Trouble

by Michael Gilbert

  “It’s not right, I know – stopping you in the street like this. If it hadn’t been so important I’d never have dared do it. I expect you’re in a terrible hurry, too.”

  “Not really,” said Anthony. “If it’s important and you think I can help, let’s have a word.”

  They were outside the Eagle and Child. It would be almost empty at that hour. He led the way in, settled Mrs. Montgomery at a corner table, ordered a gin and lime for her and a beer for himself and sat down. They were the only people in the bar.

  “Now,” he said, “what’s it all about?”

  Having been brought to the point, Mrs. Montgomery seemed to be finding it hard to begin. Then she said, “It’s Ted—that’s my husband. You know him.”

  “We all know Monty.”

  The use of his nickname seemed to encourage her.

  “What I wanted to say was that there’s something wrong with him. These last few weeks. He’s been almost out of his mind. I don’t mind him hitting me, but he’s started hitting the children. He’s never done that before.”

  Now Anthony really was startled. He knew Sergeant Montgomery, on duty, as the best sort of policeman. Steady, not wildly intelligent, but experienced and reliable. He said, “What in the world has got into him?”

  Mrs. Montgomery looked at him, for a moment, quite steadily. Then she said, “You’re not a policeman, Mr. Lee-owny, are you? Not exactly.”

  “I’m no sort of policeman at all.”

  “If I was to tell you something which – something you’d have to take some official action about if you was a policeman – would you promise not to say anything about it?”

  How often and in how many different ways had this question been put to him? A sobbing girl, a defiant boy. If I tell you, promise you won’t let it go any further—

  He said, as he always did, “I should have to be guided by my conscience. If it’s nothing to do with my probation work, I’d probably have no need to say anything to anyone. But I can’t make promises in advance.”

  Mrs. Montgomery thought about this. She was no fool, as Anthony realised, and she understood exactly what he meant. But the desire for advice was stronger than discretion. The story came tumbling out.

  “You mean,” said Anthony, “that Mr. Drayling’s been lending him money to bet with on the dogs and now he can’t pay him back.”

  “He couldn’t, not possibly. Lately it’s been all losses. He won’t tell me what it adds up to, but it must be hundreds of pounds.”

  “Suppose your husband stopped. Suppose he said, ‘No more bets. I’ll pay you back what I owe you as quickly as I can. A few pounds a week.’ “

  “That’s what I told him. But he said he couldn’t do it. Because if he did, Mr. Drayling would report him to the Superintendent and he’d be out. No question. He’s been twenty years in the force. It’d break his heart.”

  Anthony put the next question cautiously. He said, “Is there something Drayling wants him to do in exchange for letting him off the debt?”

  “There must be. I’m sure of it. It might be that he wants Ted to keep him out of trouble. He’s soft on children, in a nasty sort of way. I know that because of something he said to young Ron. Ron didn’t understand it, but when he told me about it I understood all right. Well, suppose he went too far with some kid and got into trouble, it’d be useful to have Ted to get him out of it.”

  “I see,” said Anthony. He was not altogether surprised to learn about this side of Drayling’s character.

  He said, “The only way to tackle it is to try to scare Drayling. If he’s making threats, that’s blackmail. He can be put away for it. And the court leans over backwards to protect the person who’s being blackmailed.”

  All the same, he thought, not much use Sergeant Montgomery trying to hide his identity as ‘Mr. X’.

  What an unpleasant person Drayling was. He had heard rumours about him before. Apparently none of his own circle had suspected anything, but Anthony lived in two worlds and it was from the underworld that the hints had come. Nothing definite, just a smell. It was very possible that Mrs. Montgomery was right. It would undoubtedly be useful to a man like Drayling to have a police ally handy. He seemed to remember that Monty had some job connected with the Observatory. He had been on his way there when the trouble first broke out. And Drayling’s place was alongside the Observatory.

