by John Creasey
Scott-Marie’s voice suddenly sounded cold.
“Gideon’s Force again? Look, George, with the best will in the world, I’m not sure I can authorise that.”
Gideon knew exactly what Scott-Marie was thinking. He suspected that he, Gideon, wanted to vindicate his concept of a vigilante force by gaining an eleventh-hour glory for it… despite the risk to civilian life and limb.
It was an understandable suspicion, even if it did happen to be completely unfounded.
He said, very firmly, “The patrol I was thinking of, sir, will be a rather special one …”
Even so, it took a lot of hard argument to get the Commissioner to agree.
Ten minutes later, almost exactly twenty-four hours after Gideon’s Force had been born, the last chapter in its short, strange history began.
The “very special” patrol assembled quietly outside No. 14 in the streaming rain.
It consisted of Gideon, Riddell, Harold Neame, half a dozen volunteers from Gideon’s and Riddell’s patrols – and four brand-new recruits, who had just been rushed from their homes by area car.
They looked pale and shaken, these four, and stood apart from the rest in a strained and silent huddle.
Which wasn’t surprising, thought Gideon: they represented the half of the Estate that had been hiding behind a self-made wall of silence through week after week of terror.
They were, respectively, the fathers of Douglas Keating, Roger Wheatland, Clive Matthews and Richard Barratt.
Gideon spoke to them as gravely as though they were teenage delinquents.
“The news of the trouble your sons are in may have been a big shock to you. But I doubt if it came as a complete surprise. I suspect that you have all been living for months with the fear that, one day, a summons like this would come. Aren’t I right?”
No one spoke, but the very silence indicated assent.
“Now the situation is this,” Gideon went on. “There’s no blinking at the fact that your sons have tried to carry out a major crime: nothing less than multiple murder. They will have to pay for that, and go on paying for it, probably for the rest of their teens. But not for the rest of their lives – because, thank God, actual murder has not, in fact, been done. And it is because neither you nor I want to see it done that I have brought you here tonight.
“If a normal police raid is carried out on that house, there is a likelihood of shooting. But if we all go in, that likelihood, at the sight of you, will be reduced to nil.”
“Are you really sure of that?” one father said. It was the most abject admission of parental helplessness that Gideon had ever heard.
“Yes,” he answered simply. “The only moment of human feeling the boys have shown so far was when their headmaster, Mr. Neame here, recognised them and called out their names. They stopped being monsters, at that moment, and became frightened schoolboys. I hardly think that the presence of their parents will have less effect.”
There was an awkward pause.
“But – we’ll be arresting our own sons. Or, at least, helping in their arrest,” one father said.
“No, you won’t. You’ll simply be witnessing it,” Gideon told him. “All the arresting will be done by Mr. Riddell and me, whether you are there or not. And if the boys make a break for it, I wouldn’t expect – or wish – you to try to hold them in any way. There will be a ring of police surrounding the house. Stopping an escape can be left entirely to them. I simply want you there as a reminder to the boys that they’re basically human beings, not faceless terrorists. And I really believe that with your co-operation, there will be very little trouble indeed.”
“No?” Riddell said suddenly. “Supposing Hopkins has a gun, and starts firing?”
For the thousandth time in this case, Gideon wanted to swear at Riddell.
“You and I have guns, Tom,” he said sharply. “Between us, we can handle him.”
But the damage was done.
The fathers were staring at Gideon with dazed incredulity.
“Hopkins?” said one. “You mean he’s – he’s – ”
Gideon took a deep breath, and then decided to follow his usual policy. When in doubt, confide in the public; tell them the facts straight.
“I have reason to suspect,” he said slowly, “that Hopkins is the leader of the gang; the instigator of all that has been happening in this Estate. And that the siege of himself and his family is basically a fake. It’s only a suspicion, mind, but there’s already evidence to support it – and it’s possible that you can give me more. I happen to know that Hopkins visited each of your homes last night. Tell me: did he at any time talk to your boys alone? Do you think he could have been giving them – orders – ”
Gideon broke off. From the look on the men’s faces, it was clear enough that the answer, in each case, was “Yes”.
The father of Douglas Keating was the first to spell it out. Hopkins and his son had been left in the dining-room together for more than half an hour. At one point, he had peeped in at the door, and had seen them poring over a diagram or map …
“Hopkins was probably showing him the best way to get into his garden, and across to the garage roof.”
Keating wiped sweat from his forehead. “And I – I was fool enough to think what a wonderful man Hopkins was. He told me he’d forgiven my son for his part in a terrible and vicious attack.”
The father of Clive Matthews burst out, “It isn’t only you who’s been made a fool of, Keating. Hopkins came round to my house quite late last night – well after midnight. Said he wanted to talk to Clive urgently. I got Clive out of bed, and then made myself scarce for all of forty minutes while he talked to him in the lounge. I was so impressed at the thought of a schoolmaster working so late that I actually gave him beer and sandwiches afterwards. Made the bastard feel right at home – and went on to argue with him on social problems till nearly two! To think that what he’d really come for was to poison my son’s mind – give detailed instructions for him to go out and – and kill – ”
The rest of Matthews’ words were drowned by one of the oddest and most terrible sounds that Gideon had ever heard. It came from mouths that were dry with horror, throats that were choked by a fury too strong for words, and it emerged as something as deep and menacing as an animal’s growl. Yet its meaning was plain enough.
