Roller Coaster

by Michael Gilbert

Chapter Fifteen

  After a snatched lunch at the police canteen, Petrella returned to his desk. There were a number of things to be attended to. The first was a call to Milo Roughead’s office. He was told that Milo was out at lunch, but would be back soon and would ring as soon as he returned. Idle financiers obviously took longer over their lunches than hard-working police officers. The matter he had to put to him was not urgent, but it could lead to important developments.

  As the police officer in charge of the inquest proceedings he had been able to take certain precautions. He had put two men on the door and had instructed them that all-comers were to be asked to identify themselves. With members of the public something informal would do: bank card, driving licence, even a recently delivered letter. Where people were attending as representatives, they were to be asked to demonstrate their connection with the body sending them.

  Petrella had had no particular motive for insisting on this, beyond a desire for good order, but it had paid an unexpected dividend.

  The three City types in the front row when challenged had simply produced their business cards. It appeared that they were Derek Chambers, from Franz Mittelbach, insurance brokers, J.C. Adamson from the Anglo-Netherland Shipbuilding Company, and T.H. Milford from Angus, Hardy and Glenister, merchant bankers. Petrella was not interested in Chambers, Adamson and Milford. They were clearly junior types, sent along to report, but there was food for thought in the outfits they represented.

  The Ringland whom Hoyland had encountered in Amsterdam had mentioned that he was a shipbuilder and ‘Anglo-Netherland’ suggested a connection with Amsterdam. The name Glenister also rang a bell. There was a folder of documents locked in one of the drawers of his desk. From it he extracted the brochure which Father Freeling had given him. He was right. One of the supporters of the Athletic Club holiday fund was Ray Glenister.

  He was starting to think about this when Milo came through. Petrella explained what he wanted. He said, “I expect I could get it out of directories and books of reference, but you’ll be able to do it much quicker and better.”

  “You want the names of all the directors or senior types in those three outfits?”

  “Particularly the top man.”

  “Easy enough with the company. I’m not sure about the other two. Merchant bankers and insurance brokers are a secretive bunch.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be able to get it. And as quickly as you can.”

  “The noise you heard,” said Milo, “was the clatter of my feet, sprinting to do your bidding.”

  Sometime later, happening to look at his desk diary, Petrella had a shock. He had forgotten all about his promised visit to the Quartermass Club. When Charlie Kay had first mentioned the name to him it had rung a faint bell. It was only much later and when he was thinking of something different that the circumstances in which he had heard it before had recurred to him. If he was going to visit it, there were things to be done first. But did he really want to go? He reflected that Kay must have gone to some trouble to fix the meeting and that it might produce some interesting information.

  He grabbed the telephone.

  In his busy life Petrella had had little time for clubs. The word suggested to him, at one end of the scale, an austere building full of bishops and senior members of the Bench and Bar; at the other end nightclubs, which he had occasionally entered in pursuit of undesirable characters. When he got there he found that the Quartermass Club fitted into neither of these slots.

  It seemed to cater for a wide range of age and class. The noisier element was young office workers filling in as much time as possible between leaving their desks and returning to their lonely bed-sits. The next age group, a little more serious and drinking more selectively, consisted, he judged, of in-work and out-of-work journalists. They were all equally sloppily dressed, but the in-work ones looked a little happier. At the top end of the age scale there was a sprinkling of elderly men.

  Petrella, who had the policeman’s habit of trying to identify and categorise people he met, found himself handicapped by the odd lighting arrangements. These centred on a battery of bulbs over the bar which occasionally and disconcertingly changed strength and colour. At one moment the room would be flooded by a wash of clear light, the next moment plunged into near-darkness lit by flashes of red and blue.

  None of this seemed to worry the members, or the two waiters who circulated busily between the tables.

  Following the directions he had been given he made his way towards a number of recesses at the far end of the room. From Charlie Kay’s description he had no difficulty in recognising Mai Martiennsen.

  He was sitting on a padded bench behind a table which nearly filled the niche. There were two glasses on the table, one full, the other half-empty. Petrella squeezed his way in beside him, apologising to two elderly men who were playing draughts. He was not surprised that, when Mai opened his mouth, the words which came out were accompanied by a smell of past drinks and careless tooth-cleaning. What did surprise him was the voice, which was educated.

  “Lovely to see you, Super. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering you a glass of vino. In this hell-hole it’s better to keep clear of spirits. I suspect the proprietor of boiling up the gin in his bath and the whisky tastes as though he strained it through his socks. But he can’t muck about with the wine. This is a Sancerre. Quite drinkable.” He pushed the full glass towards Petrella, who restored it to its original position. He said, “I make it a rule not to drink on business. And business is something I’ve come to discuss with you. I was told by Charlie—”

  A look at his companion’s face showed him that he had nearly been guilty of an indiscretion. He amended it. “I was told by a police officer known to both of us that you might be in a position to help me with an enquiry.”

  “Always pleased to be helpful.”

  “What I have to discover is the origin – or perhaps I should say the true originator of these photographs.”

