by John Creasey
“Don’t try any tricks, Toff,” Dwight said, and moved to one side. “Come in, Kitty. Jolly, my man”—he actually grinned—“don’t try to slip out the other way. Your East End friend is communing with himself in an armchair. I hit him over the head very hard. And my friend and helpmate will do whatever I tell her—won’t you, Kitty?”
Kitty said: “Of—of course.”
“She dare not do anything else,” explained Cedric Dwight. “I have an effect on some women. And Superintendent, it’s no use looking as if you wish it were possible to break my neck. It isn’t. The man who suffered the heat treatment isn’t in a very good mood, by the way.”
Rollison was standing by the Trophy Wall, very close to the hangman’s noose. Grice was with him, massive, tense, obviously ready to take a chance with Dwight. In the doorway leading to the front door there was Jolly, with the erstwhile prisoner just behind him, carrying a hammer, one kept in the kitchen for domestic purposes. And near Rollison was Isobel Cole, standing quite upright.
“Don’t,” whispered Rollison to Grice.
“Excellent advice,” said Dwight. “Don’t move an inch, either of you, or I’ll shoot. You—” He motioned to Isobel with the gun in his hand. “Get away from Rollison, get out of his reach. You’re the really unlucky one here.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Isobel, in a shrill voice. “You wouldn’t—”
“If you hadn’t chosen to come just now you wouldn’t have walked into this trouble. The heat-treatment trouble. My friend Arthur had a bright idea when I freed him just now, Toff. That the heat treatment should be varied a little. We are going to set fire to this flat, with you, Grice, Jolly, and poor Isobel Cole. After all, any wise man would destroy the evidence against him, wouldn’t he? And you are deadly evidence against me.”
Kitty gasped: “Cedric, you can’t—”
“Don’t interrupt me, sweetheart,” said Cedric Dwight. “I can indeed. There is just one person in this world who knows that I have planned and plotted all this, and who could name me. That’s Ivy. My old flame, Ivy!” He laughed on a high-pitched note. He wasn’t normal, of course; he never had been normal. “And she is going to vanish, never to reappear. The police won’t be able to find her, and therefore won’t be able to find me. But Rollison was too clever, and worked it all out by himself. Do you know exactly why it started, Toff?”
“I can guess.”
“Guess.”
Rollison said: “You once used Marjorie Fryer as you later used your Kitty. That set Marjorie on the downward path. She knew you from the early days of the planning and plotting, and blackmailed you. So you had to have her killed. You were afraid that if I probed too deeply, with the help of Ebbutt’s men and the Salvation Army, that I’d get at the truth. You didn’t want to risk that, so you started a diversion. It was a mistake, but at the same time it seemed a brilliant idea. You would establish yourself here, find out exactly what I was doing on the other case, and know precisely when to act if danger threatened. Right?”
“The man who died because he was too smart,” said Dwight, brightly.
“Cedric—” Kitty began, chokily.
“You can’t let this devil do anything to me! You can’t!” Isobel cried.
Rollison ignored her, and spoke to Dwight.
“And to keep me busy on an illusory fight, you had your men attack me. You knew that I was likely to get help from Ebbutt, so you had your men stir up the Razzo boys to give Ebbutt plenty to think about. If Ebbutt’s men were busy with the Razzo mob, they couldn’t do much to help me. So you did everything you could to make sure that I couldn’t hope to concentrate on the Benning case—the big weakness in your hand.”
“Nice reasoning,” approved Dwight. “I almost wish it weren’t necessary to—”
Then, Grice moved.
He meant to give Rollison a chance to act, of course, to distract Dwight’s attention for a vital second. Almost as he moved, Dwight shot him. Rollison actually heard the thud of the bullet in Grice’s chest, heard him gasp, and saw him begin to pivot round. And Dwight was good with a gun. The one shot came, sharp and clear; and then the gun pointed towards Rollison, covering him so that he was in as helpless a position as Grice.
Isobel gave a little, choking cry.
Grice fell, heavily, but he did not lose consciousness. Rollison could see the way he twisted round, hoping that he would win another chance to stop the man with the gun.
