The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  “Take a deep breath,” said Petrella, “and start again. You saw who?”

  “Morris Franks and his brother Sammy.”

  “That pair,” said Petrella, with distaste. “What do you imagine they were doing in Slough at three o’clock in the morning?”

  “Just exactly what I said to myself. I said, Here’s the Band Brothers robbing a bank – and here’s two of the nastiest bits of work that ever come out of Whitechapel sitting in a cafay, two streets away from the scene of the crime, drinking tea. This’ll stand looking into. So I parked my bike – I reckoned you could get on for a bit without me—”

  “Thank you.”

  “—and I hung around … for hours and hours. They must’ve got through twelve cups of tea, each. Just before seven o’clock they come out, and took a train back to Paddington. I went with ’em. At Paddington they got on the Metropolitan, got off it at King’s Cross, and walked towards the Angel. There were quite a few people about by that time. I don’t think they cottoned on to me.”

  Petrella was prepared to believe that. Wilmot’s urchin figure would have melted as effectively into the background of King’s Cross and the Angel as any animal into its native jungle.

  “They fetched up at a big builder’s yard in Arblay Street. Jerrold Light & Co. They walked straight in.”

  “Do you think they work there?”

  “It looked like it. But that wasn’t all. I hung round for a bit. Half a dozen others went in. I recognised one of them. It was Stoker. Remember him?”

  “Albert Stoker,” said Petrella. “Yes. Certainly I remember him. He tried to kick my teeth in when I was up at Highside. He was working with Boot Howton and the Camden Town boys.”

  “If they’re all like that,” said Wilmot, “they’re First Division stuff.”

  “Mr. Jerry Light would bear looking into,” said Petrella.

  That afternoon he paid a visit to Arblay Street. Jerry Light’s establishment occupied most of the north side. It was the sort of place that only London could have produced. What was originally an open space between two buildings had been filled, in the passage of time, with a clutter of smaller buildings, miscellaneous huts, sheds, and lean-tos, on top of, or propped up against, each other. Such space as remained was stacked, head high, with bricks, tiles, window frames, chimney pots, kitchen sinks, lavatory bowls, doors, pipes, and cisterns. An outside flight of steps lifted itself above the cluster to a door at first-storey level which was labelled, MR. J. LIGHT.

  As he watched, this door opened and a man came out. He was a very large man, with a cropped head, a red face, and a closely clipped moustache. A thick neck rose from magnificent shoulders and chest. It was a sergeant major’s figure; the sort of figure on which time and inertia would play tricks, reversing the chest and the stomach as inevitably as sand runs through an hour glass.

  But it had not done so yet. Mr. Jerry Light was, he judged, not more than forty five and his eyes were still sharp, as he stood surveying his kingdom.

  Petrella walked quietly away.

  Back at Scotland Yard he said to Edwards, “See if Records has got anything on a Mr. Jerry Light. He runs a builder’s yard at Islington, and you can find his full name and details through the Business Names Registry. Wilmot, I think it’d be a good idea if you went along and asked for a job.”

  “Suppose Stoker recognises me? I had a bit of trouble with him myself at Highside, remember?”

  “I’m counting on Stoker recognising you,” said Petrella. “Then if you’re still given the job, it’ll prove that Light’s honest. If you don’t get it, the chances are the outfit’s bent.”

  “Suppose they drop a chimney on me!”

  “Then we shall know they’re dishonest,” said Petrella. He had little fear for Wilmot’s safety. Wilmot was extremely well equipped to look after himself …

  Edwards was the first to report.

  He said, “Jerrold Abraham Light. He has got a record.”

  “Bank robbery?”

  Edwards smiled, and said, “Not robbing a bank. Assaulting a bank manager. In 1951, he was sentenced to twelve months at the Exeter autumn assizes for waylaying and assaulting the manager of the Exeter branch of the District Bank.”

  “Robbery?”

  “Not robbing, sir. Assaulting. They knocked two of his teeth out, kicked in his ribs, and broke an arm.”

