Policeman's Progress

by Bernard Knight

  Unwisely, he couldn’t resist the final bragging about fatal disposal of his enemies. Thor dropped another piece of his mental jigsaw into place as he watched warily from the doorway.

  The whimsical mask fell from Papagos’s face. ‘We’ll see, Stott – we’ll see. If that’s how you want it, we’ll have to arrange a little demonstration, eh, Bruno? Nothing like showing a customer how a thing works when you want to break down sales resistance.’

  He made for the door, with Casella in tow. Thor jerked it open and stood aside to let them through and, as Papagos passed him, the slightest of winks passed between them.

  As he neared the outer door Papagos lost his false smile for good. ‘You’re doing the wrong thing, Jackie boy,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be so very sorry.’

  Before he could make a sufficiently offensive reply, Jackie heard the thump of feet on the stairs. The doors erupted inwards and a panting Joe Blunt burst in, followed by Herbert Lumley.

  Joe took one look at the two foreigners and threw himself on them, like a trusty bulldog coming to the aid of ‘Little Master’. His battered face looked like some demented lion as he swung them round and began dragging them towards the stairs.

  Jackie stood back grinning. ‘That’s it, Joe – fling ’em out. If you ever see their ugly mugs again, you got my full permission to separate ’em from their teeth!’

  The pair of them made no resistance apart from threats as the old sparring partner hustled them down to the street.

  Jackie followed to see them off the premises and caught the last words of Papagos as Joe sent them reeling across the pavement with a final push.

  ‘You’ll be sorry, Stott – we’ll make an example of you and your damned club – one Newcastle won’t forget.’

  ‘Aw, get stuffed!’ yelled Jackie, as he patted Joe’s leviathan shoulder.

  They turned and walked upstairs, where Thor Hansen met them with a slight frown creasing his usually impassive face.

  ‘No one mucks me about, lad,’ said Jackie smugly. ‘That’s the last we’ll hear of them yobs.’

  Hansen knew better and looked calculatingly at his watch.

  * * *

  1North East Criminal Records Office.

  Chapter Seven

  An hour later, Laura Levine sat at the bar of the Rising Sun with Thor Hansen.

  Freda, the barmaid, had exchanged her usual icy looks with the singer and had pointedly moved away as far as possible.

  ‘Jackie’s upstairs, watching the wheel, so we can talk in peace for a minute.’ Laura sounded angry and dispirited.

  ‘Things are moving, darling – faster than you think,’ murmured the handsome Dane, his eyes intent on the tonic he was adding to her gin.

  ‘About time – I tell you, Thor, I’ve had about enough of that common swine.’ She gulped some of her drink almost desperately. ‘You’ve got to do something about us, Thor – and quick. I can’t take much more of this.’

  Hansen tapped her hand placatingly. ‘It’s all working out fine – that little affair tonight will hurry it on.’

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘It’s got to be now. He’s turning nasty.’

  He squeezed her fingers, then drew back his hand discreetly. ‘All right, darling – I’ll have another word with Papagos and see if he can bring things to a head more quickly.’

  He hesitated, as if unsure of how much he should tell.

  ‘There’s something else, Laura, something that would clinch it, but I don’t think that I should tell you just yet.’

  Laura leaned forward eagerly. ‘What is it? Come on, for God’s sake, don’t go telling half-truths and then leaving them.’

  He shook his head stubbornly. ‘No, I shouldn’t have said anything. But I wanted you to know that I’ve got it all worked out.’

  He refused to be drawn in spite of her persuasion and she was left with a tantalizing mystery.

  ‘Whatever it is, Thor, make it quick! I want us to get on the level, not behind Jackie’s back – we can even get married.’

  He nodded and furtively squeezed her hand again, wondering how he was going to break the news that he had a wife in Copenhagen, though he hadn’t seen her for eight years. His habitual poker face hid a turbulent, scheming mind, with ambition as its main driving force.

  Laura looked at him speculatively. ‘You knew these wops when you were in London?’

