Gideon Combats Influence

by John Creasey

  He tapped cursorily on the door marked Assistant Commissioner and went in. Rogerson was alone at his desk, writing. He glanced up, waved to a chair, finished what he was doing very quickly, and then pushed his chair back. His expression told Gideon that he did not like what he had to say.

  “Done anything about that exhumation yet, George?”

  “I’ve laid on the job,” Gideon answered.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to lay it off,” said Rogerson.

  Gideon checked a question, and sat there solidly, his face expressionless, thought of the death of the youngster pushed aside. It was remarkable how often thought of Borgman did push everything else into the background.

  “Don’t you want to know why?” asked Rogerson.

  “Don’t I know?”

  “It wasn’t Plumley.”

  “If Plumley agreed to work on the result of the exhumation he wouldn’t back out. Someone high-up doesn’t want to risk a smack-down.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t ask me where it started,” said Rogerson. “I suspect the Home Secretary had second thoughts after he’d signed that order, but it would be worth a kick in the pants to say so. The Commissioner’s non-committal, but he says that the Home Office doesn’t want to delve into a case four or five years old, when it’s so speculative, in view of public unrest about the present rate of crime.” Roger-son was speaking with great deliberation, and badly: at heart he was angry. Gideon was beginning to feel angry, too, as he often did when he came up against the brick wall of the High Authorities, but Ms was a slow anger; and already he was trying to see a way of getting round this embargo. “The official attitude is that as we are understaffed, and as we can’t really cope with the crop of car thefts, housebreakings, shop lifting and general indictables, and since we can’t hold back the steadily worsening crime figures, even though big stuff’s on the down graph, this is no time to have several men delving back into a case which might be imaginary.”

  Gideon said flatly: “I’ve asked Borgman to come and see me today.”

  Rogerson actually gaped.

  Gideon told him why in some detail, including the suicide and wife-murder. Rogerson nodded, made no comment, but pushed some papers across his desk and said: “I’ll have a look at him while he’s here. Take those papers with you, they’re not so hot.” Gideon saw that they were the latest Home Office statistics, and he was reasonably sure that the number of indictable offences had gone up by nearly twenty per cent over last year. He had been over-optimistic. In spite of the lull of the past few weeks because so many of the big boys were inside, there was more crime than ever. A youngster run down and killed; Tiny Bray, beaten to death; the Gully girl, all but drowned; the crop of thefts of cars and from cars, of housebreaking, of pickpocketing – there was no end to it. One of the troubles was that at the Yard one became almost to accept the inevitability of a rise in the crime figures; to accept the inevitability of failure in a battle which was being waged so bitterly.

  “I’ll study ’em,” Gideon said. “Anything else?”

  “No, George. I’m sorry about Borgman.”

  Gideon grunted, still making no comment, still brooding. He went into his office, and asked Bell: “Anything in from Borgman?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to have a look at the places where these car thefts have been from,” Gideon said, picking up the exhumation order and putting it into his inside coat pocket.

  He did not explain why he was going out, but Bell knew him better than most, and almost certainly realised that he was brooding over some rebuff that he wanted to ponder on his own. He had to decide what to do about that exhumation order, and he was the only one now who could make the decision. He could lift a telephone and stop the Berkshire police from proceeding – he had persuaded them to start preparing on his assurance that the order would be coming along; they wouldn’t actually start to dig until they got it. If he sent it down to Berkshire, ‘forgetting’ to cancel it, and the body was exhumed and the autopsy finished, then he would know whether he could hope to force the hand of the men who had ordered ‘no action’. He no longer felt angry, just a little sore: and that because it seemed as if Borgman, not the politicians, were to blame for this.

  He entered the Map Room, where a uniformed sergeant and a plainclothes man were on duty, sticking pins in the huge maps of London which were spread out on the walls and on the stands between the walls. It was like a huge library, with bookcases at intervals so that every London Division had a big section map of its own. In each map were pins of many colours: red for fatal accidents, pink for accidents without fatalities, black for car thefts, brown for thefts from cars, grey for housebreaking … a colour for all the common crimes. Seen like this, it seemed as if no square inch of London was free from serious crime; and as if few spots were free from car accidents and car thefts. He hadn’t been down here for a week, and he should have been, because the number of car thefts had gone up so much; he had noticed the trend, of course, and sent for special reports.

  The uniformed sergeant was standing by one of the maps as Gideon walked round.

  “How many car thefts reported this month, Ted?” Gideon asked. “In the whole Metropolitan police area?”

  “Four hundred and thirty-one, sir.”

  “God! How many up on last week?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Week before?”

  “Nineteen, sir.”

  “How many found?”

  “One in every two, sir, usually stripped of everything that can be moved. Some are used for joy-riding, of course, quite a few for thefts and smash-and-grab jobs.”

  “Yes. What’s the proportion of central and outer districts?”

  “One in every four’s inside the square mile,” the sergeant said, and meant the very heart of London’s West End.

  “Any special trends?” asked Gideon.

