It was a fairly large yard. At one end was the big shed in which old Gregory Wicks kept his taxicab, paying a small weekly rent.
Old Gregory Wicks had been a famous driver even in the days of the festive hansom. And always he had housed his horses and his resplendent cab in Tidal Basin, where he was born and where he hoped to end his days. In his advanced middle age came the taxicab. Gregory refused to regard motor vehicles as new-fangled crazes that would soon go out of fashion. He was one of the first to sit at a driving wheel at a motor school and solve the mysteries of clutches and gears. He found his lameness no obstacle in obtaining a cab-driver’s licence—he limped from a thirty-year-old injury to his ankle.
Always he was a night bird; even in the horse cab he went clop-clopping along Piccadilly in the early hours of the morning, picking up swells from the clubs and driving them unimaginable distances to their country houses. And when the taxi came he continued his nocturnal wanderings. A silent, taciturn man, who never stood on a rank or invited the confidence of his brother drivers, he was known locally and abroad for his rigid honesty. It was he who restored to a certain Austrian baron a million kroners in hard paper cash, left in the cab by the Herr Baron in a moment of temporary aberration caused by a quarrel with a lady friend. Old Gregory had returned thousands of pounds’ worth of goods left by absent-minded riders. In the police books he was marked ‘Reliable; honest; very excellent record.’
You could see him and his cab on certain nights prowling along Regent Street, his long, white hair hanging over the collar of his coat, his fierce white moustache bristling from his pink, emaciated face, choosing his fares with a nice discrimination. He had no respect for any man save one. In his more than seventy-year-old arms he packed a punch that was disconcerting to the punchee.
The doctor unfastened a door and passed through into Gallows Court. That narrow and unsavoury passage was alive with children—bare-legged, unwashed and happy. Nobody offered the doctor a friendly greeting. The frowsy men and women lounging in the doorways or at the upstairs windows favoured him with incurious glances. He was part of the bricks and mortar and mud of the place, one with the brick wall which separated his yard from this human sty. He belonged there, had a right in Gallows Court, and, that being so, might pass without notice or comment.
The last house in the court was No. 9; smaller than the others; the windows were clean, and even the lower one, which was heavily shuttered, had a strip of chintz curtain. He knocked at the door—three short quick raps, a pause and a fourth. This signal had been agreed as between himself and old man Wicks; for Gregory had been annoyed by runaway knocks and by the appearance on his doorstep of unwelcome visitors. He knew the regular hour at which the milkman called and the baker, and could cope with them. Whosoever else knocked at the door during the daytime received no answer. Marford heard the shuffle of feet on uncarpeted stairs and the door was opened.
‘Come in, doctor.’ Gregory’s voice was loud and hearty. He had been a shouter all his life, and age had not diminished the volume of his tone. ‘Don’t make a row; I expect the lodger’s asleep,’ he said as he closed the door with a slam.
‘He must be a very good sleeper if you don’t wake him, you noisy old man!’ said Marford, with his quiet smile.
Gregory guffawed all the way up the stairs, opened the door of his room and the doctor passed in.
‘How are you?’
‘Fit as a flea, except this other little trouble, and I’m not going to mention that. I’m doing fine, doctor. Sit down. Where’s a chair? Here we are! What I owe to you, doctor! If the people in Tidal Basin knew what you’ve done for me—’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Marford good-humouredly. ‘Now let me have a look at you.’
He turned the old man’s face to the light and made a careful examination.
‘You’re no better and no worse. If anything you’re a little better, I should think. I’ll test your heart.’
‘My heart!’ said the other scornfully. ‘I’ve got the heart of a lion! There was an Irish family moved in here and the woman wanted to borrow a saucepan, and when I told her just what I thought of people who borrow saucepans, along came her husband—a new fellow, full of brag and bluster! I gave him one smack in the jaw and that was his finish!’
‘You shouldn’t do it, Gregory. It was a stupid thing to do. I heard about it from one of my other patients.’
The old man was chuckling gleefully.