It was the sound of men deciding, with one accord, that another man was not fit to live.
It was the sound of murder.
And suddenly the other members of the patrol were being infected by it, and being less emotionally involved, they were the more articulate.
“Stringing him up to the nearest lamp-post’s too good for him!” someone cried.
Gideon swallowed hard. He needed no telling what was happening. The two halves of the Wellesley community – those who had always been violently angry, and those who, until now, had been cowed – were united at last: united in a rage which was making the very air throb with hate.
The whole object of starting Gideon’s Force had been to channel and contain this rage. But what hope was there of channelling or containing it now? Any of these fathers, in this mood, would be fully capable of grabbing a gun from his son, turning it on Hopkins, and emptying it without a moment’s thought of the consequences.
He couldn’t risk anything like that happening. Wouldn’t it be better to abandon the whole idea of using a Gideon’s Force patrol, and send a police contingent into No. 14 instead?
For just a moment, Gideon hesitated, his brain whirling like a dervish in a crazy dance of doubt. During that moment, something occurred which had very rarely happened to him before. The situation slipped clean out of his control.
As if impelled by a force stronger than themselves, the fathers went ahead of him through the gate of No. 14, and, with the rest of the patrol behind them, began walking up the path to the front door.
“Stop!” Gideon shouted.
They stopped – but not because of the command. A sequence
of sounds was coming from the house startling enough to stop anyone.
The little girl Karen had started screaming again, the terrible monotony of sound suddenly pierced by an agonising shriek from Charlotte. The shriek changed to a choking groan of agony, and died away. Karen’s screams stopped too, as if she was too horrified to go on. There was nothing left but a stunning, chilling silence.
With Riddell behind him, Gideon rushed past the patrol to the front door. Pulling out his revolver, he fired a shot into the lock, and then shouldered the door open.
One of the boys – Richard Barratt – was standing at the back of the hall. He had discarded his stocking mask. His face was pale and strained. At the sight of Gideon, he raised his gun. Before he could fire, he caught sight of his father, gasped, and dropped the gun to the floor.
“Where are the others?” Gideon barked.
The boy gestured wildly towards the door of the dining room, which was slightly ajar.
Brushing past him, Gideon reached the door and kicked it wide open.
The light in the dining-room was now on; and the scene that it revealed was to stay with Gideon for the rest of his life. It left the patrol, crowding behind him, numbed and motionless.
The two wounded boys – Douglas Keating and Roger Wheatland – were huddled by the shattered window. They had both lost a lot of blood, which bespattered everything near them. They were taking little or no part in the proceedings, and were like nothing so much as sick animals cowering in a corner.
A yard or so away from them, half-hidden under a highly polished table, the little girl Karen was cowering, too; in her case it was plainly from sheer terror.
She was staring at her mother, who was lying on the carpet, unconscious and perhaps dying. Blood on Charlotte’s hair suggested that she had received a severe blow, probably from the butt of a revolver.
The fourth boy – Clive Matthews – was clearly the one who had done the battering. He was standing with his back to a sideboard, with a gun in his hand: Gideon noticed that fresh blood from the butt was staining his fingers. Obviously he had been in charge of Charlotte Hopkins, and had over-reacted to her final scream of fury.
There was no danger of him over-reacting to anything now. The gun was pointing harmlessly at the floor; the bloodstained hand was trembling.
And the cause of all this trembling and cowering was the man who knelt beside the body of his wife, completely oblivious, unaware and indifferent to what was going on; utterly unconcerned as to the fate of the boys who had been his dedicated disciples.
No one was in a state to offer resistance or to make any kind of trouble. Hopkins was prostrated by his grief. The boys were paralysed with shock at having been abandoned by their leader, and confronted by their parents, all in the same few seconds. And horror at what had happened, coupled with the sight of their children covered in blood, staunched the fury of the fathers in the patrol, and turned it into a kind of dazed, bewildered acceptance.
As a result, the arrests that followed were as quiet and orderly as any Gideon had known.
Which didn’t stop the press from loudly proclaiming Gideon’s Force as being a triumph for law and order, common sense, and the will of the people …
22
Penny’s Day
That was virtually the end of the Wellesley Estate case, though not of the trail of human tragedy that it had left in its wake.
A doctor and an ambulance were summoned for Charlotte. Hopkins pleaded to be allowed to stay with his wife until they arrived, but Riddell, mindful of the violence that had so narrowly been avoided, would have none of it. Within seconds, he had piled Hopkins and the four boys into area cars, and ordered them to be driven off to the Wellesley sub-station. It was less than a minute’s journey, not too much, he reckoned, for the injured boys to stand. It would be far better to get them away from No. 14, and arrange medical attention for them at the station. Riddell himself went with the area car party. As Chief Detective Superintendent on the case, he was the one who would draw up the official charges.