“Odds even worse now,” said Dwight, cheerfully. “You aren’t saying much, Rollison. Don’t say that now you’re looking in the face of death you don’t like the idea. I seem to remember that you’ve helped to send a lot of people to the gallows, and you’ve also managed to involve poor innocents, like Fred Martin.”
Rollison didn’t speak.
Jolly said: “Mr. Rollison, sir—”
“Don’t move, Jolly,” Rollison ordered. The words were hardly necessary, for the prisoner who had suffered the heat treatment was close enough to grab Jolly’s arm; and close enough to smash that hammer down on his head. “Kitty, go and get a towel from the bathroom, and come back and pad the Superintendent’s wound.”
“It isn’t worth the trouble,” Cedric Dwight said, and now he was sneering. “Nothing’s worth the trouble, Toff. Arthur, fix Jolly, and get that petrol.”
Jolly tried to move forward; the man behind him struck a swift and vicious blow, and Jolly pitched forward.
There seemed an awful inevitability about everything that happened, as if it had been willed this way, and that there was nothing that Rollison or anyone else could do about it. Kitty turned away, suddenly, as if she could not face what was happening; she went out of the room.
“If you take it easy,” Dwight said to Rollison, “I’ll make it better for you. I’ll give you a sleeping pill, which works very quickly and you’ll be out before the fire starts on you. Little Isobel, too.”
“No!” Isobel cried, and swung round on Rollison, flung her arms about his neck and clung to him, holding him tight. “Don’t let him do this to me, don’t let him do it!”
Panic was in her voice, and it was surprising that there should be such strength in her lovely body.
Dwight was grinning.
The man who had suffered heat treatment was back in the room, carrying a can of petrol which Jolly always had on the premises for cleaning purposes. He unscrewed the cap, and was ready to splash the petrol about. The smell rose from the can, sharp and overpowering. The girl still clung to Rollison, while Grice stared up despairingly, as if pleading with him to make some effort to prevent this awful thing from happening.
“Don’t let him!” screeched Isobel. “Stop him; I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it!”
“Can’t you?” asked Rollison, and quite suddenly slid his arms around her, hugged her very tight, and lifted her high off the ground. He twisted round so that he was between the two men and the door leading to the lounge hall. “Ivy,” he said, “you tried very hard, but it didn’t work. What is it like to have two names?”
She was rigid in his grasp.
He saw Dwight fire. He dodged. The bullet actually touched the girl’s hair. Now she started to kick and bite, but he held her absolutely fast as he backed into the lounge hall. He kicked the door to, but it did not slam. He flung the girl away from him, and as she staggered, snatched open the front door.
There was Wrightson; and behind him, five or six of Ebbutt’s men, carrying sticks; one of them actually carried an old Webley revolver.
“He’ll try to shoot his way out,” Rollison said. “Don’t let—”
There was the roar of the old Army gun, and the sharper report of Dwight’s automatic. Rollison felt himself thrust out of the way by Wrightson, and as he staggered, saw that Dwight was falling, and that the gun was dropping from his hand.
Ivy-Isobel was screaming.
The man who had suffered the heat treatment was running through the flat, and suddenly there was a roar of voices from the kitchen.
Rollison knew that Dwight’s man had opened the door to more of Ebbutt’s cronies, who were waiting to come in.
“One of the Army girls said she thought Isobel looked remarkably like another woman who visited pubs sometimes,” Wrightson said, “and you’d told us to watch Isobel. So when we saw her coming this way, we made up a bigger party. O.K., Mr. Ar?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
All Square
Rollison stepped out of his Rolls-Bentley outside the hospital, was recognised by the porters, the nursing staff, and most of the patients as he walked by some of the wards, for he had been here several times already. He waved and smiled right and left as he hurried through passages filled with the faintly astringent smell of antiseptics. He saw that the door of the Sister’s room was open, and tapped.
The Sister looked up, an elderly woman whose eyes brightened at the sight of the Toff.
“Good morning, Mr. Rollison. I’m so glad to tell you that Mr. Grice is much better.”
“Wonderful!”
