Criminal Imports

by John Creasey

  “Why did he leave?”

  “He said that he wanted to make some telephone calls. One was to an acquaintance who had sailed cabin class on the Queen Elizabeth, a man who might know the people with whom Nina had associated on board. And– “Henderson opened his eyes, and it seemed to Gideon that there was almost unbearable pain in them - “I thought that sounded reasonable.”

  Gideon put the glass down.

  “And it was perfectly reasonable, sir. No use blaming yourself because you can see so much more with hindsight. I’m going to see Schumacher. I’m going to appear to accept his story, giving no indication that I know his record. Will your wife be able to behave naturally with him tomorrow?”

  “If it’s necessary - yes.” ‘

  “It’ll be necessary,” Gideon said grimly.

  “Commander.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there any good reason why I shouldn’t tell Schumacher that you believed me when I said I had located Nina?”

  Gideon said vehemently, “There are a dozen good reasons. The first and most important is that Schumacher would know that no police officer of experience would believe you, so he would expect the Yard to be working without your knowledge. Do you follow me?”

  “So far.”

  “That would scare him badly. The one positive witness against him is probably Nina. If she were dead, he would have less to worry about - at least he would think he had. But if you tell him you told me that Nina was spending the night with friends but I wouldn’t buy it, he’ll believe you.”

  “How will it help?” asked Henderson.

  “He will know that you will expect and will obtain close cooperation from us at the Yard. He will know that a man of your standing will want to be kept informed of developments and of what we’re doing. So you will tell him whatever I tell you. He will feel secure for as long as he’s in your confidence and believes he has your trust. That’s why it is so important that both you and your wife behave naturally with him. For a start, ring and tell him I’m on my way to see him, will you?”

  After a long pause, Henderson said slowly, “I see. Yes, I see. And this way we can at least feel that we’re helping.”

  Gideon said, “Unless you convince Schumacher, I doubt if we can save your stepdaughter. Her safety depends on you much more than you may realize.” After a pause, he went on; “Have you a good photograph of her?”

  “Yes.” Henderson went to a bureau and picked up a leather photograph folder. He opened this, slipped out a postcard-sized photograph and handed it to Gideon.

  Gideon studied Nina’s narrow, rather elfin face, and saw a promise of the same kind of beauty as her mother’s. The huge dark eyes held a glow of warmth; she had a look of simplicity.

  “Thank you.” He put the picture into his pocket, and turned toward the door. “Can’t tell you how sorry I am about this, sir.”

  “Commander Gideon,” Henderson said, “I want to thank you.”

  He came across and shook hands.

  Gideon, deeply thoughtful, went down two floors in the lift to the sixth floor, then walked along to Schumacher’s room, Number 697. There were odds and ends of background information which lay buried in his mind, sometimes for years, and rose to the surface whenever they were needed. Now he remembered that all the 90 to 99 rooms on all floors at the Bingham were back ones, available at comparatively low rates. Either Schumacher had little money to play with or he thought it wise to put up a modest front. By the time he had tapped on the door Gideon had concluded that an expensive room would have suited the man’s purpose better, so Schumacher wasn’t too flush with money.

  That might make him impatient.

  Schumacher opened the door, and stood aside immediately. He was very like his photograph, and at first sight Gideon could understand why people liked and trusted him. The homely face and the rather untidy, grandfatherly appearance were most disarming.

  “Mr. Henderson told me you were coming,” he said as Gideon went in. “But I was puzzled by one thing.”

  The room was small and unbelievably old-fashioned, with a single bed in a corner, a hand basin, no door to a bathroom.

  “Were you, sir?”

  “He used the title ‘Commander.’ “

  “That’s right.”