  He laid the crumpled sheet on the table. Mai looked at it impassively, then produced a lens from his pocket, turned the sheet over and examined the back.

  “Easier if they weren’t playing silly buggers with the lights,” he said.

  As though in answer to this the lights suddenly blazed out. Mai said, “Thank you. That’s a lot better. Yes, I think I can help you. This comes from one of the papers put out by a company called Intriguing Publications. More honest if they called themselves obscene publications.”

  “Thank you,” said Petrella politely. “We’d got as far as that. What we want to know is who actually owns the company. And I don’t mean the names in the register. They’re dummies. I want the real owners.”

  “The beneficial owners,” said Mai thoughtfully. “Well, that’s different. Now you really have asked me a question.” He looked at Petrella out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t actually know the answer. Not definitively. But I’m not saying I couldn’t obtain it.”

  “Then please do so.”

  “The thing is I’d have to offer some money – quite a lot of money – in the right quarters.” His red-rimmed eyes blinked hopefully.

  “You seem to be under a misapprehension,” said Petrella. He was getting tired of Mai and was beginning to be sorry that he had risked the visit. “The police have not got unlimited sums of money at their disposal to hand out to people in return for their help. Help which any right-thinking citizen should be glad to give. If you do get this information, then get in touch with me and I’ll consider how much it’s worth. But be clear about this: I’m not promising you anything.”

  As he spoke he was extracting himself with some difficulty from behind the table. Mai put out a hand as though to stop him, but seeing that his mind was made up said, “Then all I can do is apologise for wasting your time.”

  “On reflection, I’m not sure that you have wasted it,” said Petrella agreeably. “That we shall see.”

  The genius behind the bar selected this moment for plunging the
room into semi-darkness, causing him to knock over the draughtboard. He apologised to the players, picked up the pieces and fought his way through the crowd and out into the street. The young man on the other side of the road observed his exit and made a note.

  On the face of it an inconclusive meeting, but the more he thought about it the clearer did certain aspects of it appear. Some helpful, one particularly unhelpful and unpleasant.

  Whilst he had been in the club there had been a change in the weather. He had noticed that the clouds were closing up. They had hidden the moon and were now shutting down the whole sky. It seemed that the long drought was coming to an end.

  He managed to reach home before the heavens opened and poured down their benison onto the parched and thirsty earth. He stood with Jane at the open window and watched the rain beating onto the roofs and rebounding in spray. Presently they were joined by their pyjama-clad son.

  “This is something like it, isn’t it just?” said Donald.

  “What it’s something like,” said his mother, “is time you got back into bed.”

  “Couldn’t I stop and watch, just for a few minutes?”

  “Certainly not. Trotting about in pyjamas. You’re asking for a cold.” Donald moved very slowly towards the door, stopping there to say, “If I got back into bed just now I expect I should get a cold.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The rain’s been coming straight down onto it, through the window. It’s pretty damp—”

  “You evil child,” said his mother. “Why didn’t you say so at once?”

  Petrella, left behind at the window, found himself laughing and was grateful. There hadn’t been a lot to laugh about lately.

  The rain hardly stopped during the night and was still coming down steadily as he made his way to his office next morning. The change in the weather seemed to have had one good effect. It had damped down the number of people who wanted to distract him. Ramsbottom rang him twice with queries about the arrangements for the ELBO cash run next day. He began to wonder whether he ought not to go across to Harford Street and pick up the reins, but decided that any interference at this point could only be counter-productive.

  He managed to focus his mind on a number of routine matters. Went up West that evening for a game of squash with a friend at the RAC and came home feeling better.

  During Thursday night the rain eased off and London next day was alternately dripping and drying under intervals of hot sun interrupted by sudden fierce downpours. The break in the weather seemed to have improved everyone’s temper. He hoped that this was a favourable omen for what was going to be a difficult day.

  The decoy car was timed to leave the bank at eleven o’clock. He was aware that a good deal of his own future hung on what happened in the next few minutes. He had an illogical faith in the ability in action of Sergeant Stark and very little in the organising power of the sergeant’s superior officer. Maybe the two things would balance out. Unable to sit still he opened the window and leaned out, ignoring a steady drip of water from the blocked gutter above him.

  His office was no more than 400 yards in a direct line from the bottom of Globe Road and perhaps half a mile from the top. Whilst the rain was beating down he could hear nothing, but when it stopped there was an interval of silence. It was during this that he heard what he had been listening for, and hoping not to hear. Two shots. Then, a full minute later, two more. After that the rain belted down again. Petrella shut the window and mopped his head. Ten minutes later his telephone sounded. As expected, it was Ramsbottom. He sounded as though he had lost a dear relative. Petrella cut him short. He said, “Don’t explain anything. Just send Stark and Pearson straight round here,” and replaced the receiver gently, but firmly.

  When the two sergeants appeared they were wet, but looked cheerful. Petrella said, “Well?”

  “Didn’t go too badly,” said Stark. “Not a hundred per cent success.”

  “Goalless draw,” said Pearson.

  “Let’s have it all – sit down – from the start.”

