Shroud of Darkness

by E. C. R. Lorac

  “Well, sir, checking your evidence by evidence previously received, it sounds to me as though you’re being pretty accurate. I agree with you that the fog had been so poisonous all day that everybody was affected by it more or less, and I understand what you mean when you say that the journey had a nightmare quality—”

  “Very sympathetic of you, Chief Inspector. I’d hardly have blamed you if you thought I was a bit weak in the upper story myself, blethering about nightmares and bad hats. And now, for the love of Mike, tell me what all this is leading up to. I realise it’s your business to ask questions and mine to answer them, but even a patient chap like me wants to know the reason he’s being interrogated. Who was it got laid out—and where?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MACDONALD replied to Weldon’s question by repeating the description of the unidentified boy given to press and radio, adding that the casualty had been found in the station approach. Weldon said at once:

  “Well, one thing’s certain. The chap you’re describing wasn’t the chiser who got in with me at Reading. It might have been the boy in the other comer. I didn’t notice him much, but I have a vague recollection his hair was reddish. The chief thing I noticed about him was that he stared: he looked what folks in the north call gormless—a mug, if you prefer it.”

  “Did he stare at you?”

  “Only by the way, so to speak. He stared at the fellow next to me.”

  “Now, sir: will you do your best to describe the latter? You said you were convinced he was a bad lot, so I take it you must have had a look at him.”

  “I had several looks. How’s one to describe an impression? Here’s the best I can do so far as facts are concerned: he was about my own height—five eight—narrow in build, giving a queer impression that he wasn’t solid, or perhaps eel-like describes what I’m trying to say. Black hair, smarmed back, and a face like a potato, pretty shapeless, with dark eyes set too close together and a slobbery sort of mouth. Clean shaven, beastly clothes with overpadded shoulders and a waist. His clothes were dark and he’d got a flash tie and a gaudy scarf.” He broke off and suddenly asked a question, as though talking to himself. “Why did I put him down for a bad ’un? I think it was because he came up too close to me on Reading platform. One minute he wasn’t there and the next he was, close behind me—too close. It was the same when he got in the train. He sat very near to me, his hands in his pockets—but I expected them to be in mine any minute.”

  Reeves put in his first question here: “How old was this chap, sir?”

  “Oh, quite young. They were only lads, both of them—about twenty, at a guess.”

  “And you think you heard the word ‘camp’ when the boy in the corner spoke to the chiser?”

  Weldon rubbed his head thoughtfully. “I thought I did—but I might well have been wrong. I told you I was half asleep . . . camp, ramp, scamp. Oh Lord, it might have been anything. Might have been my own train of thought—why aren’t these young blackguards doing their national service? All I can tell you for certain is that the boy in the corner spoke to the fellow next to me, and that when I opened my eyes, the latter just sat mum as though he hadn’t heard.”

  “You spoke of an older man, sir, who looked in at you from the corridor,” put in Macdonald.

  “Yes: a fellow of my own age,” replied Weldon. “Heavyish, in filthy clothes. Unpleasant-looking bloke, I thought. I thought he was looking for a seat, but he wasn’t. He was attracting the attention of the young chiser next to me—not beckoning exactly, more like making a code sign with his fingers.”

  “Ticktack man,” suggested Reeves. “They have their own way of passing information.”

  Weldon stifled a yawn. “You know more about that than I do. I’ve told you all I can—and it adds up to damn-all. But I did see the three of them hurry off together, or more or less together. I lost sight of them before I got to the barrier. I made for the tube—it was the only way of getting home, bar walking. And even the tube was running dead slow. I went to Oxford Circus and changed on to the Central London and came back to Queensway—of all crazy roundabout ways of getting here. I know my way from this house to Paddington Station as well as any man can know it, but the sort of fog we had last night not only blinds you, it defeats your common sense.”

  Macdonald nodded. “I think a lot of people felt that way,” he said.

  Weldon shrugged his heavy shoulders. “It gives you an idea of the state of mind I was in last night when I admit I funked walking home: so if I seem to have been an addleheaded sort of witness, I’m sorry. Normally speaking, I’m a reasonably observant person. Last night I wasn’t.”

