Honourable Intentions

by Gavin Lyall

  “What are we doing?” Ranklin asked.

  “They’d paid those kids to guard the motor, of course. And warn ’em when the likes of us arrived.” And the kids, lacking the Bureau’s deductive reasoning, were instead leading them to the right address. Simple. Except that Ranklin would have missed it.

  O’Gilroy hurried across the road. Ranklin saw the Rolls-Royce and waved it towards him. O’Gilroy was peeking round into Tarling Street. Then he ran around the corner.

  As the Rolls-Royce came up and turned, Ranklin jumped on the running-board, and they accelerated after O’Gilroy. The two boys scattered from a front door halfway down a terrace of two-storey houses. A man stuck his head out, saw the might of the Secret Service Bureau at full charge, and slammed the door in O’Gilroy’s face.

  He didn’t bother with it. He tried the front door next along – it wasn’t even locked – and plunged in. Ranklin reached the shut front door just ahead of Lieutenant Jay. He tried one push, fired his revolver twice into the lock, then stab-kicked the door. It tore open – and he hesitated before barging into the dark hallway ahead.

  From next door came a wave of outraged yells and children’s screams charting O’Gilroy’s route through to the back yard. Ranklin said: “Oh, bugger it. Cover me,” and charged ahead in a crouch. He must remember he had only three shots left.

  He threw open a door on his right, got no reaction, and saw it was dim but empty. Jay had rushed past, holding some long cowboy pistol from the Commander’s collection. Suddenly there was uproar from a closed door at the end of the hallway, perhaps including Berenice’s voice.

  Jay kicked in the door and ducked. Past him, Ranklin saw a man dragging Berenice out into the back yard. Then, from next door’s back yard, O’Gilroy shouted: “Yer surrounded!” The man part-loosed his grip on Berenice to raise an odd-shaped pistol at O’Gilroy’s voice. Berenice wrenched free and went sprawling.

  Four guns went off in a mixture of cracks, bangs and the boom of Jay’s cowboy weapon. The man staggered, tried to correct his balance, and died trying. He fell like a puppet with its strings cut.

  Thinking back afterwards, Ranklin wondered if, after days of tiptoeing around with legalisms and delicate questions, there hadn’t been a subconscious desire to do something.

  11

  The average policeman looked very big in that small, low, narrow house, and this many looked like a Derby Day crowd. By the time Superintendent Mockford arrived, Ranklin had tidied matters up a bit. A second man had been found hiding under a bed upstairs, with a jammed pistol nearby. Questioning him had been delegated to Jay and O’Gilroy. Meanwhile the Commander had been persuaded (it hadn’t taken much effort) to go away.

  And Ranklin had talked to Berenice. She was badly shaken, shivering and pale under her grubbiness, but he had found a man’s topcoat to wrap around her while she told of being taken “to see Dr Gorkin“, which hadn’t happened, and gradually coming to the conclusion that she was going to be killed.

  “Oh, you were, you were,” Ranklin said as convincingly as possible. The last thing he wanted was her saying she’d been having a wonderful time until the Bureau arrived.

  And now it was just after sunset and Mockford and the three agents were standing in the little paved area by the corpse, watching a police doctor decide he was dead and a photographer set up his camera and tripod.

  The doctor stood up and washed his hands under the tap against the house wall. “He’s got at least five bullet holes in him – I wouldn’t be surprised to find more when I get him stripped down – and very little bleeding. I think you can say death was instantaneous, if that’s of any help.”

  Mockford asked: “And where do you think his one shot went?”

  O’Gilroy waved his hand towards the chest-high garden wall to the right. “Somewheres over there.”

  Mockford looked at the darkening eastern sky and grunted. “You can have him when the photographer’s through, doctor,” and turned back into the house.

  It was full of policemen, making laborious lists of things found and wrapping some of them in brown paper for fingerprint tests later. In the hallway two constables were waiting with a well-worn coffin to remove the deceased, and they had to ease their way past them to reach the front room. Another constable came through the broken front door with a billycan, a handful of enamel mugs and enough sense to offer tea to the Super first.