“And Mr. Jolly will be discharged this afternoon, although it is essential that he should take it easy for a week or two. He is a remarkably resilient man for his age, but—”
“He shall have a month in the South of France.”
“That’s exactly what he needs,” said the Sister. “Would you like a nurse to escort you to Mr. Grice’s ward?”
“I think I know the way,” said Rollison.
It was four days after the raid on his flat, and in those few days he had probed and talked and discovered nearly everything that he now knew about the case of the deadly double. He tapped on Grice’s door, heard Grice’s “Come in” uttered in a strong voice, went in, and saw the look of expectancy on the Yard man’s face turn to one of disappointment.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“Anyone would think you didn’t owe me what’s left of your life,” said Rollison, mildly.
“Oh, I don’t mind seeing you,” said Grice, “but I was expecting my wife.”
“She telephoned to say she’s been held up for half an hour,” Rollison told him, “so you’ll have to make do with me for the time being. How are you feeling, Bill?”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m told you’ll be off duty for two months,” Rollison said, “and that’ll be the first real holiday you’ve had for fifteen years.” He pulled up a chair. “I promised your wife I’d tell you everything, so that you could tell it to her and show her what a wonderful detective you are.”
Grice, who looked very pale and whose eyes still held the shadow of great strain, forced a smile.
“You don’t improve,” he said. “But I always said you were good at guesswork.”
“Oh, my dear chap,” Rollison protested. “Not guesswork. Sometimes we guess, but now and again something makes four out of two and two even in my mind.”
“Prove it.”
Rollison leaned back in the chair, pressed the tips of his fingers together professionally, and said earnestly: “Very good, sir. It really began when I first heard of Ivy. You rightly said that her description would fit a thousand girls, and it might have been coincidental that it fitted Isobel Cole. Isobel was pert, pretty, and naïve. Isobel was virtually forced to come to me by Benning’s mother. Over the telephone she once tried to put me off the case—but Benning’s mother wasn’t having any. Isobel was always out three nights a week, at these ‘art lessons’ she had, but although I didn’t have time to check, I was never persuaded that art was her strong suit. The real key was in the fact that Marjorie Fryer was supposed to have threatened that she would tell Isobel Cole about the licentiousness of Robert Benning. Supposing, in fact, Marjorie had also threatened Isobel-Ivy that she would tell Robert Benning what she knew about her. That would make a perfect motive for murdering Marjorie and framing Benning.”
“Yes,” conceded Grice, after a moment’s thought. “Yes, I can see how you came to that conclusion. You could call it deduction, but it wasn’t far from a guess.”
“Please yourself,” said Rollison, and dropped the pretence at earnestness. “That was pretty well it, Bill. Later I arranged for Isobel to be followed. Everyone took it for granted that I thought she was in danger, of course, but in fact I thought she would carry danger with her wherever she went. And she did. She came to my flat because she knew Dwight was back there and wanted to try to make sure he wasn’t suspected. She was as cunning as they come, but she didn’t expect Dwight to turn on her the moment there was real trouble. Dwight wanted his Kitty, not Ivy-Isobel, who had served his purpose.”
“Incidentally,” Rollison added, his eyes kindling, “there was another angle which I didn’t see clearly at first, but which I’m sure you would have picked up if you’d seen as much of Kitty Dwight as I saw.”
“Blarney apart, what was that?”
“Isobel and Kitty were types. Attractive, good figures, dumb-blondish, even though Isobel was a brunette. They had a naïveté which was almost too good to be true, and it puzzled me a lot. Why did it attract Dwight? Puzzling over that, I realised that either girl would be likely to attract Cedric. Someone hated Kitty Dwight, and made things as tough for her as they could. Why not a jealous rival? Why not the woman jilted for Kitty? Why not Ivy, in fact—although at the time I didn’t think of her as Ivy. I just marvelled that two people with so much in common should be in the two different affairs. So, I was fooled.”
“Not for long,” admitted Grice, and shifted his position a little. “Rolly, I’ve never really seen you in action like that before. Your nerve is almost as good as its reputation.”
