They Never Looked Inside

by Michael Gilbert

  “You have neglected us of late,” she complained.

  “Too much work,” said the Sergeant. “The camp’s very full now—Beaucoup de soldats—comprenez?”

  “But perfectly,” said Madame in her best English. “It is this—storm.”

  “That’s it,” said the Sergeant. “Real grasp of the mother tongue, you’ve got, haven’t you? I’m afraid there’s not much doing today. What with one thing and another we’re a bit short of grub—Manque de manger—comprenez?”

  He slid his hand under his gas cape and passed across to Madame what looked remarkably like a couple of tins of bully-beef.

  Madame received them discreetly and swept them into her capacious reticule with neat sleight of hand.

  “But perfectly,” she said, “when food is short, all must suffer together. To drink?”

  “The usual,” said Sergeant Golightly.

  An hour later, during which period he had said “The usual” six times. Sergeant Golightly drew out a massive watch (G.S. Signallers for the use of). Since “the usual” had been, on each occasion, a generous Pernod, he found a momentary difficulty in focusing, but at length decided that the time was eight o’clock.

  Good – at least another half-hour before he had to move.

  He splashed out some soda-water, a good deal of which went into his glass, and settling back in his seat became aware, for the first time, that his table was being shared by a stranger.

  “B’n soir, Monsieur le Sergeant,” said the stranger affably.

  “Bon soir to you, and see how you like it then,” replied Sergeant Golightly wittily.

  “I do no understand. You say—?”

  “What you don’t understand, cock, won’t embarrass you.”

  “You are philosophe?”

  “Oo are you callin’ soft? Are you aware that you ‘ave the singul-i-ar honour of speaking to the leading light-heavy- medium-bantam-feather-weight champion of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?”

  “Indeed?”

  “Joke,” said Sergeant Golightly. “I’m not a boxer. Not really.”

  “That I can well believe,” said the Frenchman. “Will you do me the honour of joining me in a drink?”

  “That,” replied Sergeant Golightly handsomely, “is an honour I’ll do to any man. Be he black, be he white, so long as his money’s all right.”

  “You are poetic,” said the Frenchman, and poured out a “fine” for himself and a quadruple Pernod for the Sergeant.

  Some time passed and Sergeant Golightly again inspected his watch and discovered with considerable alarm that it was five past two.

  “Try looking at it the right way up,” suggested the Frenchman, whose grasp of colloquial English was improving as the evening went on.

  An inspection on this basis showed the Sergeant that the time was twenty-five to nine.

  It was high time to be moving.

  Being a very experienced drinker he knew that the great thing was to do nothing rashly. He summoned Madame and demanded his “little bit of blotting paper”. Madame appeared to understand perfectly and produced a very large double slice of dark bread with a generous piece of rather soapy-looking cheese in the middle.

  After disposing of this the Sergeant felt more in control of the situation.

  Obviously the first thing to do was to get rid of the Frog. He spent a moment or two formulating the sentence which would achieve this in the most tactful manner, and turning back to the table he had kicked-off ambitiously with “Mille mercis, Monsieur—” when he realised that he was alone.

  The Frog had hopped it.

  The Sergeant got cautiously to his feet, and found to his satisfaction that he still had an adequate control of his limbs.

  The café appeared to be more crowded than ever, the lights brighter, the noises louder and more cheerful.

  The contrast outside was almost theatrical. The wind had increased in strength without losing its playfulness, and it alternately screamed in dry rage and threw capfuls of frozen sleet horizontally down the street.

  Sergeant Golightly turned up his coat collar and faced the elements unwillingly.

  Nevertheless, the shock of the cold and the sting of the rain had the effect of restoring him to a more cautious frame of mind. He was making for the district which lay behind the old port, and at every turn and corner in the road he stopped for a moment to look back.

  He might have spared his pains.

  He was being followed – by the most skilful trackers alive; men trained to an unbelievable pitch of efficiency by four years of street work in the French Resistance.