  “A military rank?” Schumacher sounded more incredulous than he allowed himself to look. “It’s a rank at New Scotland Yard,” Gideon said. ‘That doesn’t make us a police state, Mr. Schumacher.” He half-smiled, sat down in the only armchair while the other sat on an upright one at the dressing table. “I’ve talked to Mr. and Mrs. Henderson, who are very distressed and a little vague on some aspects of what you told them. I wonder if you will tell me everything you know, what museums you visited and the approximate times - anything at all which might help us clarify the picture.”

  Schumacher raised his hands.

  “I only wish I could be of real assistance, Commander. As it is–” He told the story which Gideon had already heard with an earnestness and air of conviction which it was impossible to fault. When he finished the details he went on: “I cannot help feeling that someone among her shipboard acquaintances is responsible. I’ve been trying to call them to mind, and have talked with a friend of mine who might have helped. There was a young couple named Pommeroy, I remember, and . . .”

  He named two more.

  He seemed unperturbed when Gideon said:

  “If Miss Pallon is still missing tomorrow I’ll have to have one of my men come and take the details down as a formal statement. Will you be in all the morning?”

  “I’ll stay in the hotel until I hear from you,” Schumacher promised.

  There was no glint in his eye, no change of tone, nothing at all to indicate any relief at the way the interview had gone. Gideon would have given a lot to see his face when the door closed, however.

  Schumacher closed the door, and smiled, very slowly. Then he wiped the perspiration off his forehead. Next he put in a call to a Hammersmith number, he felt so sure of himself.

  “I think it’s all right,” he said when Facey answered.

  “Thank God for that!”

  “How is she?” Schumacher asked.

  “She’ll sleep till morning,” Facey said.

  A stocky man standing at a telephone in the foyer of the Bingham brought Gideon up with a sense almost of shock that he could have overlooked so obvious and important a step: he should have told Lemaitre or Leslie Scott to arrange for all calls to and from the Hendersons and to and from Schumacher to be reported. There was nothing to stop Schumacher making a call, and he might be on the telephone this very moment. Gideon felt sick at his own fallibility. It was poor consolation that he could make some amends, but not necessarily enough: from the Bingham local calls could be dialled direct. All he could do was find out whether Schumacher had made any call at all.

  He went into the small office used by the hotel detective.

  “Give me five minutes, Mr. Gideon, and I’ll have the information for you.” The hotel detective, a big, hardy looking man, left Gideon and went off; he was back in three minutes, apparently quite positive of his facts.

  “Mr. Schumacher did make a local call, five minutes ago. It was automatically recorded, but there’s no way of telling who it was to or what it was about. Now I have your request it will be a different matter. I’ll see you get the information you want.”

  Gideon thanked him, and went off. He was still bitterly self-reproachful when he reached the Yard, but now there was a lot to do. Lemaitre was more than halfway through the task of telephoning division superintendents, most of whom were at home. Gideon helped finish the job. One of the most important factors in the work of the Metropolitan Police was the grapevine or gridiron system. All over London, the greatest concentration being in Soho and the East End, titbits of information about crimes planned and pending and crimes just completed seemed to float in the atmosphere - like a myriad short-wave radio communications. Everyone talked to someone;
the cleverest professional criminals could not resist bragging of what they had done and boasting about what they were going to do. Hearsay wasn’t evidence but many a man was behind bars because he had made a careless remark which had been carried from man to man, woman to woman, place to place, until eventually the police had heard. The police acted more or less like highly sensitive radio receivers, picking up odd statements, jokes, rumours, malicious gossip - all these and much more. They knew which criminal or associate of criminals was most likely to talk, for there were among them the garrulous and the gregarious as well as the surly and the solitary. The police were also quick to hear of quarrels between old friends, quicker to get their ears to the ground, for thieves who fell out were prone to insult one another bitterly.

