by John Creasey
Why had the self-styled doctor switched on the headlights?
The Toff, staring hard, centred his gaze on the grey curtains of the saloon immediately behind the driver. They gaped a trifle where they overlapped; and suddenly the Toff’s lips tightened; the little imp of doubt grinned widely.
If everything was straight and above-board, the doctor would hardly be carrying a passenger in the rear when the seat next to him was vacant. Yet twice the red glow of a cigarette spread for a second, and died down.
Someone was in the back of the Daimler; there was no shred of doubt about it.
‘Stranger and stranger,’ thought the Toff, and he was beginning to enjoy himself.
As the two cars crawled in ghostly succession, he formed an opinion in the manner that had made him the best-hated man in the shadier purlieus of the East End.
After the driver of the Daimler had jammed on his brakes and slithered to safety he had deliberately dazzled the Toff by switching on the headlights. Why? Obviously to give that mysterious passenger time to draw the curtains and hide his face. And the passenger was not overloaded with little grey cells; otherwise he would have doused the cigarette.
The Toff’s conjecture was not water-tight, but it was sound enough to rouse that curiosity. He had positive doubts of the doctor’s story, but he didn’t voice them. There might be more in this than met the eye, but it would not be revealed by slinging sudden questions. Nor, unless things happened quickly, would it be revealed that night.
The cars, still nose to nose, reached the wider stretch of road. The Toff swung his Frazer-Nash close to the hedge; brambles scratched along the wings as he smiled blandly at the man with the beard. A more affable, anger-appeased motorist would have been hard to find.
‘Here we are,’ the Toff said. ‘But go steady for the next half-mile. The road twists about a lot, and everybody doesn’t know it as well as I do.’
The ‘doctor’ ignored the thrust.
‘You have my very best thanks. I very much appreciate your courtesy, sir.’
‘Delighted,’ lied the Toff, and waved his hand.
His fingers could have brushed the body of the Daimler as it squeezed past. Taking a cigarette from his case, the Toff struck a match as the doctor, in line with him, nodded with that touch of condescending arrogance which had annoyed the Toff before, and angered him again now beyond all reason.
The Toff bit back an acid comment. He made an ineffectual effort to see through the drawn curtains, and then shrugged his shoulders. It was a promising little mystery nipped in the bud. A pity.
And then suddenly his jaw hardened, and subconsciously his hand moved towards his fob pocket, where in days of ‘off’ business he parked his gun. For out of the corners of his eyes he saw the curtains widen; the mysterious passenger was curious.
The Toff was very wary, even before he saw the gun poking towards him from the rear window.
2: AND MAKES A DISCOVERY
The Toff’s teeth snapped viciously and he ducked, grabbed for his own gun. But before he could draw, the air behind him was punctured by two yellow stabs of flame! Two soft ‘zutts’ told of an efficient silencer; lead nosed bullets potted into the rear of the sports car.
Tight-lipped with fury, the Toff found his gun and screwed round to take aim, still keeping under cover of his car’s hood. But before his finger touched the trigger the air was split again by two yellow flashes; a bullet plonked into the rear offside wheel, and the little car lurched on one side as the tyre burst with a deafening report.
The Toff felt the machine quiver from bonnet to tail-lamp; he stumbled helplessly forward, losing his grip on his gun and banging his nose painfully on the dashboard. Tears swam in his eyes, half-blinding him as he crouched out of the line of fire. He was burning to take a pot shot at the gunman, but he knew better than to show so much as the tip of his nose. For once in his life he had been caught for a sucker; there was no need to act like one!
He made a lightning review of the possibilities as he regained his automatic. Was the attack a deliberate and planned attempt on his life? It would not have been the first; there were a hundred rogues who hated him enough, for it. Or had Providence rocketed him into trouble coincidentally?
The latter, he fancied, but for the moment it did not count two peas. When the danger was past he could reason it out. Meanwhile, would the gunman in the Daimler take another blinder, or . . .
