by John Creasey
Florence, looked down at the pale face so full of promise for the future. She prayed for guidance, sensing that Carol might now talk of those things buried deep in her mind, and which might well be the reason for her withdrawal from the world into herself. Seldom had those blue eyes stared up so straightly and with such confidence.
“So she must have known what it was like to be dead,” she reasoned simply.
God, God, tell me the right thing to say!
“Did she tell you what it was like, Carol?”
“She didn’t exactly tell me.”
“What did she say?”
“She said living alone was awful, it was like being dead.”
“Oh,” said Florence. Dear God, help me. “I know what she meant, it is awful to be on your own all the time.”
“How do you know, Auntie? You’ve got Uncle Dick.”
“I didn’t always have Uncle Dick, and once he had to go away for a long time. So I was on my own then.”
“Was it like being dead?” asked Carol.
She mustn’t lie, mustn’t foster this strange delusion, and yet she must not spoil the child’s faith in her mother. If only Josiah Wilkinson were here!
“Sometimes I thought it was,” she said, huskily.
“You didn’t know, like my Mummy?”
“No, Carol, not for certain. How—how often did Mummy talk to you like this?”
“Not very often, Carol answered reflectively. But she said I was the only one she could talk to about it, because I could understand.”
No, that couldn’t be true, Margaret must have meant something different from that, Florence thought. But it wouldn’t do to argue too much with the child now, it might drive her back into herself. There must be a way of making her tell more, of keeping this newly given confidence.
“And could you understand?” asked Florence.
“I must have, because Mummy said I could.”
Almost in anguish, Florence asked herself what she should say next, and through the silence while she tried to make up her mind, she heard Clive’s voice from some distance off. Other voices sounded, obviously he was with a crowd of boys, but he would soon be here and he would break the spell. In one way she hated that, in another she was glad, for it relieved her of the agony of deciding what to say.
She saw a change come over Carol’s expression, and suddenly Carol looked downwards, hiding her eyes, holding her hands in front of her, the fingers interlocked. Then, when Clive’s voice sounded nearer, she looked up at her aunt with a penetrating, even pleading, gaze.
“Don’t tell Clive,” she begged. “Don’t tell Clive. He only laughs at me!”
“I won’t tell Clive,” Florence assured her quietly. “I promise.”
The child held her gaze for a few seconds, then dropped it. Clive shouted to someone unseen: “After supper, then!” and came running from the front gate, long-limbed, tall for his age, outwardly thoroughly happy. “Auntie, can I go to Jimmy’s after supper, he’s going to have a lot of fellows in.”
“You can go if you get your homework done first.”
“Oh, great! I’ll go and do it now.” Clive turned and rushed away, pulling his sister’s hair as he went. She did not protest, she did not even look up as he disappeared into the house.
Chapter Sixteen
The Fathers
George Jensen, senior, was a good man, according to his lights. There was some narrow-mindedness in him, and bigotry, but in other ways there was tolerance and understanding. He was strict with his children and for that matter with his wife, but he was also kind and generous. He was a shop steward at a factory in Bethnal Green – not far from Mickle & Stratton’s – and he was a lay preacher and a steward at the local Methodist Church. He was a small, thin-featured man, and no one who had ever seen him side by side with his son could doubt their relationship.
His wife knew and understood him well.
She was a much shrewder woman than she appeared to be, with her frequent, high-pitched laugh and her comeliness and her apparent lack of interest in anything except gossip and her family. Because her husband was strict, she was inclined to be lenient – but never, as far as she knew, over-indulgent.
Both of them had been troubled by their second son, George junior, for some time. It was not simply because he did not now join in church and youth club activities with the eagerness he had shown at one time: it was the fact that he had become more and more uncommunicative.
“Where are you off to, Georgie?”
“Out.”
“Where’s out?”
“In the great open spaces beyond the front door!”
“Don’t you talk to me like that, young man, or I’ll let you know who’s master here!”
But his mother never did, for he was eighteen years old.
“George.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Why weren’t you at the Social Club dance?”
“I was somewhere else that night – things clashed, see.”
“Who were you out with?”
“Friends.”
“What friends, my son?”
“You wouldn’t know them, Dad.”
But in fact, his father did know them – or at least, know of them. He had neighbours with children of their own, and friends at church and work, and by casual questioning he learned that George was often with a group of high-spending youths who gambled far too much. Most of their gambling was with the East End firm of Jackie Spratt’s Limited, and in the beginning George Jensen senior had thought it would be only a matter of time before his son got into debt and would come to him for help. That would be the time to remonstrate and reason with him.
It did not happen; indeed, his son appeared to have more, rather than less, money to spend. True, he did not waste it, but spent it on clothes and was saving up for a continental holiday, but George senior could not understand how he came by it. Most punters were in debt very early in their gambling, very few had more than a few lucky winners before coming a cropper. He knew there were ‘systems’ and he knew that some men developed successful systems for a time, but these invariably failed in the long run. And his son had no knowledge of racing, no special source of information; why, one of the men at work was the brother of a famous jockey and even he could never be sure of backing a winner!