  As he neared his destination the Sergeant dropped any pretence of secrecy. He was numbed by the vicious assaults of the weather, and he was late for his appointment.

  The district which he had reached was sordid even by the limited standards of the neighbourhood. His footsteps had ceased to ring on the cobbles and were now padding and slipping over a thick moss of fish-scales, seaweed, and unimaginable debris. The walls were dripping with filth, and bare except for the occasional ghostly tatters of a poster which had been new when the Germans had entered the town in 1940.

  The Sergeant stopped at last in a tiny “impasse”, the seaward side of which was taken up by the premises of Messieurs Branchet and Colporteur, a ramshackle building whose long doors, cranes and derricks showed it to be a warehouse on the ground floor level. A line of shuttered windows above might have indicated offices or a dwelling-place.

  Suddenly a light went up in one of the windows.

  The Sergeant cowered in the deep doorway and waited.

  Ten seconds later a second light appeared.

  The Sergeant felt behind him, and the tiny porte cochère yielded to his touch. He stepped through it into the grateful shelter of the warehouse, and, guiding himself by a thread of light, made his way up the shallow wooden steps to the landing, and pushed open, the door under which the yellow light was streaming.

  It was an ordinary commercial office and appeared to be the first of a chain of similar rooms each opening into the other. The only occupant of the room was a small man who looked up as Golightly came in.

  “You are late,” he said, in fair English.

  “Yus,” said the Sergeant. “It was this—storm.”

  “You’ve got the stuff?”

  “As per usual—” He felt inside the front of his battle-dress blouse and produced a package about the size of an ordinary box of dominoes. “Carter Paterson, that’s me. Always prompt, always cheerful.”

  Beyond a quick scrutiny of the seals, the dwarf did not trouble to examine the box. He produced a packet of notes and said: “You are prompt, we are prompt also. That is how business should be done.” He was counting out the notes as he spoke. “Five thousand francs, as agreed. We add twenty per cent for this consignment. This makes a further thousand francs.”

  “And ten per cent for the tronc,” suggested a polite voice from the doorway.

  IV

  McCann, who viewed the events of the next few minutes from the passage outside the half-open door, was compelled to admit that he had rarely seen anyone move as quickly as the dwarf.

  A second before he had had nothing in his hands but the sheaf of bank notes; now his left hand had swept the box off the table into his pocket and his right hand held an automatic pistol.

  “Who are you?” he screamed. “Thieves, murderers . . .”

  “Now then, little horror,” said one of the men in raincoats. “Put down that gun. We are the police—”

  “Police,” spat the dwarf. “You are not police. The police I know. I do not recognise you. You are bandits . . .”

  As he spoke he was backing towards the door behind him.

  For a moment the situation looked awkward. McCann was unarmed. The detectives carried guns, but they were in their pockets. The resistance was unexpected.

  The creature reached the door and flung it open.

  He got no further. M. Bren stood there, his bulk fill
ing the aperture.

  He advanced on the dwarf, who seemed to be paralysed. “So,” he said, “you do not recognise the agents de police, crapaud. But you recognise me, hein! You know Ulysse, little toad? We have met before, hein? Two years ago, in Paris, yes? But on that occasion you hop-hop-hopped away and I was too occupied to run after you. But now it is a different history, yes? Also, you should not play with toys like this.” He removed the automatic, as he spoke, and dropped it into his pocket. “When handled by the inexperienced, they explode, causing great mortification. The package also, please. Thank you.”

  The room had been steadily filling with men as he spoke, and the uniforms and dripping capes of two agents de ville now appeared in the doorway.

  “We will commit it to you,” said M. Bren. “Remove it.”

  He turned to another of the silent figures. “Take six men and search the building. I think it is empty. But detain anyone you find.”

  The prime cause of all this, Sergeant Golightly, appeared to have been forgotten. He was standing, in apparent stupor, in the corner. His relief at discovering a compatriot in McCann was most affecting.

