by John Creasey
“You’ll have to, I’ll bet,” Sarah said. She looked tired and unhappy.
“Come on, Sal,” Cyril Gee took her arm and led her away.
“He may look a nit but he’s no fool,” Kebble said, almost to himself. “How are we doing, sir?”
“The local medic has doubts about the cause of Sheldon’s death, and Sandys is beginning to hate the sight of me.” Roger forced a smile. “I’m going back to the Yard. You stay with Sandys. We want the most comprehensive picture we can of Sheldon’s collapse. Humour Sandys, though.”
“It would need an angel to do that,” said Kebble. “I won’t upset him, sir. I’ll report as soon as I’ve got the picture.”
Roger nodded, and went across to the police office. For a second time Sandys stopped him with a wave from the window. Soon, the airport policeman came hurrying out.
“Where d’you want the corpse?”
“Cannon Row,” Roger answered. “I’ll warn ‘em it’s on the way. Thanks, Sandy. Do me another favour, will you?”
“Can’t think why I should, but I will if I can.”
“Go easy on young Kebble. He’s new to the Yard.”
“Young pup,” growled Sandys. But he grinned.
Roger got into his car, drove through the tunnel to the main exit, and once on the open road, switched on his radio telephone. Information answered almost at once. Roger gave specific instructions for Cannon Row police station to prepare for Sheldon in their morgue, and went on, “Check with City Police about the passenger list. Ask Dr Whales if he has his post mortem report on Denise Morrison ready, and also ask him to carry out the autopsy on Sheldon first thing in the morning.”
Finished, he tried to put the case out of his mind for half an hour. It was a fine starlit evening, there was comparatively little traffic. The glow over central London was so bright that it tinged the night sky with a rainbow of pastel colours. Two youths in an open MG which roared past him reminded him of his two sons. He glanced at the dashboard clock. It was nearly eight-fifteen; there should be time to pop into his home, have a snack, enjoy half an hour with Janet, his wife, and the boys. He did not even need to make a detour; the quickest way to the Yard was past the end of Bell Street, where he lived. The temptation was very strong.
His radio crackled. He picked the receiver up.
“West.”
“Information here, sir. I’ve just had a message from Dr Whales. He’ll be in your office in twenty minutes.”
“Tell him I’ll be there in good time,” Roger said. “Any other messages?”
“None, sir.”
“Thanks.” Roger rang off.
Now he had another preoccupation; why should the pathologist be coming to see him? That wasn’t usual, as late in the day as this, unless it was urgent. Thoughts of going home vanished from his mind. It wasn’t until he was walking along to his office, feeling ravenously hungry, that he remembered what he had half planned to do. The office was in darkness. He switched on the light, rang for a messenger, and asked as soon as one came in, “Get me sandwiches and coffee, will you – quick as you can.”
“Right away, sir,” the elderly messenger promised.
Roger sat at his desk. Several reports had come in about other cases, and there were twenty-seven more reports about the girl on the photograph; someone had put a note of that number on top of the pile. He thumbed through it quickly, anxiously, and in his heart he hoped for one from Doreen Morrison.
None was there.
There was nothing from anyone who knew her as Denise Morrison, either, so it was a reasonable bet that none of these reports was really about the dead girl. He made sure no one had known her as Brown, the name she had used at the boarding-house, then closed the file.
He heard footsteps in the passage, and in spite of his mood, he grinned. No one could ever mistake Dr Frederick Whales’ footsteps. He plonked each foot down, rather as if he were a big fish learning to walk. He was a big heavy man, too, and his waddle of a walk was due entirely to his flat feet.
The door was ajar.
“Hallo, Handsome,” Whales greeted him. He looked pale and tired, and also looked as if he had slept in his clothes; he was notorious for his untidiness. “Glad you aren’t comfortably settled in the bosom of your family.”
He sat in the larger of two armchairs. “How about a whisky and soda?”
“When you’ve told me what this is all about,” Roger said.
“One of these days when you want a job done in a hurry I’ll refuse,” Whales said, as Roger bent down by the side of his desk, opened a cupboard and took out whisky, soda water, and two glasses. “She wasn’t strangled.”
Roger’s fingers tightened on the neck of the whisky bottle.
“That is to say she didn’t die of strangulation,” Whales went on. “Someone exerted a lot of pressure on her neck after death. Don’t ask me why. The fact remains that she was poisoned. Don’t ask me whether the poison was self-administered or not. I don’t know.”
Roger began to pour out the whisky.
“What killed her?” he asked.
“Digitalis.”
“Induced heart failure?”
“Yes.”
“How was the digitalis administered?”
“By injection, I presume.”
Roger squirted soda water into the glass which had more whisky and handed it to the doctor.
“Can’t you be sure?”
“Good luck.” Whales drank as if he were parched. “Ahhhh! Be sure of what?”
“How the poison was administered.”
“Not absolutely. Injection is the most likely. Have known it taken orally.”
“Any in the stomach?”
“No.”
“Isn’t that conclusive?”
