The Gigantic Shadow

by Julian Symons

  Copyright & Information

  The Gigantic Shadow

  First published in 1947

  © Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1947-2011

  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 Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 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

  1842329200 9781842329207 Print

  0755129563 9780755129560 Epub

  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

  Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

  Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

  Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

  He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons’ works have been filmed for television.

  Julian Symons died in 1994.

  Introduction

  The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

  His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

  That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

  This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death’s Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

  The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

  Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in Critical Occasions, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

  H R F Keating

  London, 2001

  Dedication

  Again, for Kathleen

  Chapter One

  ‘The name’s Mekles,’ Jerry Wilton said. ‘Nicholas Mekles. You must have heard of him.’

  Should he have suspected something then, should there have been some small jarring shudder, like the moment when the fated ship first noses into the iceberg? Such a premonition would have been irrational, and Hunter liked to think that his life was ruled by reason. He felt nothing.

  ‘The name is familiar,’ he said. ‘But the fame escapes me.’

  Jerry wiped his red face with a grey silk handkerchief. It was a hot day in early June, and the window in his small office was closed.

  ‘I don’t know what you read, but it isn’t the papers,’ he grumbled. ‘Mekles is always in the news. Big parties on his yacht, the Minerva, in the Med. or the Adriatic. Film actress fell off it during one of them, got herself drowned, she was his mistress, people said she might have been pushed. Owns a shipping fleet, shady goings-on I seem to remember in relation to that, Charlie Cash can dig it out for you. Gambles a lot, Monte Carlo, Nice. Fabulous villa out there on the Riviera, more big parties, socialites rubbing shoulders with crooks. Never married, but women queue up for him, socialites again a lot of them. And more, lots of it, the same sort. Plenty for Charlie to get his teeth into.’

  ‘I remember him now,’ Hunter said. ‘A sort of blend of playboy and gangster.’

  ‘More gangster than playboy. There are all sorts of rumours about him. They say he keeps half a dozen thugs as bodyguards. Also that he takes a lot of trouble to get the dirt on anyone he has dealings with.’ Jerry looked at the three pills on his desk, blue, green and white, selected the blue one, popped
it in his mouth and swallowed.

  Even then Hunter felt no anticipatory tremor. ‘A pretty tough customer.’

  Jerry nodded solemnly. His face was glistening again, but this time he did not bother to wipe it. ‘He’s coming to England on Friday week, staying over till Tuesday. We’ve approached him, told him about the programme, and he’s agreed in principle.’

  ‘Why would a man like that want to go in front of the cameras?’ Hunter wondered. ‘He’s got a lot to hide.’

  ‘Vain as a peacock. Likes to show off in front of his women. Tickled to death to be asked.’

  ‘Even on my programme?’

  ‘Especially on your programme. Nicholas Mekles pitting his wits against those of TV’s special investigator and coming out on top – what a thrill for him. And anyway, it’s fame to be on that little old silver screen, something money can’t buy. Don’t tell me I’ve got to teach you psychology as well as fixing the programmes,’ Jerry cried in a pretended exasperation that only just missed being real. Hunter watched, fascinated, as he picked up the green pill and swallowed it, as he had the blue, without water. ‘Replaces the salt you lose through sweat,’ Jerry explained. ‘Salt makes energy. You take three in half an hour, twice a day. They cost thirty bob a packet. What do you think?’

  ‘It seems all right.’ He had found in the past that it was never wise to show too much enthusiasm.

  ‘All right!’ Jerry flung up his hands. ‘I serve up something like this on a plate for you, something that’s really the chance of a lifetime to turn a gangster inside out, and you say it seems all right.’ Again there was an undercurrent of real annoyance beneath the jocularity.

  ‘When I say all right, I mean I like it.’ And he did mean it, he had no real reservations. ‘It seems to me we’ve got to be a bit cagey, that’s all. The thing’s got slander possibilities sticking out all over it.’

  ‘Just a matter of the way you handle it.’ With agreement obtained, Jerry was mellow, calmly judicial.

  ‘Make the questions too soft and we get nowhere. Make them too hard, and we get a slander action up our shirts.’

  ‘I don’t think Mekles can afford to bring slander actions. Anyway you can handle it, you and Charlie, you’ve handled trickier ones.’ Jerry exuded confidence, went so far as to give a wink from the little blue eye in his boiled red face. ‘After all, it’s the trickiness that makes the programme, isn’t that right? Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.’

  Before Hunter left, Jerry had swallowed the white pill.

  Chapter Two

  Hunter’s television programme was called ‘Bill Hunter – Personal Investigator,’ and it had a subsidiary heading tacked on: ‘Presents the News Behind the News.’ The programme ran for a quarter of an hour each week, and consisted simply of an unscripted interview with some celebrated or notorious person. There were, however, unusual features about it. Most programmes billed as ‘unscripted’ are so only in name – the protagonists have discussed very thoroughly in advance the course that the programme is to take. Hunter, however, had stipulated from the start that he should not meet his subject in advance, or discuss a line of questioning with him. The questions might be disconcerting, the answers might come as a surprise to Hunter. The programme therefore rightly appeared to viewers as a battle of wits.

  This impression was enhanced by the fact that the people interviewed had always a slightly gamey flavour about them. They were film stars famous for the number or nature of their love affairs, generals suddenly sacked or demoted, extreme Left or Right wing politicians, surprisingly rich American trade unionists, organisers of nudist colonies, former members of secret societies devoted to violence. To the watchers sitting comfortably in their armchairs it seemed that the people interviewed were being ruthlessly quizzed by a Personal Investigator who had discovered a complete range of skeletons in their cupboards.

