“The events of last night, and the subsequent meeting I had at Scotland Yard, made me feel very guilty about having enticed you both to come to London,” he said gravely. “There is every possibility that these Zeppelin attacks could continue. There is even a possibility that the Germans, having started on their foul course of total war against combatants and civilians, could resort to dropping poison gas on London. I should never forgive myself if I had been the cause of you being injured, or worse. I wonder if you shouldn’t go back to Berkshire and sit out the war in relative safety.” He flopped down in an armchair despairingly.
Both Lady Maud and Victoria loudly protested and then began to compete with each other to give reasons why it was important for them all to stay in London.
“… such valuable work …”
“… can’t sit out the war in the countryside …”
“… one needs to contribute …”
“… and feel needed …”
“… can’t run away from things …”
The reasons to stay came thick and fast as mother and daughter looked at each other for support and agreement.
A faint snore broke into the babble of protestations and they both stopped speaking as they realized that Beech was sound asleep.
Victoria covered him over with a knitted blanket, while Lady Maud placed a cushion behind his head and they tiptoed out, turning the light off as they left.
* * *
Tollman was nursing half a pint of shandy as he waited for Billy Rigsby to arrive. He could feel the weight of the revolver in his jacket pocket but he doubted that he would need to use it. He disliked using firearms on the streets of London. Too many innocent people could accidentally get shot. Besides, there were very few crooks who chose to use guns. Only a madman courted the death penalty.
Billy and Tollman had finally decided to meet at the Union Arms in Panton Street—a boxing pub, which had once been owned by the famous 19th-century bare-knuckle fighter, Tom Cribb. Tollman was examining some of the engravings of old-time boxers hanging behind the bar, when Billy arrived, looking every inch the squaddie he was supposed to be for tonight’s operation.
“Very smart, lad,” said Tollman appreciatively.
“Could have made me an officer—seeing as we’re pretending,” said Billy cheekily.
“And what would an officer be doing, drinking in a low tavern in Piccadilly with all the squaddies and trollops?” Tollman grinned. “Nah, lad, if you were an officer, you’d be having a night out at your club in Pall Mall, not slumming it with the hoi polloi.”
“True,” agreed Billy. “Are you going to buy me a drink, then, Mr Tollman?”
Begrudgingly, Tollman put two pennies on the bar and ordered half a pint of beer. Billy looked distinctly unimpressed but Tollman reminded him that they were working and he would be no use if he tried to apprehend a villain when he was three sheets to the wind.
They downed their halves in companionable silence and then made their way to the Queen’s Head. Compared to the quiet of the Union, this pub was loud and bursting at the seams with men in khaki and women in flounces and frills.
“Busy, ain’t it?” Billy bellowed to Tollman as he pushed his way through to the bar. Tollman nodded grimly. Not only was it busy but it seemed as though an entire regiment of guardsmen were in tonight. Everyone stood at least six inches taller than Tollman and he was having difficulty seeing anything useful. Suddenly, Billy unceremoniously grabbed Tollman’s collar and almost lifted him from the ground, dragging him through the press of bodies until he deposited him on a bar stool at the very corner of the bar, with a clear view of the door.
“Better … Dad?” Billy winked at the flustered Tollman, who was straightening his flat cap and trying to maintain a sense of dignity.
“Thank you, son,” he said gruffly. “Your round, I think.”
Billy ordered another two half pints and turned round to survey the crowd.
“Blimey!” he yelled cheerfully at Tollman, “There’s a rum crowd in tonight!”
A piano struck up, over beyond the mass of bodies, and a boozy cheer went up. Discordant voices began singing
“For Belgium put the kibosh on the Kaiser;
Europe took the stick and made him sore;
On his throne it hurts to sit,
And when John Bull starts to hit,
He will never sit upon it any more …”
Tollman winced at this wholesale murder of the music and took a swig of beer. It was warm and flat and he glared at the barman, who was pulling pints of the same dreadful brew as fast as his hands would allow it.