  Moreover, what he did would have cost Drayling very little. A double-chancer! One of Anthony’s earliest charges, a precociously evil imp of sixteen, had explained it to him. You got a mug in debt to you and took him to the races. There weren’t often more than two dogs with a chance. You put him on one and backed the other yourself. If the mug won, his money came back to you in part repayment of his debt. If you won, this would more than pay for the mug’s stake.

  Just the sort of game to appeal to a man like Drayling. But nothing in it was connected, even remotely, with the two gangs of boys, or with plans to land explosive on the banks of the Thames.

  By the time Anthony reached this conclusion he had arrived at the corner of Wick Lane and Camlet Road. Common sense had scored a victory over conscience. He had taken two paces past the telephone box and towards the entrance to the Social Club when it happened.

  A moment of blinding light, a great flash of flame swallowed by a wash of blackness. The sound and the shock wave hit him together. Sight and thought were suspended. Then he saw the orange and crimson glow of fire and started in a stumbling run, unhurt, but dazed, down Wick Lane.

  When he reached the shack he saw that the explosion had blown a hole in the roof and the flames were being sucked up through it. The old woodwork of the building was already well alight. A fire alarm was hoo-hahing in the distance. He thought, they’ll never get the engine down this lane. If anything was to be done it had to be done quickly.

  He remembered, from the time he had visited the boys, that there were two rooms. An outer room, little more than a hall. A single room behind that.

  He tore open the front door. The blast that came out was heat, not flame. The seat of the fire was in the inner room. He stumbled and almost fell over the body on the floor. This was one job which he could do. He grabbed at a coat, felt for the collar and hauled the body out into the lane. There was light enough for him to see that it was Boy Drummer. Blood was pumping from a crack in his head and darkening his light hair. So he, at least, was alive. And that meant that he had to go backThe heat in the outer room was greater than before, but just tolerable. He noticed, with surprise, that there was very little smoke and wondered about this until he realised that he had only stopped to think because he was afraid. He opened the inner door.

  He was looking into a furnace. The heat was appalling. He could see four bodies sprawled on the floor. The nearest was lying face downwards. He grabbed at the coat collar and cried out. The cloth he had hold of was already smouldering.

  He tore the silk scarf from his neck, wrapped it round his right hand and bent down again to pull. This one was heavier than young Drummer. As he pulled the body rolled over on to its back and at that moment a beam fell from the ceiling with a crash, landing across two of the other bodies. As the flames jumped up he saw that the boy he was trying to move was Len Lofthouse and that he was dead. The explosion had destroyed him.

  With a stab of panic he realised that his own coat was on fire. No time to do anything about that. Get out and get out quick. He turned and stumbled towards the door. It had slammed shut. He kicked at it savagely and stupidly. Then he stopped, for a moment, to think. Bloody fool. Turn the handle. That’s how you open a door.

  It was lucky his scarf was still round his hand because the metal handle was almost red hot. He turned it, the door swung open, he fell through and rolled. In the seconds of delay his trouser legs had caught fire. The agony was so intolerable that he opened his mouth to scream and inhaled a gulp of hot air. Then he started to crawl towards the outer door. His head was swimming. Only the stark realisation that if he stopped
he was finished kept him moving. As he reached the street door he saw that it was open and that there were men in the lane.

  Someone, Crispin Locke he thought, shouted out. A coat was thrown over him, wrapping him round. He screamed again. Then merciful blackness swallowed him.

  Part Two

  Dispersal

  17

  Anthony was in a private room in the Woolwich Hospital. His first five days had been spent in the Burns Unit. He had little memory of them and was anxious to forget them. Periods of pain when his flayed arms and legs were being dressed; periods of relief and drowsiness as the morphine injections took effect.

  During that time his only visitor had been Sandra. He had an impression of her face as she looked down at him for the few seconds allowed. She had been trying so hard to smile that it had made him smile too and this had seemed to please the nurse who was with her. After that he had hauled himself up slowly, day by day, out of the darkness, into the kindly light. Now he was beginning to get used to the fact that his body belonged to him; was not just a lay figure to be washed in warm saline and painted with mercuro-fluorescene.

  “I wanted them to take a colour photograph,” said Sandra. “You looked just like a Red Indian.”