  “Well, I dunno, sir.” The sergeant looked at the brown-headed pins, and then picked up his note-books. “I haven’t noticed anything, but have a look for yourself.”

  “Thanks,” said Gideon, and studied the figures. “Shouldn’t think you’d missed anything,” he went on, and picked up a telephone from the sergeant’s desk, and called Information. When the chief inspector then in charge answered, he said in an even voice: “Gideon here … I want up-to-the-minute statistics on car thefts over the whole Metropolitan and City area—comparative figures for the past twelve months, and for the past three years. Make a thorough job of it, will you?”

  “Right,” the chief inspector said. “You heard about the one an hour ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Another man died.”

  “Got the driver yet?”

  “No.”

  Gideon said: “It will be in all the headlines tonight—tell the Back Room to give the newspapers everything we can on it. Tell them I’m going to have a look at the scene myself, too. Don’t give them the slightest excuse for saying that we aren’t taking it seriously. Say that—”

  “Someone been prodding you?”

  The comment annoyed Gideon, but he did not show it. Instead, he said: “No. I’m prodding you,” and rang off without finishing what he had intended to say. He nodded to the sergeant and went out of the brightly lighted room and up the stairs towards the main hall, nodding to everyone who passed and spoke or raised a hand to him. The second fatality made this a case which was going to be sensational, and now his mind was almost free from the Borgman uncertainty; he had to present the Yard in the best light he could, and try to make sure that no newspaper would start one of the periodic ‘pep-up-the-Yard’ campaigns.

  If he had his own way he would have walked, but he did not want to be out of the office for too long, so he crossed Parliament Street, and then took a bus w
hich dropped him at Piccadilly Circus. During the slow ride, he tried to set the Borgman business in its proper perspective. Was it really conceivable that if Borgman knew about the danger from the nurse’s belated statement he would have acted so high-handedly with Appleby? Appleby had described a man who was absolutely sure of himself.

  Was it a mistake to keep at Borgman ‘on principle’? – because the man obsessed him? God knew that there was plenty doing to keep the Yard busy. That wasn’t the point, he told himself, almost portentously; the point was that no one who had committed a crime must ever feel free from the possibility of being found out; and a five-year-old crime could have far worse repercussions on the mind of a criminal than one that had happened four or five minutes ago. He could not see himself arguing that point with the politicians, and told himself that obviously there had been some talk in the lobbies of the House of Commons. Whenever a directive came from the Home Secretary it was because he was being pushed – and probably a lot of Members of Parliament were restive about the increasing incidence of crime.

  Gideon got off the bus, and said: “Damned fool.” Of course, the Home Office had seen the latest figures before he had.

  He walked along Shaftesbury Avenue. There was a crowd of people at one corner, being moved on by several policemen, some of whom were obviously out of patience because of the crowd’s insistence. Gideon was tall enough to look over the heads of most people present. He saw a squad of his own men busy, measuring, marking the roadway and the pavement. The ambulances had gone, but the grisly tale of what had happened remained; there were patches of sawdust, some of them showing the damp of blood; and there were two small pools of blood which someone had missed; on one there was the imprint of a foot. A plate glass window had been smashed, and the killer car had been nosed inside the shop, one wing badly crumpled but otherwise hardly damaged. It was a Morris, the kind of medium-powered car easiest to steal and get away with.

  Police were trying to keep the crowd back far enough for them to work in comfort, and three uniformed men came out of a shop doorway, carrying some boxes, to use as a temporary barricade. Gideon took all this in, and saw several Fleet Street men also taking in the scene; one of them was standing on a box and taking a photograph; another photographer was at a window on the first floor of the shop. Gideon knew that it was only a matter of time before a reporter came up and asked him questions; it was better to be questioned than to volunteer information.

  The photographer on the box called out: “Commander!” in a loud voice, and Gideon turned towards him. A small man with the photographer came across and said earnestly: “Investigating this in person, Mr Gideon?”

  “Just having a look,” Gideon said. “Had too many car thefts lately, and we’re giving it priority.”

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “Two or three weeks.”

  “As long as that?”

  “What do you think—that we like car thefts?” asked Gideon, as if irritably. “We can’t do much without the co-operation of the public, you know that as well as I do. I’ll bet that car wasn’t locked.”

  “It wasn’t, sir.” A Yard man had come up, smaller than most, wearing a well-cut brown suit, hair brushed very neatly, and with an immaculate air about him. “I’ve talked to the owner. He forgot to lock it after lunch.”

  Gideon nodded, and went to the car. A divisional man was in it, brushing it over for fingerprints, but if this had been stolen by an expert, then the thief would have worn gloves, and there would be no hope of finding prints.

  “The only thing we’ve got is a description of what he looked like from behind,” the brown-clad man said. “One of our men saw him.”

  “Is he here?”

  “The tall constable—yes.”

