by John Creasey
The door was open!
Now his heart began to race, for there could no longer be any doubt; this was the moment when he should send for help. He pulled up the built-in aerial of his little radio, and as he did so and before he switched it on, heard a rustle behind him.
He swung around.
A man was only a yard away, arm upraised and weapon in it, already on its way down.
Oswald didn’t dodge, didn’t back away, but simply kicked forward with his left foot, as high as he could. He caught the attacker in the groin. An anguished gasp of sound came as the man doubled up, and his weapon clattered to the concrete path. There was no more risk from this man, Oswald thought, but if someone else was inside he might have heard that clattering.
A phrase hammered into him by a wise old sergeant flashed into his mind.
Never take a chance unless you have to. Don’t just think it’s okay. Be certain.
He went forward and grabbed the man, who was still doubled up, pushed him upright, and then struck him on the chin. The man went back, log-like, banged against the wall, and fell. Oswald, one hand at his radio, turned toward the door and at that moment, it opened wide and a second assailant sprang at him.
Oswald repeated his defensive tactics, with exactly the same result, except that this man fell helplessly to one side and onto the ground, twitching his legs as if in anguish. And so he might be, Oswald thought. He switched on the radio, and when he was answered, reported quite calmly.
“You’ll have a car within three minutes,” Information from the Yard assured him. “Don’t let them get away.”
“No, sir,” Oswald promised.
He was not only very calm, but highly pleased with himself. It was hardly credible that such a thing could have happened on his first solitary patrol, but there were the two men in front of him. He could almost hear that wise old sergeant. There’s just one place to hit or kick for; if you can make it you won’t have any trouble. And he had demonstrated time and time again on a dummy.
On this, his first encounter, Oswald had carried out these instructions to the letter, and they had worked. My God! How they had worked! Although he stood in the middle of the path, narrowing any spot where either man could try to escape, there was no need at all. The men were no longer writhing but they were still on the ground when there was the sound of a motor; a car door closed; and footsteps echoed clearly along the service alley and along this garden path.
“Now be careful,” Oswald warned himself. “Don’t talk too much, just play it cool. How do they know it’s my first time out?” And he added: “And if they did, why should they care?”
A policeman approached. “Any trouble?” he asked, and then saw the two men, and whistled. “Plenty of trouble. Been inside yet?”
“No,” Oswald answered. “There was a chance there’d be another; I thought I’d better stay put.”
“Couldn’t be more right,” the patrol car officer said. “I’ll take a look around.” Another policeman joined him and they went in while Oswald stood guard outside. He was rueful and disappointed, for he wanted to go inside, but he accepted the situation philosophically, while still more men came to take care of his prisoners.
That was at a quarter to three.
At that moment, in a house less than a hundred yards from the scene of Oswald’s triumph, a pretty girl lay sleeping and a man holding a pillow in his hands stood by the side of her single bed.
The girl’s name was Rosamund.
The man’s name was Wells – David Wells.
They were – or they had been – lovers.
They had made love that night.
He had taken her in all her eagerness, and the thought of killing her had been in his mind. In a way it had been horrible but in another strangely exciting, increasing his passion and desire.
Now, while she slept, he had dressed and was standing over her.
He had to kill her or else face ruin, tragedy, perhaps destroy his wife and his three children. And he could not face these things.
He had given the promise that he would divorce his wife and marry Rosamund; but he had known he could never go through with it. He was sure that Rosamund would go to Ellen and tell her about them; and the hurt would be as great to Ellen as if he were to tell her himself.
He had to kill Rosamund: had to. And it was her own fault; she shouldn’t have insisted on marriage. He hadn’t thought she would, hadn’t dreamed of it. When he had first come here, to her flat, he had told her he was married and she had talked of love in a permissive society, of wanting only that part of his life he could “spare” from his wife. But as the days had passed he had come to realise that she did not mean what she said.
She stirred.
He clutched the pillow more tightly.
She settled again, her head turning to one side. She was flushed, and that brushed her prettiness with beauty. She had a smooth complexion, without serious blemish, and her dark hair was drawn loosely back from her forehead and caught with a ribbon at the nape of the neck. It made her look so young, almost like a schoolgirl. Well, she was young: twenty-two. And he was thirty-one.
She had such beautiful shoulders; so milky white. And in her sleep she seemed to smile.
He had to kill her.
As yet he had committed no crime, for it was no crime in the eyes of the law to commit adultery while seducing a young woman. He would commit no crime until he lowered that pillow and began to smother her.
He had to.
She had been so adamant about what he must do, and had used the one argument which silenced him as it had silenced countless married men before him: she was pregnant with his child.