  “Well, sir, I reckon you haven’t done badly,” said Reeves. “Very kind of you, but you wanted something precise, I take it, and I’ve nothing precise to tell you,” said Weldon.

  2

  When Macdonald and Reeves left Weldon’s chambers, they found, as they expected, that the fog had thickened enough to reduce motor traffic to walking pace. It was not as dense as it had been the previous night, but still thick enough to make the streets dangerous, deceptive, and exceedingly unpleasant.

  “Considering all things, we’ve not done so badly,” said Macdonald. “I shall go back to C.O. and see if any reports have come in. You might as well go home: it’s not the sort of night for alfresco observation. The tube has it, I think.”

  “How do we get there?” asked Reeves.

  “First on the left and hope for the best,” replied Macdonald. “Any comments on our last witness?”

  “Well, he did his best for us and his evidence corroborates Miss Dillon’s,” said Reeves, “but it’s a damned funny story. I was interested in the fact he spoke of that boy as ‘lacking.’ ”

  “Yes. ‘Gormless.’ It’s a north-country word—witless. It looks as though we can’t leave the psychiatrist out of it, because the boy wasn’t witless at all in the early part of the journey.”

  “Looks as though he got in a flap over something,” said Reeves, “and then tried to chum up with the spark in the spiv tie. There’s one thing suggestive there, especially in connection with the word ‘camp’ overheard by Weldon.”

  “Are you thinking the boy recognised a fellow he’d been in the Forces with?” said Macdonald. “A deserter, for example.”

  “That’s the sort of idea: if the boy insisted on recognising a tough who’d every reason to dislike being recognised it provides a motive of sorts.”

  “Well, I’ll get on to the Reading fellows and see if they can make anything of the description provided,” said Macdonald. “Now we’ve got some corroboration, it’ll be worth while urging them to find out all they can about the rowdies they’d got on the station last night.”

  “Let me have a go at it tomorrow, Chief. I made some rather good contacts while I was goating around Reading station: a coupla permanent-way men, a greaser, and a carriage cleaner. All of ’em know more about the bookies’ touts than any of the higher grades do. If you want to find out about the low-downs, the lower down you go the nearer you get to the doings.”

  “Perfectly sound—and you have a knack of your own in dealing with what you call the low-down,” said Macdonald.

  “I went to a primary school when I was five,” said Reeves. “A church school, it was, in north London. I got a schol. to the grammar later on, but what I learnt between the ages of five and eleven I’ve never forgotten, and I sometimes think it’s been more use to me than the school-cert stuff. And I don’t mean the church catechism or the pep talks the vicar doled out on Fridays.”

  “So I gathered,” said Macdonald, taking Reeves firmly by the elbow and guiding him to the left.

  “There’s just one thing I can do which you can’t, Chief,” said Reeves. “I can pass as a pukka sneak thief in the dirtiest bar in Notting Dale and get the patter right as near as makes no difference.”

  “Admitted—and the department’s profited by the fact time and again,” said Macdonald, “but I’ve got to butt in here with a ta
ke-it-steady caveat, as far as this case is concerned. Until we’ve got ‘Waterloo’ identified, it’s no use assuming that the Reading rowdies are the answer. It may be some private hate which we can’t guess at until we know the boy’s background.”

  “Good Lord, don’t think I’m backing a dark horse in a fog, Chief. I’ve learnt a bit playing second fiddle to a Jock, no offence meant, but there’s that bit of work young Denton spotted—the customer under the trolley. Funny how things fit: what was it Weldon said—‘eel-like?’ ”

  “Yes. I noticed that,” said Macdonald. “The Dillon girl said ‘sluglike.’ Both are rather suggestive.”

  “A human eel, a luggage trolley, and a patch of paraffin oil,” mused Reeves. “Suggests to me we may be heading for the rarest of all chances in our job—a firsthand witness of the event. Doesn’t often happen. Hullo, is that the tube? I never thought I should have to admit you know London better than I do.”

