Flight From Honour

by Gavin Lyall

  But Ranklin was having doubts; they had pushed their luck a long way already. “We haven’t really got grounds even for a citizen’s arrest.”

  O’Gilroy glared. “If it makes ye happier, I’ll swear I saw the little one stick the knife in. If’n we get them now, they’ll be loaded wid evidence, tickets for Brooklands and the like.”

  “No. Let the police do it. We can have them round here in five minutes.”

  O’Gilroy’s expression was pure exasperation, but when Ranklin turned back, he followed.

  The police station stood isolated on the corner of Gray’s Inn gardens, a red-brick fortress of law and order four storeys high with a semi-basement – probably the cells – beneath. They were shown into a small room, anonymous if that word included shiny, bilious green paintwork, while the desk sergeant called a uniformed inspector.

  Ranklin presented his (genuine) calling card and began: “There was an attempted murder – it may be a murder by now – at Brooklands aerodrome this afternoon. I know that’s for the Surrey police—” the Inspectors beefy face had begun to look resigned; “—but we’ve followed two men, suspects, from there to a house in Back Hill Street.”

  Now the expression was wariness. “Which house is that, sir?”

  Ranklin gave the number and knew that the Inspector recognised it. He looked at the floor, the walls and the window, then said: “I’d best telephone to Surrey about this, sir. When you say ‘suspects’, you mean you didn’t see them commit the act?”

  “Saw it wid me own two eyes,” O’Gilroy lied flatly.

  “Did you, sir? I don’t think I got your name . . .”

  “Tom Gorman.”

  “Yes, well, that’s certainly a help, sir. But I’d best confirm exactly what happened. It shouldn’t take long.”

  Ranklin demanded: “Couldn’t you at least put a guard on the house, send men to watch it, or—?”

  “If they’re in that house, they’re not going anywhere else, sir. It’s what you might call the end of the line. And – between us, sir – if they’re what you think they are, what they’re doing now is concocting an alibi with a dozen witnesses to say they’ve been there all day, nowhere near Brooklands.”

  Telepathically, Ranklin heard O’Gilroy saying “I told you so.” But aloud, it was: “Ah, then I’ll jest be stepping out for a smoke.” And his voice was so understanding and reasonable that Ranklin looked at him sharply.

  The Inspector frowned. “We’ll need a statement from you, sir.”

  “But only when yez sure there’s something to state about, isn’t that right? I’ll be back in a tick or so.”

  “That gentleman,” the inspector nodded at the closing door, “would be a colleague of yours, sir?”

  Ranklin managed to get his imagination onto a new tack. “He’s an engineer – working on our aeronautical side. Very competent chap,” he added, afraid that he was about to be proved right.

  Ten minutes later the Inspector was saying: “. . .they’ve got the Senator to a hospital in Kingston, and he’s still breathing, so . . . And no other eye-witnesses so far. It seems that everybody was busy staring at the aeroplanes – as perhaps you were yourself, sir.”

  “It’s what we were there for. But by now, if what you said is correct, those two we followed will have a cast-iron alibi.”

  “These Italians do stick together. And we’d just be stirring up trouble if we went barging in . . .”

  And let the Surrey police worry about their own unsolved cases, Ranklin realised.

  O’Gilroy walked in. His dark hair stuck out untidily from under his cap, but he spoke quite calmly. “I think ye’ve reason enough for going in there now, Inspector. Feller took a shot at me.” He laid an unfamiliar pistol on the table. “So I took a shot at him – ye know how one thing leads to t’other? Yer revolver, Captain.”

  “What happened to him?” the Inspector demanded.

  “Ye’d best go see. He’ll be waiting.”

  The Inspector grabbed the revolver, sniffed its barrel, then shook out the cartridges. Three were empty shells. He goggled at O’Gilroy. “Are you confessing to a murder?”

  19

  The police station had been ransacked for chairs, none of them comfortable, to crowd the little ‘interview’ room. O’Gilroy sat behind the small table, flanked by the Inspector, with Sir Basil Thomson on the opposite side and Ranklin, Dagner and Major Kell fitting in wherever they could. The rest of the space was taken up with tobacco smoke since even the Inspector, with direct permission from Sir Basil, had his pipe smouldering tentatively.

