‘There’ll be no need for any evidence giving because there’ll be no case in court. Not over this, anyway.’ George was still listening – or trying to – to the space behind her. How was Julie coping? Had she opened the door; had she got in? Somewhere deep inside her head she prayed that she had.
‘So you say,’ the old woman began, and now the guard lost his temper.
‘Out you go,’ he said. ‘You done right gettin’ me, but I’ve called the police and now you can be on your way. Yes, I mean it. You can wait outside if you want to talk to the police yourself and maybe they’ll want a word anyway, but right now out of here you go.’ And he walked further into the room and closed the door firmly behind him, leaving the old woman and dog outside, both yapping furiously.
‘All right, then.’ The guard was a plump rumpled man in late middle age, clearly not very fit and sweating nervously. ‘I’ve sent for the police so don’t you go getting clever with me. I only come in because I was afraid – because of the risk you might take off again before the police got here.’
‘Is that what the old witch said?’ George smiled at him. A little charm, she thought, to oil the wheels. ‘Well, she had a point. Or would have if I’d been a criminal. But I’m not. I’m one of the team on the new Ripper murders. You’ll have read about them, of course, or seen the news on the TV.’
His eyes widened. ‘Eh?’ There was fear there as well as excitement and she shook her head kindly.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘No bodies here. But we have cause to suspect that – well, I can’t say too much. You understand how it is, being in security yourself?’ She smiled as bewitchingly as she knew how.
He looked doubtful. ‘Why should you be looking around here on that case? Wasn’t all those murders done in the City?’
‘Indeed they were.’ She looked admiring as though he’d said something of great wisdom. ‘But we have cause to suspect a link between this business and some of the people on the periphery of the case.’ And she nodded confidentially at him, and he nodded back, clearly not certain what the periphery might be.
‘Have you got the proof you’re right in what you say you are?’
She smiled even more widely and reached into her pocket – at which he flinched slightly, but bravely stood his ground – and pulled out the police pass she carried. ‘Here you are. See? I’m a pathologist.’
He looked at the pass and then at her. ‘Why on earth should a pathologist be climbing into windows? That doesn’t make sense at all.’
She smiled another of her special smiles. ‘Well, of course I should leave it to the Superintendent or the Inspector, but well, you know how it is with bosses. They never want to listen to the ideas other people have, so I thought I’d follow up a hunch of my own. I dare say you do the same in this building, from time to time!’
‘This ain’t my building,’ the man said. ‘I work next door. The old girl came and called me out when she saw you climbin’ in.’ He sniffed. ‘She’s a bloody pest. Lives up the top of the road but always comes down here to walk that horrible dog, but really so’s she can snoop. She knows I’m keyholder for a few of the buildings around, seeing my company’s the only one what’s got twenty-four-hour security surveillance.’ He said it with a hint of pride. ‘Anyway, I didn’t believe her first off, to tell the truth. She’s such an old Nosy Parker she causes more trouble than you’d believe. But she went on and on, was so sure, I didn’t have much choice.’ He looked at George and for a moment produced a sort of shamefaced grin. ‘It was easier to do what she wanted than not, if you follow me. And here you are after all, so she was right, damn her! Anyway, the police’ll be here soon and you can sort it out with them.’ He lifted his head sharply and listened. ‘Is that a siren?’
It was. Even above the continuing yapping from the corridor outside she could hear it and now all her fears for Julie came back.
‘You stay here,’ the guard said. ‘If you budge out then I’ll – Well, just you stay here. I’m going to fetch ’em in –’ He went out and closed the door firmly behind him.
At once George shot behind the screen, afraid she would find Julie still crouching there, but to her huge relief, she wasn’t. She pushed on the door that Julie had been trying to open and it held fast. Her spirits lifted.
‘Julie.’ She bent to hiss through the keyhole. ‘Can you hear me?’
There was silence and she risked making more noise and scratched on the door panels. After a moment there was a soft scratching in reply.
