by Joyce Porter
‘Upstairs,’ said the fat man. ‘Fifth floor.’
Dover stared suspiciously around the entrance hall. ‘And I suppose that lift is the only way of getting there?’
‘’Sright.’ The fat man seemed quite pleased that Dover was appreciating the situation. ‘And the lift stays up on the top floor until I rings for it to come down. Very slow it is, that lift. Takes three minutes to come down and four to go up. You‘ d hardly credit it, would you?’ He paused. ‘That is, if it doesn’t break down.’
‘There must be some other way up,’ put in MacGregor officiously. ‘What about the fire regulations?’
The fat man turned a bored eye on him. ‘ Staircase. Round the back. Always kept locked. Well, you’ve got to in this neighbourhood, haven’t you? You open it by pushing one of them bar things down, from the inside of course. The fire officer was quite satisfied with it.’
‘Well, nobody’s going to raid you in a hurry, are they?’ said Dover truculently.
‘No,’ agreed the fat man easily, glad to have things on a clear footing, ‘they’re not.’
‘Look,’ said Dover, who’d had more than enough of standing there like a proper lemon, ‘ do we look like a flaming police raid?’
‘No,’ said the fat man with the merest hint of a smile, ‘who says you was?’
‘You rung that warning bell, didn’t you?’
‘Just to let the manager know we’d got a couple of new arrivals, so’s he send the lift down.’
‘Oh,’ scoffed Dover, ‘I suppose you ring in just the same way for a couple of ordinary customers? I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’
‘Neither,’ said the fat man amiably, ‘was I.’
A remark did nothing to improve Dover’s temper during the lengthy wait which followed until, accompanied by strange clankings, the lift finally came trundling down.
‘Go ahead,’ said the fat man. ‘It’s all yours.’
Dover and MacGregor, with some difficulty, inserted themselves into the lift and stood stomach to stomach as it slowly and uncertainly laboured upwards.
‘Quite a clever set-up,’ observed MacGregor, feeling obliged to help pass the time with a bit of idle chatter.
Dover blew disgustedly down his nose. MacGregor turned his head to one side.
‘Well, there’s one consolation, sir,’ – MacGregor resumed with a policeman’s optimism – ‘they must have got something to hide. They’ve had time to sweep all the vice in Soho under the carpet by now.’
Dover regarded his sergeant as best he could in the dim light. ‘Why don’t you belt up?’ he asked wearily.
The manager himself was waiting to greet them when they emerged on the top floor. His wizened little face glowed with pleasure as Dover forced his way, at MacGregor’s expense, out of the cage.
‘Well, if it isn’t Chief Inspector Dover! That’s a bit of a turnup for the books, I must say! And here was me expecting some of those crummy flatties they’ve got the nerve to call coppers round here. Come along in, sir! Drinks are on the house.’
He led the way down a shabby corridor with Dover lumbering behind him. Half way down he spoke to the Chief Inspector over his shoulder in a low voice. ‘That your side-kick, is it, sir? Cor, strike a light. We’d have eaten two of him before breakfast in the old days.’
These were precisely Dover’s sentiments but he was too busy trying to place the little manager to waste his time running down modern-day policemen. He still hadn’t succeeded when he found himself ensconced at a comer table with a double whisky in front of him.
‘Drop of the real stuff,’ the little manager assured him as he slid on to the bench next to Dover. ‘Out of my own bottle. Well, here’s to crime!’ He chuckled uproariously and dug Dover in the ribs.
With a glum face Dover took a tentative sip of his whisky. It was all right. With a sigh he examined the room in which he now found himself. It was dimly lit, that goes without saying. Each table had its own small table lamp with a thick imitation parchment shade. There was no other lighting except for a couple of milkily glowing signs reading, respectively, Cocks and Hens. There were, perhaps, a dozen people scattered around. Ten of them were girls and two were waiters, dressed vaguely as farmer’s boys, and they all had their eyes fixed in an unwinking stare on Dover and his two companions. No doubt the clientele proper had diplomatically withdrawn by the back stairs some time ago.
‘It’s a bit early yet,’ explained the manager helpfully. ‘Things liven up later on.’
‘So I should hope,’ said Dover. ‘Looks like a vicarage tea-party at the moment.’
The little manager laughed and laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘ Oh, you’re a one, you are, Mr Dover!’ he guffawed, smacking the table with the palm of his hand. ‘ He doesn’t change much, does he?’ he asked MacGregor. ‘Still the same old ba …’ He interrupted himself just in time with a fit of coughing.