  Ranklin had never seen a police investigation in action before and was struck by how slow, how mills-of-God it seemed, in contrast with the few seconds of action that had caused it. Like gravediggers on a battlefield, perhaps.

  “Have you found anything?” Mockford demanded of a searcher in the front room.

  “Nothing much, sir, but—”

  “Then probably there’s nothing here. Try again later.” He took a spindly chair, shook the heaviest dust off it, and sat down. They all found places to sit, and the four of them filled the room nicely. So then they had to have a fifth, a sergeant with a notebook who looked carefully at the wall before leaning on it.

  The single gas lamp had been lit and curtains, only thick enough to blur the vision, pulled shut.

  “First, sir, can you tell me why you didn’t just watch this house and the motor-car, and send word for us?”

  “Not that easy,” Ranklin said. “We didn’t know which house except by following the kids who were to tip them off that we’d arrived. Then we either had to charge in at once or lose surprise. Basic military tactics.”

  “This was not a military exercise – sir.”

  “I don’t know . . . it might be best if it somehow was. You’re going to meet a lot of pressure not to say who we really are.”

  “Don’t write that down, sergeant,” Mockford said quickly, then sighed. He was used to being told “your superiors won’t like this”, but not to its being true. And certainly not to Ranklin’s sympathetic tone, as if the whole thing had been just an incident that was nobody’s fault. “You could still have just set a watch on the house – sir. Even if they knew you were out there.”

  “Again, I can’t agree. They’d either have sat tight and you’d have had the Siege of Sidney Street all over again or they’d have broken out – they were armed, but didn’t know that we were – and what then? A shooting-match in the middle of the street? Either way, you’d have had more people killed, probably including Ma’mselle Collomb.”

  Privately, Mockford might well have agreed But even a siege, with dozens of police, hundreds of soldiers, thousands of pounds worth of damage and several more deaths, could have been somehow made normal. Coroners’ verdicts, court cases, committees and commissions would have chosen heroes and villains and fitted the whole thing into the British way of life. Instead, one man had been killed by the wrong people in the wrong way and it didn’t fit at all.

  A man didn’t have to be thinking of his pension to think like that. He need only think of what he had devoted his life to: law and order, a proper way of doing things. Without that, you had the jungle – whatever Dr Gorkin might say.

  Mockford grunted and wriggled on the undersized and rickety chair. “Let’s look at what these two villains intended, then. One’s dead so we can’t question him, the other seems very reluctant to talk to us – did he say anything to you? You can take notes, sergeant.”

  Jay said: “He didn’t want to say anything but we . . . we persuaded him.”

  “Don’t note that, sergeant,” Mockford said wearily.

  “I had to speak German to him, although I think he’s Russian or Latvian or something. I don’t think O ’ . . . Mr Gorman could follow it all, but he gave excellent moral support.”

  Ranklin could imagine O’Gilroy smiling his smile and clicking the Browning and sighting it occasionally at various parts of the man’s body.

  “What it amounts to,” Jay continued, “is that they were going to drug the girl, wait until dark, then take her away in the motor and dispose of her. Of course, once he knew his colleague was dead, it was h
e who’d done everything, planned it all, been in charge. I imagine that’s an old story to you, Superintendent.”

  The sergeant, by now thoroughly confused, looked at Mockford. He nodded, and then they waited in silence for the notebook to catch up. Not true silence: the cardboard-thin door and walls passed on every movement in the house and a garbled mutter from every conversation.

  At last Mockford asked: “And who got them to do all this?”

  “He described a man who could have been your –” Jay nodded to Ranklin “– Feodor Gorkin. But I hadn’t, as one might say, completed my inquiries when your chaps arrived.”

  Mockford grunted. “I should think he was very glad to see my chaps arriving.” He got up, threaded his way to the door and bellowed: “Inspector McDaniel? Do you know anything about a Feodor Gorkin?”

  From somewhere at the back of the house McDaniel called: “I think the French inspector does, sir.”

