by David Field
If Ingram wasn’t corrupt, Percy concluded, then the moon was made of cream cheese. But since Jack appeared to have hit a brick wall when attempting to dig out more facts regarding the shift change on the night of the Bartrams fire, mainly due to the obstruction of Ingram himself, then Percy might be able to undermine Ingram’s authority in one of two ways. The first would be to call in Special Branch over the man’s head, but Percy was reluctant to take that course at this early stage, thereby blowing his own ‘cover’ and admitting his own inability to flush rats from sewers. The second option was to find some ‘dirty linen’ from Ingram’s former days as a sergeant in Stepney, and it was in any case high time that he began investigating the worrying business of the missing arms stash.
Just over two hours later he was sitting in an office on the ground floor of Stepney’s Arbour Square Police Station, talking with Ingram’s successor, Sergeant Thomas Parker, a fussy little man who was clearly overawed by the sight of the letter from the Home Secretary that Percy had placed on his desk, in case there should be any doubt regarding his authority to ask questions.
‘Without wishing to be disloyal in any way to my predecessor,’ Parker told Percy with a worried frown, ‘I have to admit that the records for Ingram’s last few weeks as Sergeant here are a bit of a mess, and I haven’t really had time to sort through them. Inspector Tomkins is well aware of the difficulty, but even so…’
‘I may well be able to assist you,’ Percy interrupted him, recognising a golden opportunity. ‘My reason for being here is to assess your readiness for what may well be a considerable increase in crowd numbers on the day of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and if I can report favourably to the Home Office regarding your urgent need for additional manpower, then of course it would be of considerable assistance to you. The last thing I need to have to do is to report that your records are in a bit of a mess, so why don’t I see what I can do to sort them out for you? It would be in both our interests, clearly.’
Sergeant Parker exchanged his frown for a smile of relief and gratitude.
‘That would be magnificent, provided of course that there would be no adverse reflection on my own ability in that regard.’
‘None whatsoever, let me reassure you,’ Percy oozed back, and by the time that he returned from a substantial celebratory dinner at a local chop house, a room had been made available for him, and the desk was strewn with disorganised paper that Percy lost no time in sorting into piles, first by function and then by date.
He began with the cell records but could find no authorisation for the release from custody of Nathanial Hiscock, the man whose house in nearby Ellerdale Street had been used as the storage dump for what had been an alarming number of military issue rifles. Percy had a note of the date on which the discovery had been made — the seventeenth of August, barely two months ago — but when he checked the custody admission records for that date he quickly realised why no-one had been alerted to an unregistered release of a prisoner. The stark fact was that Nathaniel Hiscock had, according to the custody records, never been a prisoner in the first place. A gross piece of incompetence? A dreadful act of corruption? Or an inexcusable lapse in procedure on what had no doubt been a very eventful evening?
Percy needed to speak to one of the two officers who had brought Hiscock into custody in the first place, or the person on duty at the Charge Desk on the evening in question. The second question was answered as soon as Percy got the duty rosters for the past few months into some semblance of order, and he was far from surprised to learn that the Sergeant on duty at the Charge Desk had been none other than George Ingram himself. Since he would also have been in charge of the adjoining ‘fish tank’ in which all arrestees were first lodged before, in most cases, being transferred down to a cell, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for Ingram to release Hiscock on the pretence of escorting him down to a cell, then quietly slipping him out of a side door.
That was, of course, assuming that Hiscock had made it as far as Stepney Police Station in the first place. The incident report for that night was conveniently missing from the morass of disorganised paper on the desk in front of him, so he would need to speak to the two officers who’d allegedly brought the man in. They were Constables Greenway and Padley, according to the far more reliable information in Percy’s notebook, care of William Melville of Special Branch.
Percy was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to hear what Sergeant Parker had to tell him as he handed over the records that he’d managed to sort into some semblance of order.