How was it that George did?
Jensen senior asked Ted Smith, the foreman carpenter to whom George was apprenticed, as they walked home from church one Sunday morning.
“I can’t understand it either, George. He’s always got money, lends quite a bit to some of the others, even older men who ought to know better than to borrow from a kid. But he never talks about it much. I know one thing. “
“What’s that?”
“He goes to the Mill Lane betting shop, not the one near you.”
So George the father made a point of finding out where the Mill Lane office was – and discovered it, with the chemical factory behind and, on the distant skyline, the skeletal cranes of London’s docks. He did not go there often, and did not follow his son, but he made discreet inquiries until one day he had what he believed to be a stroke of luck; he found out that one of the fitters at work lived in Mill Lane, nearly opposite the betting shop.
When his son did not come in on the evening following the fire at Mickle and Stratton’s, George Jensen senior went to see this workmate, a man named Mills. The family Mills of Mill Lane had been in the same little house for three generations. There was still a grandfather, in his nineties, who had the top front room and whose eyesight was as keen, he claimed, as it had been when he was a boy.
“Ain’t no doubt about it,” he told Jensen, in his frail brittle voice. “I see your George, Mr. Jensen, spit image of you when you was a boy, he is. I see him go in but
I never see him go out. Left his bike outside he did, didn’t trouble to lock it. Someone else come along and took it. You can’t trust no one these days.”
Jensen was sure that the old man’s story was true.
He also knew that the police had been making discreet inquiries about his son.
What he did not know, but his wife did, was that George had come home late the previous night, changed his clothes and gone out again. His bedroom had smelled faintly of burning as if something had been singed, and there were fragments of wood shavings left by his shoes.
“It’s nobody’s business but my boy’s,” Mrs Jensen had told herself as she cleaned the room.
She slept; while her husband lay wakefully beside her, listening to her loud breathing, to the sound of distant traffic, to the thumping of his own heart.
“I must give the boy a chance,” he kept telling himself over and over again. “I must try to help him.”
At last, he too fell asleep.
Next morning, he left at half-past seven to cycle to work, as usual, but he did not go straight to the factory. Once there, he would not be able to get time off. He cycled to the docks and watched the work going on in the Pool, and just after ten o’clock he went to Jackie Spratt’s shop in Mill Lane.
“There’s an old geezer here says he knows young Jensen came here the day before yesterday,” a man told the Stocks and Shares office manager, to whom George Jensen had gone for help. “My God, what are we going to do?”
“We don’t get into a panic,” the manager said. “Stand by, Biddle, and leave this to me.”
The manager’s name was Rupert Kano, and he was in his shirt sleeves when he went into his office and saw old Jensen. He concealed the shock of surprise at seeing a man so like the boy who was dead, and said with brisk certainty:
“You must be mistaken, sir. No one named Jensen is on the books, and certainly no one of that name was here on Monday.”
George Jensen knew beyond all doubt that this was a lie. He stood staring, heart beating fast, not sure what to do. If he simply said he was sorry, and left, he could go straight to the police – they would make the man tell the truth. But the truth might do grave harm to his son, and he had to do everything he possibly could for the boy.
“That’s a lie,” he said quietly. “And I can prove it.”
“You can’t prove what isn’t true,” Rupert Kano retorted. “What makes you think you can prove it?”
“Because he was seen coming here on his bicycle, and someone was seen stealing the bicycle,” George Jensen said stiffly. “I don’t know what influence you have over my son or what you are doing with him, but I want to know where he is. And I’m not going to be put off with any lies.”
The shirt-sleeved man said smoothly: “I’m sure it’s a mistake, Mr. Jensen, but there’s just one possibility. My assistant who was on duty on Monday afternoon won’t be in for an hour. As soon as he arrives, I’ll speak to him. He may know something. Can you be back here in an hour and a half, say?”
Something like elation filled Jensen, but he did not show any sign of it as he said sternly: “I want to know where my son is.” And then, to make his point absolutely clear, he told one of the few lies he had ever told in his life. “I saw him come in here – I know he was here.”
“Then my colleague may be able to help,” said Rupert Kano.
When Jensen had gone, Kano sent for Biddle, and said: “The old man’s been spying on his son. He’ll be back in an hour and a half – if nothing happens to him on the way. Fix him.”
“It’s not so easy,” Biddle began uneasily.
“I didn’t say it was easy,” Rupert Kano said. “I said fix him.”
As George Jensen cycled away from Mill Lane, passing a lorry load of sulphuric acid being driven from the factory behind the street, Geoffrey Entwhistle was shifting books on the shelves of the prison library at Dartmoor, while another convict, a self-confessed murderer, was dusting the shelves. Entwhistle was obsessed by thought of the children. He had left them voluntarily for three years, but then Margaret had been with them; now, he hated the thought that they were growing up without him.
He finished the job, and then reported to the warder in charge that he was through.