Once she went to Ellen and told her that, there could be no going back. Ellen would divorce him, he had no doubt of it, but it would break her heart – and the children’s. Moreover, he really couldn’t afford it. He earned less than forty pounds a week as an accountant with a firm in the City of London, and was never likely to earn much more. Rosamund wouldn’t be able to work with a baby on the way, and Ellen, with three children under seven, couldn’t leave the house. It was utterly hopeless. The only way out was to kill Rosamund.
Murder her.
She stirred again, more gently even than before.
It was easy to imagine her body beneath the sheet and blanket, easy to remember their passion. Once, he had been oblivious of all else when with her, but of late it had been more like being with Ellen, Ellen who felt no joy and knew no ecstasy but suffered him, turning his love into lust. He could go back in his thoughts to the time when he and Ellen had lain together, in the grass in a little woodland on Ealing Common. At that time too she had suffered him but he had been too young to realise that that was not enough. Yet he had felt committed, and they had gone together for two years before getting married. The strange thing was she so loved having babies; the only time she looked less than plain was when she was with child. And she loved the children as babies, but was less patient and less loving when they began to walk and talk.
It wasn’t any use thinking back.
He had to act, now.
He had to murder Rosamund because there was no way of living a peaceful fear-free life with her alive. He knew the risks. When he had been on his way here he had calculated them. He might be caught, of course, but why should he be? It certainly wasn’t inevitable. They seldom went out together. It was his fear that Ellen might see them together that had forced this issue of marriage; that, and the baby. Of course there was risk, but this was a big old house, let out in bed-sitting rooms. Each bed-sitter had its own door to the landings, there was only the communal front door, but it was remarkable how seldom he met anyone on the stairs. And there was so much coming and going; some of the girls had a different boyfriend every night of the week! He had always cycled here, never walked; cyclists were les
s noticed than pedestrians, and there was a spot outside the house where his old bicycle was chained now.
He must get it over.
He must not delay, or he would lose the chance.
Rosamund stirred again and lay on her back, those creamy-textured shoulders so beautiful.
He drew in a deep breath, lowered the pillow, then thrust it over her face and pressed down with all his might. As she began a swift and awful struggle for life, he placed his right knee on her stomach so that only her legs could thrash as her chest heaved, fighting desperately for the air which was not there.
Soon her struggling stopped.
He did not move for a long time; a very long time, for he had to be absolutely sure. At last he was. At last he eased the pressure, but left the pillow over her face and shoulders. He felt her pulse, which was still, then pulled on some thin cycling gloves. He had been so careful not to touch a thing tonight. Rosamund had done everything for him; everything.
He turned his back on her and opened the door; listened, but heard no sound. He went out and closed the door with the slightest of clicks, then started down the stairs, covered with a strip of coconut matting which deadened all but the loudest of footsteps. At the street door he hesitated again, then stepped outside. He had done this dozens of times but never before had he been so frightened of being seen.
No one was in sight.
His bicycle was still chained to the rails.
He opened the padlock, making only a little noise, and cycled off, wheels purring, chain whispering, tyres silent on the smooth-topped road. Now and again a loose mudguard rattled. He turned out of Leith Avenue, into Acacia Road, then into the long narrow Cardiff Street, which led to the main road close to the Ealing town hall. As he drew near the end of the street he saw two cars with their lights on, and then the lighted POLICE signs became visible and his heart nearly turned over; one foot actually slipped off a pedal. Men were coming out of a service road, and he thought that some were handcuffed.
He hated the danger of passing, for policemen had such cats’ eyes and noticed so much that ordinary people wouldn’t see. But he must not turn back for they would have glimpsed him by now. He gritted his teeth, kept his head down, and went on. If they stopped him, if they even took a good look at him, he was finished.
Police Constable Oswald saw the cyclist.
The rulebook and the sergeant alike said that a strange man or a man moving about in the small hours could justifiably be stopped and questioned; though ninety-nine times in a hundred he would be innocent of all crimes, the hundredth time the man would be fresh from a “job.”
But Oswald was feeling very much put out.
He had been left outside since the men from the station had arrived, and the sergeant in charge had virtually ignored his existence. (It did not occur to him that the sergeant was deliberately making sure he didn’t get a swollen head on his first night on duty alone.) And he was cold. Although he did not realise it, he was suffering from a delayed-action shock. Whatever the causes, as he watched the cars drive off with his prisoners, while patrolmen and others from the division searched the antique shop, he looked at the solitary cyclist without moving.
He ought to stop him.
He actually took a step forward, belatedly.
Then he sneezed. It took him completely by surprise, and he raised his hand swiftly to his face. The cyclist went by, reached Broadway, and turned right and disappeared.
He sneezed, thought David Wells in choking excitement. He sneezed; he probably didn’t get a good look at me!
4
Morning Reports
“Good morning, Commander . . .”
“Good morning.”
“Morning, George – great night last night, wasn’t it?”
“Very good indeed.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, sergeant.”