‘I needn’t have done it at all,’ he said. ‘Any of the boys round here would have put him out if I’d said the word. I dare say the lodger would, but of course I wouldn’t have wakened him up.’
‘Is he here today?’
Gregory shook his head.
‘The Lord knows! I never hear him come in or go out, except sometimes. I’ve never known a quieter fellow. Reformed, eh, doctor? I’ll bet you I know who reformed him! You’d never dream’—he lowered his voice—‘that he was a man who’d spent half his life in stir—’
‘You’re giving him a chance,’ said Marford.
He was going, when the old man called him back.
‘Doctor, I want to tell you something. I made my will today—not exactly a will, but I wrote down what I wanted doing with my money.’
‘Have you got a lot, Gregory?’ asked the other good-humouredly.
‘More than you think.’ There was a significance in the old man’s voice. ‘A lot more! It’s not money that makes me do what I’m doing—it’s pride—swank!’
To most men who had known him for years, Gregory Wicks was a taciturn and uncommunicative man. Marford was one of the few who knew him. He often thought that this loquacity which Gregory displayed at home was his natural reaction to the hours of silence on the box. Night after night for nearly half a century this old cabman had placed himself under a vow of silence. Once he explained why, and the reason was so inadequate that Marford, who was not easily amused, laughed in spite of himself. Gregory had in a talkative moment allowed a client—he always called his fares ‘clients’—to wish a counterfeit half-crown upon him. It was a lesson never to be forgotten.
The doctor often came in to chat with the old man, to hear stories of dead and forgotten celebrities whose names were famous in the eighties and the late seventies. As he was leaving, Gregory referred again to his lodger.
‘It was a good idea putting up that shutter to keep out the noise, though personally there’s nothing that would stop me sleeping. I sometimes wish he’d be a bit more lively—’
‘And come up and have a little chat with you at times?’ suggested Marford.
Gregory almost shuddered.
‘Not that! I don’t want to chat with anybody, especially strangers. I chat with you because you’ve been God’s-brother-Bill to me, to use a vulgar expression. I don’t say I’d have starved, because I shouldn’t have done. But I’d have lost something that I’d rather die than lose.’
He came down to the door and stood looking out after the doctor, even when Marford was out of sight. The noisy children did not gibe at him, and none of these frowsy ones hurled their inevitable and unprintable jests in his direction. A wandering policeman they would have covered with derision. Only the doctor and Gregory Wicks escaped their grimy humour; the latter because of that ready fist of his, the doctor—well, you never know when the doctor will be called in, and if he’s got a grudge against you who knows what he’ll slip into your medicine? Or suppose he had to use the knife, eh? Nice so-and-so fool you’d look, lying under chloroform with your inn’ards at his mercy! Fear was a governing factor of life in Gallows Court.
CHAPTER V
THAT he had no other friends was good and sufficient reason why Mr Elk should drop in at odd minutes to discuss with Dr Marford the criminal tendencies and depravities of that section of the British Empire which lies between the northern end of Victoria Dock Road and the smelly drabness of Silvertown.
Elk called on the evening Janice Harman took her farewell, and found Dr Marford’s melanc
holy eyes fixed upon the dreary pageant of Endley Street. They were working overtime in the shipyard, which was almost opposite his surgery, and the din of mechanical riveters would go on during the night. Dr Marford was so accustomed to this noise that it was hardly noticeable. The sound of drunken songsters, the pandemonium which accompanied amateur pugilism, the shrill din of children playing in the streets—hereabouts they played till midnight—the rumbling of heavy lorries on the way to the Eastern Trading Company’s yard which went on day and night never disturbed his sleep.
‘If I was sure this was hell’—Mr Elk nodded his own gloomy face towards the thoroughfare—‘I’d get religion. Not that I don’t say my prayers every night—I do. I pray for the Divisional Inspector, the Area Inspector, the Big Five and the Chief Commissioner; I pray for the Examining Board and all other members of the criminal classes.’
