They were dismissed at sixteen forty-five.
Rowan walked slowly along the narrow, dark corridor, and out to the courtyard. He stood, just in the sunlight, and tried to think clearly, but his mind would gallop off in a panic. The police had received a tip-off and as a result a major operation was underway. If they were successful and uncovered a courier he would either be an amateur, fool enough to have tried to smuggle because he’d been offered so much money, or a professional who would be known: the amateur might willingly, the professional unwillingly, pass on some small clue that would eventually lead to the principals being identified. But if this happened, they’d sworn they’d take him down with them… He reshaped his thoughts. A courier, amateur or professional, would know nothing of significance because of the risk of his being caught. Therefore his evidence couldn’t help the police trace out the principals… But just suppose he’d learned something and in return for the unspoken promise of a light sentence, he…
When there was the possibility of a calamity, Rowan had the kind of mind which could not easily move away from the near certainty of such calamity taking place. He could recognise the logical unlikelihood of the courier’s knowing anything incriminating, yet be emotionally certain that by bad luck the courier would and that this would lead to the unmasking of the men at the top of the organisation and therefore to his own and Heather’s destruction.
He had to warn them, he decided, because he dare not risk the consequences of not doing so.
Somehow, this coming act of treachery seemed much more direct, much more inescapable, than his previous one. He left the courtyard and walked along the pavement towards a row of lock-up shops and two public call boxes that were a quarter of a mile away. Two one two three six four was the telephone number they’d given him: he repeated it over and over again as he walked.
*
Fusil swore and pushed the bundle of papers, held together by a paperclip, to one side. Miss Wagner was too perfect a secretary. He’d told her to chuck this load of bumf into the wastepaper basket because county H.Q. would never remember they’d sent it out, but she’d ignored his orders, returned the forms, and added a short typewritten note — very genteel in tone — to remind him to fill them in, whereupon she’d send them off. He looked up at the electric clock on the wall. Josephine, his wife, would slaughter him when he returned home. It was already eight-thirty and it would be another hour before he’d have cleared this load of paperwork… And when he did get back he’d have to tell her that he’d be leaving the house again at around midnight and would not be returning for at least twenty-four hours. One of these days she really would get hold of the chief constable and tell him exactly what she thought of him for allowing her husband to work himself into an early grave.
He picked up the next sheet of paper — a letter. Commissaire Quijano of the Cuerpo General de Policia, stationed in Palma de Mallorca, had very great pleasure in confirming certain facts to his very distinguished colleagues in England. Harry Longman, an Englishman with passport number 693249, issued in London, was now in jail and awaiting interrogation. He was being charged with assaulting two police officers and of drunken rioting in the Bodega Tomir in Calle Juan de Moyá. It was greatly to be regretted that an Englishman should have had to be imprisoned, since the English were known to behave so beautifully and there had always been great sympathy between Mallorquins and the English (There were, unfortunately, one or two periods in history when this was not quite so, but such periods were brief. And one must blame the British Government for Gibraltar, not the ordinary citizen) but the degree of assault and drunkenness was too severe to admit of its being overlooked. The writer had made extensive enquiries and regretfully had nothing further to add to his previous report, other than that Harry Longman had been on holiday in Palma for five days prior to this unfortunate event. The British Consulate had been informed, but they had naturally restricted themselves to what was right and honourable in such a case as this. The writer hoped this answered or confirmed all that his esteemed colleagues in England wished to know, but should there be other questions they wished answered they had only to ask them…
“What the bloody hell,” said Fusil, and crumpled up the letter. If the police in Palma had nothing better to do than write ten words where one would suffice, they ought to try working in Fortrow for a change.
Chapter 10
The T.S.S. Western Sand was a twenty-two thousand ton passenger ship, now in her last years of service and profitably only because of an advantageous mail contract the Sand Steamship Company had negotiated five years previously. She had had one major refit in her thirty years’ service and the most obvious result of this was that now she had a raked bow, single raked funnel, and raked fore and mainmast, instead of up-and-down bow and masts and twin upright Woodbine funnels. She had an air of grace she had not possessed when new and because of her traditional build she possessed great beauty in the eyes of those who loved ships before the competition of planes had dramatically altered their raison d’être and therefore their basic construction.
Pilgrim was no lover of the sea or of ships, traditional or modern. In anything stronger than a very light swell he felt queasy and in the heavy storm three days before — the ship’s log merely recorded a moderate sea and swell — he’d all but died.
He sat at the bar and ordered another whisky on the rocks and the bartender poured it out for him. It was just possible to hear the noise from the discothèque, one deck below. He’d tried to run a course with the blonde who did a creditable D.J. job, but she’d made it all too clear that she preferred lamb to mutton. Hell, he thought a shade drunkenly, he might never see thirty-five again, but experience was worth something.
The tannoy system came alive. “Hullo, hullo. Calling Mr. Pilgrim. There is a message for Mr. Pilgrim at the purser’s office on C deck. Thank you.”
Knowing an unwelcome tension, he finished the whisky. Then he left the bar and walked through to the square beyond and the ancient, rattling lift which always made him wonder if it had any form of fail-safe system.