  Thor nodded. ‘They have a grip on one section of the Soho clubs – including the place I managed before I came here.’

  ‘And yet you got on all right with them?’

  She sounded dubious.

  ‘You have to be protected by someone down there, darling – if it hadn’t been them, it would be some other gang. Better to pay up and let them fight your battles, than commit suicide, like Jackie did tonight.’

  Laura bit her lip. ‘They won’t hurt him – physically, I mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps not, if he plays sensibly from now on. But if he keeps on acting stubborn, he may get a better beating than he can hand out.’

  ‘He seems to have changed in the last few days,’ went on the singer, slightly maudlin now, with a few drinks inside her. ‘He’s so cocky, as if he’s done something marvellous … throwing himself around like some cheap gangster.’

  Thor patted the back of her hand. ‘That’s all part of this affair I hinted at. He’s going to fall with a big crash soon and I wouldn’t want you to go down with him.’

  She sighed and glanced at her diamante wristwatch.

  ‘Nearly time for my next number – God, if you knew how I hate these gawping idiots!’

  Adjusting the neckline of her dress to show even more white flesh, she glanced about the club to see if the boys from the band were preparing to get back to the platform. Her eyes fixed on Freddie, sitting at a nearby table. ‘Lover-girl is back again, I see,’ she commented.

  Thor Hansen turned his head to see Alex Bolam’s daughter sitting with the guitar player. ‘Her old man has never been in here at the same time,’ he mused. ‘I wonder if that’s deliberate.’

  Laura’s heavily mascaraed eyes opened wider.

  ‘Here’s your chance to find out, sweet – here’s the old man himself!’

  The tall figure of Alec Bolam appeared just inside the glass doors. He had thrown his hat on Herbert’s counter outside and strode in to the club room, his eyes picking out his daughter at once. He materialized above the couple as the manager and singer watched with interest from the bar.

  Freddie looked up in guilty surprise, then rose to his feet and stared from father to daughter with nervous uncertainty.

  Laura and the Dane could hear none of the words, but from the drawn expression on the girl’s face and the grim scowl on that of the detective, they guessed that no pleasantries were being swapped.

  ‘What d’you want – why are you following me?’ Betty’s voice was low and tense.

  ‘I’m here on business – as you well know. I want you out of here, there may be trouble.’

  She looked up quickly. ‘And you’re going to make it, I suppose?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not this time – another sort of trouble. Nothing to do with you – or even him,’ he added contemptuously, looking at the uneasy Freddie, for the first time.

  ‘I – I’d better be off, love – time for Laura’s number.’ His loose mouth twitched nervously.

  Alec Bolam glared at him. ‘Better take another purple heart, Freddie – your nerves are showing!’

  Freddie gulped and backed away, then hurried to the rostrum.

  Betty Bolam watched him go, her fists clenched tightly. She swung back to her father and spoke with suppressed violence. ‘Satisfied? You can’t leave anyone alone, can you! You spoilt Mum’s life, now you’re starting on mine!’

  Bolam suddenly dropped into the vacant chair and ran an anguished hand through his hair. ‘Look, Betty – try and understand for once. I promised your mother not to come the heavy hand with you, but that yob – he’s
no good, love.’ He bent forward and his voice was cracking with the intensity of his feelings. ‘It’s my job to stop people acting like he does. It’s my job, pet,’ he ended almost in a whisper.

  She glared back, stony-faced. ‘And your pleasure, too!’

  Alec swung his head, wearily. ‘Pleasure! Good God, Betty, can’t you see my life’s hell? Your mother … oh, forget it.’ He changed his tack abruptly and his voice became brisker and harder. ‘Now let’s have some sense. I want you out of here, straight away. Nothing to do with him. There’s going to be trouble in this place – maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow – but soon.’

  Impressed by the authority of his tone, she looked him in the face. ‘What sort of trouble?’

