The Tiger In the Smoke

by Margery Allingham

  Havoc was not listening. ‘Is that the name of the house or the village?’

  ‘Both. But you must put that out of your mind. Geoffrey Levett has gone there tonight.’

  ‘Has he? By sea?’

  ‘Yes. But the fog is lifting. He will be there by tomorrow, or the day after.’ Avril threw away the information impatiently. ‘You must forget that. That is over. The ports are watched and you are hunted, my boy. Now is your last chance to think of yourself.’

  Havoc laughed aloud. ‘Got it!’ he said. ‘The Science of Luck, it’s done it again. See how it’s worked? That’s why I came back, see? See what we’re doing, you and me?’

  ‘Passing on the stairs,’ said Avril, ‘rather near the bottom.’ And he sighed.

  ‘You cut that out.’ The hand was on his shoulder again. ‘I won’t hear it. You’re wrong. You’ve told me the only thing I want to know, and I came to hear it. You don’t even know why you came.’

  ‘But I do.’ Avril was quietly obstinate. ‘I came to tell you something which is perhaps more obvious to me than to anyone else whom you may meet.’

  ‘You came to tell me to go soft. I should say so. You silly old fool. You go home to bed and – ’

  His voice died abruptly. In the silence the chill grew so intense that it was painful. Far above them the ghostly figures on the windows had begun to take shape as the morning light began to strengthen.

  The long fingers closed round the bones of Avril’s shoulders and the trembling force of the man shook his whole body.

  ‘Look. Swear. Swear it on anything, anything you like. Swear you’ll keep quiet.’

  Avril saw the temptation into which he was led. ‘Oh,’ he said wearily, ‘you know as well as I do that for us who watch there can be no half turns. I can swear and you can let me go, but as soon as I am gone what will you think? Will you feel confident or will you think you have been soft? If you do, and you come to grief as soon you must, you will blame that one act and will go down believing it. That is no good, John. The time has come when you must make a full turn or go on your way.’

  ‘You fool, you fool, what are you doing? Do you want it? Are you asking for it?’ The boy was weeping in his weary rage and the tears fell on Avril. The old man felt the agony of them and was helpless.

  ‘I want very much to stay alive,’ he said. ‘Enormously. Much more than I could have believed.’

  ‘But you’ve done it, you’ve done it, you put the doubt in my mind. I daren’t. You know it, I daren’t go soft.’

  Avril bent forward to put his head in his hands. His resignation was complete.

  ‘I cannot help you,’ he said. ‘Our gods are within us. We choose our own compulsions. Our souls are our own.’

  He had reached the end of his secret prayer when the torch blazed and the knife struck him.

  The fact that he felt it at all was significant. For the first time Havoc’s hand was doubting, and because of that it had lost some of its cunning.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Wheel Turns

  —

  THIRTY-FIVE HOURS LATER, in the morning, when the sun was shining through the newly-cleaned windows of his office as blandly as if no such thing as a London fog had ever existed, Charlie Luke sat at his desk in Crumb Street and considered the situation with that complete detachment which arrives with exhaustion.

  Thirty-five hours. Two nights and a day. Thirty-five hours of rushed and unrelenting work, growing public hysteria, confused sympathy and censure from an excited Press, anxiety in high places which from being stern was becoming querulous, and nothing, not one pointer, not one useful clue.

  Havoc, Tiddy Doll, the brothers, and Bill had vanished again as utterly as if the sewers had swallowed them.

  This morning Stanislaus Oates and the Assistant Commissioner were with the Home Secretary. Chief Superintendent Yeo was at the Great Western Hospital, hoping to get an interview with Canon Avril. The old man had been out of danger since midnight and it was hoped he would be able to say a word or two as soon as he awoke.