  Exactly what Kell was doing there, nobody had said, but perhaps he saw himself as a bridge between the worlds of officialdom and secrecy. Which was fine unless those worlds started pulling apart.

  Sir Basil was there because he was Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner for the Criminal Investigation Division and Special Branch. If this impressed O’Gilroy, there was no sign of it.

  “I would appreciate it, Sir Basil,” Dagner said, “that if Gorman makes any statement or answers any questions, it should be clearly understood that it is quite off any record.” His voice was polite but firm – and with no hint that he knew ‘Gorman’ by any other name.

  Sir Basil frowned. He wasn’t a career policeman, of course. He had trained as a barrister and gone on to govern colonies and prisons before coming to the Yard only a few months earlier. Now in his early fifties, his face above the austere wing collar seemed as patchwork as his career: long and sleepy-eyed, it might belong to an undertaker, but the bulbous nose and full lips suggested he knew which coffin they kept the brandy in.

  And nothing in face or career suggested he normally deferred to majors of the Indian Army.

  “Or,” Dagner added, “I should have, with respect, to advise Gorman to remain silent – as I believe a lawyer would.”

  Sir Basil decided to keep his authority in reserve and said cheerily: “Fine. By all means let us get to the truth of the matter. We know what happened at Brooklands, and you trailed this fellow up to town . . . Start from the moment you left this station.”

  Dagner endorsed this with a tiny nod and O’Gilroy took the cigarette from his mouth and said: “They’d gone in round the back, so that’s the way I went. . .”

  . . . to his surprise, the little courtyard was crammed with large lumps of stone, a half-finished statuette of the Virgin, and a litter of stone chippings. Presumably the sculptor lived in the other house. He made a half-bow to the figure in half-admission of what might be going to happen.

  “So you went to the back door.” Sir Basil made a note. “And knocked?”

  “Ye might say. ‘Twas locked so I kicked it in.” He paused – as he had once he was inside and half hidden in the shadow beside the staircase. It was a mean little house with cramped dimensions, patchily dark except for the lurid glow through a stained-glass panel in the front door. That lay straight ahead, at the bottom of the staircase whose top was right above him. And another door that must lead into a front room. He was familiar with houses of this size.

  If there was anybody else in the place – and there had to be, since he could smell cooking – they must come and investigate the sound of the lock smashing. He kept his hand on the pistol in his pocket and waited.

  Feet shuffled behind yet another door that led to the back of the house, and a small, fat man in an apron and large moustache peered out. He looked slowly from O’Gilroy to the broken door, and might have made a deduction if O’Gilroy had given him the time.

  “Two fellers come in here ten minutes ago. Where’d they go?”

  The fat face looked puzzled.

  “Upstairs? Was they going upstairs?”

  Perhaps the man didn’t understand English: even in the shadowed owed light, he looked foreign, quite apart from that apron. Indeed, the whole interior was foreign, from the smell to the dingy ornateness of the wallpaper and pictures.

  O’Gilroy moved away, partly to get a view through the bannisters up the sta
irs, but also to relax the threat he posed and give the man space to yell . . . and he went off like a liner’s steam-whistle. But whatever the yell included, it couldn’t mention the pistol: he hadn’t seen that.

  A board creaked above and O’Gilroy flattened himself against the front-room door, feeling for the knob with his left hand, hiding his right hand with his body. Then a pair of feet showed at the top of the stairs, and he knew them.

  “You knew his boots?” Sir Basil broke in.

  “When yer shadowing a feller, ye take a good look at his boots. So when ye come close in a crowd, he don’t catch ye looking at his face, but ye know it’s him and which way he’s going from his boots.”

  Dagner nodded approvingly. He might or might not know that boots trick, but he didn’t mind Sir Basil being reminded that he didn’t do his own legwork.

  O’Gilroy went on: “If’n I can see his boots, I’m thinking he can see mine, so I got out me gun – the Captain’s revolver – and he comes down a coupla more steps and I can see he’s got a gun himself.”

