by John Creasey
“What do you make of it now, Mr. Rollison?” Forrest was very mild, a man who believed a great deal in outward deference.
“Someone has been storing up trouble for Ebbutt, and came to hand it out,” said Rollison. “His heart’s a bit dicky, and the exertion caused a collapse. It looks as if he got in just one punch.”
“Hmm,” said Forrest. “Do you know who’s behind it?”
“No.”
“Were you working with Ebbutt?” Forrest smiled faintly. “Or was he working with you?”
“I’d telephoned him ten minutes earlier to ask him to get me what information he could about young Bob Benning,” Rollison answered, and had the satisfaction of seeing that Forrest was taken completely by surprise.
“Benning?”
“That’s right.”
“Benning wouldn’t be involved with the men who do this kind of a shindy,” Forrest said, and looked really puzzled. “It’s a different line of country altogether.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Rollison, “but that was all the help I wanted. Even then, there hadn’t been time for Ebbutt to do anything.” He knew that Jolly was still alone at the flat, wondering why Ebbutt’s men had not arrived. But the police would keep the flat watched all right; later he might even wish that they were not there. “No, I don’t see how this raid can be connected with me,” he went on, “unless—”
“Ah!”
“I was pushed into the Thames this afternoon,” Rollison announced, as if apropos of nothing.
“So I heard,” said Forrest.
“motorcyclists with double registration plates were involved, and the dead man came here on a grey motor-cycle,” Rollison went on. He grinned. “It’s in a shed at Mason’s Yard in Frith Street; I’d taken it away in case it would help to trace the owner. Will you take over?”
Where a lesser man would have reproached or reproved him for taking the machine away, Forrest simply answered: “Yes ”
“Thanks.”
“Are you suggesting that smashing up the gymnasium may have been a move to distract your attention?” asked Forrest.
“I simply stated the facts,” Rollison answered. “You can draw the conclusions. Inspector, Ebbutt’s friends are anxious to start finding out who put the Razzo boys up to this. I think I can hear them outside, raring to go.”
“All right,” Forrest said, helpfully. “I hope you’ll warn them not to take the law into their own hands, Mr. Rollison. There certainly isn’t a lot more we can do here. Be a waste of time trying to assess the damage quickly, or to look for clues. How long will this meeting last?”
“Half an hour, probably.”
“Let’s say we’ll want to take over in an hour’s time,” suggested Forrest, accommodatingly.
“Fine,” said Rollison.
There was silence as the two plain-clothes men went out, but soon there came a babble of sound, a rumbling and a thumping. Men streamed into the battered gymnasium, not in twos or threes, but in dozens. It was an astounding crowd. Big men and little men, fat and thin, young and old, men who seemed to have no association one with another, but who were in fact friends of Bill Ebbutt. Every one of these had trained in this gymnasium, been roared at and wheezed at by Ebbutt, had put on the gloves, skipped, swung on those parallel bars, vaulted over the broken horses, punched those deflated balls. Still they streamed in. After reaching fifty, Rollison stopped trying to count, and realised that he and Sam would have to squeeze themselves into a corner, to make more room. Sam was already backing away. He fetched two chairs from Ebbutt’s small office, stood up on one, and began to direct the crowd, moving them to parts of the big room which were not crowded. Everyone was strangely subdued, and only a few people spoke, in undertones. Most stared towards the office, and Rollison could be seen above the heads of the tallest. Men in old suits, men in polo sweaters, men in shirt sleeves, men in braces – youngsters in their teens and gaffers in their seventies; all these kept surging in until there was no room for more. But there were impatient calls from outside.
“Keep them quiet aht there!” Sam roared. “Mr. Rollison’s going to talk to us.”
“Quiet, there!”
“Quiet!”
And silence fell.
Rollison stepped on to one of the chairs, knowing more or less what was expected of him, and finding it difficult to put into words. These men shared his feeling for Ebbutt, and the great danger was that they might go too far. One thing was certain: if they found out who was behind this attack, and the men were safe from the police, many among this gathering would take the law into their own hands.