  “The tube it is,” said Macdonald. “I don’t think I do know London better than you do: I know it in patches. So do you—but you could beat me hollow in the neighbourhood between Hackney and Walthamstow.”

  “Good old Hackney,” chuckled Reeves. “I wasn’t half a limb when I went to St. Phil’s Primary; but my dad belted me in the good old way and I learnt it didn’t pay.”

  “You’d better have a chat with Dr. Garstang about it,” said Macdonald.

  “Reckon I could teach him a lot,” said Reeves reminiscently.

  3

  Macdonald went back to Scotland Yard and waded patiently through a number of reports sent in by a diversity of persons on the subject of redheaded boys who might have travelled on the West of England to Paddington train. Long experience had taught Macdonald to sort out reports of this kind pretty accurately. He knew that there was nothing here which was worth investigating and he tidied away some routine jobs, delegating them to his colleagues.

  The chief inspector had decided that he’d got to get “Waterloo” identified before he could put his case on a firm basis, and the best chance of doing so was to rely on Sally Dillon’s judgment. “He lived somewhere near Plymouth. . . . He changed trains at Plymouth. . . . He knew the railway which goes up to Princetown, through Horrabridge and Yelverton. . . .” In short, Macdonald had made up his mind to go to Plymouth, to follow the branch line, and tackle every stationmaster and porter en route between Plymouth and Princetown. He knew it would be an advantage to have a car: remembering the time he had spent in the train between London and Reading, he wondered if a car would really be much slower than the railway: he rang up the Meteorological Office and was offered a crumb of comfort about conditions to the west of London: once clear of the “London basin,” he was informed, visibility was improving to the southwest. The Midlands and the north were still dense, but the west country was clearing.

  “Well, here’s hoping,” said Macdonald. “I’ll turn in early and get on the road by six provided the Met. blokes haven’t changed their minds.”

  Reeves got home to his small house in West Hampstead much earlier than his wife had dared to hope. “How did you manage it? Scotland Yard shut down by the fog too?” she asked.

  “The Chief sent me home. There wasn’t much we could do at the moment,” said Reeves. “But I’m going out later—not for long. In by closing time. I say, that smells good, whatever it is.”

  “Call yourself a detective,” she retorted. “That’s oxtail, that is: and why you can’t sit down and have a bit of a rest after a good supper I don’t see. You and your pub crawling.”

  “I’ve learnt more that’s been useful to me in pubs than I ever did sitting at home and reading a book,” said Reeves. “I told you what it’d be like when you married me——”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. I’m not complaining. You’re all right—if only I saw a bit more of you. But when you start on a new case it’s always the same. Now go and wash your face, do, you’re as black as a sweep, and I’ll have supper on the table in five minutes.”

  “Nothing like a good meal for helping the old ideas to develop,” chuckled Reeves.

  4

  On the same foggy evening a young man sat in a pub in the Notting Dale district studying the sports page of his evening paper. The Whistling Pig was not a house of good reputation: the local police had nothing definite against it, and no charge of breaking licencing regulations had ever been brought against the publican, Albert Hodgeson, but the police believed the bar to be the resort of shady characters. The customers at the Whistling Pig, nearly all of them men, were not toughs or rowdies, not men who gained their living by brawn, such as navvies or heavy-goods porters. One constable had given it as his opinion that you’d never find any man in the bar of the Whistling Pig who was employed in any job represented by a trades union; they weren’t employed in the sense of earning a weekly wage. They picked up a living on their own account, trading goods in short supply, gambling in the wider sense of the word, using their wits to buy cheap and sell dear, always on the lookout for tips, inside information, the chance of betting on “a cert.” On the whole they were a quiet lot: messages were frequently left for “old so and so”: enquiries made as to whether Tom or Dick or Harry had been in lately, and the customers certainly got around: Doncaster, Leicester, Newmarket: Lewes, Brighton, Gatwick: Lincoln, Liverpool, Lanark: all these familiar place names were bandied about by men who had either just come from or were going to them, and who were ready to “do business” in various lines, not always connected with the sport of kings. And they had money in their pockets: beer was not in great demand. “Scotch—a double and the same again, Bert”—a pound note didn’t last very long when these gentry got going.