  It was the smaller man, the one who’d done the stabbing, and O’Gilroy came close to opening fire right then. But some errant streak of lawfulness took over and instead he turned the door-knob behind him and said loudly: “Police! Brooklands!” – reckoning the man must know those English words if no other ones.

  The feet took another step down, the gun swivelled, and O’Gilroy ducked as he threw himself back into the room behind. Two shots splintered through the door after him, close as two eyes and at head height, so the man fancied himself as a marksman.

  O’Gilroy yanked the door open again while the man would be off balance coming down the rest of the stairs and shot him. Twice into the body, tumbling him the rest of the way to sprawl on the front-door mat. But instead of lying there and quite probably surviving, he had to raise his gun, still unbeaten, still trying. In a flare of fury at having to do it, O’Gilroy shot him in the face from no more than six feet. And then, swearing aloud, hurried over to snatch the pistol.

  He thought of the second man, but he was deaf from the gunfire in that cramped passageway, so the odds were stacking against him. Anyway, he didn’t have quite the same quarrel with that one. Waving a gun in each hand, he barged past the servant – who had his mouth open and might be yelling again, for all O’Gilroy could hear – and out of the back door . . .

  “. . . and back to the police station,” he concluded. He took a drag at his cigarette.

  And there you have it, Ranklin thought. Just another typical afternoon in the life of a typical Secret Service Bureau agent.

  Only it wasn’t over yet. There was a faint flush on Sir Basil’s cheeks and a frown gathering above his eyes. He was, after all, supposed to be maintaining law and order in this capital of Empire.

  Politely tentative, Dagner said: “That seems to me a fairly clear case of self-defence, since the other man fired first.”

  Sir Basil ignored him. “Only you,” he looked at O’Gilroy, “were already, by your own admission, guilty of breaking and entering and the victim might – had he survived – have claimed he was simply defending his property.”

  Ranklin asked: “Has he been identified?”

  Sir Basil glanced at the Inspector, who said: “Not yet, sir. Nothing on the body that tells us.”

  “Whoever he is – was – the fact remains that had you waited for my police to take the proper legal steps, none of this would have occurred.”

  Ranklin said: “Even after Gorman got back, it still took a while to persuade your chaps to go along and have a look at the house. By which time the place seemed rather underpopulated. And I could have identified the second man as one I’d seen trying to follow the Senator from his hotel last week.”

  Sir Basil checked with a report on the table. “All you found was a cook who speaks no English and an old man living upstairs – the householder?”

  He looked again at the Inspector, who waggled his features and said: “It’s difficult to be sure of things like that in those places, sir.”

  “Quite so . . . Who’d heard shots but says he’s never seen the man before and so on . . . Is this usual with that community?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir. Very close they stick, rather sort things out themselves.”

  “I understand.” Then Sir Basil frowned. “But damn it, this is London, not the back streets of Naples. I will not have . . .” he gestured comprehensively but vaguely and finished: “. . . such things.” And topped it off with a glare at O’Gilroy.

  Now Ranklin saw what the local police had been waiting and hoping for: that the house would be empty not only of witnesses but that embarrassing corpse as well. Blood-stains and bullet-holes could be shrugged off as long as nobody made a complaint. But not a body.

  After a moment, Dagner suggested gently: “I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that, since Gorman began by seeing this man stab the Senator at Brooklands, and ended by giving himself up at this station, and there are no witnesses to what happened in between, why should we doubt his word? Particularly with the evidence of the bullet-holes and the man’s pistol. Quite apart from any Other Factors.”

  But Sir Basil bristled at that last. “If I’m not having London turned into Naples, I’m not having your people turn it into a Wild West show, either . . . You say you’ve got the victim’s pistol, Inspector?”

  “Yes, sir. A bit of an odd one, that.” He slipped into his witness-box manner. “A new type of Webley semi-automatic, which I understand has only been issued to the Navy. In which case it should have an Admiralty stamp as well as a number, only the stamp’s been filed off.”

  Ranklin said: “May I ask the Inspector if the house in Back Hill Street has any sort of reputation?”