No one called out; there was a rustle of movement as he looked over the assembled heads; that was all. The old man who had stopped Rollison in the street had only just managed to get inside. There must be a hundred or more people still in the street, and he had the impression that they were waiting with bated breath for him to speak.
He could turn them into a mob.
He said, quietly, but clearly: “There’s no news about Bill, but a bulletin will be posted up outside whenever one comes in. You’ll see to that, Sam, won’t you?”
Grey-haired Sam, standing by his side, promised: “Yes. Every hour or so.”
“Fine. Now! We all want exactly the same thing,” went on Rollison, “and we’re certainly going to get it. One of the two men who put Razzo’s boys up to this raid is dead. The other escaped. We want to know who it was. I want to know who it was,” he corrected, and there was a new hardness in his voice. “Once I know, I can fix him. But I won’t want him hurt. If he gets hurt, if he should go the way of the other man, then there’ll be no one left to talk. And we don’t need telling that these two men weren’t working for themselves. They were taking orders. We want to know who gave them the orders. And there’s good reason to believe that they’re connected with the motor-cycle gangs. Keep your eyes open and your ears to the ground for news about that mob.”
Men nodded; one or two called: “We will.” It could not have been more solemn at a political meeting. And Rollison deliberately kept the temperature down; angry men would do harm, coolly determined men might get the results he wanted.
“There are two other things,” Rollison went on. “Bill was going to ask three or four of you to act as a bodyguard for my man Jolly. Anyone here remember Jolly?”
He knew that his man was almost as well known as he was himself; and to these people Jolly was a kind of throwback to an earlier age, yet a man to respect for the things he had done here over the years.
For the first time, many of the men grinned.
“And I’ve promised to try to help young Bob Benning,” Rollison declared. “You know all about the murder of Marjorie Fryer, you know the pubs she and Benning met in. She always said she went to meet him and that he paid her to keep quiet, but it’s just possible that someone else paid her, and that he was framed. Don’t ask me why. I like the chap, and if he didn’t kill her, I’d like to make sure that he’s set free.”
“Okay here,” a few men called.
“It’s as simple as that,” said Rollison. “Sam, will you select the men who’re going to help me and Jolly?”
“Sure,” said Sam.
He would do it almost as quickly and effectively as Bill Ebbutt, Rollison knew. He waved his hand and stepped off the chair, feeling a deep sense of anti-climax. He had kept the mood of the crowd quiet all right, and almost wished that he hadn’t. They felt as he felt: viciously angry, anxious to hit out and hurt. He was sure that every man present would put everything else aside and work to find the men responsible for Bill Ebbutt’s seizure.
How was Bill?
There was no change in Ebbutt’s condition, Rollison was told at the hospital. It was a coronary thrombosis, and the chances were no more than even.
Rollison spent ten minutes with Lil Ebbutt, and was not surprised to find that she was preparing to stay at the hospital on a night vigil. Three of her Army friends were now with her, and asked if they coul
d help. There was one possibility at the back of Rollison’s mind, and he said: “There might be a way.”
“Just say the word,” a large and heavy woman responded.
“You people go in and out of the pubs a lot, selling the War Cry,” Rollison remarked. “See if you can find out more about Bob Benning and Marjorie Fryer, will you? Someone’s lying, and it would help to know who.”
“If we can find out, we will,” the woman promised.
Rollison left the hospital about a quarter to eleven. The night was beautiful, and the stars made even the grey roofs and the ugly chimney-pots of this part of London seem soft and attractive. There was a kind of glow in the western sky, as if it would not become really dark to-night. He walked towards the corner, where four of Ebbutt’s tougher men, two middle-aged and two young, were waiting by the side of a T-model Ford, painted a beautiful bright blue. As Rollison had no car with him, they were to take him home, and then make sure that there could be no other attack on the flat. Rollison sat next to the driver, and the others crowded into the back. The engine was a little noisy, but remarkably smooth, and the tyres carried the old car along with a pleasing buoyancy. Bill Ebbutt had always said that he would not change it for any car in London.