  “The start was when this big estate car pulled out across our bows. The idea was that we would force our way past, let them chase us and lead them into Limehouse Fields, which being a dead-end they couldn’t get out of. By that time the supports would be coming up behind us and we’d have them bottled.”

  “And it didn’t work like that?”

  “It worked all right. But the wrong way round. To start with, the spot they’d chosen to stop us had been chosen, well, pretty craftily.”

  “You mean bloody craftily. That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”

  “Right. But seeing as how this is an official report—”

  “Your official report can come later. In writing. For now let’s have it in your own words.”

  “Right, sir. Bloody crafty is what it was. A lamp-post on one pavement and a direction post on the other. No chance of squeezing past. So we started to extract ourselves from the van and sort them out.”

  “Them?”

  “The two bastards who’d jumped out of the car – they must have spotted me and Lofty.” Stark grinned. “We’re pretty well-known in that part. Whilst we were climbing out, they got the car turned and pissed off up Globe Road with us on their tails. If I’d had a little more speed I’d have rammed them, but they kept ahead until they tried a skid turn into the road that leads to Limehouse Fields.

  “Whilst they were doing that they ran up onto the pavement and hit a gate post. No real damage. They started backing, but I was out by this time and put two bullets into the car engine.”

  Whilst he paused for breath, Petrella said, “Let me be clear about one thing. They were deliberately heading for Limehouse Fields?”

  “No doubt about it. And now they were on foot and we were back in the van. With the upper hand, you’d have thought. Then, when we turned the corner, we saw the crowd waiting for us. West Indian hunkies. Fifteen or twenty of them. The two men dived in among them. We couldn’t drive after them, not without starting a massacre, so we jumped out. The crowd was deliberately blocking us—”

  “Laid on for the purpose,” agreed Pearson. “All part of the organisation.”

  “—so I fired two more shots over their heads. This scattered them all right and we got through. A bit too late. By that time their reserve car was on the spot. It must have been hidden in that private garden.”

  “Meath Gardens?”

  “That’s the one. Easy enough to get a key, I suppose. The men jumped on board and set off down the track beside the canal. By that time we had got back in the van and started after them, pushing past a few stupid buggers who were trying to commit suicide. Faint, but pursuing, you might say. The canal track wasn’t no sort of motorway and the rain had made it so slippery that I thought once or twice we were going into the drink. The other car was doing better. Maybe it had chains on. I don’t know. They seem to have thought of most things.”

  “But,” said Petrella, who had been following all this on the map, “they couldn’t get away. The path runs up to the Jewish cemetery and stops there.”

  “So you might think,” said Stark with a grin. “I don’t know whether that part was good luck or good staff work, but a funeral happened to be going on and both gates were open. They ran straight through and out into the Mile End Road. When we arrived, the gates were shut. Seems they didn’t approve of people barging through their sacred ceremonies. Can’t blame them, really. By the time we’d explained who we were and they’d let us through there wasn’t any point in going on, so we came home.”

  Petrella thought about it. He supposed that a very careful man would have blocked the cemetery exit gate, but since it was normally kept locked it was hard to blame Ramsbottom for this. And there were more important things to attend to. He said, “When you fired the second time, you said you fired high.”

  “That’s right. I put the shots into the trunk of one of the trees in Meath Gardens, about twelve foot up.�
��

  “Both shots?”

  “Hit it both times. Not a difficult target.”

  “Good. I saw from your record that you did the three-month explosive recognition course at Woolwich.”

  “Most of us did that before we went to Ireland.”

  “Have you kept in touch with any of the instructors?”

  Stark pondered. Pearson said, “Hector’s still there. I saw him the other day.”

  “Sergeant Instructor Hector Lambie. Yes, a good bloke.”

  “See if you can get hold of him.”

  “Now?”

  “Right away. Tell him that what’s wanted urgently is a piece of aid by the military to the civil arm. If there’s any trouble I’ll square it with his CO.”

  Whilst Stark was looking up the number and dialling, Petrella went down to talk to Ambrose. He said, “Can you lay on a truck for me with a ladder at least twelve foot high and have it standing by with a full crew?”

  Ambrose said, “Sure.” One of his many virtues was that he never asked unnecessary questions.

  When Petrella got back to his office he found Stark looking ruffled. He said, “Crowd of box-wallahs. Professional obstructors. What was my name? What did I want? Where was I speaking from? However, I got through in the end. He’s coming.”

  “Excellent.”

  “One thing I forgot to tell you. I thought I recognised the driver of the get-away car. Not well enough to swear to it in court. Boy I was at the Matthew Holder School with. Len Lampier. Younger than I was, of course. I thought he was a decent sort of kid. Don’t know what he’s been playing at lately.”

  “That’s something I’d give a lot to know myself,” said Petrella. He was thinking about what Lee Morrissey had said; duly reported to him by Hoyland.

  They sat in silence for some minutes. Then Stark said, “I hope you won’t think it out of order, but there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you and now seems a chance to mention it.” Petrella wondered what was coming. All his guesses were wide of the mark.

  “People were saying that when you were on leave you got into a bit of trouble in the desert.”