The people on the fourth floor rushed madly towards the down escalator, elbowing each other aside in their effort to escape. The first few made it without incident, and rushed down the steps to the safety of the floor below. Then – inevitably – one man lost his footing. He fell, and the woman behind him fell over him, and soon bodies were bouncing down the escalator like snowballs down an icy slope.
Only seconds had passed since the first alarm had been raised, but already pandemonium ruled.
The falling people tried to stop themselves by jamming their hands and legs against the sides of the escalator. Sometimes they succeeded. But now they presented an obstruction both to the further falling bodies – which slammed into them – and to the more nimble of foot – who tried to kick them out of the way.
The noise swelled with the panic. There was screaming and cursing and sobbing and praying.
‘Please let me through – I have three little children waiting for me at home.’
‘Help me save my baby! For the love of God, won’t somebody help me save my baby?’
The customers who had been on the fourth floor were not the only ones trying to escape. Those who had been on the up escalator when the fire started had turned around, and were attempting to fight against the movement of the escalator and return to the safety of the floor below. And to make matters even worse, the down escalator was now so jammed with bodies that some of the fourth-floor customers had turned to the up escalator as their means of salvation.
Blackstone struggled against the tide, trying to force his way up to the fourth floor – but it was an impossible task. The sheer collective weight of the people coming down slammed into him, knocking him off his feet – and he became no more than a part of the tumbling mass of humanity which gravity was rapidly propelling back to the floor below.
When he landed, it was on the bodies of those who had fallen before him, and even before he had time to raise his arms in order to protect himself, more of the human avalanche was piling on top of him.
‘Keep calm!’ Blackstone told the man he had landed on – and the man who had landed on him, and the people who were sandwiching him in from both sides. ‘Keep calm! You’ll do less damage that way.’
But he might as well as saved what little breath he had left, because within the mound – within this Chinese puzzle of flesh and bone – there was already movement. Trunks squirmed and twisted, legs kicked, and hands clawed, as people tried to pull themselves clear.
Gradually, the situation eased. Gradually, some of the fallen freed themselves from this horrendous mêlée, and some were assisted by shop assistants and other customers.
Once he was clear of the mound himself, Blackstone conducted a rapid assessment of damages.
His head ached. His cheek – after an unwelcome encounter with someone else’s boot – was throbbing furiously, and a knee smashing into the small of his back had not helped matters either.
But there was nothing seriously wrong.
Nothing to prevent him from seeing – right through to the bitter bloody end – what had turned out to be a disastrous operation.
He looked up at the escalator. A few remaining refugees from the fourth floor were still trickling down it – but Harold Holt was not one of them.
Of course he wasn’t one of them, Blackstone told himself. Harold was still upstairs – being robbed of his money and possibly his life!
The air on the fourth floor was thick with smoke, but through it Blackstone could still see several assistants who were standing in one corner, holding fire extinguishers in their hands.
He turned, and scanned the rest of the floor. He already knew what he was expecting to find, he thought despondently – he just had no idea, for the moment, where he would find it.
The counters, behind which the assistants normally stood, were too much in the open to have been used. The mannequin displays – set up eye-catchingly in the middle of the room – offered nothing like the amount of cover that would have been needed. But the several racks of bargain fur coats – bunched together at the far corner of the floor, almost as if the management were ashamed to be even selling them – would have proved ideal.
Hoping that he was wrong – and knowing that he was right – Blackstone dashed across the floor to the racks. As he drew level with them, he heard the sound of a man groaning, and recognized the voice as Harold Holt’s.
Holt was lying on the floor, between two racks of coats. There was blood on his face and his hands, but he did not have the appearance of a man who had been seriously injured.
He looked up, and recognized Blackstone.
‘Where were you?’ he asked.
I was downstairs, Blackstone thought angrily. I was bloody well downstairs – letting the kidnappers run rings round me.
He let his gaze move from Holt to the distinctive leather satchel which lay a couple of feet from him. It was open and – of course – it was empty.
The patrolmen who’d originally converged on Moore’s to catch a kidnapper were now fully employed in holding back the ever-swelling crowd. The fire brigade had arrived, though there was little for it to do, and a dozen horse-drawn ambulances stood at the Broadway entrance of the store, while two dozen stretcher-bearers ferried the worst of the injured from the building to the waiting vehicles.
It was a mess, Blackstone thought, looking out of the window at what was happening in the street. It was a huge bloody mess!
He turned to the pale-looking man with the bandaged head, who was sitting on the chair next to him.
‘What can you remember, Harold?’ he asked.
‘You shouldn’t be questioning him now – not in his condition,’ George Holt protested.
‘It’s . . . it’s all right,’ Harold said weakly. ‘What I got was little more than a scratch. I was lucky, in comparison to most people.’
‘Even so—’ George began.
‘I want to help,’ Harold interrupted him.
George sighed. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, resignedly.
‘When I got to the fourth floor, I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next, so I started to walk towards the window. I think I must have been about midway between the escalator and the window when the screaming started.’