  Dear, silly old fool. Luke thought he could just understand him and hoped to be able one day to forgive him. Sam Drummock had saved his old friend’s life. He had come creeping down in the very early morning, intending to take his boxing article to Fleet Street, and had found Picot asleep, the front door unlatched, and Avril’s bed unslept in. It had taken the frightened household twenty minutes to find the old man where he lay on the vestry floor, which was as far as he had got before the loss of blood had doubled his legs under him. The actual nature of the wound was one of those miracles which Luke decided he would never understand. Why a man of Havoc’s skill should suddenly miss his mark by inches, so that the collarbone took most of the blow, or why, having surely known he had missed, he had not struck again, completely defeated him. Pneumonia had not followed either. That was just God looking after His own, he supposed. ‘Surprisingly little loss of bodily heat,’ the surgeon had said, ‘as if the system had suffered very little shock.’

  Luke dragged his tired mind away from the subject and, although he was for the moment quite alone, made a gesture as if to throw a crumpled ball of paper over his shoulder into the wastepaper basket.

  He was open to bet that Yeo would get nothing from Avril voluntarily, and he knew his Archbold far too well to expect that there would be any attempt to drag much from him. Page 483 … ‘while in strict law the privilege does not exist, the minister should not be required, etc…’ It did not fit the case, of course, because no one supposed that there had been any question of confession, but it was near enough if the old fellow didn’t want to talk, and he wouldn’t, Luke was sure of that. Besides, what news could he tell? Havoc had been his attacker. His prints were all over the blessed church. As to the rest, Luke could hardly suppose that the chap would have had a chat with the old man before he did his handiwork, much less mention where he was going.

  Luke had been working. As he sat, his dark head resting on his hands, he reflected that they could put that on his tombstone: ‘Thickheaded but Thorough. R.I.P.’ He had taken the church apart and the crypt, with its clear evidences of recent occupation, had been gone over with a tooth-comb. The miserable Sergeant Picot, still weaving slightly from the drug (and what a fantastic crazy piece of bad luck that had been!) had found the way out through the coal-cellar of the cottage.

  As Luke sat staring red-eyed at the notes before him he checked every point, his own slightly racy language colouring the dark list.

  Ma Cash was in a detention cell downstairs, held on an accessory charge. She had refused to speak all yesterday and he was giving her until zero-hour, just before the mid-day meal, before he tried her again. What a flinty old besom she was! As he considered her, his diamond-shaped eyes widened and there was a gleam of unwilling admiration in their depths. ‘I don’t know. I can’t help you. Find out.’ That was all she had said to every question, just like the gangsters in the movies. Not a bad line either, he conceded, except that there were no smarty lawyers around to bung in a writ of habeas corpus, so the old lady could sit there while the police asked for her case to be remanded for a week or two.

  Luke did not think she would crack yet awhile, if she did at all. There was something very strong in that bright flat face with the knowing eyes. He was not at all sure even now that there had not been something in his substitution of the child theory, after all. Mrs Avril could have been mistaken. Something certainly was giving the wicked old girl in the cell a remarkable amount of courage.

  He sighed. All this was getting him nowhere. Routine, that was the only thing. Well, that was going on steadily and relentlessly, despite the help from the public which was no help at all. Two men for whom he could have found better employment were needed to control the traffic in St Petersgate Square this morning. Mercifully, old Sam Drummock was good with reporters, and Miss Warburton too, when she could be prised away from the hospital, she showed a lot of common sense. He thanked his stars that the other four were out
of the way, and allowed his mind to wander to them briefly on their treasure hunt.

  He expected to hear from them any minute now. There had been some delay in the crossing. That was all he had gathered so far. And it was curious in a way, because he had wired, and yet Meg Elginbrodde had not telephoned about her father.

  He returned to his list. ‘The cottage’. There the routine had all but taken the paper off the walls. Havoc’s prison clothes, or what was left of them when they had been shovelled out of the back of the boiler, had gone down to the Forensic Science Laboratories at Hendon. They would provide sufficient evidence to take care of the old lady for a while or he was a Dutchman. Then there were the cash memorandum books. They were the only hope. Thirty-four in all, little fat black books hidden under a loose board in the bedroom. Picot had brought them to the station in a borrowed suitcase, and four experienced men had spent the best part of yesterday on them.

  By six in the evening they had brought him their little list, three hundred and twelve names and addresses of men and women who still had outstanding reasons for hesitating to refuse to do Mrs Cash a favour.

