The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  Behind him, he heard the fence go down with a crack.

  There was a circular opening on the left. It looked like a drain. He crawled into it, until a bend in the pipe forced him to stop. Footsteps thundered past. Men were shouting. There was a rumbling, thudding noise, which shook the ground; a hiss of steam, and the clanking of iron on iron.

  For the first time, he realised that he was on a railway line. The wire he had been following must have been a signal wire. What he was in now was some sort of rainwater conduit. There was plenty of water coming down it, too.

  Further voices, angry voices. Official voices. A dog barking.

  Petrella pushed himself backwards until he was out in the open again.

  Some way up the line an argument was going on. Orders were being shouted in loud, angry German.

  Petrella propped himself against the bank, and started massaging the life back into his sodden legs. A dog passed out of darkness, and stood watching him.

  “Good boy,” said Petrella hopefully.

  The dog gave a sharp bark, like a sergeant major calling the parade to attention.

  Two men appeared. They were in the green uniform of the railway police. As soon as they saw him, both of them started to shout.

  When they seemed to have finished, Petrella said in impeccable German, “Conduct me, at once, if you please, to Inspector Laufer, of the Municipal Police.”

  Even the dog seemed impressed by this …

  Constantia Velden was a compulsive talker. She didn’t really need a secretary, Jane Orfrey decided. What she needed was a captive audience. And Jane, for two whole days, had been it.

  There were advantages, of course. Within an hour, and without any actual effort on her part, she had learnt almost all there was to know about Constantia; about her late husband, who had been an administrative officer in the Air Force, and had died of hepatitis jaundice in 1955; about her brother, Douglas Marchant, a Wing Commander, D.S.O., D.F.C., now the managing director of a firm making window frames, with a London Office in Lennox Street; about Constantia’s charitable enterprises; about the time Constantia had shaken hands with the Queen; about life; about money.

  Money came into most of Mrs. Velden’s calculations.

  Reading between the lines, Jane had deduced that she had inherited a reasonable competence from her late husband, and that she was helped out, where necessary, by her brother. He advised her on her investments and looked after her tax. He had also produced Alex; and probably paid his salary as well.

  Alex was the only other resident at the Loudon Road house, and was chauffeur, butler, gardener, and footman combined. A husky, brown-haired, freckled boy, who looked no more than sixteen and was in fact in his early twenties. He did everything that was beyond the strength or capacity of Mrs. Velden and her cohort of daily women.

  What spare time Alex had, he spent polishing his employer’s car and tuning up his own motorcycle.

  He was out with Mrs. Velden now. A lunch date with brother Douglas, she gathered. Jane munched her way through a solitary meal, and wondered, for the twentieth time, what possible connection her talkative middle-aged employer could have with an organisation which robbed banks. Her faith told her that the connection was there. After forty eight hours, her reason was beginning to doubt it.

  It was three o’clock before the car reappeared in Loudon Road and Alex jumped out and held the door open for Mrs. Velden. Jane caught a glimpse of her, and of the man who followed her out. So Douglas had accompanied his sister home. Interesting.

  Then the drawing room door opened, and he came in, holding it open for his sister and closing it behind her.

  He was a man of about six foot, with the round shoulders and barrel chest of a boxer; thick black hair, greying round the edges; a face dominated by a long, straight nose which turned out, suddenly, at the end, over a bush of grey moustache. Like a down pipe, she thought, emptying into a clump of weeds. A disillusioned pair of eyes peered out from under thick black eyebrows.

  “Wing Commander Marchant, Jane Orfrey.”

  “Plain Douglas Marchant, if you don’t mind,” said the man. “You’re my sister’s new secretary. Has she driven you mad yet?”

  “Really, Douglas …”

  “If she hasn’t, she will. She gets through secretaries at the rate of two a week. She’s a Gorgon. She doesn’t realise that the days of indentured labour are over. There are more jobs than secretaries. Girls please themselves nowadays. Isn’t that right?”

  “More or less,” said Jane.

