The Toff Breaks In

by John Creasey

  Copyright & Information

  The Toff Breaks In

  First published in 1940

  © John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1940-2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2014 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755136608 9780755136605 Print

  0755139933 9780755139934 Kindle

  0755138287 9780755138289 Epub

  0755146301 9780755146307 Epdf

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Creasey – Master Storyteller - was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron.

  Creasey wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the ‘C’ section in stores. They included:

  Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.

  Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the One Party Alliance which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.

  He also founded the British Crime Writers’ Association, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed upon him the Edgar Award for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate Grand Master Award. John Creasey’s stories are as compelling today as ever.

  Prologue

  Partly 1910

  The heat was terrific, scorching the skin of the two men who struggled across the parched desert of Central Australia – men whom the burning sun and the dry sand drove almost mad. It worked into their food, their water-bottles, their eyes and mouths and noses; they were never free of it. But they kept their sanity, for gold drove them on. The lure of gold, which they knew existed ten, twenty, perhaps thirty miles away. There was water, too, now almost as vital as the yellow dust.

  Hour after hour passed, and slowly the sun moved across the brazen heavens, finally to sink below a line of distant mountains. There was no breeze, but the shades of night brought coolness.

  One of the men spoke, his voice cracked and hoarse.

  ‘Another two hours,’ he muttered. ‘No more than that, and we’ll be through.’

  There was an ugly scowl on the other’s face.

  ‘Unless Robertson’s beaten us to it.’

  ‘He can’t—’ began the first speaker; but he lapsed into silence without completing the sentence. It was just possible that another prospector could have reached that oasis of water and gold before them. If he had …

  Slowly they went on until suddenly the desert was broken, and in the distance they saw shrubs and stunted trees. One of the men sniffed, and his eyes glittered. He broke into a run, stiff and painracked though he was, and there was a word croaking from his lips, a magic word in that barren desert.

  ‘Water, thank God, water!’

  ‘Quiet, you fool!’ his companion snapped viciously. ‘Look there—’

  Both men stopped, for in the distance they could see the glow of a small fire, evidence of another man’s presence. They had been beaten to that oasis of water and gold. There was water enough for them all, but the gold belonged to the first-comer.

  Black hatred towards the unseen man possessed them.

  Even more slowly they made their way towards the fire until gradually the man was visible, a silhouette against the uneven red glow. Both men were breathing hard, and their right hands were on the butts of guns – heavy Colts, for in 1910 the Colt .45 was a popular weapon.

  ‘No,’ muttered one man suddenly. ‘We—we can’t do it.’

  His companion’s voice was vicious.

  ‘That claim is ours, we’ve got to have it after this and, by God, he won’t stop me!’

  They were near that solitary figure, within easy shooting distance, and still they had not been observed; the only sound was the cracking of burning wood and the hum of insects.

  The first man drew his gun. A loud roar came as flame stabbed through the darkness, and by the fire the solitary prospector threw up his arms and collapsed. Through the quiet came moans mingling with curses, dwindling slowly to an incoherent muttering.

  The others broke into a shambling run towards him. When they reached him he was lying still, flat on his face. They turned him over roughly.

  ‘Look!’ The gunman kneeling beside the corpse stared down at the dead face. ‘It’s not him! It’s not Robertson! Robertson’s not here yet …’

  They felt fear surging through them, panic on its heels. This was a stranger. Robertson, the only other man who knew of the gold at this spot, whom they had been racing across the desert, had not arrived.

  But – they knew Robertson would come.

  ‘He said that he’d bring others—he’s sent one in advance.’ The murderer brushed his hand across his lips. ‘We ought to have known. They’ll be here soon, and they’ll find this. Find this!’

  ‘Shut up!’ The second man looked round, seeing that the lonely traveller had provisions in plenty; Robertson probably had sent this man to guard the gold-claim. No one could have crossed that stretch of desert alone with the big load of provisions and trappings which the dead man had near by. Others were probably close at hand.

  ‘We’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘We’ll take his food, make up-country for a few miles, and then rest for the night. We can push on tomorrow.’

  Within an hour they were on their way, with fear instead of avarice to drive them and goad them. It drove them temporarily to safety although with little time to spare – but most important it drove them into intrigue and crime that was to be with them all their lives.

  They did not know that then.

  Nor did they realise that it had taken them irrevocably into the orbit of the Hon. Richard Rollison, who at that time was preparing without trepidation – nerves were never to be a characteristic of his – for his first departure from the wings of his parents to the ministrations of schoolmasters. Which masters quickly came to the conclusion that if Rollison wanted to do a thing it would be done, regardless of the consequences. Some even prophesied for him a sticky end.