  The criminals and the police had one thing in common: they kept their eyes open and their wits about them. The most trivial unusual thing would warn the one and alert the other. A man might be hard up one day and flush the next - and this would automatically make him suspect if his kind of job had been done the previous night. Many approaches were less obvious. For instance, two men might have a drink in a pub away from the district they usually frequented, so: were they planning a job? Or a man might take his girl or his wife to a restaurant in an unfamiliar part of town, so: what place was he casing? Into this category of the less obvious would come such an observation as: X was talking to a Yank last night, what’s on? Or: Y’s rented a room for a girl who spends all her time there. They can’t be at it all day.

  Some fragment of gossip such as this could give the police their badly needed lead. Gideon and Lemaitre were alerting all the senior officers to give even closer attention than usual to some specific questions. The Yard was briefing the divisional senior officers, who would brief their junior officers, who in turn would brief their subordinates in the C.I.D. and also in the Uniformed Branch. Before the night was out all the divisions in London would be alerted, and the antennae of the Metropolitan Police would be at their most sensitive.

  One young uniformed officer from the Kensington district had put a single short paragraph in his report that evening:

  A milk roundsman named Wilson mentioned to me he thought he heard a girl scream as he was passing Geddos, an art shop in Gulliver Street, about eleven-thirty a.m. The assistant in the shop, a Lucy Green, appears to be a bit nervous and short-tempered. She was not on duty this afternoon but returned about five o’clock.

  This item was in the report because a week ago the constable had overheard a quarrel between a man and his wife, and the wife had been found badly injured the following day. Had the constable reported the quarrel, the police would have worked on the husband at once. As it was, he denied the assault and a neighbour’s report of the quarrel had been the first to reach Divisional H.Q.

  The constable still smarted from the reprimand by the Superintendent.

  “. . . and if you ever want to become a policeman instead of a car park attendant, keep your ears and your eyes open, and put everything you see or hear in your report.”

  Hyde had obeyed that order to the letter.

  He had also put in a great deal more, and the sergeant whose duty it was to read all reports and mark those he considered sending to the CO. yawned his way through it.

  He did not mark the milk roundsman’s story for special attention.

  With the Force alerted, the photographs of Nina Pallon in hand, and everything ticking over well as far as he could judge, Gideon did the inevitable: he checked what was going on in London. Every few minutes a report came through of another crime. Standing in the big new Information Room, watching the men at the telephone - line and radio - seeing the teleprinters moving as if by invisible hands, hearing and reading reports which were brought to the inspector-in-charge in a never-ending stream, it was easy to imagine that London’s streets were running with blood, echoing to the cries of the assaulted, crackling with the breaking of window glass, reverberating with the roar of stolen cars, pulsating to the pneumatic drills of men invading the vaults of banks and business houses. In fact as Gideon drove home a little before midnight, London seemed to be sleeping as peacefully as any man tired by the exertions of the day. Few people walked, fewer drove their cars; there was only a background of noise.

  But in a hundred, in a thousand parts of the somnolent city crime was being committed.

  Somewhere Nina Pallon lay - alive, please God.

  Somewhere Quincy Lee was talking.

  Somewhere the man Mayhew was hiding, awake or asleep. Alone, wondered Gideon, or with some other girl who did not know how near she was to horror?

  Jerry Klein, with his cut hand, was nursing his secret.

  The killer of Benito Dolci Lucci felt absolutely secure.

  The distributors of the counterfeit West German marks had no idea what the police were ferreting out, no idea that in three days Superintendent Oliver should know how many there were circulating in England.

  There were these and other criminals, with the police more intensely active at night than during the day - a war of attrition was being waged all the time, as it had been since Gideon had first joined the Force.

  The bedroom light was on, so Kate wasn’t asleep. He locked the front door and went upstairs. She was sitting in bed, high on the pillows, with the evening newspaper. She wore a pink woollen bed jacket loose about her shoulders over a simple nightdress of the same colour; she had not yet put on her hair net. As Gideon entered she switched on an electric kettle, so she had waited for their tea nightcap for him.

  “How has it gone?” she inquired. When he did not answer, she seemed to comprehend the weight of the burden on his mind, and asked more earnestly, “How is Mrs. Henderson?”