  “Photographs be blowed,” said Anthony. “What I want is to get up.”

  “In a day or two Nurse Williams said. If you behave yourself.”

  “I refuse to behave myself. I want to know what’s happened. What are the police doing? Have they found out what caused the explosion? Is Boy Drummer alive?”

  “You’re not to worry about anything until you’re better.”

  “It worries me much more being treated like an idiot child.”

  “There, you see. You’ve worked yourself into a state. I shouldn’t be surprised if your temperature hadn’t gone up several points. Just wait till I tell Nurse Williams.”

  At the door she relented sufficiently to say, “Boy’s still unconscious. But the doctors are pretty sure they can save him.”

  On the tenth day he had his first outside visitor. He had been allowed up that afternoon and was feeling cheerful. His cheerfulness increased when he saw who it was.

  Mr. Norrie parked himself carefully on the chair beside the bed and examined Anthony.

  “Well, Lion,” he said, “I must say you look better than I’d been led to expect.”

  “I am better,” said Anthony.

  “Like to know what the doctor said about you? In cases of over twenty per cent burns, he told me, the chief enemy is shock. In this case they’ve observed practically no shock symptoms at all. Extraordinary mental resilience apparently.”

  “Thank you,” said Anthony. “I did have nightmares to start with. But now I seem to dream about nothing but scrambled egg. Do you think that’s a sign I ought to get up for breakfast?”

  “Doesn’t do to rush these things. All the same, we could do with you. Things are moving in a way I don’t like. Don’t like at all. You know Dr. Allpace?”

  “The Woolwich coroner?”

  “Right. And that’s a very suitable name for someone who tries to exceed the speed limit. The inquest opened last Thursday – that’s just a week after the fire – and if he’d been allowed to have his own way it would have closed the same day. He called only four witnesses. Just four, think of it. Summerson, the Guy’s pathologist, who kept his evidence toned down so as not to upset the families. It amounted only to the undisputed fact that Edward Drummer, Andrew Connors, Norman Younger and Leonard Lofthouse had died, either as the direct result of the explosion or in the fire that followed, more probably the former, and that in either case that death had been instantaneous.”

  “My God, yes,” said Anthony with a shudder. He was looking again into the furnace.

  “Then we had the fire brigade Site Inspector. He’d been on the scene as soon as the flames were under control. He said that in his view the fire itself had been caused by petrol. There were several gallons of it stored there – illegally, incidentally – in jerricans. Apparently they were for young Robin Drummer’s motorcycle. No one’s been able to ask him, of course.”

  “How is he?”

  “No change. But the medicos are hopeful that he’ll pull through all right. If the blow on the head hasn’t hit anything vital it doesn’t signify how long he remains unconscious. The longer the better, in some ways. The only thing is, he won’t remember much about the time before the explosion. And the longer he stays under the longer the gap will be. A pity, since he’s the only person left who could tell us what those boys were up to. After the Site Inspector we had the ATO, Major Webster.”

  “ATO?”

  “Ammunition Technical Officer, ex RAOC. On call to the police in matters involving explosive. Most of them are good chaps, but for some reason I didn’t think this one was very convincing. He seems to have visited the place once, talked to the Fire Brigade man and ducked out as quickly as possible. When the coroner asked him whether the explosion could have been caused by dynamite or opencast gelignite – putting the idea into his head, you see – his answer was that it was quite possible, but in view of the total destruction of the site … and so on and so on. In other words, he didn’t really know. The coroner then brought in a storeman from the Clipstone Sand and Gravel Works, who agreed that they used both these types of explosive. He was then asked if he could identify some detonators.”

  “You mean they had survived the fire?”

  “Yes. They were in a glass jar, which had fused in the heat, but stayed whole long enough for the contents to be identified. You know what a detonator looks like?”

  “No idea.”

  “It’s a copper tube, about an inch and a half long, with wires coming out of one end. The wires were outside the jar and had been burnt off, but there was enough left inside the jar for identification. The storeman agreed that they were common-type detonators and could have come from Clipstones. When he’d finished the coroner spent the rest of the morning expressing sympathy for the relatives who were there.”