‘What did you do then?’ Blackstone asked.
‘I panicked, along with everyone else,’ Harold said. ‘Isn’t that shameful? I forgot all about Father and the ransom, and all I wanted to do was get out of there as quickly as possible.’
‘So you turned back to the escalator?’
‘I would have done – if they hadn’t grabbed me.’
‘How many of them were there?’
‘I know for certain that there were two – but there may have been more. One of them pinned my hands behind my back, and another forced my head forward, so all I could see was the floor. Then they half-pushed me, half-dragged me towards the racks of fur coats, and once we were there, one of them must have hit me over the head – because that’s when I blacked out.’
And while he was unconscious, the kidnappers transferred the ransom money from the leather satchel to whatever they’d brought with them to carry it away in, Blackstone thought.
‘Can you describe the men?’ he asked.
‘Not really. It all happened so quickly. They were both bigger than me – though that’s not saying much – and one of them had a beard, but it didn’t feel like a real one, if you know what I mean.’
‘Can I take my brother home?’ George asked.
‘Yes,’ Blackstone said wearily. ‘Why not?’
‘What will happen to Father now?’ Harold asked. ‘Will they release him?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Blackstone lied.
‘It’s a funny thing, you know, but there have been times when I did wish Father dead,’ Harold said quietly. ‘But not now. Now I know there’s a chance he might never come back again, all I feel is a great emptiness inside.’
TWENTY-FOUR
The beer was ice-
cold, and as it washed away the smoke which had coated his throat, Blackstone began to feel better – but not much.
‘Tell me about the fire,’ he said to Alex Meade.
‘It started near the stairs,’ Meade replied.
‘There were stairs!’ Blackstone exploded. ‘I never saw any bloody stairs!’
‘No, you wouldn’t have. All the exit doors leading to the stair wells were covered with thick curtains. In fact, it seems to have been those curtains which caught fire first.’
‘There were curtains over the exit doors?’ Blackstone asked incredulously. ‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘They were there to hide the fact that there was an exit door.’
‘That’s insane!’
‘Not from the store’s point of view,’ Meade said. ‘This is a city that worships the new and exciting. Moore’s – and all the other big stores – loves publicity. It wanted its customers to ride the escalator, because it was an experience they’d tell their friends about – and then the friends would come to Moore’s, to try it out for themselves. See what I’m getting at, Sam? Nobody ever bothers to tell their friends they’ve walked upstairs.’
‘So the incendiary devices were probably placed between the curtains and the doors,’ Blackstone said.
‘That’s what the evidence suggests.’
‘And did the devices have timers?’
‘The fire department isn’t willing to say definitely that they did – but that’s the way its thoughts are going.’
There would have been timers, Blackstone thought. And if the fire in Arthur Rudge’s apartment – seven years earlier – had also been caused by incendiary devices, then there’d probably have been timers on them too, because the fire hadn’t started until half an hour after the men carrying the armoire had left.
‘We’ve been outclassed and out-thought all the way,’ he said gloomily. ‘When the kidnappers told Harold that he only had five minutes to get to the store, we thought that was because they didn’t want to give us time to get organized. Wrong! They limited it to five minutes because they’d already set the clock – and wanted him there just as the devices went off.’
‘Yes, I suppose that was smart,’ Meade conceded, ‘but just because they made one smart move, it doesn’t mean that they’re criminal masterminds who will always be able to—’
‘And starting the fire by the stairs was brilliant too,’ Blackstone interrupted. ‘If it had started anywhere else, the staff would have told some of the people on the fourth floor to use those stairs as their means of escape.’
‘There’d still have been a panic,’ Meade pointed out.
‘Yes, there would – but nowhere near as much as there was when the customers realized that the escalator was the only way out for them. Do you think that just happened? Or is it more likely that it was all part of the kidnappers’ calculation?’
‘They probably calculated it,’ Meade admitted reluctantly.
‘And then there’s the leather satchel,’ Blackstone continued.
‘What about it?’
‘It always bothered me that they didn’t specify what kind of bag Harold carry the money in. And why didn’t they specify it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘They’d figured out that if they left it to us, we’d buy the most conspicuous bag we could. That was exactly what they wanted us to do – and we fell for it!’
‘We told our men to look out for a yellow satchel!’ Meade exclaimed, getting the point. ‘We made it central to identifying the kidnappers.’
‘Every cop was focusing on that satchel – which meant they weren’t looking so closely at other things.’
‘You’re right, we were outclassed,’ Meade said miserably.
‘And do you know what the real irony of the whole fiasco is?’ Blackstone asked. ‘I probably saw the kidnappers!’
‘You probably saw them!’
‘That’s right – because I saw nearly everybody who came down the escalator. But there were at least two hundred people, and maybe half of them were men, so I’ve no idea which of them it could be.’
Meade went to the bar, and when he returned he was holding a tray with two beers and two whiskies on it.