Billy stood with his back to the bar and scanned the crowd, then looked at Tollman and shook his head, indicating that he could see no sign of Dodds as yet. Tollman reflected on the sorry state of the world as he looked at the young women hanging around the necks of the soldiers.
So young, he thought, overpainted and powdered like stage actresses. All on the make. Just out to part young men from their money as fast as possible.
He suddenly felt very old. Forty years of police work still hadn’t prepared him for how quickly society was changing.
“Want to buy a nice girl a drink?” said a loud female voice in his ear and he turned to see a smiling female with rouged cheeks and scarlet lips.
“No,” he said curtly. “Be off with you.”
Her smile faded and she scowled. “Please yourself, grandad,” she said rudely and pushed her way through the crowd to find another victim. Tollman noted that she had not spoken in the grating tones of the East End but in the softer accent of South London.
Could be one of my own daughters, he thought with a shudder and resolved to give them a moral lecture when he got back home.
Suddenly, Billy’s head jerked to an alert position and he turned to Tollman. “Behind the bar!” he said in a harsh whisper, barely audible in the din. Tollman casually looked in the direction of the barman and, beyond him, Dodds was visible, having just entered from a door at the back. Dodds appeared to scan the crowd and then he signaled to someone—Billy and Tollman craned to see who that person might be but it was impossible to tell, in the melee. Then Dodds disappeared back through the door and closed it behind him. Billy looked at Tollman for orders. Tollman signaled to wait, just for a moment. He was watching to see if anyone was trying to get behind the bar and follow Dodds.
They waited for a few seconds, then Tollman turned to Billy and shouted, “Whoever it is must have gone out the front way and round the side alley! You go after Dodds—I’ll try and get out the front!”
Billy nodded and scrambled over the bar, much to the indignation of the barman, who produced a cosh from his pocket and began to threaten Billy.
“Police!” shouted Billy, fumbling for his warrant card and dodging the well-aimed blow from the cosh. “Police, you bloody fool!” Warrant card held high, Billy edged toward the back door as the barman froze in confusion.
Meanwhile, Tollman, with every bit of strength he could muster, was pushing through the mostly drunk and unyielding press of bodies. It was a frustrating exercise. Tollman realized he was not powerful enough to make them move, so he pulled out a police whistle from his pocket and gave one loud and insistent blast which stunned the revelers into silence.
“Police!” he shouted. “Make a path!” The people tried to edge out of the way but barely made an inch of space, so Tollman roughly pushed people, without ceremony, in order to make his way to the entrance.
Billy, finding the door locked, was attempting to kick it in, much to the annoyance of the barman, who was shouting loudly in protest and threatening to use the cosh again. Billy turned and laid him out with a powerful right hook and the barman staggered back and slumped down beneath the bar. “Obstructing the police!” Billy yelled to the women on the other side of the bar who had started screaming, then the door finally splintered from its lock and gave way.
Tollman, now out in the fresh air, took in a couple of lungfuls and darted to
the left and the side alley that he knew led to the back of the pub. Running as fast as his legs would allow him, he cursed his age and hoped that Billy could cope until he got there. Rounding the corner, he could just make out, in the dim light hanging above the back door of the pub, Billy was crouching over a man’s figure.
“You’ve got him!” he panted happily as he drew close.
Billy stood upright, his face set in grim defeat. “Not before someone else did for him,” and he pointed to the prone figure of George Dodds, who lay dead on the cobbles with a knife through his chest.
It was going to be a long night. Billy and Tollman had to corral all the customers of the public house into groups for interview, knowing that it would be a fruitless task. Most of the soldiers were too drunk to understand what was going on—none of them, of course, had seen anything. The women were fearful that they were going to be locked up for soliciting and none of them were talking either. Both policemen realized that whoever Dodds had arranged to meet had killed him and was long gone.