  “They?”

  “There was another man with him. Alwyn Corder. He got twelve months too.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “No motive was suggested at all. Mr. Justice Arbuthnot in his summing-up called it, ‘a particularly cowardly and senseless assault.’”

  Petrella’s mind wasn’t on Mr. Justice Arbuthnot. He had experienced a very faint almost undetectable tremor of excitement; like a patient angler near whose bait a fish had swum, not seizing it but troubling it by his passage.

  “Alwyn Corder,” he said. “It’s not a common name. I could bear to know what he’s doing today.”

  “If he’s had any other convictions, he should be easy to trace,” said Edwards. “Incidentally, Light hasn’t. That’s the only time he’s ever stepped out of line.”

  “It’s the only time he’s ever been caught,” said Petrella.

  It was seven o’clock that evening before Wilmot returned. C12 kept irregular hours. Sergeant Edwards was filing some papers. Jane Orfrey was filing her nails. Petrella was watching Jane Orfrey.

  “Hired and fired,” said Wilmot.

  “What happened?”

  “To start with, it all went like love’s old sweet song. Mr. Light said I was just the sort of young man he was looking for; clean, healthy and not afraid of work. He explained how he ran his outfit too. He works for big building contractors; say one of them’s doing a site clearance job at Southend, and wants extra help: Light sends a gang down. Half a dozen men – a dozen – however many he wants. Light takes a ten per cent cut out of their wages. They reckon it’s worthwhile, because he keeps ’em in regular work.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “What went wrong was, just as I was about to sign on, in comes Stoker.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was a bit of an awkward moment, actually. Stoker went bright pink, and said he’d like a word outside with Mr. Light. So they stepped outside, and shut the door, and I heard ’em yaw-yaw-yawing. Then Mr. Light came back and said, very polite, that he hadn’t got a vacancy right now, but he’d let me know if he had one. So I scampered – keeping my chin on my shoulder, just in case anyone tried to start anything.”

  “Lucky they didn’t.”

  “I’ll say it was lucky,” said Wilmot. “Because if they had started anything, they might have spoilt this.”

  He took his handkerchief out of his side pocket, and unwrapped it carefully. Inside was a lump of cobblers’ wax. Impressed in the wax was the outline of a key.

  “The key was on the inside of the door,” said Wilmot. “I got it out while they were talking. Nice impression, isn’t it? I know a little man who’ll knock it up for us while we wait.”

  Petrella said, “Are you suggesting we break into this office?”

  “That’s right. We could get over the side wall. Borrow a ladder. Plenty of them about.”

  “You realise that we should be breaking practically every rule in the Metropolitan Police Code?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And if we’re caught, we shall both be sacked.”

  “That’s why I’m not planning to get caught, personally,” said Wilmot.

  It was half an hour after midnight when they backed the little van into the passageway behind Light’s yard. A veil of drizzling rain had cut down visibility to a few yards.

  “Perfect night for crime,” said Wilmot. “You hold the ladder. I’ll go first. I think I saw some broken bottle on the top of this wall.”

  Petrella gave him a minute’s start, and then followed. Negotiated with care, the ragged cheveux-de-frise presented little obst
acle. Petrella let himself down on the other side, and Wilmot’s hand grabbed his foot and steered it on to an up-ended cistern.

  Five minutes later they were in Jerry Light’s office, carefully fastening the blanket, which Wilmot had brought with him, over the only window.

  Petrella turned on his lantern torch and put it on the floor.

  “Better get cracking,” he said. “It looks like a lot of work.”

  One cupboard contained box files full of bills, invoices, and trade correspondence. Another was devoted to builder’s catalogues, price lists, and samples mixed with old telephone and street directories, technical publications, and an astonishing collection of paperbacked novels, mostly pornographic. The desk was full of mixed correspondence and bills. The old-fashioned safe in the corner was locked.

  Three hours’ hard work convinced Petrella that Mr. Light had a perfectly genuine builder’s business.