  “As soon as you present yourself to an agency, they offer you a dozen jobs, and say, take your pick.”

  “It isn’t quite as easy as that.”

  “What agency do you use, by the way?”

  It came out so swiftly that Jane gaped for a moment. Then she said, “As a matter of fact, I got this job through an advertisement.”

  “But you must have an agency,” said Douglas gently. “You’ll never get paid properly if you don’t.”

  “Really, Douglas,” said Constantia. “Are you trying to lure her away?”

  “I don’t see why not. I don’t mind betting you underpay her.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t want to work in an office.”

  “I think it would be terribly dull,” said Jane.

  “You wouldn’t be dull in my office,” said Douglas. “Eighteen pounds a week, and luncheon vouchers.”

  Jane felt it was time she asserted herself. “If I had to work in an office,” she said, “I’d choose a professional office, I think. Not a commercial one.”

  “There, if I may say so, you display your ignorance,” said Douglas. “Professional men overwork their staff and underpay them. They operate on too small a scale to do anything else. We’re just the opposite. We’ve got factories all over England. There’s hardly a building goes up that hasn’t got one of our windows in it.”

  “You may be right,” said Jane. “But personally I find businessmen so boring. They think and talk of nothing but money.”

  “What businessmen have you worked for?” inquired Douglas politely.

  Damn, thought Jane. I walked into that one. Better watch out. He’s a lot cleverer than he looks.

  “Two or three,” she said. And to Constantia, “Should I see if we can raise a cup of tea?”

  “Not for me,” said Douglas. “I’ve got to be off. A bit more money-grubbing to do. I’ll get Alex to drive me back into Town, if you don’t mind.”

  Jane telephoned Sergeant Wilmot at six o’clock that evening, from a call box on Hampstead Heath. “This is urgent,” she said. “See what you can find out about Douglas Marchant. Ex-R.A.F. Runs a business which makes windows. Not widows – windows. The firm’s got a head office in Lennox Street and factories all over the place.”

  “Wasn’t he the other director in the firm Light worked for, just after the war?”

  “That’s right. And he’s Mrs. Velden’s brother. He gives her money. Any notes she’s been passing could easily have come from him.”

  “I suppose they could have done.”

  She could hear the doubt in Wilmot’s voice, and said urgently, “We’re looking for a man who could run a show like this. Well, I’m telling you, Douglas Marchant fills the bill. I can’t explain it all over the telephone. But he’s big enough and bad enough—”

  “A big bad wolf,” said Wilmot. “O.K., I’ll take your word for it. We’ll certainly have him checked up.”

  “Any news from Germany?”

  “Not a word,” said Wilmot.

  As Jane came out of the telephone booth, she heard a motorcycle start up and move off. When she got back the house was in darkness, and she let herself in with her own key, and went into the drawing room.

  She felt restless, and uneasy, and had no difficulty in putting her finger on the cause of it. The powerful and unpleasant personality of Douglas Marchant seemed to linger in the room, like the smell of a cigar, long after its owner had departed. She realised that it was the
first time she had been alone in the house.

  Leaving the light on in the drawing room, she went along to what Constantia called her business-room at the end of the hall. Her objective was Constantia’s desk. She found that all the drawers in it were locked, so was the filing cabinet, and so were the cupboards under the bookcases which lined one wall. The books in the shelves were mostly political and military history, and this surprised her, until it occurred to her that they probably represented the departed Mr. Velden’s taste rather than Constantia’s.

  She took down one of the six volumes of Lloyd George’s War Memoirs, blew the dust off the top, and opened it.

  From an ornate bookplate, the name jumped out at her: Alwyn Corder

  Jane started at it in blank disbelief. Then she started taking down books at random. The bookplate was in most of them. For a moment she was unable to think straight. She knew that she had stumbled on something desperately important.

  A slight sound at the door made her swing round. Alex was smiling at her.

  “Looking for something to read?” he said …

  Sergeant Edwards said to Wilmot, “It’s a big company. Superintendent Baldwin says Douglas Marchant is the Chairman. Leaves most of the work to his staff, and comes up twice a week from the country to justify his director’s fees.”