‘Keep out of sight if you can,’ George murmured, her lips close to the keyhole. ‘With a bit of luck they won’t look in here.’
Behind her the door of the main room opened again and she shot out, knowing her face was red and unable to do anything about it. The uniformed policemen who were standing in the doorway stared at her and she stared back. She knew neither of them, but then, why should she? They were local.
‘I’d be grateful if you’d put in a call to Ratcliffe Street nick,’ she said as easily as she could, leaning against the bench beside her with both hands in her pockets. ‘Ask for – let me see – Superintendent Hathaway or Inspector –’ She stopped and thought, Dudley? Heaven forfend. ‘Sergeant Urquhart, who are all from the Ripper team. They’ll tell you who I am.’ She pulled her hand out of her pocket and held out her pass.
The smaller of the two policemen came towards her and took the pass, stared at it and then at her. ‘Are you telling me that you’re one of the Force?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Just one of the team. I’m the forensic pathologist at the Royal Eastern Hospital. We’re handling the new Ripper murders. There’s a van outside this building’ – she jerked her head in the general direction – ‘that was involved with one of the people involved in the investigation. It’s hard to explain. Just let me say I had a hunch, found out the address of this building – where the van was – and came here to look around. I’m sure you understand.’
The policeman clearly did not. ‘Why did you have to get in through the window, which is what I’m told you did?’
‘The door was padlocked,’ she said with sweet reasonableness. ‘What else could I do?’
‘Get a proper warrant and search that way,’ the policeman said. ‘If you really are on this case.’ He looked down at her pass and the glowering photograph of her on it. ‘How do we know you didn’t pinch this? That you’re not just another villain?’
She smiled delightedly at him. ‘Oh, thank you! I hate that picture – it doesn’t look a bit like me, does it? I told Gus as much when I got the pass – Superintendent Hathaway, that is – and he said I do look like that and there was no need to fuss. But now you think maybe I pinched it – you’ve truly made my day.’
‘Um, Jerry?’ The other policeman, who she could now see was rather younger and clearly the junior of the duo, came forwards. ‘There’s something here that I –’
Jerry raised a magisterial hand and his colleague subsided. ‘Pictures on passes are never all that good,’ he said. ‘This could be you. On the other hand, it mightn’t be. And I still say, what proof have I got that you really are involved in this investigation?’
‘Jerry,’ the other policeman said a little more urgently, and this time his colleague turned and glared at him.
‘What?’
‘Um she called him Gus,’ he muttered.
‘What’s that? She what?’
‘She called him Gus.’ The younger policeman looked a little braver. ‘How’d she know that if she wasn’t on the team?’
‘Gus? What are you on about?’
‘Superintendent Hathaway, Jerry. He was one of our lecturers at Hendon last month. He’s called Gus. And she knew it.’
There was a little silence and then the other policeman turned back to George. ‘Have you touched anything in here?’
She looked around and then pointed. ‘That stuff over there on the bench. The blue and the green. Yes. These labels in this box here. But otherwise …’ She lo
oked around. ‘That’s about it.’
The policeman tucked his hat under his arm and began to walk around the room, looking at everything as his colleague and George watched him in silence. The old lady and her dog now sounded much further away, though the yapping could still be heard from time to time, and George stretched her ears, trying to hear whether any sounds were coming from the room in the corner.
When the policeman called Jerry moved the dust cover and then the screen she felt her heart literally jump a beat. It was a choking sensation and her pulse was so pounding she thought he’d be able to hear it, but all he did was rattle the door of the office, satisfied himself it was locked and then turned back to her. ‘OK, lady. You come with us. I’ll take you back to the station and we’ll make a few calls to see if you are what you say you are. But Gawd ’elp you if you’re not.’
Gus stood and stared at her, his face quite expressionless. She stared back, her hands shoved deep into her pockets, trying to look as blank as he did. She suspected, however, that she looked anxious and apologetic. She certainly felt it.