The sudden, fierce whirr of the Daimler’s engine answered him. The big car leapt into life, and the black roof, all that Rollison permitted himself to see, slid along the hedges.
‘They’re off,’ muttered the Toff, and his fingers tightened round the handle of his gun. A mad thought was scurrying through his mind, tempting, enticing. If he stood up from his cover and emptied his gun after the Daimler there was a sound chance of sending the big car into the hedge; what happened after that would be in the hands of the gods.
It was a beautiful thought. The Toff licked his lips over it, and his eyes sparkled. Nine times out of ten he would have taken the chance, and been coolly confident of getting away with it. But this time . . .
He had a hunch that there was something farther along the road, something from which the Daimler was flying hell for leather, and which the gunman was very anxious to hide for a while. It occurred to the Toff that it would be better to let the Daimler go, to hurry along the road as quickly as he could, and find what there was to find. So for once he played for safety.
Still crouching, he saw that flying roof twist with a bend in the road out of shooting range. The Daimler was a hundred yards away, still gathering speed, weird and ghostly beneath the moon. Watching it, the Toff felt a queer intuition that he was only on the fringe of trouble; and a question thudded into his head, urgent and worrying.
What would he find when he went on?
One thing was certain. The attack had much more behind it than the attempted annihilation of the Hon. Richard Rollison. Otherwise the shooting would have had a more personal note from the outset.
With which comforting thought the Toff stepped quickly into the road and surveyed the damage. A wing of his car was badly dented, a piece was chipped from the number-plate; but that, apart from the punctured tyre, was the extent of the trouble.
‘It might have been a lot worse,’ he consoled himself, dipping into the tool-box for the jack. He had a habit, when alone, of talking aloud, usually in the plural. It fortified him, he said.
He started to get the wheel off. ‘We ought to have the spare wheel on inside ten minutes,’ he told the world at large, ‘and then we shall see what they wanted to stop us from seeing. And it looks very much as though we shall be very busy in the not too distant future.’
And again, as he spoke, his eyes were like flints, and his shapely lips were pressed together in a thin line. Many things were passing through his mind as he worked, but he told the world nothing about them.
A fraction over the ten minutes later, Rollison straightened his back and sighed thankfully. He tossed the tools back in the box, flung the busted wheel into the rear seat, and swung himself into the driving position.
The engine hummed to a touch on the switch. He let in his clutch gently, switched on the headlights, and as the car nosed ahead, looked right and left on the shimmering surface of the road. He did not propose to miss a thing.
A quarter of a mile dropped behind, and the gentle hum of his engine harmonized again with the quiet of the night. The moon was so bright that he switched off the headlights; the ribbon of road unwinding in front of him seemed as empty of trouble as the blue-grey sky.
And then, taking a bend slowly, Rollison caught his first glimpse of the night’s dreadful secret.
Black and grim at the side of the road were the shattered remains of a big car.
The Toff stared at it for a moment; then he tightened his grip round the steering-wheel.
‘I had a hunch,’ he reminded himself softly, ‘that there was trouble – big trouble – a
nd I fancy I was right.’
He drew close to the wreckage. Nothing else moved; no sound came. The hush of the night seemed to whisper death – death which was hiding amidst the ruins of that smashed-up car.
As Rollison pulled in beside the wrecked car, he saw that it was a saloon Packard, with its radiator buried in the ditch at the side of the road, where it had plunged helplessly. The body was crushed and twisted; the wings ripped away, and the windscreen was smashed into a thousand pieces.
Rollison stepped out of his car, and, as he drew nearer, he realized it had been the very devil of a smash.
But he was looking more for what had caused the smash than the effect of it. But for the Daimler and the attack which had been made on him, he would have jumped to the conclusion that it had been due to the driver’s recklessness. Now no such possibility entered his mind. The Packard had been deliberately wrecked by the man with the beard and his sharp-shooting passenger – and the Toff’s car had been put out of action to give the attackers a clear get-away before the alarm could be raised.