‘You’ve met the Chief Inspector before then?’ asked MacGregor.
‘Met him?’ The little manager roared with laughter again. ‘I’ll say I’ve met him, the old … bogie! Why, if I’d a quid for every time he’d run me in I’d be sitting on my backside in the South of France by now, straight I would. Here, Mr Dover, sir, how about introducing us?’
Dover, conscious that his image was going to take severe hammering if he didn’t look smart, thought quickly. ‘I would,’ he said, ‘if I knew what name you were using these days.’
They nearly had to retrieve the little manager from under the table after this witticism. Still spluttering with flattering mirth and mopping his eyes, he performed the introductions himself.
‘Joey the Jock,’ he said, extending a tiny brown paw across the table. ‘Otherwise Joseph Aloysius O’Daley, but you can call me Joey.’
‘Sergeant MacGregor,’ said MacGregor in his turn, shaking Joey’s hand.
Joey the Jock? Dover sighed. Could be Evans the Post for all he knew, or cared. He finished his whisky.
‘You’ve not changed much, Mr Dover, sir,’ said Joey, smiling to show that the observation was meant to be complimentary.
Dover sniffed.
‘I was wondering if you’d still recognize me,’ said Joey, ‘after all these years.’
‘Never forget a face,’ said Dover solemnly. ‘You can’t afford to in my job.’
‘I heard you was in town,’ said Joey, signalling for more drinks.
‘Did you?’ said Dover.
‘Come about Hamilton, have you?’ said Joey idly, handing round his cigarette case.
‘Hamilton?’ said Dover, wondering what the dickens they were talking about now.
His reply sent Joey off again. Sobbing with laughter, he even rested his head on the table to relieve his aching sides. Dover regarded the heaving shoulders with distaste while MacGregor smiled wisely as though he knew what it was all about. The ten girls and the two waiters just looked.
‘Well,’ said Joey when he had at last recovered his powers of speech, ‘that’s what he was known as when he come to live up here. After all, even in Wallerton, you can’t go around calling yourself Sunny Malone and not expect the neighbours to look at you sideways, can you?’
‘Sunny Malone?’ MacGregor looked at Dover for guidance and explanation.
‘Bit before your time, Sergeant,’ said Joey kindly. ‘Though I don’t doubt you’ll have heard of him. He was one of the first of the big boys, just after the war. He’d got Barking and Dagenham and Ilford tied up so tight you couldn’t change your mind without paying him his percentage.’
‘Oh, yes.’ MacGregor nodded his head. ‘I think I’ve heard of him. Protection racket.’
‘That’s the boyo!’ said Joey with approval. ‘You’re not as thickheaded as I thought you was. Damn sight brighter than the local flatties, at any rate. They still don’t know who Hamilton really was – not unless you’ve told ’em, Mr Dover.’
Very portentously Dover shook his head. If there was one sure thing amongst all these shifting s
ands it was that he had not revealed to the local police the true and notorious identity of the late Mr Hamilton.
‘How did you spot him, Mr Dover?’ asked Joey, not a man who could leave well alone.
Dover scowled at him reproachfully. ‘Professional secret,’ he said lamely.
‘Garn!’ laughed Joey. ‘Now pull the other one! It’d be a photograph, wouldn’t it? Ah, I thought so. They showed you a photograph of the corpus derelictus and you recognized it. That’s what comes from having a trained mind.’
‘I pride myself,’ said Dover, putting a bold front on it, ‘on never forgetting a face. Or a name.’
MacGregor choked over his whisky.
‘Don’t I know it!’ chuckled Joey with rueful appreciation. ‘ What do you think made me tuck myself away in Wallerton?’ he asked MacGregor. ‘Because your Chief Inspector made things too flaming hot for me in the Smoke, that’s why! Eyes like a hawk, he had, and him hardly dry behind the ears in those days. Taking the bread out of my mouth, that’s what he was doing.’
MacGregor, now thoroughly bemused, looked somewhat incredulously at Dover and then, receiving no enlightenment there, directed his gaze back to Joey. Joey beamed at him. There was some justification for MacGregor’s scepticism. Joey the Jock may have been motivated by fulsome flattery or it may have been that he just had a bad memory; whichever way it was his rosy picture of Dover as a keen young cop was totally erroneous.
MacGregor, in any case, had no stomach for sitting there patiently while Dover’s praises were being sung, and he redirected the conversation rapidly. ‘Why did Hamilton leave London in the first place?’ he asked.