  Mockford looked back to Ranklin, who said: “I first thought he was just an anarchist journalist and pamphleteer, but he’s beginning to look more and more the ringmaster. Only I don’t know of what circus. He was staying at the Bloomsbury Gardens house.”

  “But there weren’t any clothes or luggage that might have been his,” Jay said. “So we rather fancy he’s gone.”

  Mockford seemed about to give an order, and Ranklin said quickly: “Our Chief was going to ask Special Branch to keep watch at the ports for him. I meant to ask Miss Sackfield just when Gorkin left, but we had to hurry on here.”

  “Did you?” Mockford asked pointedly. When Ranklin said nothing, the Superintendent went back to his chair and sat down carefully. “Now, did anybody mention the murder of Guillet?”

  “I knew I’d forgotten something,” Jay said sunnily. “I said to our chap: ‘You murdered Guillet,’ and he looked blank and Mr Gorman made a . . . a gesture –” putting a loaded pistol to the man’s head, probably “– and it suddenly came back to him: the other chap had murdered him, he’d only watched.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Mockford said heavily. “Yes, I see – but I wonder if you do? Your heavy-handed and quite illegal questioning of this man, which defence counsel will bring out at a trial, may make it impossible to convict him of either murder or kidnapping – do you realise that? He may actually go free.”

  Jay looked contrite. “I’m most frightfully sorry. Perhaps we should have shot both of them.”

  That hadn’t been the right answer. Mockford looked at Jay without expression for a moment, then turned to Ranklin. “I suppose I’m still not allowed to know just what it is you’re doing or looking for?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Then will you answer me this, sir: is it more important than solving a murder?”

  Ranklin felt Jay and O’Gilroy looking at him, and felt also that he shouldn’t be answering for them. But really he had no choice; he was the senior, his answer would be theirs, and his first duty was to protect them.

  He temporised. “But you’ve solved your murder. We know it was those two thugs and they used the Simplex.”

  “No!” It was a sudden bark. “To us, just knowing is not solving it at all. Every bobby on the beat knows who’s done what. The hard part is catching and convicting them and that’s what we have laws for. Not so we’ll know, but so we can do something about it. And be seen to do something. A murder isn’t solved until someone’s been hung for it, all nice and legal.

  “So I’ll ask you again, sir: is whatever you’re doing more important than us solving a kidnapping and murder?”

  Ranklin didn’t answer immediately. He was remembering how shocked he’d been at the idea of the law being manipulated to bring the “right” result to Langhorn’s extradition. Hadn’t he said something about it setting us back three or four hundred years? Yet now he was blithely assuming that laws would be twisted to protect the Bureau.

  But if there were any excuse, that was it: the Bureau. They hadn’t come dashing down here as individuals, but as agents of the Bureau. O’Gilroy and Jay were owed the protection of the Bureau, and it was up to him to see that they got it.

  “Do you believe in patriotism, Superintendent?”

  Mockford looked wary, but said: “Of course I do.”

  “And yet patriotism sometimes requires men to go out and kill others, destroy property, do all sorts of things which are against the laws of any country you care to name.”

  “Then are you claiming that you’ve been behaving patriotically?”

  “Indeed I am. It’s not just the best excuse we’ve got, it’s the only one.”

  Perhaps Mockford would have found a reply to that, but there was a hideous scraping noise from the hallway. He yanked open the door to see the laden coffin being dragged towards the front door.

  One of the constables straightened up and panted: “Too heavy for the two of us, sir, and not room enough to get more.”

  As they reached the battered front door, Noah Quinton appeared outside. Seeing the coffin, he took off his hat and let it go by. Then he came in.

  “Good evening, Superintendent.”

  “Evening, Mr Quinton. Who are you representing this time?”

  “Mrs Finn said that Ma’mselle Collomb was in trouble again. Is she here?”

  Mockford turned away, mouthing “damned vulture” once he got his back turned.

  Quinton followed him into the front room, peered through the dim gaslight until he recognised everybody who mattered, and put his briefcase down on the table. It sagged and he had to stop the case falling off. “Good evening, Mr . . . er . . .” He didn’t know who Ranklin was being in this context, and didn’t mind his uncertainty showing.