The Toff squeezed through the narrow gap between the car and the hedge. Thorns caught his coat and scratched his fingers, but he hardly noticed them. For he caught his first glimpse of the victim of the smash – the body of a man slumped in the driving seat amidst the wreckage. And as he saw him, the Toff knew there was not a chance in a thousand of the man being alive.
The victim’s right leg was doubled back beneath him. His eyes were glazed and sightless. One arm was bent across his chest, with his hand near his chin, as though he had darted his hand upwards to ward off the sudden terror that had loomed in front of him.
The moon shimmered on blood coming from a hole in the forehead, and there was no mistaking the cause of that wound. It was a bullet hole,
The Toff knew it, and his shoe tapped the surface of the road. His nostrils were distended as his breath came softly. In his mind’s eye there sprang a picture of a bearded face and a pair of baleful yellowish eyes.
Then he found himself thinking, unreasonably, inconsequently, of a name.
‘Garrotty’s in England,’ he muttered. ‘Garrotty the Yank. And this is gunman’s work. I wonder –’
He jerked himself together suddenly and bent down, feeling for the man’s heart. It was a mere formality; there was no movement, and he had expected none.
But he felt something damp against his hand, something which shone red in the moonlight. The man had been shot through the chest as well as the head.
The Toff stayed where he was for a moment, staring down. The face of the man was arresting, even in death. Saturnine, swarthy, like that of a man who had lived for many years in hot climates, there was a sardonic twist to those still lips, as though the man had died with mockery in his eyes.
The Toff took his hand away, stood up and peered about him. There would be the deuce to pay for this brutal murder on the country road. And, without question or doubt, it had traces of gangster work; in the vernacular, the man had been put on the spot, and the killers had made a good job of it.
Then the Toff, who was not easily surprised, saw something which made his heart miss a beat.
Odds and ends of steel were strewn about the road, mixed with a few pitiful possessions of the victim. A watch dangled from its chain, which had got caught in the running-board, the glass smashed, but the mechanism was still ticking. A case, half full of broken cigarettes, was close to it; and close by a trilby hat rested on its crown.
Then, entirely out of keeping with the rest, and some distance from the wrecked car, was a woman’s shoe.
The Toff picked it up. It jerked his mind from the horror of the murder, and his lips curled.
‘Puzzle,’ he muttered, ‘find the lady.’
The shoe was a small, satin-covered creation, more suited for a ballroom than for a journey by road. There was a film of dust over the satin, and here and there it was scratched and torn. Half-way up the heel was a patch of mud – and it was the mud which made the Toff frown suddenly. For it was wet.
In five minutes the Toff had learned enough to make the owner of the shoe a central figure in the mystery. In the ditch alongside the road ran a sluggish stream of water, more mud than anything else. And there were deeply-set footprints, fitting the shoe to a T at one place, and blurred out of recognition in another, while on the thorns of the hedge the Toff found a wisp or two of finely woven cloth.
The Toff fitted the clues in quickly. The girl had been travelling in the wrecked car, he reckoned, and had managed to get out of it before the smash. But her bid for safety had failed; almost certainly she had been in the Daimler, hidden from sight by those drawn curtains. No wonder he had been blinded to make sure that he saw nothing inside!
The Toff’s eyes were very hard as he turned away, stuffing the shoe into his coat pocket. He decided to waste no more time there, and he slipped quickly into the car. The quicker the police knew of the hold-up the better, but it was possible that the shoe would help the Toff to find a short cut to the murderers, and he looked on the shoe as his own special clue.
3: THE PUG IS VISITED
The Toff might not have had the true citizen’s regard for the police, but he treated that body of men with a measure of respect which they rarely appreciated. For instance, he spoke over the telephone from an A.A. box half a mile from the wrecked Packard to one, Chief Inspector McNab, of Scotland Yard, who was no bosom friend of the Toff’s. He told McNab just where a man had been killed near the London-Chelmsford road, and he promised McNab he would make sure that no one interfered with the wreckage until the police arrived.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was certainly murder – gun-play, Mac.’