The purser’s office was in the square of C deck. There was an open working area, twenty feet long and ten deep, with a counter and to port of this was an enclosed office in which the chief purser was reputed to drink two bottles of whisky a day. Behind the counter was a young, smooth, male purser with two rings on his arms and a snappy brunette with one ring. He told the brunette he was Pilgrim and how come he hadn’t seen her before on this trip. With a weary smile she said she’d been very busy otherwise she was sure they’d have met. She handed him a ship’s telegram.
He opened and read it. ‘Regret Abbot died last night Stop Drop everything on return and come home immediately.’ It was signed Anne.
He crumpled up the cable and dropped it into his pocket. He was vaguely aware that the one-ringed purser was looking at him, her attention caught by something about his expression, but he ignored her. He crossed the square to the lift and returned to the bar, where he ordered another whisky on the rocks. Two men saw him and suggested a game of poker, but he shook his head and said he wasn’t feeling too bright. They laughed and suggested that in future he stick to dry land, then left. He drank. Something had gone wrong and this knowledge made him shake all the way down to the soles of his shoes. A thousand quid for the trip, he’d been promised, and no chance of trouble: like presents from Father Christmas. No chance of trouble? That thousand quid was beginning to look hard earned.
The whisky steadied him, instead of making his mind more muzzy. He began to regain confidence. There might be trouble ashore, but it wouldn’t affect him because full contingency plans had been made. Get a cable telling him to drop everything, they’d said, and carry out the alternative plan. Drop the consignment over the side when abeam of the first flashing buoy — three flashes every ten seconds — that marked The Shallows outside the mouth of the River Fort.
He thought about ordering another whisky, but finally decided not to. He stood up, left t
he bar, and took the lift down to B deck where he walked for’d along the alleyway to his cabin.
His suitcases were stowed in the special compartment against the after bulkhead, at the side of the washbasin. He unlocked the blue one and took out the neatly packed parcel which would have been dumped at sea after the contents had been rendered sinkable had he not received that cable.
Inside the parcel was a deflated rubber container, a small canister of gas, a line, and a floating electric light with sealed battery and a time switch that would turn the light on fifteen minutes after being activated.
He repacked the parcel and returned it to the blue suitcase. Also in that and the brown suitcase were — together with his other clothes — three coats, bearing the names of different multiple English tailors — which had a quantity of pure heroin packed into each shoulder and down some of the seams. Under normal conditions, no one would ever have suspected there was anything unusual about them.
*
The police and the customs searches caused considerable inconvenience, aroused a great deal of expressed annoyance, and were responsible for a lot of embarrassment. On a plane from Copenhagen nine men were found to be in possession of hard-core pornographic magazines. A blonde woman, on a plane from Istanbul, turned out to be a man and immigration officials were faced with the problems of his/her passport. Two stowaways, would-be illegal immigrants from India, were found in the cargo hold of a freighter, surrounded by all the detritus of their long, hidden voyage. Seventeen men and thirty-seven women on a mail ship were caught with far more than their rations of duty-free goods. A woman on a plane from Nice was discovered trying to smuggle in a Chihuahua and she had hysterics. Four students in a jalopy, returning from the Continent, seemed uneasy and as a consequence fifty-four pounds of first quality hashish, in half kilo cakes, were found hidden about their vehicle. A man sweated as his small suitcase was being examined and this led to his identification as someone who’d skipped the country ten months before, just ahead of the police. A married couple were extremely nervous, but their problem was that they were not married to each other.
Fusil and Kywood returned to Eastern Division H.Q. at seven-thirty in the evening, just as a light drizzle started. They slumped down in chairs, both men physically and mentally exhausted. After a while, Fusil mustered up sufficient energy to use the internal telephone to speak to the desk sergeant to ask him to detail someone to bring up two snack meals from the canteen. The desk sergeant’s answer made Fusil swear.
“Shut down?” said Kywood.
“The day staff left at six, the two on the evening shift have both reported through as ill, there were some stale sandwiches but they’ve all been eaten, and the coffee machine’s on the blink.”
“It’s a great life,” muttered Kywood. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit a cigarette. “Just under four and a half hours left,” he observed.
Fusil began to tap with his fingers on the desk. At an educated guess, they’d a couple more ships and half a dozen aircraft to come in before midnight.
“We’d no option,” said Kywood suddenly. “We had to lay on the full operation.”
Fusil was mildly astonished. Normally, Kywood by now would have been manoeuvring himself into a position where none of the responsibility for the results of failure or of a negative operation — in this case mainly financial: overtime pay, payment to county for the ‘hire’ of each of their men — rested on his shoulders. But it seemed clear that he had no intention of disassociating himself from events. He wasn’t so bad a D.C.I., thought Fusil: no man could be really bad who was ready to fight hard for the force he served.
*
Pilgrim stared through the porthole of his cabin into the night and waited for the quick sequence of flashes. One, two, three. He counted the seconds with the help of his wristwatch and the three flashes were repeated in ten seconds. This was the first buoy marking The Shallows. The ship began to alter course to port to head for the dredged channel.