He sighed then, and went over to the glass wall that separated his office from the main incident room, which was buzzing with activity. ‘Honestly, George, you make life hell sometimes. What were you thinking of to go snuffling around that way?’
‘Snuffling?’ she said. ‘You make me sound like a dog. Oh, Gus, you should have heard that awful dog the old woman had. It really was –’
‘George, shut up!’ He turned on her and now he was far from expressionless; he looked exceedingly angry. ‘Look, I bow to no one in my admiration for your cleverness. You get ideas and you make deductions that leave me breathless sometimes – even if they’re wildly out, there’s always something in them that makes sense. But you really have to stop being such a bloody loose cannon, rolling round this way.’
‘First I’m a dog and now I’m a bit of armoury,’ she murmured. She looked up at him but he was clearly in no mood for her feeble humour so she straightened her face. ‘OK, Gus. I’m sorry. I was wrong. It was just that I thought there had to be some stuff there that’d help us, seeing the van’s linked with the place. It made sense to me to go and have a good look round.’
‘We’d have had a look round ourselves in due course, once we’d got a warrant! You know about warrants? Those bits of paper that make what we do legal and which make it possible for us to get evidence into court? Without them we’re no better than a bloody police state. Which this country is not.’
She took a deep breath. This was as angry as she had ever seen him, and the degree of control he was exercising shamed her. ‘I truly do apologize, Gus.’ She meant it. ‘I suppose I was impatient and it seemed something useful to do. And I discovered some stuff that does show the way to –’
‘It’s no use till we go there ourselves,’ he said flatly. ‘With a warrant. You must realize that.’
‘Yes. But please let me tell you!’
He was silent for a moment and then threw both hands up and went back to his desk to sit down. ‘So, tell me.’
She did, at length, and in spite of himself he became more and more absorbed in her account of her findings.
‘So it’s a commercial espionage operation. They get hold of original designs from expensive designers, copy the samples and then –’
‘Sell them at inflated prices in inferior fabrics. Yes,’ she said. ‘And Alice Diamond has to be bang in the middle of it all. That’s what she was bringing back from Italy, wasn’t it? Samples of designer clothes. And the chap who met her at Heathrow and took them from her trolley is working for this Max Hazell chap. Which means she is too. You didn’t seem to think much of that contact – I mean, all that stuff about the van just happening to be borrowed because it was available. I thought there had to be more to it than that. Which was why I went to look. And truly, Gus, I reckon one hell of a lot of money’s going through that business one way or another. Once we find out what’s in the office, it’ll be easier.’
Gus tilted his head. ‘What office?’
She blinked, pulling herself back from the brink of saying too much. ‘Oh, the one in the corner. I opened all sorts of doors and there was one in the corner of one of the big rooms that I reckon had to lead to an office but it was locked. I’d love to see what’s in there. It’d answer a hell of a lot of questions, I’ll bet you.’ She thought yearningly of Julie. Was she still there? Had she managed to get out? Should she, George, go back as soon as she could and see if she needed extricating? Or … Oh hell.
‘How did you know where to go?’ Gus said then.
‘Mmm?’ She blinked at him again. ‘Well, I just sort of looked around you know. Worked out the geography of the place and went looking for a room to match the one where I found the fabrics and there was this door and –’
‘No,’ Gus said with exaggerated patience. ‘I mean how did you know where to go to do your break-in? How did you get the address of Max Hazell’s place?’
She stared at him and felt as though her blood was congealing in her veins. How did she know? How could she say without implicating Julie? And that just couldn’t be considered.
‘Um,’ she said, aware of the way his eyes were fixed on hers and the tilt of his eyebrows, which spoke of deep suspicion. ‘I – the computer –’ She took a breath. ‘You know how it is with computers. You hit the wrong key and suddenly you’re into a whole lot of info you didn’t really want. I was putting in my report and it happened.’ At least her lying abilities were marshalling themselves. She didn’t like using them on Gus, but sometimes a person had to. ‘I thought I’d lost all the stuff I’d put in and I was nearly finished too, but then I saw that it was Mike Urquhart’s stuff that I’d accessed by accident, and there it was. It put the idea into my head. I mean, you were busy here and there wasn’t anything else I could do, so I thought, why not go over to Wembley and have a look around. And then I hit another key and this time I got my own copy back. It was a great relief,’ she finished piously.