Gideon made his way in nigh majestic progression up the steps and along the passages of “old” New Scotland Yard. The move to the splendid new modern building was still several months off, and Gideon had not yet adjusted to the fact that a change was in the offing. There was something reassuringly solid about these old premises, and about his own office, with its two windows overlooking the Embankment, the Thames, the London County Hall, and Westminster Bridge, with its low parapet and its three- lamp standards and the steady flow of traffic.
Two Chief Superintendents were coming out of Hobbs’s office, next door to Gideon’s.
“Good morning, Commander. Very good show last night, wasn’t it?” said Superintendent Ringall, a big, bluff man.
“Very.”
The other Superintendent’s face was deeply chasmed as if there were crevices in his flesh dried almost to pale leather. He seemed to have the suffering of the ages in his expression and the wisdom, too. He was Superintendent Piluski.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, Superintendent.”
Piluski, a Pole by birth, English by training, soft-footed and quick-moving, turned to Gideon’s door and opened it for him while Ringall went on.
“Thanks,” Gideon said. “What are you on at the moment?”
“I’m nearly through with the jewel smuggling case,” said Piluski. “It’s all over bar shouting.”
It was a little strange to hear this colloquialism uttered in his near guttural voice; almost as strange to observe the droll expression on the harp-shaped lips, to become so aware of his dark, deep-set eyes – so dark at eyebrows and lashes, in fact, that it was almost as if he used eye makeup.
“Got them all?” asked Gideon.
“I think so.” The words sounded almost “I zink so.”
Gideon nodded as he went in, and Piluski closed the door quietly. Gideon glanced at the pile of reports on his desk, saw that the one on new cases was much fuller than usual, and was instantly aware of a direct relation between the police night out and the crooks’ night out. He pursed his lips in a resigned grimace and stepped to the window.
This was almost a ritual with him. There could hardly have been a better morning. The sun was breaking through the river’s mist, which made the surface of the water look as if it were steaming. The nearer part of the bridge and the Embankment were very sharply etched, but the farther end of the bridge and even the County Hall were enshrouded in a misty, pearly grey. Along to the right the new skyline of the south bank of the Thames emerged, the square buildings huge designs of concrete and glass; to the left were the graceful arches of Waterloo Bridge, beyond which the neo-modern structure of the Festival Hall and the mammoth commercial buildings looked stark.
Gideon crossed to his desk and sat down, glanced through the files on new cases and saw none, as far as quick opinion could tell, of exceptional importance. Then he looked through the other files, all of investigations in hand. There had been a time when he would have seen the officers in charge of these, but nowadays Hobbs vetted them and only sent through cases which he felt needed the Commander’s personal attention. Gideon could not recall a single instance where Hobbs’s judgment had been wrong.
The jewel smuggling case, covering several weeks’ work, was indeed at the point of finish: three members of the crew of an English ship which made a run of English and Dutch and Belgian North Sea ports were under arrest, and a jewel merchant in Hatton Garden was about to be charged with receiving.
Gideon pressed a bell for Hobbs, who, for once, didn’t come immediately; that meant he was out of the office or on the telephone. Gideon pushed his own three telephones a little farther away. One was green and connected to the Yard’s exchange; one was grey, the direct line to the Whitehall exchange; a black one was the internal machine, with a great variety of buttons. The desk, of highly polished mahogany, like the filing cabinets and a table, had some trays fixed to it. In, Out, Pending. There w
as one file in the Pending tray. He picked it up, frowning. It was Riddell’s latest report.
The door opened and Hobbs came in, as immaculate in a dark grey suit as he had been last night in tails. He showed no sign of having been up too late. Gideon remembered him going off with Penelope, who hadn’t come home before her father had gone to sleep; but she had been up before he had left this morning.
“Sorry, sir,” Hobbs said.
“That’s all right.” There was a moment’s pause, but Hobbs didn’t take the opportunity to say who had been on the telephone, so perhaps it hadn’t been so urgent after all. “The boys were busy last night, I see.”
“And we made a good haul,” Hobbs announced.
“That’s something.”
“Eighty-nine burglaries, and fifty-one arrests or arrests-pending already.”
“Very good!”
“And I’ve just heard of the best one we’ve had for months,” said Hobbs, with obvious satisfaction. “Two youths were caught at an old antique and junk shop at Ealing. It turns out that over the past months they’d sold a lot of stolen jewels and silver to the dealer. They returned by night to steal it back, to resell to someone else. Now we have plenty on the dealer, and”—Hobbs chuckled—”something like a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stolen stuff from beneath the floorboards of the shop. They’re still counting at Ealing; there might be twice as much when the count is over.”
“It was certainly a big night,” said Gideon with equal satisfaction. “Who caught the pair?”
“There’s an aspect about that that the press will go to town on,” reported Hobbs. “It was a man out on his own for the first time. He was lucky to strike such a case, of course, but he was on top of his job to start with.”