“No,” Whales said, “and you know it. It can be absorbed and all traces lost. But there’s no doubt about the cause – no doubt at all. Want all the clinical details?”
He finished his drink.
“No. Have the other half,” Roger said.
“Don’t mind if I do, but what are you after?”
“A quick job on another possible victim of poisoning by digitalis.”
Whales exclaimed, “Goddamighty.”
He watched Roger pour out, took the refilled glass, sipped this time and savoured, and then asked, “How quick?”
“Tonight.”
“Slave-driver as always.” Whales gave a gargantuan yawn and Roger did not think the weariness was wholly assumed. “Where is it?”
“It will be upstairs in the laboratory in half an hour.”
“Must go and eat first,” Whales said. “I’ll be back.”
He heaved himself up and padded out.
Roger called Cannon Row, told them to bring Sheldon’s body over to the Yard, and had hardly finished when the door opened and the messenger came in with a pile of succulent-looking ham sandwiches and a pot of coffee.
“I didn’t think I would disturb you while Dr Whales was here, sir.”
“Quite right,” said Roger. “I’d hate to share these.” He started on the sandwiches at once, poured out a cup of coffee, and hoped he would be spared ten minutes without interruption. He had seven or eight before the telephone bell rang.
He let it ring for half a minute, while finishing the sandwiches, then picked up the receiver. It might be Kebble, or the City of London Police, Sandys, or young Scott.
“Excuse me,” said the operator, “but there’s a woman on the line who wants to speak to someone urgently, sir. She sounds in some distress. It’s about that photograph in The Globe. I know you are handling that.”
“What’s her name?” asked Roger, almost without thinking.
“She says she’s a Miss Doreen Morrison.”
Roger felt
as if some kind of delayed action shock had caught up with him, and for a moment he could hardly speak. Then he said harshly, “Put her through, and make sure someone takes a tape recording of the conversation. If I can get an address from her, or a telephone number, I want her traced – Information will see to it.”
He found himself gripping the telephone tightly as the operator said, “Very good, sir.’ A moment later she went on, “You’re through to Superintendent West.”
Roger said, “This is Superintendent West. Can I help you, Miss Morrison?”
It seemed an age before she answered, so long that Roger began to wonder if she had gone off the line.
5
Terror
“Are you there?” Roger forced himself to be brisk. “Did you hear me?”
After another pause, a girl said huskily, “Yes. Yes, I heard you. Do you—do you know about my sister’s photograph?” The words seemed to come reluctantly, as if she were too tired to speak clearly.
Roger could pretend not to know that the photograph had been this girl’s ‘sister,’ or he could make her realise he knew a great deal. She could ask questions afterwards.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Where are you?”
She didn’t speak.
“Did you hear me?” Roger felt acutely frustrated, and cold with anxiety. There was no way of checking the telephone she was speaking from unless she gave the exchange and number.
She seemed to stifle a yawn. “I don’t—I don’t know where I am.”
It was almost as if she did not know what she was saying, as if her mind or her memory had gone. The vital thing was to find her, and this might be his only chance.
“Miss Morrison, listen very carefully, will you?” Roger said.
There was a sound like a sigh. “Yes.”
“Is there a number on the telephone in front of you?”
“A—what?”
“A number.”
She paused again, and he had to wait for her. Then she answered, for the first time she seemed to b“Yes, it’s Notting Hill 4785 – I think the last number is 3. Yes, it’s 3. Notting Hill 47853.”
“If we get cut off I’ll know where to telephone you,” Roger spoke quite matter-of-factly, a reassurance in itself. “Are you all right?”
“I—I’m frightened,” Doreen Morrison said. “I’ve been—I’ve been frightened for so long.” There was another pause, before she burst out, “Is Denise all right? Please tell me. How did you get her photograph? Is she all right?”
“I’m going to tell you all about it as soon as I can,” Roger said. “I don’t want to talk much on the telephone. Are you indoors or out of doors?”
“Out of doors,” Doreen said. “I got away from—”
She broke off, with a little gasp.
“Oh, please,” she gasped. “Please.”
Roger felt quite sure that she wasn’t talking to him. For the first time urgency touched with alarm sounded in his voice.
“Doreen! Stay where you are. I will be with you in—”
The line went dead, and stayed dead for perhaps fifteen seconds, before the Yard operator spoke in an agitated voice, “She’s gone, sir.”
“Did you talk to Information?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Put me through to—”
“The Inspector-in-charge is on the line for you, sir.” The girl broke off and Robinson’s calm voice replaced hers.
“I’ve two squad and two patrol cars converging on the call-box. We’ll pick her up. Don’t worry.”
“Where was she speaking from?”
“A call-box at the corner of Nash Street, near—“
“I know Nash Street,” Roger said. “I’ll go straight there.”
He rang off, stretched for his hat, and hurried out. A minute later he was at the door of the nearest sergeants’ room. Three men in a huddle, probably over a smutty joke, all straightened up.