  “Are you an English officer, sir? Thank God for that. You’ll look after me, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” said McCann grimly, “I’ll look after you. What’s in this packet ?”

  “On my perishing life and soul,” said Golightly, “I’ve carried nearly fifty of them, but I’ve never once looked inside.”

  Illogically, McCann believed him.

  Under the paper wrapping was a neatly-made white wood box. M. Bren prised open the lid with his knife.

  Inside, there lay, gleaming, mint-new and tightly packed, two hundred golden sovereigns.

  V

  “I’ve had a talk with Golightly,” said McCann to Major Middleton next morning, “and I believe that he has told me the simple truth. Incredible as it may seem, he just did not know what he was carrying. The routine was simplicity itself. A soldier on the returning draft would approach him in the cookhouse and say: ‘You’re the chap who knows the ropes here, aren’t you?’ Golightly would answer: ‘Yes, I’ve been here a long time,’ and the chap thereupon handed him a package.”

  “Always the same sort of package?”

  “Identically. The same shape, the same weight, and wrapped and sealed in the same way.”

  “Did he know the men?”

  “No—they were almost always different. One or two of them have done it twice. None more than twice.”

  “Incredible. Are we all incurably dishonest?”

  “They say that you can bribe anyone,” said McCann, “if you pay enough. I look at it like this. The man coming back from leave was probably hard up anyway. Someone gets hold of him, and promises him twenty pounds for something that’s so easy that it can’t go wrong. Or so it seems. Just take the box and put it inside your battle-dress. No one ever searches soldiers coming back from leave. When you get to the Camp at Dieppe, give it to the Sergeant-cook. It’s money for old rope. Everyone else is doing it. Why not you?”

  “Well,” said Major Middleton practically, “the proof of the pudding was in the eating. It must have been a good system, because it worked. It’s been going on for eight months without a hitch.”

  “We might catch a few of the carriers now, I suppose, poor beggars. It’s really not them we’re after at all.”

  “I’ve promoted Corporal Sutherland to Sergeant Golightly’s place – he’s about the same shape, too. If anyone approaches him with the patter and offers him a package he’ll know what to do.”

  “Yes, I think we’ve got that tied up all right. It’s the next step that worries me—there’s a touch of illegality about it that I don’t quite like.”

  VI

  By Tuesday morning the weather had mended and a notice on the boards warned “Draft X” to parade at 1200 hours and “Draft Y” to stand by for a possible move at 2200 hours.

  “Draft X” packed happily and “Draft Y” said: “Just our perishing luck, a night crossing.”

  At 1230 “Draft X”, which consisted of about a hundred and twenty men, climbed into six three-tonners and were carried down to the quay. Here they dismounted, formed column of threes, and marched for about four hundred yards along the quay, carrying their baggage, whilst the lorries, now empty, drove beside them. This was such a normal military manoeuvre that it caused no comment.

  At the end of the quay was a large shed, and the column was directed behind this, turned left, and told to sit down and wait.

  The first ten men, who had formed the leading files and were thus on the right hand end of the line, found themselves fallen out and marched round the corner of the shed, and out of the sight of their comrades.

  The older hands began to scratch their heads. This was a variation from the normal, and therefore suspect. How the rumour started no one knew, but it spread with the speed of a prairie-fire, and, as is the way with rumours, it grew in the spreading.

  “’Ave you ‘eard what they’re doing? Those ten blokes wot went orf first. Searching ‘em? I’ll say they’re searching ‘em. Stripped to the skin. Yus. There’s about fifty coppers – plain-clo’es men, beside the Customs. What’s it all about? Smugglin’ or somethin’. ‘Eard about Nobby? That gold ring he had off the signoreena. ‘E’d put it in the middle of a bully-sandwich, in ‘is ‘aversack ration. Artful, he? But you know what happened—they ‘ad a — great magnet. Electromagnet—yus. That hauled it out, quick as a dose of salts.”

  Ten more men were led off.