The fathers also left, looking more wan and lost than their sons, and wondering which would be better: to go to the police station and watch their boys being charged and clapped into cells, or to wander mournfully back to their homes, and the task of comforting inconsolable wives.
Gideon waited at No. 14 for the arrival of the doctor. His report on Charlotte was fairly hopeful. “Severe concussion, of course,” he said. “But nothing broken, no sign of internal haemorrhage … I’ve seen worse cases come through.” She was rushed off in the ambulance to Fulton North General Hospital, where she was put in an intensive care unit – not far, incidentally, from Eric Beresford.
The immediate problem of what to do about Karen was solved swiftly. It turned out that Harold Neame knew the child quite well; Hopkins had on several occasions brought her to the school. Neame’s cold, donnish manner held no terror for her, and she went with him willingly, holding fast to his hand with confidence and trust.
“We must take very great care of her,” Gideon said, painfully aware of what she had been through. With her father whisked off to the police station and her mother shot off to hospital, the child had been virtually orphaned in seconds; and those seconds had come after an hour of terror which could have scarred her mind for life. Gideon did not like remembering how long he had waited outside the house, listening to Karen’s screams and doing nothing – first because of the “cooling-off” regulations and later because he had been waiting to round up the fathers. If only he had followed his heart, and not his mind, and gone into the house earlier …
Evidence was soon forthcoming, however, which showed that if he had acted more hastily, there would have been a grave risk of gunplay. Two revolvers were found on Hopkins when he was searched at the station, and a hoard of twenty more came to light at the back of the loft of No. 14, together with fifty rounds of ammunition.
Next day, the police made more discoveries at No. 14. A bureau desk in the front room was found to have a secret drawer, packed with papers identifying Hopkins as one of the leaders of “Youth Against Society”, a secret organisation aiming at – as one badly-printed pamphlet put it – “incessant guerrilla warfare in every urban centre, carried out by our heroic young”. The pamphlet continued: “Great care should be taken to conceal the political reasons for our activities. They should appear to be simply criminal actions carried out by a mindless mob. Thus our real purpose will never suspected until total victory – the complete breakdown of law and order throughout society – has been achieved.” Other pamphlets showed how the children were to be caught at an early age, indoctrinated with the belief that violence and heroism were identical virtues, and systematically trained to be tough and ruthless killers.
Gideon passed all these documents on to Special Branch, who were delighted to receive them; they provided confirmation of a great deal that had been suspected, but never proved. The work of identifying and routing out Hopkins’ confreres in a dozen different areas was intensified. Gideon felt that he owed Special Branch a favour after their help with the Dino Orsini affair. He was glad that the chance to repay the debt had come so soon.
Further details of the “Youth Against Society” operations in Wellesley gradually came to light after Hopkins’ arrest. Horrified at the thought of the massacre that had so nearly taken place, more and more families in the Estate broke their silence. In addition, Eric Beresford provided vital information under several different headings. He described the knifing in the car in detail, but refused to name the boy who had wielded the knife. He would have knifed someone equally readily, he said, if Hopkins had ordered him to do so. “Wouldn’t have thought anything of it,” he added. It was clear that after conducting a successful summer-long reign of terror, the gang had been punch-drunk on violence – and on the heady belief that they could get away with anything.
Putting Eric’s testimony and that of other witnesses together, a picture began to emerge of how the organisation h
ad been run. Eric, and about twenty other boys, used to meet Hopkins once a week after school-hours – usually in the basement of a disused riverside warehouse on the outskirts of the Estate. These boys, all aged between thirteen and fifteen, became almost worshippers of Hopkins, and formed the hard-core membership of the gang. Sometimes older teenagers were roped in, but only for special duties, such as driving getaway cars, or attempting to break up the vigilante meeting. These older boys also helped to create the Estate-wide spy network, but there their involvement ended. They were never allowed to attend the warehouse sessions, and it was around these that everything had really revolved.
Here the younger boys had received their orders for all their major activities – the organised rampages of vandalism, the fire-raising, the muggings. But the gang also had an operational headquarters nearer the centre of the Estate; one of the boys, whose parents were out until late every evening, had offered the use of his home – and telephone. It was here that
Eric had been seized by his fellow gang-members, when Hopkins had ordered his killing.
Most of the training of the boys – the actual process of turning them into “urban guerrillas” – had been done in the warehouse basement, a room which had been sound-proofed by the judicious use of sandbags. The programme had ranged from target practice with revolvers to “nothing-barred” fights, using razors, chains and flick-knives.
In one of the flick-knife fights, Eric had stabbed his opponent in the shoulder, his own shirt being smeared with his victim’s blood. It was this incident which had led to Marjorie calling in the Gideons for help.
Because Eric had subsequently suffered so much – largely as a result of his, Gideon’s, rashness in visiting his home so openly – Gideon decided to ask Riddell not to press the charges against him.
Marjorie must have guessed what had happened. On the day that Eric was released from hospital, he and his mother came round to Gideon’s home to thank him.