It took McNab, a burly, square-jawed Scot, exactly forty-four minutes to reach the scene of the crime, accompanied by three equally grim-visaged plain-clothes men. McNab found the Packard and the murdered man just as he had been told. But he did not see the Toff, although the Toff saw him. It was the kind of thing that savoured of black magic, but in point of fact it was easy.
The Toff simply ran his car to a convenient lane off the main road after telephoning the police, and then perched himself on a five-barred gate near the Packard, smoking many cigarettes and persuading occasional motorists that he had had a smash, and that they would have to go back for a bit, making a long detour, unless they cared to wait for the breakdown gang. None of them waited.
Thanks to the moon, he saw the police car coming. McNab, whom he knew well, was easily recognizable. Then the Toff slipped off the gate, hurried across the field to his bus, and started for London.
He did not expect things to happen quickly, and he was quite prepared to await developments. Yet the affair loomed prominently in his thoughts, especially because of the hush-hush attitude taken up by the police.
For when the Toff read the morning paper over the breakfast table, the murder had no front-page headlines, although it undoubtedly deserved them from a journalistic point of view. When he eventually found the report, there was nothing to suggest that there had been anything more unusual than a road smash. No mention was made at all of the gunshot wounds in the forehead and the chest.
“Funnier and funnier,’ thought the Toff, and then read the only useful piece of news in the paragraph. The dead man’s name was Goldman – Paul Goldman – and he had recently returned to England after a long sojourn in Turkey.
‘I could have guessed most of that myself,’ murmured the Toff, as he got up from the table. ‘I wonder what McNab will have to say about it?’
McNab telephoned him early, and asked him to go round to the Yard after he had given evidence against Lopez the Killer. When the Toff arrived he found the Chief-Inspector almost fussy, which was merely a device to persuade the Toff not to put up difficulties over the hush-hush business, and the Toff was not surprised.
Nor was he surprised when McNab refused to talk much. He agreed, generously, that there were a thousand Daimlers which might have answered his description of the murder
car. Nor could the police be expected to put their hands on the driver of the Daimler because he had a beard and looked like an Egyptian.
But there was not a shred of doubt that the police knew more about the affair than they professed, and it gave the Toff to think, furiously.
He did not say so.
‘So we’re stuck,’ he suggested to McNab. They were in the latter’s poky office at Scotland Yard, which possessed only one comfortable chair – McNab’s – and he showed no inclination to linger.
The Scot grunted.
‘Maybe. We know Garrotty’s about, mind ye.’
‘Och aye,’ grinned Rollison, ‘and we might guess that Garrotty killed Goldman, But we don’t know anything about the man with the beard’ – the Toff’s grin widened –’and we don’t know much about Goldman himself. Or do we?’ He arched his brows inquisitively. ‘Seeing that I found him, it doesn’t seem fair to leave me out in the cold.’
McNab rubbed his chin, and then he grew talkative, which told the Toff that the Scot was giving nothing away beyond a little information which might be picked up from the later editions of the yellow Press.
‘Goldman,’ said McNab portentously, but with feeling, ‘was a damn’ fool. He meddled with things that were too big for him –’
The Toff interrupted.
‘A point for you,’ he conceded. ‘Goldman meddled – I’m meddling. Sounds like a conjugation of verbs, doesn’t it, Mac?’ He beamed, and waved his hand airily. ‘But don’t let me stop you.’
McNab bit the end off a cigar.
‘You’re getting funny,’ he growled. ‘See here, Rolleeson. The man Goldman was bad from beginning to end. He saw the inside of Pentonville before he went abroad, and then he mixed himself up with a gang of thieves. You know the result of it.’