‘I’m mightily obliged to you,’ Parker told him with a reverential smile, ‘and that makes it even more embarrassing for me to have to advise you that neither of the men you wish to speak to are available.’
‘Have they both been subsequently murdered?’
‘Only one of them — Greenway,’ Percy was advised. ‘He was found in the alleyway alongside a tanners’ yard in Barrett’s Court, where according to bystanders he’d gone to investigate a woman’s screams for help.’
‘Let me guess — no sign of said woman, but every indication that he’d been lured up there to his death?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Years of bitter experience,’ Percy grimaced back. ‘No man on my shift would have been allowed up there on his own, but then again I gather than you’re short of manpower — even shorter now that Greenway’s been done in. What about Padley?’
‘Promoted to the Yard at about the same time that George Ingram went to Whitechapel.’
‘It figures,’ Percy nodded sadly, ‘but at least I think I can work out how the rifles came to be stolen afterwards.’
‘They were transferred to the Yard, on Sergeant Ingram’s instructions,’ Parker told him. Percy raised both eyebrows at him and waited or the penny to drop. ‘You don’t think that…?’
‘Don’t I?’
‘You mean that Jim Padley ... that is … I mean, he wouldn’t. Would he?’
‘Would, and probably did, Sergeant. But don’t worry — you’ve done nothing to reproach yourself for. Which makes you stand out somewhat in this place.’
Jack hung around on the pavement outside Leman Street Police Station until he was certain that it was Albert Preedy on duty at the Charge Desk, then shuffled in with his head down before raising it again with a friendly grin as he reached the counter.
‘You chancy bugger!’ Preedy grinned back at him. ‘If the Inspector catches you back in here, I’ll be the one instructed to put your arse back outside on the pavement.’
‘All the more reason for me to keep this brief.’ Jack grinned back at him as he cast a cautious eye up the staircase just in case. ‘When are you due your meal break?’
‘Half an hour or so, why?’
‘Fancy a meat pie?’
‘Better than the cheese sandwiches the missus packed me this morning. Where?’
‘“Jimmy’s”, around the corner. My treat.’
‘It’s a deal,’ Preedy replied with another smile. ‘Now bugger off, before we both get caught.’
‘So what are you really after, assuming that it wasn’t just the pleasure of my company?’ Preedy asked as he smiled his thanks for the brown paper bag containing a mutton pie that Jack had just handed him.’
‘Information.’
‘So what do you need to know?’
‘Any unidentified stiffs pulled out of St Katherine’s Dock lately?’
‘How lately?’
‘Any time since that warehouse fire on Beat Four. Probably hammered into a state that made it unrecognisable before it went for a swim.’
‘Funnily enough, we sent one to the mortuary last week some time,’ Preedy advised him with a shudder. ‘It was stinking to high heaven, so we ordered it down the road on a handcart.’
‘How was it dressed?’
‘From memory, like it was going to church, why — what’s this all about?’
‘I take it that Edward — or “Teddy” —
Ainsworth hasn’t shown up for duty recently?’
‘No, why?’
‘I think he may be your stiff.’
‘Far from “stiff”, as I recall,’ Preedy replied as he all but dry-retched. ‘Running all over the place would be a better description — it must have been a fortnight old, at a guess. But do you really reckon it was Teddy Ainsworth?’
‘That’d be my guess,’ Jack replied. ‘I suppose he was too far gone to recognise his face?’
‘I don’t recall the poor bugger having any face left, to tell you the sickening truth.’
‘And none of you undressed the corpse?’
‘What do you think?’
‘So the body went down to the mortuary fully clothed?’
‘Yes. We didn’t even search it for personal possessions, since Inspector Ingram wouldn’t let it through the door.’
‘Perfect!’ Jack whispered, almost to himself, but Preedy was curious.
‘You might at least tell me what this is all about.’