  The Toff – as Rollison came to be known – was the last to dwell on his days at Charterhouse and Cambridge, where he gained fame and his cricket blue, and by some remarkable means avoided a battle with the dons. He had a way with him, had Rollison, against which th
e sternest proctor wilted, but probably the reason he avoided the indignity of being sent down was his habit of doing misdeeds mostly on his own.

  Some said that Cambridge began his quite abnormal dislike of certain types of crime. Others claimed that he had been born amoral in some things, but oddly righteous in others. Still more decided that it was the unreasonable fortune which a misguided grandfather left him that enabled him to encourage his own peculiar tastes.

  England had not been large enough to hold him.

  A year out of Cambridge, with a first in Classics which had surprised everyone but his tutors, he began a five-year tour of the world – and not by luxury liner. The holds of cargo-boats and small tramps had a great deal to do with the development of his bone, muscle, experience and first-hand knowledge of the most unlikely crimes and their exponents. There was, for instance, the tramp plying from London to the Barbary Coast and manned by three murderers, two white-slavers, a God-fearing skipper and a Devildefying first-mate who liked rum more than his own soul. With the discovery that there was gold in the hold a mutiny not only threatened, but took place – and the Toff and cabin-boy guided the ship into port, with the crew in irons and the skipper in his bunk.

  In the course of his travels by sea and land the Toff learned to differentiate between crime and crime. On his black-list were blackmail, murder, robbery with violence, drug-trafficking and white-slavery, and later he learned to dislike company frauds and most confidence tricksters with similar intensity, although no one who outwitted a millionaire gave him much concern.

  In those five years of travelling, too, the Toff earned the first rumours of his reputation.

  He was a handsome man, and darkly tanned; he had grey eyes that could smile one moment and be very cold the next, he was tall and lithe and yet muscular. Remarkable stories circulated about him, although at first he had no idea of them. In his remarkable way he was happy …

  But he possessed an orderly mind.

  His life was too haphazard, and his dislike of crime – especially the items on his black-list – increased. He began to look for examples of it, and to pick out the perpetrators for his special brand of retribution, not always in accordance with the law. Twice, in fact, he was frowned upon by the authorities in Shanghai and Chicago, and politely but firmly requested to leave the localities – which he did, being tired of them and saying so in a way which did not cause offence until he was out of earshot. Whispers of his activities grew apace; the number of people with reason to hate him also grew. From Chicago to Stamboul, San Francisco to Marseilles, Shanghai to Paris, the whispers travelled. It was said that he carried death in his two fists, that he could shoot and throw a knife with equal accuracy, that his smile and his laughter were of the Devil, that he could be in two places at once, and that he had never been known to fail to get his man.

  And so the Toff reached London, preceded by his reputation.

  Within a year he was more feared in certain circles than any man – or organization – in London, including Scotland Yard. He worked mostly on his own, although a certain Chief-Inspector Horace McNab had good reasons to bless and to curse him in turn.

  His chief weapon was fear – the other man’s fear – and he called it psychological terrorism. Out of the blue he would drop on his victim, his grey eyes sparkling, his shapely lips curving, his voice filled with all the mockery in the world. And then he would strike – and soon afterwards the gates of one of His Majesty’s rest homes for the crooked in mind were opened to admit another unwilling guest. But the name of the Toff rarely figured in the official records of the case. Usually Chief Inspector McNab took the kudos, and was duly grateful until such time as the Toff snatched a small-time crook out of his grasp. For the Toff loved some small rogues, and helped them when he could.

  Despite the misguided conception of some people, of the type rigidly superstitious, the Toff was not omniscient. True, he heard rumours of many crimes so that he could stop them before they materialised, but that was because so many people who haled Scotland Yard looked on the Toff as their guardian angel. They learned that if they asked him to say nothing to the police, nothing was said. He was at once the most-hated and the best-loved man in that place euphemistically called the Underworld, and he became almost a legend, which was what he wanted.

  To help the legend, he prepared a number of visiting cards with his name and address on one side, and on the other the pencilled drawing of a top hat, a monocle and a cigarette, and a face that wasn’t there. That, of course, was after he had been dubbed the Toff by a little East Ender with an appreciation of good tailoring. He had innumerable agents, and learned many incredible things, but some escaped him. For instance, the habits and practices of a Mr. Arnold Chamberlain, which even the Toff would have admitted was no name for a villain.

  But it was due, if unwittingly, to Mr. Chamberlain that he heard so many years afterwards of a murder which had been committed in Australia’s Central Desert; and into his hand fell the axe of retribution.