  Gideon went across, knowing that he had been identified by every policeman and newspaperman here, and by many of the crowd. He spent only a minute with the tall constable, enough to make the man glow, and then checked everything that had been done. Every shopkeeper and every front office was being visited, in the hope that someone had seen the face of the car thief; nearby shops, offices and restaurants were being visited in the same quest. Harrison, the brown-clad man, had missed nothing; his was a temperament that thrived on praise, and Gideon said: “Keep it up and you’ll get the chap all right.”

  This was ‘his’ London; the ‘manor’ which he had walked as a constable, and later as a sergeant; the district he had come to know inside out as a detective officer and a detective sergeant; and his first major job at the Yard had been that which Harrison had now. It was less that he loved the square mile than that it seemed natural for him to be here; the little shops in Soho, the delicatessens, the murky doorways, the laundries, the discreetly shrouded restaurants, the chatter in foreign languages, the streaming traffic, the noise, the bustling vitality, the quiet squares, the graceful Mayfair houses – to Gideon all this was the true heart of London. It never failed to restore his sense of balance. He could think more clearly and with less bias here than anywhere else, even in his own office and his own home. In a strange way he could be alone here, in spite of the throng who jostled as they passed.

  He visited twenty-one places from which cars had been stolen in the past few weeks, and saw how cleverly the cars had been selected to give the greatest possible chance of a getaway, and he came firmly to the conclusion that many of these thefts were the work of one gang. If that were so, then almost certainly there were several nearby garages to which each stolen car could be driven, the number plate whipped off and replaced by a false one; there would be other garages, probably on the perimeter of the West End or even in the outer suburbs, where cars could be re-cellulosed and their appearance changed completely.

  He was at the end of Shaftesbury Avenue when a plainclothes man came up, a little diffidently, and said: “Commander Gideon?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a message from your office, sir. It says that a Mr B. will be there at half past five.”

  Gideon said: “Good, thanks,” and immediately his spirits rose: he realised how much he wanted to see Borgman, and how glad he was that Borgman had decided to accept the invitation. It was already nearly five o’clock: the quicker he got back the better. He waved to a taxi, and as it slowed down, he said to the plainclothes man: “Call the office back, and ask them to have Superintendent Lee there for me in ten minutes, will you?”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Thanks, Osborn,” Gideon said, and could see the astonishment in the man’s eyes at being recognised. Gideon got into the taxi, sat back, and began to fondle the bowl of his pipe.

  First Fred Lee; then Borgman; then the decision about the exhumation; and before he went home he must prepare an outline of what he wanted done about the car thefts, and have a word with Bell about the best man to put in charge.

  He was almost buoyant when he strode into his office, where grey-haired, round-shouldered Fred Lee waited, on his own.

  Chapter Seven

  Borgman

  “Joe had to nip out,” Lee said. “He won’t be five minutes. He tells me you’ve got a special for me.”

  “And what a special,” Gideon said. He rounded his desk and sat down. “Take a pew, Fred.” He was a little over-hearty, and that was only partly due to his mood. Lee needed pushing; needed to feel at least for the time being that he was not really on his own, and that the strength and the confidence of Gideon and the Yard was behind him. In fact he was a person whom one success could make into a new man, and another serious failure destroy utterly, as a policeman. “Joe say what it was?”

  “Borgman.”

  “That’s right. An old cashier …” Gideon outlined the situation without wasting words, and saw the intentness with which Lee followed every point. This was undoubtedly the right job for Lee, who could make a column of figures live, and could read account books
as another might read a simple report, and who also had the gift of making what he discovered clear to those who had no head for figures. He had followed through three big cases of income tax fraud brilliantly, and nothing had seemed likely to stop his progress at the Yard until, a year ago, he had been given the Rambaldi Case. This had been an involved case of income tax fraud in a series of companies of which Rambaldi had been the leading light – another Borgman in a way. There had been no question of the tax evasions, simply doubt as to whether Rambaldi had taken any part in them, or whether the onus had lain entirely with the parent company’s secretary and accountants. Each of these men had accepted the responsibility, and denied that Rambaldi had known about the frauds. Lee had been sure – in the way that Gideon was now sure about Borgman – that Rambaldi had been the main architect, and that the other men were taking the rap because their wives and families were being well looked after and because each would come out of jail to a small fortune.

  At one time it had looked as if the prosecution would win easily: until Percy Richmond had started the cross-examination of Fred Lee.

  It had not been good to see a man made to look a fool. In the witness box, Lee had gradually broken down under the remorseless questioning, and two other witnesses on whom he had been relying had contradicted themselves so often under Richmond’s questions that Rambaldi had been found not guilty. Only Lee and a few Yard officers believed that the acquitted man had been as guilty as either of the others.

  The first break in Lee’s testimony had come when he had forgotten some figures, under Richmond’s cross-examination, and become momentarily confused. Then Richmond had attacked him on his greatest strength – his memory. If he could ‘forget’ one thing, couldn’t he get others wrong? The jury had been duly persuaded that Lee’s memory was unreliable, and his reasoning consequently faulty.