  He shrugged. ‘Two big-time protection racket men from London have been seen in Newcastle tonight. One of the men on the beat saw them being chucked out of here earlier on – there’ll be fireworks before long, take it from me. So I want you out – and if you won’t go quietly, I’ll carry you out, so make your choice.’

  This time she knew he was telling the truth. ‘I was going, anyway – I never stay when Freddie’s got to work for a long time.’ She pushed her chair back and stood up.

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ offered her father.

  ‘I thought you were busy this time of night.’

  Her voice was still cold and uncompromising.

  ‘I can come back.’

  She was just going to brush him off, when chaos hit the big room.

  A loud crash made Bolam spin around. He was just in time to see the last fragments of glass tumble from the main window that overlooked the Bigg Market. Something rolled on to the floor a few yards from the detective and immediately burst into flames. Luckily, most of the patrons were at tables around the walls or at the bar and no one was actually sitting where the bomb landed. But yells and screams filled the room and the music died away into a discordant drone. A sheet of yellow flame leapt up as a flammable liquid gushed over the floor and soaked into the carpet. Clouds of acrid black smoke billowed above it and within seconds the yells turned to coughing. The surrounding tables were overturned as people trampled around in terror. The flames licked wider and wider across the floor, though the actual area involved was much smaller than panic-stricken customers imagined.

  Bolam was one of those who acted first. He grabbed his daughter around the shoulders and hustled her towards the doors, slightly ahead of the general stampede. ‘Get out – get a taxi home.’ He gave her a shove in the back and then ran to a red fire extinguisher hanging on the wall.

  Herbert Lumley, the only other with any presence of mind, dashed in from the foyer with another and within seconds the two men were dousing the floor and tables with jets of fizzing soda-acid foam. The next to take action was Thor Hansen, though Laura noticed that he deliberately waited a few seconds before moving to get an extinguisher.

  In spite of the terrifying initial fireball, the flames died quickly. The bomb was a beer flagon filled with paraffin, a length of colliery fuse stuck in the neck. It had been deliberately designed to create fear and disturbance rather than to burn down the Rising Sun. If it had been filled with petrol, the result might have been different.

  The three jets of foam soon isolated and then extinguished the flames but, inside two minutes, the room was a smoky, smut-filled shambles. A heaving mass was now jostling to get through the foyer to the stairs, and Herbert had to leave his fire-fighting to attend to his besieged cloakroom counter.

  In the middle of this pandemonium, Jackie Stott raced downstairs from the gaming room and stood raving in the centre of the main club. The arrival of the fire brigade a moment later made the confusion more devastating, as uniformed men battled up the narrow staircase against the down-going tide of outraged ex-patrons.

  The fire Section Officer advanced on the fuming club owner. ‘Good work on the part of your men, sir – nothing much left for us to do, except investigate the cause and call the police.’

  Jackie stopped short in the middle of his apoplectic tirade. ‘Police! What the hell do we want the police for? … it’s just a fire. Keep the coppers out of this!’

  The fire officer smiled indulgently. ‘Now, sir, be reasonable. This was no ordinary fire – somebody threw a bomb through your window – the person who rang up with the alarm said so, and the stink of paraffin and that broken window confirms it … here it is, what’s left of it.’

  A helmeted fireman handed him the broken neck of a brown bottle, a piece of hollow fuse still held in position with putty.

  Alec Bolam had padded up behind them. ‘Who wants the police? We’re already here – were here even before it happened!’

  Jackie Stott almost foamed at the mouth. ‘Bombs! Firemen! … And now damn police walking all over me! Haven’t I got enough trouble with all this?’

  He swept a hand around the rapidly emptying room but, at that very moment, three uniformed policemen battled their way into the club. One was a sergeant from the local beat, the other two were from a motor patrol that followed the fire tender.

  The sergeant advanced on them, picking his way through the overturned chairs. He saw Bolam and touched his blue and white banded cap. ‘What’s happened, sir?’

  ‘Somebody “arson” about, sergeant,’ punned Bolam with grim humour. ‘No casualties, thank goodness. You’d better catch some of those clients and try to get a few statements, though half of ’em have shoved off by now. And I can’t say I blame them!’