The ghost of a smile illuminated the thin face of Dr Marford. He was a man of thirty-five who looked older. Spare of build, his greying hair was thin on the top. He wore absurd little side-whiskers half-way down his cheek, and gold-rimmed spectacles, one lens of which was usually cracked.
For a long time they stood in silence behind the calico curtains, attracting no attention from the passers-by, for there was no light in the surgery.
‘My idea of hell,’ said Elk again.
Dr Marford laughed softly.
‘With its own particular devil, by all accounts,’ he said.
Detective-Sergeant Elk permitted himself to guffaw.
‘That bunk! Listen, these people believe anything. Funny thing, they don’t read, so they couldn’t have got the idea out of books. It’s one of the—what do you call the word—um—damn it! I’ve got it on the end of my tongue…’
‘Legends?’
‘That’s it—it’s like the Russians passing through England with the snow on their boots. Everybody’s met the man who saw ’em, but you never meet him. Every time there’s a murder nobody can explain, you see it in the newspaper bills: “The Devil of Tidal Basin”, an’ even after you’ve pinched the murderer an’ all the earth knows that he never heard of Tidal Basin, or thinks it’s a patent wash-bowl, they still hang on to the idea. These newspapers! Next summer you’ll have joy-wagons full of American trippers comin’ here. Limehouse has had it, why shouldn’t we?’
A bright young newspaper man had invented the Devil of the Basin. It was the general opinion in Tidal Basin that he wasn’t any too bright either.
‘There is a devil—hundreds of ’em! The waterside crowd wouldn’t think twice of putting me out. They tried one night—Dan Salligan. The flowers I sent to the man when he was in hospital is nobody’s business.’
Dr Marford moved uncomfortably.
‘I’m afraid I helped that legend to grow. The reporter saw me and very—er—indiscreetly, I told him of the patient who used to come to me—he hasn’t been for months, by the way—always came at midnight with his face covered with a mask. It wasn’t good to see—the face, I mean. Explosion in a steel works.’
Elk was interested.
‘Where does he live?’
The doctor shook his head.
‘I don’t know. The reporter tried to find out but couldn’t. He always paid me in gold—a pound a visit, which is forty times more than I get from my regulars.’
Mr Elk was not impressed. His eyes were fixed upon the squalling larrikins in the roadway.
‘Weeds!’ he said, and the doctor laughed softly.
‘Those ugly little boys are probably great political leaders of the future, or literary geniuses. Tidal Basin may be stiff with mute, inglorious Miltons,’ he said.
Sergeant Elk of the Criminal Investigation Department made a noise that expressed his contempt.
‘Nine-tenths of that crowd will pass through the hands of me and my successors,’ he said drearily, ‘and all your electric rays won’t stop um! And such of them as don’t finish in Dartmoor will end their days in the workhouse. Why they call it a workhouse, God knows. I’ve never known anybody to work in a workhouse except the staff. You know Mrs Weston?’ he asked suddenly. ‘A pretty woman. She’s got the only respectable apartment in the Basin. All Ritzy—I went up there when some kids broke her windows. She’s not much good.’
‘If she’s not much good,’ said Marford, and again that ghost of a smile came and went, ‘if she’s not much good, I probably know her. If she’s the kind of woman who doesn’t pay her doctor’s bills, I certainly know her. Why do you ask?’
Elk took a cigar from his pocket and bit off the end. It was obviously a good cigar. He had hoarded it so long that it had irregular fringes of leaf. He lit it with great deliberation and puffed enjoyably.
‘She was saying that she knew you,’ he said, fully two minutes after the question had been asked. ‘Naturally I said a good word for you.’
‘Say a few good words for the clinic,’ said the doctor.
‘I’m always doing it,’ said Sergeant Elk complacently. ‘You’re wasting your time and other people’s money, but I do it. That’s a pretty nurse you’ve got—Miss Harman. Quigley the reporter’s all gooey about her.’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Marford quietly.
He rose and pulled down the blind, went to a cupboard, took out a whisky bottle, a siphon and two glasses, and looked inquiringly at the detective.