  “There’s only one thing here I don’t quite understand,” he said. “Why should he bother to keep a seven-year-old diary in the top left-hand corner of his desk? Anything you kept close at hand, like that, you’d expect it to be important, wouldn’t you?”

  “Probably forgot to throw it away.”

  “But why keep a seven-year-old one, and throw away the other six?” Wilmot came across to have a look.

  “There’s something else odd about it, too,” said Petrella. “Do you see?”

  Wilmot shone his torch on to the open book and studied it carefully.

  “Doesn’t seem to mean a lot,” he said. “There’s something written on each page. Sort of shorthand. Perhaps it’s business appointments.”

  “That’s what I thought at first. But would he have business appointments on Saturday and Sunday too?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” agreed Wilmot. “What are you going to do?”

  “We can’t take it away. If it’s important, he’s bound to miss it. We’ll have to photograph it.” He produced from his coat pocket a small black box. “We’ll prop it up on the desk. Shine your torch on it, and turn each page when I say.”

  It took them an hour to finish the job, replace the book, and tidy up.

  “If there’s anything important,” said Petrella, “it’s in the safe. I’m afraid that’s beyond me.”

  “You never know,” said Wilmot. “I found this key on top of that cupboard. It’s just the sort of daft place people do hide their safe keys. See if it fits.”

  Petrella took the key, inserted it in the lock, and exerted pressure. There was a tiny sensation of prickling in his fingers, and the key turned.

  “Nice work,” said Wilmot. “Let’s see what he keeps in the old strongbox. Hullo! Something wrong?”

  Petrella had relocked the safe. Now he walked across and replaced the key on top of the cupboard. He did this without haste, but without loss of time.

  “We’re getting out of here,” he said. “And damned quick. That safe’s wired to an alarm. I set it off when I turned the key.”

  He picked up the torch from the floor, and made a careful tour of the room. There wasn’t a great deal to do. But it took time.

  “All right,” Petrella said at last. “When I turn out the torch, get the blanket down.”

  “Nick of time,” said Wilmot.

  They could both hear the car coming …

  As they locked the office door behind them and went down the steps into the yard, headlights swivelled round the corner throwing the main gate into relief. Brakes screamed; a car door slammed; a voice started giving orders.

  Wilmot lay across the wall, leant down and pulled Petrella up beside him. There was no time for finesse. Petrella heard the cloth of his trousers rip on the broken glass as he swung his legs across, felt a stinging pain in his thigh, and the warm rush of blood down his leg. Then he was following Wilmot down the ladder. As he reached the ground, Wilmot’s hand grabbed his arm.

  Footsteps were echoing along the pavement.

  Wilmot put his mouth close to Petrella’s ear. “They’ve sent someone round the back,” he said. “I’ll have to fix him.”

  Petrella nodded. He felt the blood running into his shoe.

  Wilmot crouched, pressed against the wall. The dim form of a man appeared at the mouth of the passage and came on, unsuspecting.

  Wilmot straightened up, and hit him, once, from below, at the exact point where trousers and shirt joined. The man said something which sounded like, “Aaargh,” and folded forward on to his knees. As Wilmot and Petrella picked their way past him, he still seemed to be fighting for breath.

  “What are these?” said Jane Orfrey.

  “They’re ten magnification enlargements of microfilm shots of the pages in a seven-year-old desk diary.”

  “But what do they mean?”

  “If I knew that,” said Petrella, “I’d know whether I risked my whole professional career last night for something or for nothing. I want you to go through every entry. I expect it’s a code. The home-made sort, that’s so damned difficult to decipher – where U.J. can mean Uncle Jimmy, Ursula Jeans, and the Union Jack. You’ll need a lot of patience with it.”

  Jane said, “We got something useful this morning. Do you remember Mallindales? The hire-purchase house. It was in answer to one of our circulars about marked and series notes.”

  There were two things, thought Petrella, about Jane Orfrey. The first was that she said we quite naturally, identifying herself as a member of the outfit. The other was that she had carried out every job she had been given without once saying, I’m only here to type letters.