  The Chief Inspector’s brows had risen several times on his dark forehead as he had read. Little things which had puzzled him about some of the most respected residents of his district suddenly became plain. An attempted suicide which he had never understood emerged as almost reasonable. One of his own men, now on leave, became due to make some explanations.

  The lodging-house keeper who had visited Havoc in prison appeared prominently on the list, but the favour she had done Mrs Cash had been investigated already, so that her name could be eliminated.

  That left three hundred and eleven and, just after seven o’clock five picked officers, which was more than could be spared, had set out from Crumb Street to visit and question each one. They were still at work and so far none of their reports, which had come in at three-hourly intervals all through the night, had contained anything helpful. It was slow work but it had to be done. In the end the result would be worth the delay.

  Delay. The word hung in Luke’s mind. That was the keynote of the whole inquiry. From the start there had been a perverseness in the whole business. Little snags had developed at every weary step, and although on the face of it the thing was inevitable it was taking its own time and nothing and nobody, it seemed, could hurry it. As his own old grandmother would have said, it was as though the devil had got into it. He grunted. A fat lot of good that was. The Assistant Commissioner didn’t believe in the devil.

  Meanwhile there was plenty to do. His desk was stacked high with dockets. There were the Flying Squad’s confidential memos, containing news and gossip from informers. The whole of the fraternity were leaving Havoc strictly alone by all accounts. The underworld had never liked him and now considered him dynamite.

  There were copies of all the more hopeful telegrams from police headquarters all over the country, reporting suspicious characters observed or detained. There were details of every car theft reported in the Metropolis in the past three days. There were seven bona-fide ‘confessions’ from people who were now being held for medical reports on the state of their minds. And there was one highly ingenious theory that the killer was a well-known politician masquerading as Havoc (who had been his first victim), offered in all seriousness by an expert just too eminent to be directly snubbed.

  The maze of tinted paper towered in front of Luke’s hot eyes, looking like the Blue Ridge mountains. He surveyed it thoughtfully and reached for another barley-sugar lump.

  Andy Galloway, his clerk, an earnest youth who had served in the R.A.F., had been feeding him with this for days in the belief that it would keep him from dropping in his tracks. Luke reckoned he must have eaten four pounds of the stuff and wondered idly whose ration he was robbing.

  His mind was off the main problem only for a second, but in that little pause the wheel turned and suddenly the long march of events began to race.

  As he put out his hand the pile of paper on the right side of the desk toppled over and slid slowly to the floor. He dived after it, but one flying sheet eluded him and he had to lean over under a chair for it. As he fished it out to place it with the rest he glanced at it, and one paragraph caught his attention. It was a reply to a query of his own which he had put to Sergeant Branch while that officer had been reporting on Havoc’s companions.

  Why, Luke had asked, did two fishermen spend the war in the army when all such men had been directly instructed to join one of the two sea services? It was a minor point and he had forgotten making it, but good old Branch had been busy. After enormous difficulty he had identified the two as Roland and Thomas Gripper of Weft, near Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and the paragraph in his report which had caught Luke’s eye said simply:

  On leaving school the two brothers joined their father, Albert Edward Gripper, who owned a fishing smack, and worked for him until 1937 (December), when he was charged and convicted of various offences connected with the shipping of uncustomed goods. He received a sentence of twelve months’ imprisonment and was severely fined. The boat appears to have been sold to meet these demands, and the brothers then left the district. Evidence points to the fact that they were simple ignorant men, most of whose lives had been spent on the water, and it looks possible that they felt it safest to disclaim any knowledge of their former calling, hence their appearance in the army soon after the outbreak of war. The father died in 1940 but a mother and sister still live at Weft.

  As the Chief Inspector finished reading, the private telephone on his desk tinkled and Chief Superintendent Yeo’s deep voice came through to him.

  ‘Charlie? Good. Listen. Canon Avril spoke to Havoc and told him (a) that the name of the place where the stuff was hidden was Sainte-Odile near Saint-Malo, and (b) that Geoffrey Levett had gone after it. That’s all. Nothing else so far. The old gentleman is very weak, but they say he’ll live. I shall be here for the next half-hour but I wanted you to have that information at once. Anything new with you? No? Very well, keep at it. Good-bye.’