  Gideon talked as he undressed and had tea. It was good to confide in Kate, even though there was nothing she could do to help. When at last he stopped, she was silent for a while, until she said quietly: “Lem telephoned just before you came in. He says he forgot to tell you that Quincy Lee promised to keep his ear to the ground. What a nice little man Quincy is!”

  “What a lot of nice little men are in the cells tonight,” said Gideon gruffly.

  He found himself thinking what a lot of beasts there were not in police cells or behind prison bars: Schumacher, for instance.

  Yet he was tired, and dropped off to sleep before Kate did; and she was very glad.

  12: Of Many Wives

  “Hey, Maggie!” Barney Barnett cried as usual as he pushed open the living-room door. “Old Quincy Lee! Fancy him back! You could have knocked me down with a feather, you could really.”

  “Who needs a feather?” Maggie scoffed.

  “That’s true enough. Come to think, I’m wasting away for want of some good food. Why don’t you go to tech school and learn to cook?” He paused. Maggie’s eyes called a truce, and he went on enthusiastically, “Done all right for himself, they say.”

  “Who says?”

  “Some of the boys. He was with a dozen old pals yesterday. Don’t know whether it’s true or not but they say he’s on the level.”

  “If Quincy’s on the level, you watch your step. He was dangerous enough when he was in the business. What other breathtaking news have you collected, Barney dear?”

  “Bit sarky this morning, aincha?” Barney moved forward, gave her a big bear hug and would not let her go. “You’d better be careful or I’ll emigrate like Quincy did. I never heard nothing much else,” he went on. “Oh - you know old Facey?”

  “No.”

  “Go orn - old Facey, who paints lightning portraits for half a quid a time.”

  “Oh, him,” Maggie sniffed. “Don’t go getting mixed up with him.”

  “Just because he didn’t flatter you when he did your phizog,” jeered Barney. “He’s doing a job with some Yank.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “I don’t know much about it, but they say it’s fake pictures,” answered Barney. “Who’d believe old Quincy Lee would be back? Must be thirty years. Preci
ous close to thirty, anyway.” He let his wife go, and moved to a kitchen chair, straddling it. “How about inviting him over to a bite of dinner one day?”

  Maggie moved toward her husband, and her manner silenced him. She stared at him fixedly, and then spoke with great deliberation:

  “Barney, I don’t mind you having a drink with Quincy Lee, but don’t get too friendly until you see what he’s up to. The police aren’t nits, and they’ve got a grapevine that never lets them down. They know Quincy’s here, and they’ll wonder if he’s come to pick up some hot stuff cheap and take it back with him. You be careful.”

  “You’re the boss,” Barney said humbly. Then his eyes sparked. “God damn it, can’t you trust my discretion?”

  “No,” said Maggie simply. “And don’t do anything for that Facey, either. He’s a queer, and I don’t like queers.”

  “Old Facey,” whose name really was Philip Facey, was in a small studio at the arches, in Hammersmith. This was one of the more thickly populated boroughs of London but quite near the better-class western residential suburbs. The arches were big arch-shaped sheds formed by a viaduct over which the railway line led to the West Country. Beneath the studio was a carpenter’s shop, where among other things picture frames were made for the trade. Half a dozen men worked there, all of them acquainted with Facey, the “artist bloke upstairs”. They had soon learned that Facey was useful with woodworking tools, and when in need of extra cash, or when the carpenter’s shop was short staffed, he would lend a hand downstairs.

  Adjacent on one side was a car-body work and repair shop; on the other a paint and oils warehouse. No one at the arch had been surprised when Facey had brought a big tool chest in the back of his old station wagon. Two men had helped him lift it to the foot of the loft ladder, the only access to the studio. He had arrived at four o’clock, left title chest padlocked until five, at which time the others finished for the day. When the last had gone he had opened the box and lifted Nina Pallon out.