  “Berenice Collomb is next door or somewhere,” Ranklin said shortly. “I think we’ve just about reached an understanding here—”

  “Have we?” Mockford asked.

  “Well, perhaps an impasse, then. You’re obviously going to talk to Sir Basil and he’ll talk to the Home Secretary or my Chief, probably both, and . . .” He spread his hands.

  Quinton looked from one to the other. “Am I allowed to know what happened here?”

  Ranklin said: “Berenice Collomb had been kidnapped, we tracked her down to here, a man trying to drag her away took a shot at Mr Gorman so we shot him.”

  There was a short silence. Then Quinton murmured: “Most succinct. However, I can’t say that I would have advised you to say anything like that . . .”

  “Never mind that. Whatever gets said at a coroner’s inquest is going to be arranged at a much higher level than this. It might help if you had a talk to Berenice. She’s got an anarchist view of the police —”

  “Not only them,” Quinton reminded him.

  “– and the last time she met them, they suspected her of murder. So if the Superintendent could now say that she is no longer under suspicion, she might tell us something useful.”

  Quinton looked at Mockford, who shook his head. “I can’t do that, sir. Not until I know more about the whole matter.” Being kept in the dark as he was, he was sticking doggedly to the rules. Ranklin could hardly blame him, but did.

  “Talk to her anyway and see what she says about being kidnapped. We’ll think about the rest later.”

  Quinton took his briefcase away to the back room. Mockford waited until he was sure both doors were shut, but even then kept his voice low. “It seems to me, sir, that Mr Quinton knows more about this affair than I do.”

  “Possibly.” Ranklin adopted a soothing tone. “He’s been involved in it since before we were: extradition, anarchism . . . God knows what.” Then he added: “And perhaps only God.”

  Mollified or not, Mockford changed the subject. “Before you go, sir, I’d like to take signed statements – just to show my superiors, no question of them being used in court.”

  Ranklin shook his head. “Sorry, Superintendent, but what isn’t written down can’t be misplaced.”

  “You may be called to give an account of your actions to Sir Basil T
homson.”

  “That’s happened before.”

  Mockford was still digesting that when Quinton came back. “Ma’mselle Collomb will only say anything if Mrs Finn’s present.”

  Odd how sudden and strong the bonds of womanhood – the word “femininity” didn’t spring to mind around Berenice – could become. Ranklin stood up.

  Jay said: “Ho for Clarges Street, then.” It seemed that a little of the East End went a long way with Jay.

  * * *

  By now, the street outside was full of people and rumour, clustered at doorways and under the rare gas lamps hung from the house walls. The local women were now wrapped in shawls – but still with their arms folded – and supplemented by men home from work. And journalists who flocked around whoever came out of the house, asking urgent questions.

  “Just smile and shake your head,” Ranklin briefed his crew, “and tell them to ask the police. And don’t do or say anything to make yourself memorable.” He was speaking more to Jay than O’Gilroy there.

  Probably Tarling Street hadn’t seen so much traffic in its life: several taxis retained by journalists, Quinton’s Lanchester, the Sherring Daimler and a more modest vehicle from Scotland Yard. Quinton took Berenice and O’Gilroy, Mockford and a sergeant driver followed in the police motor, while Ranklin took Jay to report to the Commander at Whitehall Court and then try to find and charm Inspecteur Lacoste in re the matter of Dr Feodor Gorkin. Then he drove the Daimler back to Clarges Street.

  The others had got there ahead of him. Corinna opened the door – the staff didn’t live in, and had gone off duty – and greeted him with a heavy outward breath. “Well . . . you’re back in one piece. I’ve got garbled accounts of what happened and I’m not sure whether I’d have done better to come with you–”

  “You wouldn’t. If they’d had a few more seconds’ warning, it could have been very different.”

  “Anyway, you rescued Berenice. I felt bad about her, though I won’t pretend I’m wild about having her here again. In fact, I’m not wild about having a class reunion here.”