Jack thought briefly and decided to risk it. ‘I was puzzled as to why Ainsworth didn’t report back for duty the night after he seemingly allowed a warehouse to go up in flames a few yards from where his arse should have been parked for the entire shift. So I made enquiries of his landlady and learned that he was last seen heading towards St Katherine Dock with a floozy on his arm. I reckon she was some sort of decoy.’
‘If she was an acquaintance of Teddy Ainsworth’s, she was probably more than a decoy, if you get my meaning. Did you search his lodgings?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Find anything significant?’
‘You’re referring to his dirty postcards, aren’t you?’
‘It was just a thought,’ Preedy explained. ‘Now that you clearly know what Teddy was like, you won’t be surprised to learn that he may have been lured to his death by a tottie, will you?’
‘Not half as surprised as he probably was.’
Later that afternoon Jack pushed open the rubber doors to the local mortuary, with its pervading smells of carbolic and formaldehyde, consoling himself that at least it covered the much worse smells that assailed his nostrils as he picked his way gingerly through the belongings that had come in here with the corpse from St Katherine Dock. With a muted grunt of triumph, reluctant to open his mouth to the sickening miasma by which he was surrounded, he located what looked like a set of solid silver cufflinks.
On one side were the engraved initials ‘EA’, which he hoped denoted their owner as Edward Ainsworth, while the reverse had a silversmith’s mark that he believed revealed the manufacturer as having been ‘Mappin and Webb’. If he was right, then it was a simple process of confirming the purchaser for whom these cufflinks had been manufactured — someone whom the silversmiths had no doubt believed to be a wealthy man about town, when in fact he had been a police constable with expensive tastes and a lifestyle that made him ripe for corruption.
‘So what have we got?’ Percy asked as he and Jack lowered themselves into the facing armchairs in the sitting room, ahead of a Tuesday supper that threatened to be another of Aunt Beattie’s culinary experiments designed to test their gastric fortitude.
‘I went back to Leman Street and traded on an old friendship. That was of course after I’d been shown the door by Inspector Ingram, but not before I’d been able to confirm that Michael Black — the constable who was originally allocated to Beat Four in Wapping, right outside Bartrams — had a gambling problem, fell in with some unidentified soldier, then claimed to have had a substantial win at cards before disappearing over a week before the warehouse was set on fire. No idea where he’s got to, but his replacement Edward Ainsworth was living a high old lifestyle way beyond his means, was fond of the ladies, and was decoyed down to St Katherine Dock, where I believe his corpse was found in an unidentifiable state some two weeks later. However, among his possessions was a set of solid silver cufflinks, and I showed my police badge to the mortuary attendant — who thank God hadn’t realised how valuable they were — and brought them home with me. Tomorrow I hope to confirm that they belonged to Edward Ainsworth. Not bad for a day’s work.’
‘You were thrown out of Leman Street by Inspector Ingram? That seems to confirm what my investigations have revealed, and it all seems to come back to George Ingram, whichever way you roll the dice. You might want to take a note of what I’ve discovered, because it gets a bit complicated.’
Jack extracted his notebook and pencil, while Percy leaned back in his chair, blowing pipe smoke lazily into the air in between snippets of acquired knowledge.
‘As we agreed,’ he began, ‘I began looking into the phony story I was fed by Mrs Cameron regarding her son. She never had a brother, so the man who turned up was clearly sent to warn me off any further investigation. I’m now all but convinced that Hector Cameron was bribed to look the other way when certain persons up to no good stole the police uniforms and wagon that were used to rob the jewellers in Hatton Garden. But at this stage I’ve no reason to suspect his Inspector of anything other than misguided loyalty in covering up for him. Which is more than can be said for that arsehole George Ingram, as I discovered when I made enquiries at Stepney police station.’
‘In connection with those rifles found in a local house?’ Jack recalled, and Percy nodded.