Joey shrugged his shoulders. ‘He got like a lot of us, old and fat and lazy.’ It was a pure coincidence that he was looking at Dover when he made this remark. ‘ The Tallahassee Brothers moved in. You remember that mob, Mr Dover? Nasty lot, they were. Sunny Malone could see the writing on the wall same as anybody else. If he’d hung around and argued the toss he’d have been lucky to get away with a chiving. And they’d have carved up his missus, too, soon as look at her.’
‘Chiving?’ said MacGregor, suddenly becoming very alert and watchful. He glanced at Dover to see if that master mind had got the point. The Chief Inspector, however, was fully occupied in gazing fixedly at his glass, which happened to be empty again.
‘Not half,’ said Joey. ‘ There were terrors with a razor, those Tallahassee lads. Some of the things they did was horrible, proper horrible.’
‘Where are they now?’ demanded MacGregor, leaning steely-eyed across the table.
‘Search me, mate! Laying flat on their backs with a tombstone on their chests, I hope!’
‘Hamilton,’ said MacGregor, ‘this Sunny Malone, what was he doing in Wallerton?’
Joey looked uneasy. ‘I told you. He retired. Come up here to live quiet on his ill-gotten gains.’ He managed an unconvincing laugh.
‘Come on,’ snorted MacGregor, ‘don’t give me that! He was back on the old game, wasn’t he? Back on the protection racket?’
Joey shifted about in his seat and looked appealingly at Dover. Dover pushed his still empty whisky glass idly round the table.
‘Aw, come off it,’ said Joey, eyeing MacGregor warily. ‘Give a fellow a chance.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me about it, Joey,’ said Dover, coming at last to the rescue. ‘ Just the two of us.’
‘That’s right, Mr Dover,’ said Joey eagerly, and mopped his brow. ‘I don’t mind doing a bit of singing, for old time’s sake as you might say, but I don’t want to give a blooming recital.’
‘Quite,’ agreed Dover smugly.
‘Here, Alicia!’ Joey bawled across the room to a bored-looking girl sitting by herself at one of the tables. ‘There’s a gentleman here I want you to look after, a special friend.’
Alicia’s jaws were moving slowly up and down. She broke the rhythm momentarily and swivelled her eyes questioningly in the direction of a small door in the wall behind her.
‘No, you stupid cow!’ hissed Joey. ‘In here.’ He smiled invitingly at MacGregor. ‘Why don’t you go and have a nice, cosy little chat with Alicia, eh? You’ll like her. She’s a nice girl. Been in the nick a couple of times, too, so you’ll have something in common. And, just a word of warning. Sergeant,’ he added as a very reluctant MacGregor got to his feet, ‘ keep your hands on your wallet, eh?’
Chapter Eight
With MacGregor out of the way being entertained by the fair Alicia, Joey the Jock looked happier. He ordered Dover another drink and slid up closer to him on the bench.
‘They’re not the same, these young ’uns, are they?’ he remarked sorrowfully. ‘You want a bit of give and take in your job, don’t you, Mr Dover? Helps to make the wheels go round, if you see what I mean.’ He shook his head. ‘But these young ’uns, they don’t have no idea of what I call compromise. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Why, in the old days, back in London, I could have named you a score of coppers who were – well – accommodating. Not bent, mark you, but what you might call short-sighted. And it paid off for them, too. We didn’t forget ’em, oh dear me, no! There’s a good few of you high and mighty bogies up at the Yard who wouldn’t be where you were today if it hadn’t been for a bit of a helping hand from the likes of me. Not that I’ve ever been one to grass, but – well – if somebody scratches my back I don’t mind, once in a while, scratching his.’
‘Quite,’ said Dover, mildly irritated to find that he had Joey the Jock practically sitting on his lap. Confidential conversations were all very well but there was a limit. He shoved Joey off a couple of inches and got down to business. ‘What about Hamilton?’
‘You won’t forget it was me what told you?’ asked Joey anxiously.
‘I won’t forget.’
‘Well, Hamilton – I soon got used to calling him that, especially seeing as how he told me what he’d do to me if I ever so much as breathed his real name – he come up here to retire really. He’d made his packet and things had got too rough even for him up in the Smoke, so he thought he’d call it a day. He opened up this garage place because, of course, he’d got to account for his money somehow and – well – second-hand cars, who’s to know? A kid of two could fiddle it. But he was a right bent bastard, Hamilton was. He couldn’t have kept off it even if he’d had a million quid a week coming in. First he tries a bit of dealing in stolen cars, but that’s a dicey business, especially in a town like Wallerton where they’ve nothing else to do except poke their noses into other people’s business. Then, oh, it’ll be a year or more ago now, he finds the perfect answer. He starts going in for the money-lending business. Not in a regular way, of course. He didn’t deal with what you might call the suckers. No, he was smart. He lent money to crooks.’
