Vigilantes & Biscuits

by John Creasey

  He had no smile whatsoever for the constable who saluted him in the car park, and barely replied to the “Good morning, sir” of the sergeant in Reception. He made straight for his office, head jutting forward, his massive frame looking as though it was able and ready to bulldoze anyone or anything out of its way. And he had only a grunt to spare for a lean, lanky individual whom he passed on one of the corridors, even though his was a very familiar face indeed. It was Superintendent Lemaitre of N.E. Division, one of the toughest manors in London.

  Long years before, Lemaitre had been Gideon’s chief assistant. Long years before that, they had been detective sergeants together, and Lemaitre never seemed to forget that they had started their careers on an equal footing. He pointedly refused to treat Gideon with the deference owing to the C.I.D.’s Commander, and Gideon usually let him get away with it, partly for old times’ sake, mostly because he was secretly rather sorry for Lem, whose impulsive way of jumping to conclusions had prevented him from getting the full promotion that his agile brain deserved.

  Lemaitre clearly had no intention of being dismissed with a grunt.

  “Good morning, Gee-Gee. Don’t forget I’ve an appointment with you at ten thirty, about the Orsini killings. I came up early because I wanted to do some checking with Records before l saw you. I’m up against a very peculiar problem over this Orsini business, and would like – ”

  Gideon stopped, turned and glared.

  “When did you say our talk was timed for?”

  “Ten thirty.”

  Gideon’s voice rose in volume.

  “Then what the bloody hell do you mean by starting it now?”

  Lemaitre looked shaken, but by no means vanquished. He raised a laconic eyebrow.

  “Keep – “ he began, and was plainly intending to finish: “ – your hair on.” But at a second glance at Gideon’s expression, his temerity deserted him.

  His agile wits did not.

  “Keep-er-yes, it’ll keep, Gee-Gee,” he ended hastily. “See you around ten thirty, then. I’ll be-er-looking forward to it.”

  He disappeared down the corridor with a speed unusually displayed by a senior officer within six years of his retirement age.

  Gideon, watching him go, smiled in spite of himself. Good old Lem, he thought, may he never change, and walked on towards his office feeling just a little less like one struck by the wrath of Jehovah.

  He had been intending to start the day by summoning Tom Riddell and tearing into him. Now he decided, for both their sakes, to have a quarter-of-an-hour’s cooling-off period first. If the Wellesley Estate case was really getting on top of Riddell – if it was pushing him to the brink of cracking up – then a heated exchange would do nothing to help.

  But with the unknown vandals seeming to have the complete run of the place, while the police were being openly accused of incompetence on public hoardings, Gideon didn’t know how far it was in him to keep the temperature of that interview down.

  He went into his office, resisting a childish, but strong, temptation to slam the door behind him. With marked control, he crossed to his polished mahogany desk, seated himself behind it, and began going through the files of new cases and investigations in hand. There weren’t many of them. These days, Alec Hobbs only sent in the cases which he considered it vital for his chief to see. The others he dealt with himself, working long and late and hard – so hard that sometimes he and Gideon barely had a chance to exchange more than a few words in the course of a whole working day. Gideon was very grateful to Alec, and never on any occasion had he found his judgment to be wrong; but sometimes he had a guilty feeling that he was being mollycoddled into a sense of false security. If the files on every major case being handled by the C.I.D. were put on his desk – as they had been once, when he had first become Commander – he knew well enough that the pile would have reached formidable heights every day of the week. The Yard had its successes, sometimes spectacular ones, but by and large, the tide of London crime was rising to a frightening degree.

  More frightening in Gideon’s eyes was the fall in the age of the average criminal. Children in the ten to sixteen age group – ruddy little nippers, as he’d have called them in his own youth – were responsible for thirty-five per cent of all violent snatch-thefts, and forty-nine per cent of burglaries. And that wasn’t all they were responsible for. Motiveless maimings, knifings for kicks, the systematic terrorising of whole neighbourhoods could also be put to their discredit. There were some teenagers who were capable of anything, and there seemed to be more of them every day. If things went on at this rate, half London would end up by being one huge Wellesley Estate.