  “Anything known?”

  “As far as Records know, the company and Marchant are both as clean as the proverbial whistle. What have we got on them?”

  “What we’ve got,” said Wilmot, “is a woman’s instinct. Jane doesn’t like his smell. She thinks he’s a crook.”

  “It doesn’t seem a lot to go on,” said Edwards doubtfully. “When’s Petrella coming back?”

  “Baldy hasn’t heard a chirrup out of him for twenty-four hours,” said Wilmot. “If you ask me, he’s found himself a Rhine maiden.”

  It was after midnight when the bedside telephone rang. The redheaded girl, who had been sharing Marchant’s flat, and bed, for the past month, groaned and said, “Don’t take any notice, Doug. It’s probably a wrong number.”

  “Pass it over,” said Douglas, who was lying on his back beside her. He balanced the instrument on his stomach, and unhooked the receiver. As soon as he heard the voice at the other end, he cupped a hand over the receiver and said, “Out you get, honey. It’s business.”

  “This is a nice time to do business.”

  “Get up and get us both a cup of tea.”

  Not until the girl had grumbled her way into a dressing gown and out of the room did Douglas remove his hand from the receiver and say, “Sorry, Alex, there was someone here. It’s all right now. Go ahead.”

  His pyjama top was unbuttoned, showing a chest fuzzed with greying black hair. One of his thick hands held the telephone. The other was fumbling on the bedside table for a cigarette. His face was expressionless.

  At the end he said, “Let’s just see if I’ve got this straight. Each of the three evenings she’s been there, she’s been out about the same time and made a call from a public phone box. And this evening, you found her in the library, snooping through a lot of books which had the old bookplates still in them. Damn, damn, and damn.”

  There was a long silence as if each was waiting for the other to speak.

  Then Douglas said, “If she’s what we think she is, and if she’s got a regular reporting time, she won’t pass any of this on until six o’clock tomorrow night. We ought to do something about it before then, I think.”

  Alex said, “Yes. I think we ought.”

  “I can’t attend to it myself. I’m flying over to Germany tomorrow afternoon. There’s been some sort of trouble at the factory. Could you think of an excuse to take her out in the car?”

  Alex said, “Suppose I said you had left some papers at the office which had to be taken to the airport – and you had a message for your sister-something like that.”

  “It’s worth trying,” said Douglas.

  “When I get her in the car – what then?”

  “My dear Alex, I must leave all the arrangements to you. A moonlight picnic, perhaps.”

  As he rang off, the red-haired girl came back with two cups of tea. Douglas drank his slowly. He didn’t seem to want to talk. The redheaded girl thought that Douglas, though a generous spender, was a tiny bit odd; and had been becoming odder just lately. Now, the look in his eyes frightened her. At the age of twenty-five she was something of an expert on men, and she made up her mind, there and then, to clear out while Douglas was in Germany – and not to come back.

  When, late on the following afternoon, Alex told Jane that he had to collect some papers and take them to the airport, and that Marchant had asked that she should go too so that he could give her a message for his sister, her first reaction was to say no.

  Then she reflected that no harm could really be planned on the crowded roads between Central London and London Airport.

  “I’ll have to ask Mrs. Velden,” she said.

  “I’ve asked her. She says the trip’ll do you good.”

  “When do we start?”

  “Right now.”

  “I’ll have to get a coat,” said Jane.

  She ran up to her room and stood listening. The house was quiet. She tiptoed across the corridor and into Mrs. Velden’s bedroom. As she had hoped, there was a bedside telephone extension. She grabbed the receiver, and dialled the code number which she knew by heart.

  “Hullo,” said Wilmot’s voice. “What’s up?”

  “No time to explain,” said Jane. “Alex is taking me, in Mrs. Velden’s car, to London Airport. We’re calling at the Lennox Street office first. Can you put a tail on?”