At Gresham Terrace Rollison saw two shadowy figures near Number 22, but as the driver exclaimed: “Who’s that?” he recognised a policeman, the man who always had this beat by night. There was a plain-clothes man on duty too.
“You’ve got rivals,” Rollison said. “What I’d like, if it’s all right with you, is two men up in the flat, one in the street, and one at the back for a while.”
“Good as done,” promised the senior man of the party.
Usually there would have been much leg-pulling and hearty jokes and crude humour. Now there was only a kind of unnatural earnestness. Rollison led the two men upstairs, remembered what had happened when he had last come here, and wondered whether this was the time to question the man locked in the W.C. He felt his heart thump as he reached the top step, for Jolly should open it.
It opened, and Jolly bowed as if to royalty, stood aside, and greeted the two prize-fighters by their names.
“Good evening, sir. Good evening, Mr. Day; good evening, Mr. Wrightson.” He was almost absurd with the formality, but it was exactly right for the two men. “I’m very sorry indeed to hear about Mr. Ebbutt. A newspaper man told me,” he went on. “I telephoned the Divisional Police Station to inquire.” As the two men followed Rollison in to the large room, Jolly added: “There have been no messages, sir, but I wonder if you could spare me a moment to look at the cloakroom door.”
“Coming,” said Rollison, and took beer and tankards from the corner cupboard. “Help yourselves,” he said to Ebbutt’s men; at least their reaction to that was normal. He went out with Jolly, knowing that there was nothing wrong with the cloakroom door. “What’s on, Jolly?”
“I was concerned because there was no sound from the toilet, sir,” said Jolly; and undoubtedly he meant it when he said that he was worried. “So I took precautions, removed the chair which secured the door, and opened it.”
Rollison barked: “Don’t tell me he’s killed himself.”
“No, not as drastic as that,” said Jolly, “but he has taken some kind of drug. He is unconscious. I left him there, as he was rather heavy. As far as I could judge from the pupils, he has taken morphine. His pupils are pin points, and his pulse very faint. Obviously he meant to make sure that he could not be compelled to talk.”
“Well, well,” said Rollison, heavily. “Prepared for everything and with everything, aren’t they? Anything in his pockets?”
“Nothing at all by which to identify him, sir.”
“Jolly,” said Rollison, edgily, “I’m beginning to get a little unnerved. These people are very good indeed. Did you make those keys?”
“Yes,” Jolly answered, and took three sets out of his pocket. “I was glad to have something to do, sir. But—” He hesitated, and then asked: “Do you think any useful purpose will be served by going to Mr. Dwight’s apartments? He isn’t likely to be there, is he?”
“In this case I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t dreaming of delusions,” Rollison said. He opened the door to the closet and saw the prisoner sitting there, head on one side, mouth slack, looking almost as if he were dead. But there was life in him. “We’ll get our boy-friends to move him into the spare bedroom,” Rollison went on. “Don’t take any chances, Jolly.”
“That is exactly what I am anxious to say to you, sir,” Jolly riposted.
“If you’re warning me to take gun and gas pistol and a little something up my sleeve, you couldn’t be more right,” said Rollison.
“I have everything laid out,” Jolly told him, and Rollison grinned as he went into his bedroom, and smiled broadly when he saw a small gas pistol, an automatic, and two knives fastened to clips, laid out on the bed. The clips were rather like bracelets, and one would fasten round his forearm and the other round his leg. There had been a time when these had seemed melodramatic, but the years had taught them that in times of emergency they were as vital to his safety as the brakes on a car.
“I hope you won’t go alone, sir,” Jolly said.
“I’m going to take one of Bill’s chaps with me,” Rollison told him, “but he can come out five minutes after me, and pick me up. I’ll be on the corner of Piccadilly and Park Lane.”
“Very good, sir,” Jolly said.
The simple truth, Rollison knew, was that his man did not want him to go out. That might be partly because he realised that Rollison had endured quite enough for one night; and might be because the speed and gravity of what had happened were unnerving him. It was almost as if someone had made quite sure that he, the Toff, could not work swiftly and well on the most important job.