  Gideon forced the thought out of his mind, and pounced almost ferociously on the first of the files. It contained the facts on the Orsini killings – the case which Lem was coming to see him about. The Orsinis were two brothers, both of whom had been killed in what appeared to be gangster slayings. The second brother had died after he had proclaimed loudly and publicly that he would avenge his brother’s death. Gideon was sure that Lemaitre would announce that he had identified the killer – and then wouldn’t have a shred of evidence to back up his suspicions. Jumping to conclusions had always been Lemaitre’s main trouble. He had a bad reputation for making premature arrests, and must be stopped at all costs from doing it again.

  The next file concerned the Cargill case: the kidnapping, six weeks before, of Barbara, the pretty young wife of Gordon Cargill, son of a leading manufacturer, Thomas Cargill of Cargill & Wright’s Biscuits. The kidnappers had demanded £50,000 ransom money from Gordon Cargill for the safe return of his wife. With the help of his father, Cargill had found the money, and following the kidnappers’ instructions, had left it in the boot of a second-hand car parked in a side-turning off the Commercial Road. The police had kept a very, very discreet watch on the pick-up point. In fact, they hadn’t been physically present in the road at all, but had used sophisticated bugging devices and a T.V. camera concealed behind the boarded-up window of a derelict newsagent’s. But despite all this careful preparation, the kidnappers had been frightened off. The money had not been collected, and nothing further had been heard from the gang. Nothing for six long weeks. Hundreds of possible leads had been followed, involving more police than could easily be spared; but there was no use blinking at the fact that the trail had become cold.

  It was getting difficult not to fear the worst for Barbara, and Gideon felt deep sympathy for Matt Honiwell, the Chief Detective Superintendent who had the triple task of handling the investigation, fighting off an increasingly hostile press, and dealing with the growing despair of the distraught husband and father-in-law. Not that there was anyone at the Yard more suited to the job. Matt’s mild appearance concealed not only a penetrating mind, but also great depths of human understanding. He would need all that understanding to cope with the atmosphere of spoken and unspoken recrimination – those terrible, inescapable “if onlys” – that always followed when a kidnapping case went wrong.

  Gideon turned to a short note that lay beside the files, neatly typed and signed by Alec Hobbs. It confirmed that Lemaitre’s appointment was at ten thirty : Matt Honiwell was down to see him at eleven.

  Putting the note on one side, he saw that there was a third file, half-hidden under the others. He pulled it out, and blinked. Never in all his career had he seen a file like this one before. It was a bright pink in colour (the ordinary C.I.D. files were usually buff) and was inscribed, in Alec’s handwriting:

  PRIVATE AND PERSONAL.

  THE CASE OF THE BEETHOVEN 2ND.

  Abruptly, Gideon remembered that Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto was the piece that Penny had been playing the night before. Smiling broadly, he opened the file and found a collection of neatly-scissored press cuttings from The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail – virtually all that morning’s papers. And they made the best reading that he had had in years. “Concert Star is Born”, the Mail announced,
while The Times and the Telegraph were full of such resonant drum roll phrases as “flawless technique” and “incomparable phrasing”.

  Gideon pushed a button. Deputy Commander Alec Hobbs came in, looking, as always, well tailored and distinguished. They spent a happy two minutes reading out the reviews to each other. It would be hard to say which of the two men was the more proud, father or fiancé.

  “I’d like to ring Penny and congratulate her now, George,” Alec said. “Do you think she’ll have got up yet?”

  “Oh, she’ll be up,” Gideon said. “But I should wait a bit, if I were you. She’s trying on her wedding dress this morning – I understand a dressmaker’s coming to make some alterations. It might be awkward – if not downright bad luck – if you rang her up in the middle of that.”

  In point of fact, at that moment Penny Gideon was not trying on her wedding dress, because Marjorie Beresford simply hadn’t kept that dressmaking appointment.

  After waiting a long time – a very slow hour and a half by her bedroom clock – a somewhat indignant Kate telephoned Marjorie to ask why.

  For a long time, there was nothing but the ringing tone.

  Then there was a click, and she heard Marjorie say, “I – I am sorry. Whoever you are, I can’t talk to you now. And I’m afraid all my calls for the day are cancelled. I’m – I’m not well.”