“Either you or I are reforming,” Rollison quipped.
“You’ll never reform,” Grice retorted. “How’s Jolly?”
“Coming out to-day.”
“You ought seriously to think of retiring him,” Grice declared. “It isn’t reasonable to expect him to stand the pace much longer.”
“I’d like to see me try to retire him before he’s ninety,” Rollison scoffed. “Anyhow, where would I be without him? Seen anyone from the Yard lately?”
“The Assistant Commissioner looked in this morning,” Grice said. “He told me that all the records of the organisation were found at Ivy-Isobel’s flat—damn it, you’ve got me doubling the name now! I still don’t understand why she came to you in the first place.”
“I’ve told you, Bill. Ivy-Isobel made it clear that she wouldn’t have come if Benning’s mother hadn’t practically forced her to. She also arranged with Dwight to keep my mind off the Benning job. They nearly did, too, but they crossed too many t’s and dotted too many i’s. Racket all over, though, including your motor-bike mob.”
“That was one of the most widespread groups we’ve had to deal with,” Grice said. “It operated for a long time before we suspected how big it was; before you did, either, if it comes to that.”
“We must get our ears closer to the ground,” Rollison conceded, and stood up. “Bill, you’d better have ten minutes’ rest before your wife comes. Ever paused to think of what would have happened if Ivy hadn’t driven the man to stop Martin’s lorry?”
“She took too much on herself,” Grice agreed, prosily, “but if she hadn’t slipped up that way, she would in another. They always do. Incidentally, we didn’t have another informer about the passenger in that lorry. You sometimes have the luck.”
“Mostly in my friends,” Rollison said. “The real red herring was Dwight, of course. He used his childhood delusions wherever they would help.”
“Don’t rub it in,” Grice begged. “And remember he didn’t need money; he just got a perverted thrill out of being a big shot. That’s one reason why he fooled us at the Yard.”
Rollison agreed; shook hands; smiled; and went out.
He strolled more slowly towards the front of the hospital, more preoccupied than when he had come in, although he ignored no one who took the trouble to wave or speak to him. He was glad to get outside. He got into his car and looked up at the hospital, telling himsel
f that he would be coming here on and off for several weeks. Bill Ebbutt wouldn’t be out for a month, and Grice would have at least another three weeks.
Rollison found himself thinking about Dwight as he drove back to the West End.
Dwight was in a different hospital, recovering from his wound, and would soon stand trial. Ivy-Isobel hadn’t been hurt. The Yard had questioned Kitty, but there was as yet no charge against her, and there wasn’t likely to be. These things Rollison knew, and they gave him some cause for satisfaction, but whenever he thought of the case he also thought of the Salvation Army trombonist, of his wife, and of little Mrs. Benning.
Bob Benning was free, of course.
Rollison reached his flat, where Wrightson, wearing striped trousers and a black coat, greeted him with an expansive grin and said as he stepped inside: “Getting as good as Jolly, aren’t I?”
“Provided you never tell him so, yes.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t tell the old cove,” said Wrightson. “I don’t mind telling you that he’s the salt of the earth, Jolly is. The salt of the earth. Like old Bill Ebbutt and Lil. Funny thing, I never used to have much time for Lil,” went on Wrightson. “I always thought she was a humbugging old hypocrite with her singing and her blowing and her get-down-on-yer-knees talk. Shows how wrong you can be about people. You heard?”
Rollison was thinking of Fred and his Jane.
“What?”
“They’re planning a bang-on concert party and a couple of bouts for the day Bill gets home,” said Wrightson. “Getting two or three of the best artistes, and you’d never believe, they’re going to have an Army band there. How about that? The proceeds will all be devoted to the widow of Fred Martin, too. Salt of the earth, that’s what Jolly is.”
“Jolly?”
“He’d suggested it to me while we was washing up,” said Wrightson, simply.
The concert was held five weeks afterwards to the day. There were three bouts at a fast clip, there were five of the West End’s leading artistes and television favourites. There was the Salvation Army Band, led for the occasion by Lil Ebbutt, who had never stood so straight nor looked with such pride at her Bill.