‘What’s this?’ Blackstone asked, looking down at the shot glasses. ‘Is it a reward for figuring everything out just half an hour too late, or is it an attempt to cheer me up?’
‘It’s neither of those things,’ Meade told him. ‘It’s more like an attempt to fortify you.’
‘And why would I need fortifying?’
‘Because Commissioner Comstock asked if we could see him half an hour from now – except that it wasn’t really a request.’
‘Is that right?’ Blackstone asked, picking up the shot glass and swallowing the fiery liquid in a single gulp.
The first time Blackstone had met Commissioner Comstock, the commissioner had shaken his hand warmly and invited him to sit down – two things which would never have happened to the inspector in New Scotland Yard. It had struck him at that time that Comstock was a decent, well-meaning man who wanted to do the right thing – but would have been much more at home on a small university campus than he could ever be in a large police department.
This meeting was entirely different. Comstock did not ask Blackstone and Meade to sit down, but instead gestured that they should stand in front of his desk. Nor did he have the look of a slightly bemused academic any more. Now, the expression on his face was strained, and his eyes were those of a wild animal which had suddenly found itself trapped in a corner.
‘When you solved the O’Brien case, do you know what I thought?’ he asked Blackstone.
‘No, sir.’
‘I thought, “Here is a man who really understands police work. Here is a man who could teach us a great deal.” But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It wasn’t brilliant detective work which led you to solve that case – it was pure dumb luck.’
‘With respect, sir, I hardly think you’re being fair,’ Meade said.
‘Shut up, Sergeant!’ the commissioner shouted. ‘You’ll have your say when it’s your turn to be hauled over the coals!’
‘I guess I will,’ Meade agreed.
Comstock turned his attention back to Blackstone. ‘So when the next important case came up, I immediately thought, “Let’s give it to the ‘expert’ from Scotland Yard.” But that was a mistake, wasn’t it?’
None of this is about me, Blackstone told himself. It’s all about him.
Comstock knew that the only way he was going to survive this particular debacle was by getting someone else to take the fall, he thought. But the commissioner knew, too – deep inside himself – that what he was about to do to his English guest was both dishonest and dishonourable. So, like all decent men who also happened to be weak, he was attempting to cajole his victim into saying that what he was doing was right.
‘I said it was a mistake, wasn’t it?’ the commissioner repeated.
‘We did all we could,’ Blackstone said. ‘We did all that any two policemen in our situation could have done.’
But did we? he found himself wondering.
Perhaps another copper would have realized the significance of the leather satchel before he had.
Perhaps another copper would have realized that what he was being led into was a trap.
‘Do you know how many policemen I assigned to this case?’ the commissioner asked.
‘Over one hundred.’ Blackstone guessed.
‘Over a hundred,’ the commissioner agreed. ‘I personally removed them from their normal duties – I let crime run rampant through this city – so you could have the manpower you needed.’
If most New York cops had seen it as part of their duties to combat crime, the commissioner might have had a point, Blackstone thought, but since they were mainly concerned with feathering their own nests, it was unlikely that taking them off the streets had made any difference at all to the crime figures.
Not that any of tha
t mattered a jot. This was a classic mud-throwing exercise, and only some of it had to stick.
‘Over one hundred and fifty people were injured in Moore’s, some of them quite seriously,’ Comstock continued. ‘What have you got to say about that, Inspector Blackstone?’
Blackstone shrugged. ‘I didn’t start the fire, sir. That was the kidnappers’ work.’
But could he have foreseen it, he wondered. Should he have foreseen it?
Of course not!
So why did he still feel guilty?
‘The kidnappers did start the fire, it is true, but it happened on your watch,’ Comstock pointed out.
Ah yes, that was it – it happened on his watch.
‘Although the New York Police Department is temporarily paying your salary, I have no real jurisdiction over you, Inspector Blackstone,’ Comstock said. ‘And that being the case, I have cabled all the details of what has happened to Assistant Commissioner Todd in New Scotland Yard, and will leave it to him to decide what disciplinary action should be taken.’
‘Pontius Pilate himself couldn’t have said it better,’ Blackstone told him.
‘Would you care to repeat that, Inspector?’ Comstock asked.
‘Not really, sir,’ Blackstone said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much point, when you so obviously heard me clearly the first time.’
‘I will not tolerate—’ Comstock began. And then he stopped himself, because he had realized that he would tolerate it – realized that being angry at Blackstone made his task a lot easier.
The commissioner turned to Meade. ‘Have you anything to say for yourself, Sergeant?’
‘Yes, sir, I have,’ Meade replied. ‘Wouldn’t it save us all a lot of time if, instead of going through all this rigmarole that none of us is taking seriously, you just suspended me right now?’
‘Suspend you?’ the commissioner repeated. ‘I have no intention of suspending you, Sergeant – at least for the moment.’
Of course he hadn’t, Blackstone thought. It wouldn’t be good politics to suspend Meade then. It would be far better to wait – until they found out exactly what had happened to William Holt.
Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street Page 20