  Kate frowned. There was something startling, even weird, about Marjorie’s voice and manner. It was hard to think of any illness that could account for it.

  “Look,” she said. “This is Kate Gideon. Do you need help of any sort? Should I ring for a doctor?”

  “No – no, thank you. I’ll manage.”

  Kate suddenly remembered Marjorie’s thirteen-year-old son.

  “But won’t you need some help to cope with Eric when he comes back from school this afternoon?”

  Marjorie’s voice rose almost to a scream.

  “He’ll manage. We’ll both manage. Leave me alone – just leave me alone]”

  She rang off, leaving a very puzzled Kate to hang up the receiver.

  “What’s going on?” called Penny, from the direction of the dining-room, where she was enjoying a late breakfast.

  “Something I can’t make out at all,” Kate said, thoughtfully. “Marjorie sounded quite all right when I spoke to her yesterday. Yet now it’s as though she’s on the point of snapping from some great nervous strain. It’s just – not normal.”

  Penny suddenly had as much trouble finishing her breakfast as her father had done two hours before. She said in a small, unnatural voice, “Is anything normal on that Wellesley Estate?”

  3

  Signs of Strain

  It was at about that time that Chief Detective Superintendent Riddell walked into Gideon’s office, and Gideon and Kate, although six miles apart, shared a common experience: that of sensing themselves to be in the presence of overwhelming strain.

  Riddell, a brown-eyed, brown-haired man, had once been as authoritative as Gideon; but the years had not been kind to him, and his once domineering personality had lost much of its impetus. He was still capable of being aggressive and abrasive, could still be implacably determined; but nowadays he could also become deeply anxious when things were going wrong, as though somewhere, at some level inside him, his confidence was faltering. There was no doubt that he was deeply anxious now. His eyes looked haunted; his cheeks were almost grey.

  The last of Gideon’s earlier fury vanished at the sight of him. He even hated himself for having to begin the interview on a reproachful note, but there was no other honest way.

  “Tom, on my way in this morning I took a trip round the Wellesley Estate. And I came across two very disturbing things.”

  Riddell’s lips twisted in a defensive line.

  “Only two? I’d say you were lucky.”

  Gideon’s face remained grim.

  “First. There had obviously been stone-throwing in that central shopping precinct. Now we both agreed that that precinct should be guarded night and day.”

  “We did, and it was, George,” Riddell said sharply. Clearly his spirit was by no means crushed, however deep his worries went. “There were two detective constables on duty all night, hidden in a supermarket doorway. The trouble was, they were caught by an old playground trick. A gang of boys appeared from nowhere, and threw stones at them. The men lost their tempers – not surprisingly as one of them got a nasty gash on his cheek – and, well, the upshot was that they gave chase.”

  “Out of the precinct?”

  “Out of the precinct, I’m afraid, yes. And immediately, a second gang, that had been waiting round the corner, appeared on the scene, and did the damage to the windows. The constables acted very stupidly, of course. As it happens, I was over at Wellesley police station telling them so, at half past six this morning.”

  “You were over at Wellesley at – “ Gideon took a deep breath. “Tom, don’t you ever sleep?”

  At this unexpected note of personal concern, Riddell’s smile lost much of its bitterness.

  “I didn’t go over there just for that. I had had a report that someone had been going round the Estate at the crack of dawn, putting up notices about a vigilante force. I thought I ought to look into it pretty damn quick.”

  Gideon nodded.

  “Yes, that was the second thing I was going to ask you about.” He suddenly tensed and leant forward across his desk. What was coming next could be the most important news of the day. “Did you find out who’s behind the notices?”

  “Without the slightest trouble. He was spotted and recognised by my men several times over while he was putting them up.”

  “You mean – he’s known to the police?”

  Riddell almost grinned.

  “And to everyone on the Wellesley Estate. He’s Mr. Harold Neame, headmaster of the local High School. He was putting his notices up at that extraordinary hour for a very sensible reason. He wanted people to see them on their way to work, knowing that if he’d put them up the previous night, vandals would have ripped them to shreds before morning.”