“Do it again,” the warder said.
There was a break for a meal in the canteen; reasonable food in the hateful hall beneath the hateful watch kept by armed men. It was the daily routine: a low-pitched rumble of talk, the clattering of knives and forks and plates, the usual complaints for the sake of being able to utter some words freely, then straight back to the library.
The first person he saw was Josiah Wilkinson, and his heart seemed to stand still.
“We can talk over here,” Wilkinson said quietly. “We have permission.” He led the way to a corner where there was a table spread with old dog-eared magazines. “I saw the children,” he added simply. “They’re all extremely well.”
Entwhistle dropped heavily into a chair; he was sweating from reaction, and could not find words.
“I also saw Commander Gideon,” Wilkinson went on. “And he listened.”
“Listened,” echoed Entwhistle hoarsely. Then he muttered: “Will he do anything, that’s what matters.”
“He has promised to review the investigation,” answered Wilkinson, “but it doesn’t really mean anything, unless we can give him something to work on. If we can, he will do all he can.”
Entwhistle said with an effort: “Well, I suppose it’s something. Better than a flat ‘no’.” He paused, for a long time. “How—how is Carol?”
“When I saw her, much the same,” answered Wilkinson, “but when I got home last night – very late – I had a telephone call about her from your sister-in-law.”
Entwhistle sat very tense.
“Carol’s beginning to talk about her mother,” went on Wilkinson. “That can only be a good thing.”
When his visitor left the library, Entwhistle sat in absolute silence and stillness. The warder who had been so indifferent in the morning saw him, studied the expression on his face, the strange look that was almost of hope and yet had the brand of despair written across it The warder could have sent him back to work, instead, he left him alone.
Entwhistle did feel hope; but he had become so accustomed to the death of hope that it was almost an emotion of fear.
Old Jeff Mickle forced his way out of the ancient Rolls-Royce and squeezed himself through the doorway of the new ‘factory’. Inside, twenty or thirty men were working, a new circular saw was being bolted to the cement floor, while stocks of wood were being carried in. Tony, his son, was in his shirtsleeves, hot and perspiring as he helped in the work and talked to two men, one of them the foreman carpenter, Ted Smith. Old Jeff, sweating freely, looking like a bloated John Bull, his enormous clothes much too tight for him, watched his son in warm approval. But as he reached him, he bellowed: “Hey! What’s holding you back, Tony boy? We want to get this place working, didn’t I tell you! We’ve got the orders – you know what? We’ve got the contract for the new hotel in Bournemouth. Remember it’s Mickle and Son, now – just Mickle and Son!”
The almost unbelievable thing was that the men began to work harder.
Gideon reached the office that morning, wasted no time over his briefing, then sent for Hobbs to discuss the power house investigation. Waiting for Hobbs, he discovered that he had left his notes about the sabotage at home. He had been at such pressure for the past day or two that he welcomed a brief respite, and decided to go back to get them himself. He turned into the gateway of his house, and heard the piano being played with a joyous zest which broke through his preoccupation with the day’s events, and brought a smile to his lips. He recognised the piece but could not place it. Tchaikovsky, that was the man, the Nutcracker Suite! Remembering the name was a triumph for Gideon. It was one of Penelope
’s favourites, and she played it whenever she was happy. Greatly cheered, he opened the door – and saw Kate near the front room door, listening but looking towards him. She raised a hand to stop him from speaking. He closed the door with hardly a sound. The sound of music filled the house and gave it a brightness that was near radiance. Penelope had boyfriend after boyfriend, and happiness always made her playing sheer delight. This morning, however, there was something very special. He stepped to Kate’s side and slid his arm round her waist. She took his hand, twining her fingers through his. There was a glow in her eyes as she listened to her child playing with such triumph.
At last, Penelope stopped.
Her back was to the door and the baby grand, a Bechstein, was slantwise across the corner, in exactly the same position as the Right Honourable David Wilshire’s desk. Penelope sprang up from the stool, pirouetted towards the window, disappeared from sight-and then exclaimed: “Daddy!”
She reappeared, eyes glowing, young body childishly appealing in her short, sleeveless dress. She flung herself at him in a dramatic hug, then stood back.
“I haven’t told him,” Kate said.
“Daddy,” his daughter said eagerly, earnestly, “Jonathan’s asked me to marry him. And I do love him. I truly do.”
All Gideon could think of was the radiance in his daughter’s face, for he had only a vague picture of a pleasant youth who had been in and out of the house for the past few months. But if ‘Jonathan’ had been an ogre, he couldn’t say so to Penelope now.
Chapter Seventeen
The ‘Accident’
George Jensen stood on Tower Hill and stared at the flow of people going into the tower. Two beefeaters were on duty, near the gates, while the guards marched up and down with their endless, military precision. A few people were sitting or standing idly about Tower Hill, too old or too indolent for work. The tower itself stood ageless. Down in the grassy moat, a few soldiers kicked a football in a desultory, time-wasting way.