Their only hope was the barman, who eventually came round from Billy’s knockout blow and was nursing a swelling, and probably cracked, cheekbone and a great deal of grievance.
Billy roughly slapped a cold, wet cloth on the barman’s face and told him to “act like a man.” The barman realized that there was no sympathy coming from the older policeman either.
“I don’t know nothing,” he sullenly replied and flinched as Billy ostentatiously clenched his fist and moved it slightly forward, as though to punch him once more. “I only know that Sumpter was going to meet someone here. He comes here a lot. Half the girls in the pub work for him. I let him—or used to let him—work his trade here and he would bung me a few quid. Then he asked to use the back room to meet someone and I said fine. I don’t know no more than that. He didn’t say who it was and I didn’t ask. What about my smashed door? Who’s gonna pay for that?” he added aggressively.
Tollman smiled, without any humor in his face, and said sarcastically, “Well, you can ask the station sergeant about that when we charge you with running a knocking shop, can’t you, son?”
The color drained from the barman’s face, making his red and purple cheekbone and eye look all the more garish. “Look! I wasn’t running the racket! Sumpter was! Take him down for it! I just turned a blind eye!”
“Well, of course we would arrest Sumpter, if we could—but you see, he’s lying dead in your back alley with a knife through him. So you could be facing an accessory-to-murder charge as well, son,” said Tollman simply. The barman looked as though he was going to be sick. “Billy, find a bucket,” warned Tollman. Billy produced a slop bucket from under the bar and they stood patiently while the barman retched repeatedly into the dregs of ale.
“Look,” said the barman, breathing heavily and wiping his mouth. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I don’t know much—I swear to God—but I’ll tell you what I do know.”
Tollman nodded. “Billy,” he said, “clear the patrons out and lock up, then we’ll get down to business.”
Billy nodded and began to unceremoniously haul drunken squaddies up by their collars and throw them out into the street. Weeping and flustered women pushed past him, anxious to be lost in the night. The bar room was soon cleared and then Billy checked the toilets, found two soldiers passed out in the urinals and hauled them, semi-conscious, out into the alley, leaving them to recover in the cold night air. Once that was all done, he locked and bolted the main door and they sat down to cross-examine the barman.
They learnt that Sumpter/Dodds had been running a low-grade prostitution racket out of the Queen’s Head for the past year. He had also been selling drugs to soldiers.
“Where did he get his supply?” asked Tollman.
The barman shrugged. “Some doctor, I think he said.” Then he added that he had been on the verge of ending his arrangement with Sumpter because he’d had a few visits from a representative of the McAusland brothers. They said that Sumpter was messing up their business around Piccadilly and they didn’t like it. “The McAuslands own three clubs and a couple of pubs in this area,” he said, “they were threatening to smash up the Queen’s Head, me, and Sumpter, if it carried on. I was gonna tell him it was over—I didn’t want the aggravation—when he comes to me and tells me he’s leaving the country and that someone was coming with some money for him tonight. He didn’t say who,” he added hastily.
“Did he tell you what he got up to, when he wasn’t in this pub running his racket? asked Tollman.
The barman shook his head. “He didn’t say and I didn’t ask.”
“He must have given you a way of contacting him, when he wasn’t here,” Tollman persisted.
“He gave me a telephone number. Belgravia exchange. He said that if anyone answered the telephone other than him, I should ring off. He was most insistent on that.”
Tollman nodded. He was satisfied that he had obtained all the information he was going to get from the man.
“Write the number down for me,” Tollman said, handing the man a piece of paper and a pencil. “Then I guess that will be all.” He stood up and looked at the barman, who was looking fearful. “Count yourself lucky that we have better things to do than arrest a little toerag like you—” the barman exhaled in relief “—but I’m putting you on warning,” Tollman continued. “If I find out that this amateur prostitution racket is continuing in your establishment, I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks, do you hear me?”
The barman nodded furiously.