  The depression deepened among the remaining hundred. Almost all of them were smugglers in a small way – a hundred cigarettes, a Jerry watch, a bottle of Anisette, a phial of dubious scent from Venice or Milan.

  Another quarter of an hour passed, and the Embarkation Officer appeared and gave an order. The remaining men were fallen in and marched on board the waiting transport.

  Here they found the first twenty victims, and the general amazement grew. Apparently no one had been searched at all.

  “Searched!” said an undersized rifleman. “Whatcher talking about. We bin sitting here kicking our — heels waiting for you—s to come on board.”

  “One more M.F.U.,” was the general verdict of the mystified draft.

  VII

  No sooner had the gang-planks been taken up and the boat warped off than a curious scene was enacted which would have confirmed the soldiery in their opinion of the higher military mind.

  A squad of gendarmes, assisted by a number of civilians, and apparently directed by a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, assembled on the spot on which the draft had been so recently seated. Armed with long iron-spiked poles similar to those used by British park-keepers, they prodded and poked in systematic fashion up and down the whole area. Another squad searched under the edge of the shed against which the rear line had squatted.

  Both parties unearthed a number of things, all of which were brought to the Colonel for his inspection; many of them seemed to cause him amusement.

  It was the party searching under the shed who made the find. One of them, feeling with his hands along the central line of piles, felt a place where the sand had been recently disturbed.

  He brought his trophy to McCann.

  It was an ordinary army water-bottle of painted enamel, brand new.

  “Full too, by the weight of it,” said McCann. He jerked out the cork and upended it. No water came out.

  “More and more interesting.” He borrowed M. Bren’s knife and cut the stitches of the covering felt, removing it carefully. The secret of the bottle was then revealed. The base had been cut away, resoldered, and carefully replaced; the join in the enamel was patent.

  Most of the helpers had stopped work and gathered round in an excited crowd.

  “It is, perhaps, an infernal machine,” suggested Monsieur Bren, grasping the base plate firmly.

  The crowd receded.

  McCann pulled, M. Bren twisted, the crowd held its breath.

/>   The plate yielded with a jerk, and a twist of wash-leather shot out, falling to the ground.

  McCann picked it up and again untwisted it. Inside there lay two of the most beautiful diamond bracelets he had ever seen.

  14

  The Bitterness Of Failure

  “Well now, gentlemen,” said the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, “I think we are in a position to move.”

  “From our point of view,” said Colonel Hunt, “the sooner the better.”

  “And ours.” Chief Inspector Hazlerigg glanced at Inspector Pickup, who nodded.

  Seated on the Commissioner’s right was a pale grey gentleman, clothed in that suit of self-effacing rectitude which seems to be the uniform of all senior civil servants. He was, in fact, a permanent under-secretary from the Home Office, and an Important Person.

  “I take it,” he said, “that such a drastic step is ab-so-lutely necessary. We have to consider public opinion, you know.”

  Fortunately the Commissioner was well used to dealing with permanent under-secretaries.

  “I think,” he observed, “that I will ask Chief Inspector Hazlerigg to run over his conclusions for us, gentlemen, and you will be able to judge for yourselves what the position really is.”

  Hazlerigg cleared his throat.

  “In my last report, sir, I told you that we had reason to suspect that the stolen property – the result of those burglaries which we were investigating – was being disposed of abroad. At the time, our chief reason for thinking so was a negative one – in other words, we were unable to believe that if the stuff was disposed of in England, we should have had no hint of it. We had very full and very accurate descriptions of most of the jewellery, and I need hardly remind you that micro-photography and other methods of comparative analysis make it difficult for the criminal to dispose of known stolen articles, especially where these consist of precious metal or precious stones. The stolen goods were all of this character, ranging from rings, watches and bracelets to ingots and loose coins. The bulk of the metal was gold, with some commercial platinum, and a little silver. Monsieur Bren of the Paris Sûreté, whose valuable co-operation has been much appreciated—”