‘Hmm.’ Gus’s gaze left her face and wandered off behind her head to the incident room on the other side of the glass. ‘I see. That was how. Very fortunate, wasn’t it?’
‘Wasn’t it just?’ she said with enthusiasm. ‘So, now you’ll come with me and take a look too? As soon as you can get a warrant? And then after that, let me come with you to talk to Alice Diamond again –’
‘Again?’
‘You’ve talked to her before, haven’t you?’ She was on an improvisatory roll now. ‘So talk to her again. Only let me come along too, what do you say? I might be able to, well, you know, two women together. She might talk more to me.’
‘I haven’t the least doubt she’d talk more to you,’ Gus said drily. ‘If you shut up long enough to let her. I’ll think about it. Right now, I have to talk to my team. As long as they’re all there. I’ll make a check and see where everyone is and what they’ve been up to.’ He looked at her with eyes wide and smiling and George thought, he knows. The bastard knows I went with Julie and he’s going to drop me right in it. And of course, get Julie. And I’ve no one to blame but myself.
She followed him out of his office into the incident room with her head spinning as she tried to think of a convincing tale she could tell to cover Julie’s absence. It wasn’t as though she was a member of the detective force; as a uniformed officer Julie’s job on this team was station-based. She had no leeway to wander off the way CID people sometimes could to follow a lead they had picked up. The moment of her discovery was on her and it was, George reminded herself yet again, all her fault. She couldn’t let it happen. She put out her hand to catch hold of Gus by the elbow and pull him back; she had to tell him the whole truth and trust to his innate goodheartedness to protect Julie. Not that she was too sanguine because she knew that when it came to matters to do with the Force, Gus was a sea-green incorruptible. But for all that, he had to be told.
21
He was through the door and into the incident room be
fore she could reach him, and it was too late to pull him back. He had eluded her grasp expertly as though aware that she was trying to stop him and again she thought, he knows. The rocket’s going to go up with such an explosion and I don’t think I have any idea what I can do.
‘Right!’ Gus called loudly. ‘What’s everyone doing? I want a progress report. Roop – Rupert, let’s go through the roll and see who’s doing what and with which and to whom.’
Dudley, who had been head down over one of the computer screens, lifted his chin and sighed. ‘It’s getting a bit late, Guv.’
‘It certainly is. So the sooner we get on with things the better.’ Gus sounded sunny. Too sunny. George felt sick. ‘Let’s start with the uniformed lot, shall we? Then they can go home to make the best of what’s left of Sunday and us poor CIDs’ll work on into the midnight hours, hmm?’ He showed his teeth in a great glimmering grin and caught George’s eye, and she could have hit him. He was tormenting her and doing it deliberately, she was sure of it. ‘OK, Roop, let’s get on with it.’
Roop got on with it, trailing through the various members of the team and what they had been doing. They listened to accounts of long searches to find the people in the Creechurch Lane building and the painstaking collection of statements from them to add to those already collected from people living or working near the other murder sites. They heard of similar actions in the Market at Spitalfields and found that at neither place did anyone know anything at all about anything and certainly no one had seen either victim or anything that might have suggested a useful line of inquiry.
‘Not that they was eager to help,’ the reporting sergeant said gloomily. ‘You’d think on a case like this people’d be glad to give you all the co-operation they could, but it’s the usual business of “if you’re talking to the Bill then act like you’ve got a terminal case of verbal constipation”.’
‘Then try again tomorrow,’ Gus said briskly. ‘People can be different when they’re talking in their boss’s time, at work, than when they’re using their own at home. OK. What’s next? Ah, yes. Victims’ interests. The Committees and suchlike they sat on. And the family connections and their activities. Who’s on that?’
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