‘Indeed. There’s a new Sergeant down there, and he seems to be an honest enough cove. From what he could tell me, and what I worked out for myself when I went through the paper explosion that passes for records in Stepney, the weapons were discovered when two constables called Greenway and Padley gained entry to a house occupied by this bloke Hiscock. That’s when it gets a bit murky, since according to the records, Hiscock wasn’t even taken into custody, which perhaps helps to explain why there’s no record of his release. And lo and behold, the Sergeant in charge of custodies that night just happened to be our old friend George Ingram, who, far from being disciplined for his laxity in record keeping, was promoted with indecent haste to his current position as an Inspector at Leman Street.
‘So Hiscock went free?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘And the rifles?’
‘Transferred to the Yard, from where some of them subsequently disappeared, of course. But there was another transfer out of Stepney at the same time as Ingram’s. Constable Padley can now be found somewhere inside the Yard, where I strongly suspect I’ll discover, when I ask some pointed questions tomorrow morning, he was allocated to stores duties.’
‘A bit blatant, surely?’
‘Not if someone higher up is covering for you.’
‘Inside the Yard?’
‘What makes you think that the Yard is any less open to corruption than the rest of the Met? And hadn’t we already begun to suspect that the rot starts high up? William Melville warned me that I might be approached from within the Yard to join the conspiracy. I don’t think it will be long before the waves I’m about to make threaten to rock the boat. But therein lies a risk, since you haven’t asked me what happened to Constable Greenway.’
‘Something tells me that it wasn’t good,’ Jack grimaced.
‘And you’d be right. Lured up an alleyway by the screams of a woman no doubt amply rewarded for her vocal talents, then done to death in the course of his duty.’
‘And we could meet a similar fate?’ Jack protested. ‘I’m the father of four children, let me remind you.’
‘They’ll come for me before they even consider you,’ Percy assured him. ‘But at least you’ll be left to point the finger.’
‘I’m about to point two fingers,’ Jack replied sternly. ‘Both of them in your direction.’
Chapter Nine
The following morning Percy frowned in disbelief as he read the file on Constable James Padway’s duty allocations since his transfer to the Yard following his discovery of the arms cache in the Stepney house. At least he’d not met the same fate as his colleague Walter Greenway, done to death in a back alley,
but he’d no doubt proved to be the only one of the two who was open to corruption, and his immediate allocation to ‘stores management’ was so blatant that someone within the Yard must have been covering up.
In only the second week of Padway’s night shift in the ‘Stolen Goods Repository’ that he was supposed to be guarding, seventy-eight Martini Henri rifles had gone missing. This would not have come to light had his day shift opposite number not taken it upon himself to conduct a stock-take in order to relieve the boredom, and Padway had got away with it by pointing out that the previous stock-take had been a month earlier, two weeks before his allocation to the stores duty, and therefore no-one could confirm that the rifles must have disappeared during his period of duty. This conveniently overlooked the fact that the rifles in question — well over a hundred and fifty — had not been delivered to the store by the date of the previous stock-take, but had been stacked against the far wall, still in their boxes, a week before Padway was entrusted with their security.
At the same time, Percy was puzzled as to why the rifles had been allowed to be transferred to the Yard in the first place. Assuming that Sergeant Ingram, as he then was, had been perfectly capable of arranging for Nathanial Hiscock to escape from custody without having ever been officially in it in the first place, why could Ingram not have had the rifles stolen long before they reached the Yard? The slightly encouraging answer was that someone within Stepney police station had alerted the Stolen Property team within the Yard, and they had lost no time in doing the right thing. There were, it seemed, at least some officers in the Met who played by the rules. Then Percy reminded himself that he had a reputation for doing exactly the opposite, and that he shouldn’t be so judgmental.
‘I might have known you’d waste no time in crossing even the broad and uncertain lines of operation that you were given,’ Chief Superintendent Bray glowered from Percy’s doorway. ‘And to judge by the written complaint that just landed on my desk from Inspector Ingram in Leman Street, you’ve passed the disease on to your nephew.’