“Now, I shall make a telephone call to the local police station and they will be down here with a body wagon. They may ask you a few questions and I’m sure I can rely on you to tell them that you know nothing and that you didn’t see anything. Alright?”
The barman nodded furiously again.
“You can tell them that we were here, looking for Sumpter and they can contact me at Scotland Yard for more information. Got that? I’ll tell them who I am and they can take it from there.”
Tollman made the telephone call and then motioned to Billy that they were leaving. Outside, Billy asked, “What do we do now, Mr Tollman?”
“We need to speak to the McAuslands now,” said Tollman grimly. “I need to know if they were responsible for this night’s work.”
Piccadilly was packed with soldiers and sailors, anxious to have a good time and part with their money before shipping back to hell on the high seas or the Western Front. For the most part, they were jovial or drunk. Progress was slow because they kept collaring the uniformed Billy, figuring that he was knowledgeable about the best places to get more drink or find girls. Billy brushed them off with a smile and a pat on the back but Tollman was getting irritable.
“I’ve always hated the West End,” he muttered to Billy, after the fourth such encounter. “And now I hate it even more. Immorality and futility. Most of these men have got families back home and their mothers are just about able to put food on the table. Yet, here they are, throwing their money at publicans and good-time girls, when they should be thinking of their families. I’m getting old, lad,” he added, by way of an apology.
“No, I know what you mean, Mr Tollman,” Billy answered sympathetically. “This war doesn’t seem like any other war. Too many amateur servicemen,” he explained. “They don’t think like regular army men. To us, and men like my dad, fighting in the army is just a job, and you did it so as you could take care of your family, and you knew what you were expected to do. Most of these men are just farm laborers and servants in uniform. They have no idea what’s waiting for them. They think it’s all a lark with better pay than they were used to. Those of them who have been through some months in the trenches, come up West to get as drunk as possible to blot it all out. At least, that’s what I think.”
Tollman looked impressed by Billy’s little speech. “I think you have hit the nail on the head, Billy, lad,” he said, patting him on the back. “Never figured you for a deep thinker but I
was obviously wrong.”
“I have my moments, Mr Tollman,” said Billy, grinning.
* * *
Club Tango in Soho was in full swing, lights ablaze, and a succession of well-dressed and well-heeled patrons were drifting through the open door in obvious merriment. The thickset bruiser who had admitted them before was standing by the doorway, looking uncomfortable in his evening suit.
“We can’t go in the front door,” counseled Tollman, “that would not go down well with the owners. There must be a back entrance.”
They walked to the intersection of the streets and turned right to find an alley where the club obviously took its deliveries. As they passed the row of dustbins, Billy spied a door that announced “Club Tango. Tradesman’s Entrance.”
They knocked and another well-dressed bruiser opened the door and was about to tell them to clear off, when Tollman flashed his warrant card.
“Be a good chap and tell your bosses that Detective Sergeant Tollman wants an urgent word. Tell them it can’t wait.”
The bruiser scowled and shut the door on them while he went to relay the message.
“Told you I should have been dressed as an officer,” said Billy light-heartedly. “Then we could have gone in the front way.”
Tollman was amused. “And who would I be, then? Your batman?”
The door opened and the bruiser motioned them in and up a small staircase near the door. “Office is there,” he growled, pointing to a door and he went back to his post. Tollman knocked and a voice said “Enter!”
The McAusland brothers were waiting expectantly. Tollman noted that they seemed bemused as to the reason for the visit, not prepared, as he thought they might be.
“So soon, Detective Sergeant?” asked Matt, “and I note that you are hardly dressed for a night on the town.” There was some amusement in his voice but Tollman let that pass.
“The lad looks good in uniform,” commented Mike, giving Billy the once-over. “Sure you won’t reconsider that job offer?” He grinned but Billy ignored him.
“I’ll keep this brief,” said Tollman matter-of-factly. “Sumpter is dead. Knifed in a back alley about an hour ago.”
Murder in Belgravia Page 18