  Chapter One

  Mr. Augustus Meer

  Mr. Augustus Meer, tall, frail and grey-haired, had a pair of benevolent weak blue eyes that surveyed the quiet world around him through horn-rimmed – and some said rose-coloured – spectacles. It was as though he found not a single thing to displease him, and if he read the scare-heads of the daily papers during the recurring crisis that threatened to put the world in chaos, he did not say so. No one thought of asking Mr. Meer what he thought of Mr. Malenkov, for instance; it was so obvious that he would harbour only kindly sentiments, and in times of crises kindly sentiments were not seriously wanted.

  In the old-world but A.R.P. infested town of Hersham, in Sussex, Mr. Meer was respected and popular, and looked on with warm if sometimes slightly tolerant esteem. Children especially liked him. He was like a godfather spreading kindly arms over the sick and the poor.

  He was also a dealer in antiques, a dabbler in philately – he never called it stamp-collecting – and a connoisseur of wines. His friends were legion. During the days when he was well enough to attend his little shop in the High Street he would talk to every client not as a salesman but as a glowing fellow-enthusiast. Experts from all over England visited Mr. Meer and were startled by the value of many of his pieces. And yet, despite the excellence of his trade and the genuineness of his antiques, Mr. Meer’s bank balance was not large. Twice in a year he was forced to ask a friend and next-door neighbour, Simonson, of the London-National Bank, to oblige him with a small overdraft.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Simonson, a jovial-faced if worldly man, on the second occasion, ‘it’s a pleasure to help you, but—and I know you won’t take this badly—you really shouldn’t give so much money to charity. It’s—’

  ‘Provided I have enough to eat and drink,’ said Augustus Meer in his curiously mellow voice, ‘and friends like yourself, I have nothing to worry about. If I can make the lot of less fortunate people better, I am satisfied.’

  Simonson was touched in more ways than one.

  Another man in Hersham, Dr. Vincent Lowerby, uttered a different warning with more vehemence.

  ‘You must take things more heartily, Meer; you’re a healthy man, even if you think you’re not. You can’t be more than fifty-five, yet I’ve heard that you spend two or three whole days a week in bed. It’s unhealthy, I tell you; you’ll rue it later.’

  Mr. Augustus Meer shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I get so fatigued,’ he said. ‘But you must not concern yourself, my dear doctor. My trouble is more—er—inertia, shall we say?—than anything else.’

  ‘I know all about that,’ said Vincent Lowerby, a tall, aggressively hearty man of middle age. ‘But you’re rusting away down here.’

  ‘I’m very happy,’ said Meer softly; yet there was a far from soft expression in his eyes which a more observant man than Dr. Lowerby would have noticed.

  The doctor, however, was concerned with more important things. He lacked scruple; and he had discov
ered that he could pick up antiques from Augustus Meer at ridiculously low prices, and dispose of them to a certain Mr. Arnold Chamberlain, of London, at two hundred per cent profit or more.

  That day the doctor purchased a Chippendale cabinet, slightly damaged, wished Mr. Meer good-bye and reiterated his advice, and delivered the cabinet a few hours later to Arnold Chamberlain’s Oxford Street salerooms.

  Chamberlain was out, but Lowerby was not worried, for he knew that he would get his money. Also he knew, or thought he did, a lot of things about Mr. Arnold Chamberlain. In the first place he had learned that the man was a fur-importer with warehouses in Wapping and salerooms in Oxford Street. He posed as an American business man, and he certainly looked and acted the part.

  What Dr. Vincent Lowerby realised besides these ordinary facts, however, was that Chamberlain trafficked in dope and stolen jewels. Lowerby knew that for a very good reason: he helped Arnold Chamberlain in his illegal traffic. It was not difficult, however, for Lowerby to explain if necessary the presence of certain drugs, although he – on Chamberlain’s advice and with details supplied by the fur-importer – handled them with great care, and was not suspected by the local police.

  From Chamberlain’s showrooms, and with the cheque as good as in his pocket, Lowerby went to a block of mansion-flats hi Piccadilly, where he was amused by a lady whose charms the Toff would not have considered pleasing. It was an odd but inescapable fact that the Toff – as the Hon. Richard Rollison – was walking past the mansionflats as Lowerby went in. The Toff, who was with an Austrian film star of world-acknowledged charm, saw and noticed, as was his way, that the man who entered the mansions was large and red-faced.

  It was some time before he saw Lowerby again.

  It was also to be some time before he saw the film star, who was wanted in Hollywood. Persuading her that he would be desolated was a full-time task even for Rollison, but he contrived it, and bade her good-bye, and told himself that he would like a different kind of amusement. This he confided to Jolly, who was his man.