  Luke’s hand was still on the receiver, and the expression of incredulity was still on his face when Picot appeared, looking as excited as anyone had ever seen him.

  ‘Chief,’ he burst out as he slammed the docket on the desk, ‘here’s a small van found abandoned at Tollesbury in Essex. First reported ten p.m. yesterday and just been traced to a family called Brown, who run a little bakery in the Barrow Road here. They’re all at home and they’re lost without the van for the business, and yet they haven’t reported it. Old Mrs Brown, who owns the shop, is on Mrs Cash’s books. She owes her three hundred pounds.’

  Luke sat looking at him. ‘Tollesbury? Where’s the nearest town to that?’

  Picot’s solid face flushed with disappointment. ‘You must know Tollesbury, Chief. Everybody knows Tollesbury.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’ Luke uttered the blasphemy in all innocence.

  ‘But it’s so near Town,’ protested Picot earnestly. ‘A wonderful place. You must know Tollesbury! Yachts, oysters, fishingboats – ’

  Luke’s sagging body jerked to attention.

  ‘Is it on the sea?’

  ‘The estuary. Right out on the marsh, yet only forty-odd miles from London. It’s littered with little sea-going boats, all of them out in the river well away from the village, and the dinghies lie around on the mud with no one to mind them. If anybody should want to pinch a sea-going craft it would be the one place on earth to get away with it. Chief, suppose those lads tried to stage the raid again.’

  Charlie Luke, the Londoner, to whom all water-borne traffic was a holy mystery, stared at him in stupefaction, and Picot hesitated, trying to find some way of conveying the desolation of the grey-green expanse of marsh and sky and sea, where, in November, the black geese and great saddleback gulls seem to live alone.

  ‘The locals don’t worry,’ he went on, ‘because the place is the devil’s own job to get away from if a man doesn’t know the mudbanks. But a
ny East Coast fisherman would know the lanes like his own backyard.’

  Luke rubbed his eyes, one of his more ingenuous and endearing gestures.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘There were just about three hours early yesterday morning when no cars were stopped on the Southend By-pass. There was the Pa and Ma of a smash between two milk lorries and an all-night coach, and all available men had to go down there. Havoc couldn’t have had luck like that.’

  ‘He’s had all the cards so far.’ Picot was thinking of the milk-food.

  The D.D.C.I. seemed still bewildered. ‘Anyone down there lost a – sea-going boat?’

  ‘Nothing’s come through yet, sir, but it’s early. People have to sleep, people other than us, I mean. I don’t suppose a man would notice for twelve hours or so that his craft had gone, and then he’d think she had broken away.’

  Luke stretched out a long arm. As in most other professions, the one certain way of cutting through red tape in police matters is to have a private word on the telephone with a very old friend in another department.

  Once again the luck held. Superintendent Burnby of the Essex C.C. had walked a beat with Luke in the far-off happy days when they were both prepared to put the world right if given only half a chance and another sergeant, and within a few minutes, although it was such an awkward hour of the morning, the well-remembered voice was drawling over the wire.

  ‘Wotcher, Charlie boy, how are you? See you’ve kind of mislaid someone up there in the fog. It’s funny where they get to, ain’t it? Never mind, it’s a nice drying day today. What? Boat from Tollesbury? That’s a very strange thing, so that is now. Got it on my desk this minute. Just come in. What are you trying to do, confess?’

  Luke spent a few precious moments in lucid explanation and the other voice lost its banter at once.

  ‘It could be,’ he said briskly, ‘it well could be. You may be on to something. This is a smack of eighteen tons, the Marlene Doreen. Here it is: Lister diesel engine fuelled up for one week, stores on board, hatch possibly left unlocked (if it wasn’t it wouldn’t signify. Two little old girls could lift it off bodily), owner Mr Elias Pye. He saw her last lying out in the Fleet just before eleven p.m. the day before yesterday. His son missed her yesterday afternoon about three. Until dawn this morning they thought she must have fouled her anchor. They spent a bit of time thinking about that, and notified the Tollesbury Police an hour ago. Customs have been informed. Anything else you want? We can’t always do it like this, so make the most of it.’