Joey took a quick glance at Dover’s face to see if all this was sinking in. It was hard to tell. The Chief Inspector’s eyes were half open and every now and again he raised his glass to his lips. These were the only signs of life or interest. Joey frowned. He felt, reasonably enough, that he was entitled to more appreciation than this.
‘He lent money to crooks,’ he repeated and edged a bit closer. ‘Dead clever, that was. He’d got plenty of spare cash kicking around, more than he knew what to do with, really. And the risks was negligent. Some bright boy comes along with a nice little plan for doing a pay roll job or robbing a bank or something. He’d explain it all to Hamilton, and get the benefit of his expert advice for free, by the way, and if Hamilton liked the look of it, he’d stake him. Lend him up to a couple of thou’ or so for incidental expenses. When the job’s done, back comes the wide boy and pays back the loan, with interest. And that wasn’t peanuts. Never less than a hundred per cent and sometimes a hell of a lot more. Always in cash, too.’ Joey appealed somewhat desperately to Dover. ‘It was a damned good racket, wasn’t it? Clever?’
Dover sighed. ‘ Suppose somebody gypped him? Cleared off without paying the loan back, or the interest?’
<
br /> Joey looked at Dover with surprise. ‘We’re not all crooked, Mr Dover,’ he declared with dignity. ‘Besides, Hamilton was dead careful. He wouldn’t have no truck with all these long-haired young tearaways that bash old ladies up for a handful of small change and a pension book. He stuck to the professionals. People who’d got a bit of a reputation to keep up and who you could trust. And, anyhow, Hamilton had the whip hand, didn’t he? He knew all about the job, see? Right down to the last detail. If anybody crossed him up he could tip the rozzers off and get the whole lot nicked as easy as pie. And he was as safe as houses, wasn’t he? It’s no bleeding crime to lend a few quid to a pal who’s down on his uppers, is it? You don’t know he’s going to buy a couple of yards of jelly with it, now do you?’
Dover grunted. He was getting fed up. The seat was hard and the atmosphere, in spite of the lack of customers, smokey. He yawned widely. If this was Wallerton’s idea of a wicked and dissolute evening out, you could keep it! He, Dover, was ready for bed. He yawned again. Joey the Jock looked at him in awe. Dover’s yawns were enough to strike terror into the hearts of bolder men.
‘Ahduyecominit?’ said Dover, as his dentures came together with a resounding click.
‘Eh?’
Dover regarded Joey wearily. Why was it that he always had to deal with the fools and morons of this world? ‘I said,’ he repeated slowly, ‘how do you come in it?’
‘How do I come in what?’ asked Joey, retreating smartly into thickheadedness.
Dover glowered at him. ‘ Well, you weren’t Hamilton’s probation officer or father confessor, were you?’
‘No,’ admitted Joey cautiously, ‘I wasn’t.’
‘For God’s sake!’ snarled Dover with mounting irritation. ‘I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?’
‘Well,’ said Joey, trying to play it nonchalantly, ‘me, I was just a bystander, see? An innocent bystander. I retired up here about the time Hamilton was starting up this new racket. Arthritis it was, in my hands. Well, in my line of business it was the kiss of death, wasn’t it? Well, I decided to open this club, see? And that was an up-and-a-downer, if you like, but in the end I got my licence. Well, who turns up as one of my first bleeding customers but Sunny bleeding Malone. You could have knocked me down with a sledge-hammer, I knew him all right, and he knew me. I told him I was strictly on the level these days and he says so was he. All he wanted was somewhere quiet to meet his friends. Well, you know who his friends was. Before long, when Hamilton’s reputation had got around, I’d every villain worthy of the name for a couple of hundred miles around dropping in for a double Scotch and a quiet chit-chat with Hamilton. There was nothing I could do about it even if I wanted to. And why should I? They was all fully paid-up members, they weren’t breaking the law and they were good for trade. Most of my local customers come along in the afternoons, see, during office hours. They don’t have to make up any cock and bull stories for their wives, see, like what they would have to do if they come in the evenings. Hamilton’s cronies used to come at night. Well,’ – Joey waved a disgruntled hand – ‘you can see what it’s like now they don’t come. Like a bleeding cemetery!’