He turned away. On the settee was the heroin, wrapped in small parcels, each of which had been coated with a waterproof sealing agent. He picked them up and carefully worked them into the deflated rubber container, made certain the line to the light was fast, checked the setting of the time switch, coupled up the gas canister and released the gas. The container inflated immediately, but into a cylindrical shape, not a spherical one. At the pre-determined pressure, a valve in the container shut: should there be any leakage of gas, the valve would allow a compensating amount of gas through.
He carried the container over to the porthole. It was just one inch less in diameter than the port, proving the extent of their planning. He pressed down the time switch on the light, to activate it, then threw the battery case away from the hull: the weight ensured it held a trajectory which took the inflated container well clear.
He used a penknife to slit up the three coats. He threw the pieces out of the port.
*
On the wing of the bridge, the third officer stared aft. The captain hurried out of the wheelhouse. “When was the last plot, Third?”
“Two minutes ago, sir. We’re dead on course and making seven knots.”
“Who altered the radar?”
“I did, to check more accurately our distance off number three buoy.”
“Humph!” muttered the captain, who always fussed when coming into port.
The cadet on watch reported from the wheelhouse that Wheelon Point was abeam, five miles, by radar.
Ahead, a small vessel altered course and her green starboard steaming light became cut off. They passed the two white anchor lights of a ship awaiting a berth or the tide.
“Funny thing, sir,” said the third officer. “When I was looking aft just now, someone was throwing what looked like a load of clothing out of one of the ports.”
“What’s the point of looking aft? Concentrate on keeping an efficient watch for’d. How long before we pick up the pilot?”
“Twenty minutes, sir, at our present speed.”
“Humph!” muttered the captain, who had not expected the third to be able to give him the information.
Chapter 11
It was well after midnight, but because the T.S.S. Western Sand had docked late, the police and customs’ search was still continuing.
Passengers had had the option of spending the night on the ship: Pilgrim was one of about thirty who’d elected to disembark as soon as possible. He carried his own suitcases over to the bench for customs inspection — all ‘Nothing to declare’ exits had been closed — and waited. A single ring customs officer came across and, despite everything, Pilgrim felt nervous. Not knowing that the tip-off had been in very general terms, he believed that the Western Sand had been pinpointed and he was becoming more and more scared that some trace of the drugs he had carried would he evident to nail him as having been the courier.
The customs officer showed him the usual printed notice to travellers. He reported only the legitimate amount of cigarettes and drink, together with a few presents bought for his niece. The customs officer nodded, asked how long he’d been out of the country, asked to see his passport, in itself sufficiently unusual to increase Pilgrim’s unease, and then called for the two suitcases to be opened.
The customs officer expertly searched the suitcases. “Did you fly out of Athens?”
“Yes, I did.”
“D’you like the country?”
“Very much.” Pilgrim went to close the suitcases since the other seemed to have finished.
“Just wait a moment. Is this all your baggage?”
“Yes, it is. Why?”
“You seem to have made do with very few clothes for a three weeks’ stay in Greece and a week on the boat, Mr. Pilgrim?”
Pilgrim stared at the suitcases, shocked to discover the organisation had made a mistake. Because he’d had to jettison the three coats, and the trousers belonging to the two suits, he was patently underclothed for his time abroad.
&n
bsp; The customs officer remained polite, but called across an older and senior man. After a murmured conversation, the suitcases were searched for the second time. As they tapped the linings, checked thicknesses with a special gauge, and examined every article at length, Pilgrim began to sweat.
Yarrow, seeing what was happening, walked over. Pilgrim was asked if he minded being personally searched and he hesitated because he couldn’t decide whether innocence was better simulated by ready acceptance or indignant initial refusal. In the end, he agreed and was searched in a nearby office. When he returned, he saw his now emptied suitcases were being given to a black Labrador to smell and for a few seconds was completely panic-stricken as he credited the dog with miraculous powers of being able to pick up the scent of the heroin even though this had been in sealed bags in the now missing coats.
His passport was examined again and its details taken. He was asked for his home address and he gave one.
They finally let him go, obviously puzzled, wondering what racket he was in, yet satisfied he was not smuggling heroin.
A car was waiting for him. The driver asked him what had happened, then refused to talk again for the whole of the journey up to London. When he was dropped outside his semi-detached house in Ealing, just beyond the common, he was handed a small parcel. He unwrapped this in the house and found it contained the promised thousand pounds, in five-pound notes. Never again, he swore, still feeling sick at the thought of what he’d gone through in the customs shed.
*
Yarrow, who was almost as intelligent as he believed himself to be, accepted a drink from the third officer and amusedly wondered if this was contraband. He yawned and thought about his coming date with a blonde who’d real potential.
“You and the customs have certainly gone over the ship with a fine tooth-comb,” said the third officer — in his early twenties and with a look of tired decadence which suggested the stories of a wife in every port weren’t always myths. “What were you after?”
The Murder Line (C.I.D. Room Book 8) Page 9