Only one thing could out-match speed and cunning: obviously, greater speed and cunning.
Rollison left the flat a little after twelve-thirty, had a word with the C.I.D. man still on duty, went to the mews garage where he kept his Rolls-Bentley and a Morris Minor which Jolly used. He took out the small car and parked it near the entrance, against a late emergency, and walked to the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly. Wrightson came up in the old Ford.
“We’ll leave that where we can get at it quickly,” Rollison said, and they found a space near a large block of modern flats, which rose towards the starlit sky off Park Lane. This block tapered off towards the top, so that each floor had fewer apartments than the one below. At the top, he knew, there was only one apartment.
This was Apex House, where Cedric Dwight lived in luxury.
Chapter Eleven
Luxury Apartment
“You attract the night porter’s attention,” Rollison whispered to Percy Wrightson, a middle-weight of considerable achievement. “I’ll slip into the lift without him knowing I’m in the building.”
“Right,” said Wrightson.
He was a man in the middle thirties, good-looking, with smooth features and glossy hair. He did not look like a boxer, for his shoulders were unexpectedly narrow, although his arms and fists carried a remarkable punch. He was in normal times a peace-loving man, and he had a wife and three children.
He went striding into the main entrance hall of Apex House, and Rollison slipped round to a side entrance which, he knew, led into the main hall. The moment he stepped into the building there was luxury. The carpet had a thicker pile than most, the walls were beautifully decorated in gold and pale blue, there were alcoves and easy-chairs and lovers’ seats, and at each doorway was an elaborate knocker and equally elaborate bell. Rollison knew that Dwight lived on the fifth floor, and the key gave the number: 55. He heard Wrightson talking in his slow, thoughtful way; he was asking about a woman who, he said, lived in flat 110. There was little doubt that the porter believed that he was a private detective on the hunt for evidence, perhaps for divorce. So the porter concentrated on being cagey. Rollison slipped towards the stairway out of sigh
t, and the thick carpet ensured that his footsteps did not make the slightest sound.
He took the lift from the next floor; it carried him slowly upwards, and stopped as if it were heavily burdened with responsibility. Number 55 was towards the right, which meant that it was one of the better apartments, overlooking Hyde Park. He reached the door, listening intently, for someone might share this flat with Dwight; and neighbours might come out from the flats on either side of 55, or else from those opposite. He heard no sound, which was what he had hoped. He took out the key which Jolly had cut, and it fitted perfectly; Jolly always made sure that he did a first-class job.
Rollison pushed the door open, and stepped into darkness.
Although there was silence, and nothing at all to suggest that anyone else was here, Rollison closed the door without a sound, and stood quite still. His heart was pounding more than he liked, and he had a headache, which could only be partly explained by the bump on the back of his head. He felt much as Jolly: that this was a case where almost every thing could go wrong.
There was still no sound.
He took out a thin, pencil torch and flicked it on; the tiny click seemed very loud. The narrow beam of light shone on to a doorway, and as he moved it round on to photographs of beautiful women, all, surprisingly, not only clad but covered. He recognised film stars of an earlier age, and here and there one whose picture was often in the newspapers to-day.
There were four doors.
Rollison knew the lay-out of these flats, for more than one acquaintance of his lived here, and he had often visited the building. The door to the right led to the main living-rooms, that to the left led to the kitchen, the bathroom, and, beyond, a small servant’s bedroom. He went left, shining the torch about. There were cups and saucers on the draining-board, a tray set as if for morning tea, but nothing really unusual. Any servant in a hurry might have left the kitchen like this. Dwight had said that he did not have a personal servant, but used the Apex House service.
Rollison made sure that all the domestic quarters were empty, and then crossed the hall towards the main rooms. There would be a huge drawing-room with a great window overlooking the park; a smaller dining-room which could be approached from the hall, and a large and a small bedroom, with windows overlooking the side street and with a glimpse of the park.