“One of you, take over in my office,” Roger said. “Tell the operator to put anyone who calls about Denise Morrison – know whom I’m talking about?”
“Yes, sir – this morning’s unknown.”
“Right. Have all calls about her put through to you. I’m interested in anyone who knows her as Morrison or Brown, and I want to be able to talk to them tonight. Got that?”
Three big men spoke like eager schoolboys. “Yes, sir.”
Roger went hurrying on.
A constable was standing by his car, and opened it as Roger reached it.
“A bit late going home, sir.”
‘If only I was,’ Roger almost groaned.
In fact, the thought was little more than a reaction; he wanted only to be at Notting Hill Gate for the next half-hour. If anything had happened to the other sister—
Surely it couldn’t.
If Kebble or anyone else said that to him, he would rasp, ‘Don’t be a damned fool.’
Of course it could.
He could hear the girl saying she was frightened; he could hear her saying, “Please, oh please,” in a tone of horror and in desperate pleading.
“Please,” Doreen Morrison said with a catch in her voice. “Please don’t take me back to that room.”
The man at the door of the telephone kiosk, a small man with thin, dark hair and a thin, pale face and wishy-washy blue eyes, smiled at her. He had a charming smile; it seemed intended to take a load of anxiety off her.
“You will be all right,” he assured her. “Don’t you want to see your sister again?”
“Yes, yes, but you promised I would see her this afternoon.”
“She was delayed,” the small man said. He took Doreen’s arm, and held it very tightly, tucked under his elbow, so that she had to keep pace with him; if she didn’t, it would hurt. She knew, because he had held her like that before.
He hurried along the narrow street – Nash Street, which led off the main road from Bayswater. There were tall, narrow houses all joined together. Many people thronged the streets, most of them black-skinned. No one took any notice of Doreen or the man. They reached a corner of a street which was even narrower. Here the dim lights at windows and the slightly brighter ones at the street lamps showed the dilapidated houses, front rooms overcrowded with people but with very little furniture.
“Please—” Doreen began.
The man gave her arm a twist. Pain streaked from her wrist to her elbow, shot up to her shoulder. “Oh!”
“Don’t talk any more,” the man ordered roughly.
A car passed. In it were two men who looked like policemen. They glanced at her. She knew that she appeared to be walking happily arm-in-arm with her companion. He twisted again, and she turned her head away from the police involuntarily, because the pain was so great.
The car was a long way off when she was able to look straight ahead again. Fewer people were here – and fewer houses. This was a deserted area, with few buildings standing after the bombing which had devastated so much of London before she had been born.
One house had two lighted windows and a light at the front door; otherwise it was in darkness. The man propelled her towards it. As she drew nearer she felt panic born of the quiet terror which had been with her for so long. She had been in that house for two weeks, almost a prisoner, believing that she had to stay if she wanted to help Denise.
Suddenly, awfully, she knew that Denise was dead.
In that moment, walking against her will through the semi-darkness of the street, she seemed to see the photograph which had been in The Daily Globe more vividly than she had before. Denise was dead; Denise, sleeping, had never looked like that.
They were close to the front door of the house. The small man’s grip on her slackened because they were so near. Out of panic and desperation Doreen felt an upsu
rge of courage. She must not go with this man. Denise was dead, and anything might happen to her.
She pulled herself free.
She pushed the man and kicked him. He went staggering to one side. She began to run, skirt riding up her slim legs, higher, higher, giving her greater freedom of movement. She raced along. Not many months ago she had run in the State Championships at Adelaide, third in the two thousand yards. She felt like the wind. She did not look round, it might lose her precious seconds. She heard no sound of footsteps in pursuit. As she began to gasp for breath, she felt a great sense of elation.
He wasn’t chasing her. He—
He appeared in front of her, from a side alley. There was a smear of blood on his forehead. He wasn’t smiling; he looked as if he could kill.
“No!” she cried.
She dodged to one side, but he shot out his leg and she tripped. She had not a second to prepare herself, and just crashed down. Surprise and shock were so complete that she did not know even a spasm of fear. She struck her head against the pavement and lost consciousness. She was not even aware that the little man bent down, picked her up, and began to carry her towards the alley which led round the back of the derelict houses.
A police car waited at the corner of Nash Street as Roger drew up. A Divisional detective sergeant, a man in his fifties, came up and put his head through the open window.
“Any luck?” Roger demanded.
“Not yet,” the sergeant answered casually.
Roger said harshly, “You mean you’ve lost her.”
“Never had her to lose,” the Divisional man retorted; he was too old a hand to worry too much or be too troubled by a Yard officer in a bad temper.
“Has anyone seen her?” asked Roger.
“Can’t be sure,” the Divisional man replied. “Our chaps and the Flying Squad boys are following several leads. Only a matter of time, Super.”
“Time,” Roger echoed. He sounded as bitter as he felt, and the Divisional man realised something was seriously wrong but did not know what it was. It did not seem to trouble him. Roger opened the door of his car and got out. There was no sense in antagonising this man, who was simply doing a routine job.