  “Nothing for certain, sir.”

  “But—” looking at Sir Basil; “—since all this is unofficial and off the record anyway . . . ?”

  Sir Basil nodded to the Inspector, who said: “It’s said to be the headquarters of the local Mafia or Camorra, we don’t know which – if they’re different, in London. They’re not that important, sir,” he added quickly. “The Italian population isn’t permanent enough for that sort of thing to have much of a hold.”

  “But still,” Dagner took up the thread, “a place where a visiting assassin might find sanctuary?”

  “Major—” and in Sir Basil’s tone it wasn’t much of a rank; “—we have only Gorman’s testimony that the man was an assassin.”

  “Oh my Lord.” Ranklin had suddenly remembered, and fumbled in his pocket. “There was a piece of paper stuck on the knife in the Senator’s back. I’d quite forgotten.” He handed the blood-stained and crumpled note to Sir Basil, who smoothed it on the table-top. Everybody craned to look.

  “It appears to be the symbol,” Sir Basil announced, “of the Ujedinjenje ili Smrt – a Serbian secret society.” Ranklin was surprised he recognised it. Then he realised the head of Special Branch had to know about any conspiracy that might crop up in London – as most did, sooner or later. Sir Basil passed it to Kell, then swung around on Ranklin: “And why, may I ask, did you remove a vital piece of evidence?”

  “I thought it might help us—”

  “Us? Us? Your Bureau has absolutely no jurisdiction, no authority – you don’t even have any statutory existence. Yet you interpret that as licence to suppress evidence and behave like a crowd of Buffalo Bills whenever the mood takes you!”

  “I can assure you, Sir Basil,” Dagner soothed, “that disciplinary action will most certainly be taken.”

  “Closing the stable door after a herd of wild horses has been unleashed on the community.”

  “Nevertheless . . .”

  “No.” Sir Basil was thinking. Finally he said: “Major, I’d like to co-operate with your Bureau. But if I agree to an unofficial resolution of this matter, I’d be behaving no better than your . . . your agents. Moreover, the Surrey Police are also entitled to expect the cooperation of Scotland Yard. At present, they have an unsol
ved case of attempted murder – highly unsatisfactory. If we leave it like that, they have to spend time and trouble demonstrating they’re trying to resolve it whilst knowing, unofficially, that they never will – even more unsatisfactory.”

  Now he was looking straight at Dagner. “But if they can connect the dead man here with the stabbing at Brooklands, they can close their books. And the only way for them to do that is through German. So by all means let him plead self-defence, and I’d be quite happy if the court accepted that. But court is where he’s going. Lock him up again, Inspector.”

  * * *

  It was well into the evening now. The public house on the opposite corner sounded busy, trams clattered and squealed at the junction, but there was little other traffic. A few yards south were the legal chambers of Gray’s Inn itself, while hardly further to the north-east lay the tenements of Little Italy, and just south of that was Hatton Garden, the gemstone district. London was full of such anomalous neighborhoods, each now becoming self-contained villages again for the night.

  “Probably quite a quiet spot, later on,” Dagner said, apparently inconsequentially.

  “I have a motor-car,” Kell offered. “If I can give you a lift . . .?”

  “I think I’ll walk a little way . . . You feel there’s nothing left to be done?”

  Kell and Ranklin were forced to accompany him as he paced along Theobald’s Road. Kell said: “He’s only had the Scotland Yard job since June, so he probably feels a new broom should be seen to sweep clean – and within the letter of the law. He may even feel his authority has been . . . well, challenged. But by morning he’ll probably decide you’ve learnt your lesson and drop the whole thing.”

  “Are you sure?” Dagner asked bluntly.

  “Well, no, I can’t be cert—”

  “So in the morning Gorman may appear in the police court and from there things will be a good deal more difficult to untangle. I assume you feel there’s nothing you can do yourself?”

  It was clear that Kell felt there was nothing he should be doing, but he said politely: “The trouble is that, on the face of it, the picture is complete, no obvious loose ends to involve my service. I’m sorry,” he added without overdoing the sincerity.