  He wondered, not for the first time, how they had been lucky enough to get her.

  “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Petrella. “We’ve had a lot of answers in to that particular inquiry.”

  “Mallindales told us they had a special stamp which they used on all their notes. Remember? The point about it was that it didn’t appear to mark the notes at all. But if you held one of them flat, and looked across it in an oblique light, you could see the letters M.D.”

  “I remember now,” said Petrella. “They’d paid in a couple of hundred marked notes the day before the Maritime Bank at Liverpool was broken open. They thought we might locate some of them, because the thieves wouldn’t realise they were marked.”

  “We have located one. It turned up yesterday, in the possession of a character called Looey Bell, a small time thief picked up by the Highside police for illicit collecting.”

  “And this was part of the money he’d collected?”

  “That’s right. The only person – he says – who gave him a note, was the local parson.”

  Petrella considered the matter. A clergyman who gave away pound notes to people who came to the door sounded an unusual sort of character. “He might be worth looking into.”

  “Wilmot’s looking into him now.”

  “He’s cracked,” reported Wilmot, when he came back after tea. “He tried to give me a pound. He said I looked a very nice young man.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The Reverend Mortleman, vicar of St. John at Patmos, Crouch End. When I’d convinced him that I was a police officer and not a good cause, he spun me a yarn about a party who gave him money to give to the deserving poor. Some old girl, with more money than sense, who knew Mortleman when he was an assistant clergyman at St. Barnabas, Pont Street, I gather. He wouldn’t tell me her name.”

  “That sounds plausible,” said Petrella. “A lot of rich people go to St. Barnabas. One of them might be sending him money for his local charities.”

  “I could probably find out who it was if I made a few inquiries.”

  Petrella considered the matter. He had to be careful not to disperse the efforts of his small force chasing red herrings. “Let it stop there for the moment,” he said. “I’ll get the local boys to watch out. If they find any more of these M.D. notes circulating in those parts, we’ll think again.”

  The next M.D. note
arrived from quite a different source. A waiter at the Homburg-Carleton, going home in the early hours of the morning, started by accusing a taxi driver of overcharging him, then assaulted him, and finished up in custody. The station sergeant, checking his belongings before he was put into a cell, found three pound notes in his wallet, all marked with the Mallindales stamp, and brought them round personally to New Scotland Yard.

  Petrella said, “Three of them together! That looks more like it. Where did he say he got them from?”

  “He said they were his share of that evening’s tronc.”

  “Then they must have come from someone dining at the Homburg. Good work, Sergeant. We’ll follow it up.”

  Jane Orfrey spent the afternoon with the restaurant manager, and came back with a list of three public dinners, five private dinners, and the names of the eighty-four people who had actually booked tables that night.

  “It’s impossible to identify their guests,” she said. “And there were one or two people who came in without booking.”

  “It’s not so bad,” said Petrella. “Agreed, we can’t do anything about the people who didn’t book. But there weren’t a lot of those. And why bother about the guests? Guests don’t pay the bill. As for the big dinners, it’s only the organisers of those who matter. A bit more work, and we can boil this down to quite a short list.”

  “Suppose we boil it down to twelve names,” said the girl. “What do we do then? Go and ask them all if they know any bank robbers?”

  Petrella looked at her curiously. “You need a break,” he said. “You’ve been overworking.”

  Jane said, stiffly, “It’s the most interesting job I’ve ever done. I don’t want to fall down on it, that’s all.”

  “When we heard we were going to get a secretary,” said Petrella, “I remember Wilmot said”—at this point, he remembered what Wilmot had said, and improvised rapidly—”‘As we’re the youngest department, we’re bound to get the worst secretary.’ I think we had a bit of luck there. I think we got the best.”

  “It’s nice of you to say so.”

  “It must have been a slip-up in the typing pool. They’d earmarked someone like Mrs. Proctor for us, and they pulled the wrong card out of the filing cabinet.”