lemaitre?
“Come on,” the man snapped. “Let’s have it! Who’s going to dope the horses?”
Charlie was gasping.
Then, with his other hand, the man in the corner gripped his vitals and squeezed, bringing a terrible pain. The sweat on Charlie’s forehead rolled down; into his eyes, his mouth, under his chin, and the pain spread all over his body, making anguish in his thighs, his legs, his stomach, his shoulders.
“Tell me what you know!” the man rasped.
“Let go!” Charlie choked out the words. “Let go! I’ll tell you! It-it’s Jackie Spratt’s, the whole company -they’ve got a fix ready-they can make a million. But I wasn’t going to tell Lemaitre! I was just going to make a packet for myself-Lemaitre’s a joke. Oh, God,” he pleaded. “Let me go!”
The man released him, and he doubled up on the floor.
As he did so, the driver turned in his seat and spoke through the glass partition.
“He’s there.”
‘He’ meant Lemaitre; ‘there’ meant the Old Steps.
“Sure?”
“I saw him go in.”
“Okay,” said the man in the corner. “You know what to do.”
“Sure, I know. Don’t do anything in my cab, though.”
“Nothing that will show,” the other promised.
Charlie was now leaning against the edge of the seat for support. His expression was one of piteous entreaty as for the first time, he saw the face of the man who was tormenting him. It was a hard, handsome face, with deep-set eyes, a deep groove between the heavy black brows and a deep cleft in the chin. In new and abject terror, he realised that it was John Spratt, one of the three brothers who owned the vast betting-shop network that was Jackie Spratt’s Limited.
“So you weren’t going to see Lemaitre at the Old Steps?” John Spratt said heavily.
“No — I swear I wasn’t! I was just going for a drink — a drink on the terrace — I love the river, and —”
“So you love the river?” John Spratt’s dark eyes glinted with a strange kind of merriment. “Okay, Charlie Blake, I’ll see you get plenty of river!”
Then he laughed. And his laughter sent a terrible chill through the man whom Lemaitre was waiting to see in the pub overlooking the Thames.
Gideon slept fitfully that night, as far away from Kate, his wife, as he could get in their big double bed. The merest touch of body against body created oven-heat. With every window and door wide open, there was still not a breath of air.
Lemaitre, moody and troubled because his informant had let him down, and not looking forward to making his report to Gideon tomorrow, was restless, too. But his wife in her bed, the clothes thrown off, lay outstretched and beautifully naked. There was enough light from a street lamp for Lemaitre to be acutely aware of her body, especially at certain moments; and he kept turning on his back. He would love to be with her, but it was too hot, everything would be spoiled. And it was a pity to wake her.
By God, she was lovely! Beautiful.
His thoughts slipped back to an earlier marriage; a beautiful bitch of a woman who had nearly driven him out of his mind. Chloe always, always, eased his mind. If he could talk to her at this very moment, he would feel better. But he mustn’t disturb her; it wasn’t fair.
He turned away from her again.
“Lem,” she asked, in a far from drowsy voice. “Can’t you sleep?”
His heart leapt as he turned towards her.
In the pleasant house in Wimbledon where he boarded, P.C. Bob Donaldson could not sleep either, and for some peculiar reason he kept thinking about Martha Triggett. Not deeply, not resentfully, not even suspiciously; he was simply aware of her and the month he had spent learning hair-dressing with her, and the Charm School of which he knew and yet to which he had never been admitted. Between these odd moments of thinking of her he kept tossing and turning, shifting his pillow to try to find a spot which was not damp. His hair needed cutting, and was almost soaking wet . . . that was why he kept thinking of old Aunty! Pleased with this understanding, he turned over and dropped off into a sound sleep.
Another man was sleeping very soundly, a few miles away from P.C. Donaldson; a man who was not at all troubled by the sticky heat. He was Barnaby Rudge, whose childhood — in fact, most of his twenty-three years — had been spent in summer heat and humidity much greater than this, in a small but spotlessly clean, cross-ventilated house near Montgomery in Alabama.
Rudge slept on his back. Just outside the window of this small house in Southfields, Surrey, was a street lamp which shone directly in on him. The light showed up the shiny darkness of his face and the stark whiteness of his pillow and the single sheet which covered him to his chest. One arm-his right arm, the arm with which he served -was outside the sheet, lying parallel with his body. His expression was absolutely peaceful; it would be easy to imagine that he was dreaming happily. In fact, he was not dreaming.
But before going to sleep, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling, he had been day-dreaming — of Wimbledon. Wimbledon: his Mecca! Wimbledon, which he had followed with such rapt attention in those boyhood days when he had played, unceasingly and nearly always alone, with an old racquet against the wall of his house; sometimes the wall of the mill where his father worked. As the years had passed, he had gone to work at the same mill, found others to play tennis, found it possible to play on a real grass court, found himself using a racquet which was properly strung . . .
There was much that he had not known, in those days. For instance, that a man who was building an extra store room for the mill often watched him. This man’s name was Willison, and in those days he had been a man in his early thirties, a very keen tennis player but much more keenly a master-builder in the business he had inherited from an uncle. And there at the mill, while the raw cotton was being unloaded from the great wire cages on the trucks, with the cotton and its dust flying lazily in the bright sunlight, and the great maws of the feeder taking the fluffy stuff to work and card and turn it into threads, he had seen the young negro play.
Barnaby Rudge had played tennis in every moment of his spare time; every moment when there was light enough to see. And Willison, passing by the mill some evenings, had seen the solitary figure, a silhouette against the red-tinged beauty of the after-glow, serving to an imaginary opponent. He served with utter and unbelievable precision, time after time, to hit a tiny circle-no larger than a tennis ball-placed in various spots inside the serving area.
Willison had been fasci
nated.
At that stage, some men might have found Barnaby Rudge a special ‘fixed’ job so that he could spend most of his time on the tennis court. In this way he could have been frequently tested in tournaments, and regularly exposed to players a little better and more experienced than himself. And in this way, many believed, champions were made. Willison had never quite understood what had held him back; but then, he had never quite understood himself. He had a flair, perhaps even a touch of genius, which told him when to act and when to bide his time. He had not been sure, in those early days, what to make of Barnaby Rudge, except that Barnaby was undoubtedly going to be a brilliant player; his reflexes were as remarkable as his physical strength and endurance. But how brilliant, and in what way it would be best to develop him, Willison did not know.
He gave Barnaby a job in his building organisation, one which would keep him fit as well as develop his body and leave him ample time for practice. And he soon discovered one strange characteristic about Barnaby which proved very helpful: Barnaby was a loner. The companionship of others did not mean much to him, and he took real pleasure in his constant search after perfection in placing a tennis ball exactly where he wanted it. In other things, he was no more than average, in some ways even less.
He had to be told what to do and how to do it time and time again. But once he got it into his head, nothing could shake it out and he became set on performing every task to the absolute limit of his capacity. He had a pleasant, humble home life. Besides working in the mill, his father was a Baptist minister, his mother was a midwife: there was no poverty and no hunger in his family.
One business friend of Willison’s, seeing Barnaby play one day, remarked: “That boy wants some real competition, Lou. He could make the big time.”
“He’s not ready, yet,” Louis Willison had demurred.
Barnaby sometimes drove him in a utility truck to one of the working sites: Willison invariably had half-a-dozen different building projects in hand at one time. (“He’ll stretch himself too fir one day,” the wiseacres said. But he made more and more money, and took on more and more projects.) Just after his friend’s comment he spoke more seriously than usual as Barnaby drove him to a site.