  Gideon remained tense. It would have been enough of a blow to the police if a vigilante force had been suggested by a crank. But proposed by one of the leaders of the community –

  “It sounds as though you’ve been and talked to Neame about it.”

  “I have. His house is just behind the school. I paid him a call at about seven a.m. and found him in his shirtsleeves, making tea to take up to his wife. He invited me in, gave me a cup, and then suggested I stayed for breakfast… He’s a good chap really. About fifty. The tall, scholarly type. Mild enough until he gets on the subject of the vandals – and what they’ve done to his school. Then he rattles away like a machine-gun. I’ve never been given such a lecture on police incompetence in my life. The thought never seemed to occur to him that just some of the fault might lie inside his school.”

  “Never mind about all that,” said Gideon impatiently. “The big question, from our point of view, is this. Is Neame acting entirely on his own – or has he got backers in this vigilante enterprise?”

  “Backers? From the way he talks, he has the entire Estate behind him. He showed me the names of the Vigilante Committee. It includes the vicar, the Methodist minister, a Catholic father, the Estate’s two doctors, the heads of the other two schools – and a host of quiet, unaggressive people who’ve come to the end of their tether. After the meeting tonight, when he hopes the force will be set up officially, he intends to apply to the Commissioner of Scotland Yard for a special licence to issue firearms to its members.”

  “I can just imagine how Sir Reginald will react to that,” Gideon grunted. He got up from his desk, and walked to the window. He didn’t want Riddell to see the anxiety that must show so plainly on his own face. This situation was developing into one of the gravest crises he had ever faced. Never in the history of Scotland Yard had so many leading members of a community displayed such a lack of confidence in the police. Th
e moment the papers got hold of it, there would be a national outcry; and if the local M.P. approached the Home Secretary, as he surely would, that would mean a gargantuan top-level inquiry. There was a more serious aspect still. If the Wellesley Estate succeeded in launching its own official vigilantes, other groups would be started in similar trouble-spots up and down the country; and however well-organised or well-disciplined such forces might be, hotheads and extremists were bound to be attracted to their ranks. Britain would be marching down the high road to mob rule; in other words, lynch law.

  Gideon’s fingers crept instinctively into his pocket, and encircled the bowl of a briar pipe which he rarely smoked, but kept about him: fondling it, for some reason, soothed and calmed him, helping him to think more clearly.

  He turned back to Riddell.

  “There’s not much doubt what we’ve got to do, is there? It’s absolutely imperative that we both turn up to this meeting at eight thirty tonight, and at all costs – at all costs – restore confidence in the police.” All signs of anxiety had been swept from his face, which now glowered pugnaciously. “The only way to do that is the time-honoured one. We have to make concrete promises, and fulfil them fast. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we’ve got to commit ourselves publicly to cracking this case and restoring order within a very short time-limit. Not much more than, say, a week.”

  Riddell was on his feet now; the desperation in his eyes nakedly apparent.

  “George, listen to me! I’ve been battling with this business for three months, and basically – let’s face it – got nowhere. What sort of difference will one week make? I have no more idea now than when I started about what the bloody hell I’m up against. I’ve questioned the few vandals we’ve arrested – and their parents – for hour after hour after hour, and got nothing definite out of any of them. I’ve talked to school staffs, doctors, psychiatrists, sociology chaps – and all they’ve given me is an endless stream of negatives. There is no special racial tension here on the Wellesley Estate, no special colour problem, not even an exceptional unemployment rate. There are no extremist groups, right or left, which are particularly active – at least as far as is known. I’m apparently battling with a vast nebulous nothing – and yet all my experience suggests that the enemy is, in actual fact, a complex, subtle, highly intelligent something. All the violence – even the most piffling little Window-smashing incidents – have the hallmark of careful organisation and planning. A load of malcontents just creating havoc for kicks simply couldn’t have evaded all our precautions so constantly, and for so long. And whoever’s doing all this organising and planning has somehow acquired a grip of iron on the minds of just about everyone on the Estate between the ages of, say, thirteen and eighteen … and the bulk of their parents, too. Sometimes – sometimes I feel I’m in the middle of a science-fiction story in which a power from outer space has taken over the bodies and souls of – ”