  The young man who sat studying form and odds and analyses had been to the Whistling Pig several times before. He really knew his subject, and he had occasionally discussed the runners in some of the less famous races with the hangers-on who came to the pub hoping to pick up something from the more knowledgeable as they warmed up towards closing time. The young man’s name was Henry Brown—1’Enery, to those who asked for his opinion on a hopeful outsider. He was thin and shabby and grubby and furtive-looking, and he sank into his environment so well that he wasn’t noticed—which was the best tribute to his ability that could have been formulated. For Henry Brown was a policeman, in training for the borough C.I.D. If his superior officers had known that Henry was doing a spot of private training “after the hooter went” it was very improbable that he would have been commended for his zeal. But Henry was an incorrigible seeker for information: he was fascinated by these hoarse-voiced men who spoke a language still often incomprehensible to him. Very slowly but surely Henry Brown was getting an insight into the minds of men who made their livings by anticipating what other mugs would do with their money.

  Henry was chary of speech while he was at the Whistling Pig. When he spoke it was in a hoarse growl which suggested he had spent his day bawling from a coster’s barrow: he found the hoarseness easy to assume and his accent was faithful Cockney. He had a good ear for vowel sounds and his “Naow” was a negative compounded of a rich variety of variations on a basic “ow.” He was beginning to get the hang of rhyming slang, too, but his most dearly prized achievement was the fact that he could hang about in a pub like the Whistling Pig without arousing any comment among the habitues.

  It was just as Henry was folding his paper to a suitable size to slip into his pocket that he heard a slight altercation going on at the bar. He didn’t turn his head—he was much too cagey for that: he crammed his paper into his pocket and began to make a pattern with matches on the table top beside him.

  “Oh, you didn’t, did you?” enquired the voice of an elderly Cockney—and the expression he got into his words was quite remarkable. “So you never went to see Solly Bing’s new tike? That’s a funny thing, that is.”

  Henry knew about Solly Bing. This worthy was a breeder of greyhounds and he had got some big prices for his dogs, but the fact that interested Henry Brown w
as that Solly Bing’s kennels were near Reading. A conscientious student of police reports, Henry knew that Chief Inspector Macdonald was interested in the arrival of a train from the west of England which had picked up passengers in Reading last night. His reasoning as neat as the interlocking of a zip fastener, Henry immediately wanted to know more about the man who had denied going to Solly Bing’s, while his interlocutor obviously didn’t believe the denial.

  “Went to the flicks with yer girl friend instead?” went on the unbelieving one, “And that’s a very funny thing, that is, me ’aving ’ad a nice chat with Solly this morning, over the phone, mind you. You see I went to you-know-where to pick up a parcel as ’ad been brought up for me by an obliging friend.”

  “I don’t care where the flicking blank you went to,” retorted the other. “I stayed at ’ome last night, like any bloke in ’is senses would, the weather being what it was. Got that?”

  “Now you do surprise me,” put in the first voice, but Bert Hodgeson put his spoke in before the argument could be continued.

  “Now then, Barney, that’s enough of that. Can’t a young chap do as ’e blooming well likes on a foggy evening without ’aving to cross ’is t’s and dot ’is is to Uncle? Now if you wants to ’ear of a likely dawg, what about the Major’s Little Nipper?”

  The conversation became general again, and Henry Brown backed his hunch and walked out with a growled “goo’ night all.” Henry was certain that the altercation would not be continued in the bar: Albert Hodgeson was not only a very competent publican, he was a character whose veto was respected. None of the habitues of the Whistling Pig would get across Hodgeson: it wasn’t worth their while. If customers felt quarrelsome they took their quarrels outside, and Henry believed that the two men who had contradicted one another with so much venom in their voices would come and finish their argument outside, for preference in the blind alley at the side of the pub, where lorries pulled in for the night by arrangement with Hodgeson.