  “Which were?”

  “Father Drummer, Sergeant Connors and his wife and Mrs. Younger, who’s a widow. Lofthouse didn’t seem to have produced any parents though there’s talk of an uncle in the north. It’s my opinion that if the coroner had closed the hearing before lunch he’d have got the verdict he was angling for. Boys playing with explosives they didn’t understand. Accidental death. However, he gave the jury the lunch interval to consider their verdict and when they came back it was clear they were unhappy. I think they realised they were being pushed and they didn’t like it. I’ve noticed that before about juries. It’s a great mistake to try to bear-lead them.”

  “Thank God for juries,” said Anthony. “But why was he in such a hurry?”

  “Because he remembered what happened after the New Cross fire.”

  “Yes. I see,” said Anthony. He too remembered the tribulations of the unhappy coroner after that catastrophe. “So what happened?”

  “The foreman, a nice little man, simply stood up and said that they weren’t satisfied that the evidence so far produced enabled them to arrive at any verdict at all. Allpace made the mistake of snapping at him. The situation seemed plain enough to him. No need to prolong the hearing. Must consider the feelings of the bereaved. The foreman wasn’t to be shifted. It turned out that he was an assistant in the Royal Arsenal Laboratory and I guess he knew more about explosions than most of the people in court. He said they wanted the opinion of a real expert – a nasty back hander at Major Webster – about what type of explosive was involved. He didn’t believe that the explosive used for quarrying would act in that way. The rest of the jury were solidly behind him and Allpace had to give way. He said that, since the jury seemed incapable of understanding evidence, he would adjourn for fifteen days and see if a witness could be produced who did satisfy them.”

  “And that’s where the matter stands at the moment?”

  “Until this morning.” Mr. Norrie produced from hi
s pocket a folded copy of the South-east London News. “I thought you might like to see this letter. In fact, it’s been copied in The Times, a rare compliment to a provincial newspaper, but I guess they knew what they were doing. The Wick Lane fire is headline news in all papers.”

  Anthony glanced first at the name of the correspondent, Angus McCaskie, a forthright character and a noted controversialist.

  As Chairman and Managing Director of the Clipstone Sand and Gravel Company I hope you will grant me the courtesy of your column to make a few points which may be of public interest.

  Coroners, as we know, are a law unto themselves. Which is another way of saying that in their courts very little attention is paid to the normal rules of procedure and evidence.

  One of the victims of the recent fire in Wick Lane – not, I am happy to learn, one of the four boys who were killed – was Robin Ernest Drummer. Robin was an employee of my firm. We use various types of explosive. On these slender grounds the Coroner, Dr. Allpace, saw fit to make certain suggestions to the jury. Indeed, ‘suggestions’ is too mild a word. To me they sounded more like directions. The jury were to find that Robin had abstracted explosive and detonators from my premises and in playing with them had caused the disaster referred to.

  You will perhaps notice that the only witness from my firm that the Coroner saw fit to call was my storeman. I am not criticising Seward. He was asked three questions and answered them as simply as he could. But if Dr. Allpace had followed what you might have considered to be the more normal practice of calling me, as the head of the firm and the party responsible for its overall management, I could have pointed out one or two important facts to him.

  Under the Control of Explosives Act 1952, and Regulations made from time to time under that Act, any premises upon which explosives are stored have to be licensed. It is a condition of the licence that the licensees prepare an accurate and up-to-date schedule of those explosives, indicating types and quantities. Moreover, they have to maintain a responsible person in charge for twenty-four hours in the day, so that the police can visit the premises at any hour of the day or night, without warning, to check those lists. Fortunately such a spot-check was made a fortnight ago. Our stores of PE 808, Nobel 704 and Slurry Explosive were all carefully checked and found to correspond with our schedules. Since we have had no cause to use any of them since, they still correspond. I need hardly add that all of them are kept in a proper store, the key to which lives in the safe in my office. It has not been suggested that Robin Drummer was, among other accomplishments, a safe-breaker.