  In fact, the questions were all based upon the material unearthed by Hunter’s research assistant Charlie Cash, and Charlie’s research rarely went beyond industrious digging in old newspaper cuttings plus the fruits of intelligent guesswork from conversations with friends around Fleet Street. Occasionally questions based on Charlie’s speculations provoked unexpected reactions, and the person interviewed got really annoyed. These were the moments when the watchers in suburban semis wriggled most deliciously in their overstuffed armchairs, the moments that fixed the Personal Investigator in their minds as an inquisitorial father figure extracting secrets from mentally-tortured victims. The idea was seven-eighths illusion, but then, as Hunter sometimes reflected, wasn’t the whole apparatus and effect of TV designed to create an illusion? The difference between TV and the cinema, he had once heard someone say, was that while both created legendary figures, the cinema did not try to deny that they were fabulous while TV pretended that they were just homebodies like you and me.

  Reality faced him now, however, reality quite undeniable, in the shape of Charlie Cash sitting across the table from him in Charlie’s little Fleet Street office, a dusty cubicle filled with law and reference books, quite remote from Jerry Wilton’s splendour of glass walls and chromium fittings. Charlie sat behind a table spilling over with papers. He had a long thin nose, sloping shoulders, and the hungry look of a good research man. He twisted a toothpick in his mouth.

  ‘Here’s the stuff on Nick the Greek.’ He handed over two large envelopes marked A and B. The first contained facts, the second what Charlie called his intelligent guesswork. There would be a separate page for each story, and appended to the story would be a note from Charlie about its origins and possible use. Charlie, with the aid of a secretary, gave this kind of service to a dozen people, and got well paid for it.

  ‘Is he a Greek?’

  ‘He’s rich, a crook, a commercial genius. Must be a Greek or an Armenian or a Jew, isn’t that right, statistics can’t lie. Anyway they say he carries a Greek passport, though there seems to be a bit of mystery about it.’

  ‘How does it strike you?’

  Charlie looked down his long nose. ‘Not too good.’

  ‘Jerry thought we were on to a winner.’

  ‘Jerry believes what he reads in the papers. He doesn’t know a tiger from pussy. This Mekles is a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘We’ve handled nasty pieces of work before now.’

  ‘Yes, but this is different. The stuff about our friend Nick that Jerry is thinking of is really old hat. That girl who fell off the yacht, for instance, Lindy Powers –’

  ‘The film actress?’

  ‘That’s what they called her. She had a bit part in a B film, then lay around Hollywood until Mekles picked her up. Anyway, the press did that to death at the time. If you want to give it another going over, you can, but it’s stale stuff. Same with a lot of the rest of it. There was a story that he had some famous stolen paintings in his villa on the Riviera. Mekles showed reporters round, turned out the paintings had been bought through art dealers, only he’d bought shrewdly and cheaply. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Do you mean we haven’t got a story?’

  ‘You’ve got a story, only I don’t see how you’re going to tell it without landing up to your neck in slander. And other trouble too, I dare say. Nasty revengeful type friend Nick is said to be.’

  ‘What’s the story, then?’

  ‘There are half a dozen, and they’re all poison. You know the international groups controlling tarts are supposed to have taken a knock since the Messina brothers were put inside? So that the import of French tarts into Britain by marriages of convenience almost stopped, for instance? Well, in the last few months the organisation has got a lot tighter again. Mekles is said to be one of two or three people controlling it. Then drugs – he’s said to have both the import-export and the distribution ends tied up. It’s distribution that’s the problem as you know, getting the stuff into and out of the country is easy here, not like the States. Fake antiques is another sideline – there’s still a ready sale for them in the States, though Am
ericans have smartened up a lot in the last few years and look twice at worm holes made with a drill. But Mekles has an east end factory turning out the stuff.’

  ‘Let’s get down to cases, Charlie. How much of this can I use?’

  Charlie dropped the toothpick into a waste basket, picked another. ‘I thought I’d made that plain. None of it.’

  ‘None of it?’

  ‘I don’t see how you can. It’s all B stuff. I know it, but there’s no proof. Take the factory. It runs as a perfectly straight concern, making cheap furniture that falls to bits when you use it. Now, a pal of mine named Jack Foldol, a bookie’s tout, knows the manager at this factory, a White Pole, if you know what I mean, named Kosinsky. One day Kosinsky told him about the other stuff they made, and the prices they got for it. Kosinsky also said that one day Myerson, that’s the man who’s supposed to own the place, had made a terrific fuss about an important conference, cleared everyone out of the place. Kosinsky was curious, managed to hang around, saw Mekles arrive, recognised him from newspaper photographs. Kosinsky hasn’t any doubt it was Mekles, heard a little bit of what they were saying, enough to know that Mekles was giving Myerson orders.’

  ‘If it was Mekles.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. It’s all hearsay stuff. I told you you couldn’t use it.’

  ‘Does Mekles come here often? From the way Jerry spoke I thought this was a first visit.’

  ‘Hell, no, he’s been in England a dozen times. Why should they keep him out, he’s a solid citizen. It’s a headache, and I’m glad it’s yours.’

  Hunter nodded, took the envelopes. He had, even now, no warning presentiment. He had made good programmes out of less promising material.