‘I’m off duty,’ said Elk, ‘if a detective is ever off duty.’
He pulled up a chair to the writing table. The doctor was already in his worn leather chair. ‘Ever read detective stories?’ asked Elk.
Dr Marford shook his head.
At that moment the telephone rang. He took up the instrument, listened for a while, asked a few questions, and put down the receiver.
‘That’s why I don’t read detective or any other kind of stories,’ he said. ‘The population of Tidal Basin increases at a terrific rate, but not so rapidly as some people expect.’
He jotted a note down on a little pad.
‘That’s a come-at-once call, but I don’t suppose they will require my attention till three o’clock tomorrow morning. Why detective stories?’
Sergeant Elk sipped at his whisky. He was not a man to be rushed into explanation.
‘Because,’ he said eventually, ‘I’d like some of these clever Mikes to take my patrol for a couple of months. I saw an American crook play up in the West End the other night. It was all about who-did-it. First of all they introduced you to about twenty characters, told you where they were born and who their fathers were, and what money they wanted and who they were in love with—you couldn’t help knowing that the fellow who did the murder was the red-nosed waiter. But that’s not police work, Dr Marford. We’re not introduced to the characters in the story; we don’t know one. All we’ve got in a murder case is the dead man. What he is, who his relations are, where he came from, what was his private business—we’ve got to work all that out. We make inquiries here, there and everywhere, digging into slums, asking questions of people who’ve got something to hide.’
‘Something to hide?’ repeated the doctor.
Elk nodded.
‘Everybody’s got something to hide. Suppose you were a married man—’
‘Which I am not,’ interrupted Marford.
‘We’ve got to suppose that,’ insisted Elk. ‘Your wife is abroad. You take a girl into the country…’
The doctor made faint noises of protest.
‘We’re supposin’ all this,’ conceded Elk. ‘Such things have happened. And in the morning you look out of your window an’ see a feller cut another feller’s throat. You are a doctor and cannot afford to get your name into the papers. Are you going to the police and tell them what you saw? And are you going to stand up in court and tell them what you were doing out of town and the name of the lady you were with, and take the chance of it getting into all the papers? Or are you going to say nothing? Of course you are! That happens every day. In a murder case everybody has got something to hide, and that’s why it’s h
arder to get the truth about murder than any other kind of crime. Murder is a spot-light. You’ve got to take the stand and face a defending counsel who’s out to prove that you’re the sort of fellow that no decent jurywoman could ask to meet her young daughter.’
The detective sucked at his cigar for a long time in silence. Then he asked:
‘Bit of a mystery, this woman Lorna Weston?’
The doctor’s tired eyes surveyed him thoughtfully.
‘I suppose so. They’re all mysteries to me. I can’t remember their names. God, what names they’ve got! Like the patterns of a dull wallpaper—one running into the other. Jackson, Johnson, Thompson, Beckett, Dockett, Duckett, Roon, Doon, Boon…eh? And some without any names at all. I attended a young woman for three months—she was just “the young woman upstairs”, or “Miss What’s-her-name”. Her landlady didn’t know it. She was a waitress working nobody knew where. If she had died I couldn’t have certified her. I called her Miss Smith—had to put some sort of name on the books. What does Mrs Weston do for a living?’
Mr Elk made a little grimace.
‘Well, you know, she’s…well, she goes West every night all dolled up.’
The doctor nodded.
‘There are lots of ’em—a whole colony. Why do they live in this hell shoot? I suppose it’s cheap. And their earnings are not what they were. One girl told me—but you can’t believe ’em.’
He sighed heavily and sighed again.
‘You can’t believe anybody.’
Elk got up, drained his glass and reached for his hat.
‘She wanted to know if you were an easy man to get on with. I got an idea she’s a dope-getter. I don’t know why, but I’ve just got that idea. There was a doctor in Silvertown who made a fortune out of it: he spent over a thousand on his defence when I got him to the Old Bailey…’
The doctor went out with him, and they arrived at the street door at an opportune moment.
The Terror Page 12