  He gave the infuriated Stott a mirthless smile.

  ‘Better close up, Jackie – you’ll do no more business tonight. I’ll bet all your mugs upstairs have slung their hook by now – they may be afraid that your wop friends may come back with an H-bomb next time!’

  Rage faded to astonishment on the ex-boxer’s face. How the hell did Bolam know about the visit of Papagos and Casella so quickly?

  Bolam turned back to the uniformed sergeant. ‘I’d better run this for the time being – call up the station on your joy-box there and tell them what’s happened. Ask them to rout out Jimmy Grainger and get him to phone me here.’

  He looked at the two mobile men. ‘Give the sergeant a hand in rounding up some customers and the staff – start taking statements, I suppose. A waste of time, but we’ve got to go through the motions.’

  The sergeant pulled out his small personal radio that was clipped inside his coat, extended the aerial and called up the Central Police Station to relay a message to Information Room.

  ‘Better tell them to notify Chief Superintendent MacDonald, too,’ added Bolam, ‘though I expect he’s still busy with that murder.’

  Jackie Stott pricked up his ears. The mention of murder struck a sensitive spot.

  He had a bigger shock coming.

  Bolam, genuinely unaware of Stott’s interest, made another of his jibes at the club owner. ‘Better watch yourself, Jackie … this time it was a home-made bomb. Next time, we may be dragging you out of the Tyne with your legs lashed together!’

  Jackie went as pale as a corpse himself. His mind whirled as he tried to grasp what Bolam had said. A body from the river – legs tied together! They must have found Geordie already! God, what the hell am I to do!

  He looked around wildly, almost on the point of making a run for it. In a moment the ex-fighter had got control of himself again. Bolam hadn’t said it was Geordie Armstrong, though it was unlikely that there were two murdered bodies in the river at the same time.

  ‘I need a drink,’ he muttered. ‘Where’s Hansen?’

  He stumbled across to the deserted bar, poured himself a triple whisky and threw it down neat.

  The uniformed policemen had started to round up the stragglers and had herded them to some tables in the far corner of the room. The firemen had gone, except the section officer and another senior man who had just arrived.

  Bolam checked with the sergeant that nothing had been seen of the bomb-throwers from outside, then went over to the long figure of Jackie Stott at
the bar.

  ‘Right, now let’s have your version of it, Jackie … I know Papagos and Casella have been in here … and I don’t need twenty questions to guess what they wanted!’

  The club owner stared fixedly at the glass-backed shelves behind the bar.

  ‘I got nothing to say, copper,’ he muttered.

  Alec Bolam sighed. ‘No use coming the dumb act, Jackie … you’re in real trouble now. For once I give you credit for flinging those London yobs out. Though I’m sure that you didn’t do it just to please me!’ The sarcastic banter came back into his voice.

  Stott was only half-listening to the detective – the bomb incident was submerged in the far greater peril of the finding of Armstrong’s body. If only this damn copper would stop jabbering and give him time to think – to work out what to do! He had to find out more about it for his own sake – but he could hardly ask the man standing alongside him.

  Bolam, all unsuspecting of Stott’s fearful anxiety, pressed him again about the fracas in the club. ‘They did this to you as a gentle warning, Jackie – if that had been petrol instead of paraffin, we’d be out in the street now, watching it all burn down.’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Come on, man – how much did Papagos want? Give us a statement and we’ll have them inside before morning. They couldn’t hurt you then. We’ll have a “demanding with menaces” charge on ’em, if only you’ll cough.’

  Stott continued to glare at the back of the bar.

  Bolam tried wheedling. ‘Jackie, look, you know damn fine what a pair of villains they are – the boys in the Met could have had them half a dozen times if they could have witnesses to testify against them.’

  Stott swung round at this.

  ‘And why couldn’t they get witnesses, eh? Because they’d have had their throats cut or their wives maimed before they got halfway to court … be your age, Bolam, I’m going to play this my way.’