  “It could be done,” said Wilmot. “But why—” He found himself talking to a dead telephone. Jane had gone.

  It was half past five by the time they reached Lennox Street. Whilst Alex was inside, Jane looked cautiously round to see if Wilmot had been as good as his word. She could see a small green van, apparently delivering parcels at the far end of the road, but nothing else.

  By six o’clock, with dusk coming up, they were across Kew Bridge, and had joined the tail-end of the home-going traffic on the Twickenham Road.

  “Quicker this way,” said Alex, “until they’ve finished messing about with the flyover on the Great West Road. Trouble is, everyone else knows it too. Let’s try a short cut.”

  He swung expertly across the traffic, and turned into a long road of neat houses, with neat gardens and neat cars in neat garages. At the far end of the road, the street lamps petered out, and they came to a halt in an area of allotments and high fences.

  “It’s a dead end,” said Jane.

  “Not the last time I came here, it wasn’t,” said Alex. “Let’s have a squint at the map. It’s in the pocket.”

  As he leaned over her, she felt the needle go into her arm. For a moment, she thought it was an accident – that a loose pin in Alex’s coat might have stuck into her. Then she realised what had happened, and started to fight, but Alex was lying half on top of her, his thick leather driving glove feeling for her mouth.

  A minute later the boy sat back in his seat, and relaxed cautiously. He had given her a full shot of pelandramine. She’d be out for an hour, and dopey for another hour after that. So, no hurry.

  He looked at himself in the driving mirror; and was pleased with the unexcited face that looked back. He stripped off the driving gloves and felt his own pulse, timing it with his wristwatch. Eighty-four. Twelve faster than it should be, but not bad. He took out a comb, and ran it through his hair.

  Then he examined the girl. Her mouth was open and she was breathing noisily. Her cheeks were flushed. Anyone looking at her would think that she’d been drinking too much, and had passed out. Just the job.

  He felt in the right-hand door-pocket and took out a small bottle of gin. A few drops round her mouth and chin. A little spilt on her dress. Enough for people to smell it, if he was stopped.

  He opened the door. There was no one
in sight. He threw the gin bottle and the empty syringe over the fence, got back, turned the car, and drove off slowly the way he had come.

  The mist was thicker. At the Slough roundabout he took the Staines road, driving carefully now. He crossed Staines Bridge, following the Egham Road. At Egham, the road forked. The main road, with its string of garages, its traffic and its orange neon lighting went away to the left. The right fork, a much smaller road, followed the river towards Windsor. In summer, this road, too, would be crowded with traffic heading for the open spaces of Runnymede Meadow. On a damp February night, it was empty.

  Half a mile along, Alex turned out his headlights, and drove very carefully off the road and on to the rough grass. There was some danger of getting the car bogged, but his town-and-country studded tyres would grip on most surfaces. There was a worse danger. Somewhere ahead was the Thames, its bank unprotected by any fence.

  Alex stopped the car, got out, and walked forward, counting his paces. It was fifty yards to the bank. He came back, climbed in, and drove the car forward cautiously in bottom gear.

  When he stopped again, he was five yards from the edge. At this point, where the bank curved, it had been revetted with concrete bags against the sweep of the winter floods. A yard below his feet the river ran cold, grey and sleek.

  Alex walked back to the car. Jane had slumped over sideways, so that when he opened the door she nearly fell out. He got his hands under her body, and lifted her on to the wet grass.

  Alone, islanded by the mist, touching the girl’s body, moving it, arranging it, gave him a sense of power, near to exultation. He crouched beside her for a full minute to let the singing noise in his ears die down and the lights stop flashing in front of his eyes. Then he got up slowly, went round to the back of the car, opened the boot and took out two fourteen-pound kitchen weights and a coil of odd-looking plaited cord.

  With the cord he tied Jane’s wrists together in front of her, passing the ends through the handles of the weights and knotting them.

  When he stood up, he saw three pairs of yellow eyes looking at him through the mist. He thought, for a moment, that it was his imagination playing him tricks again. Then he heard the engines, growling to themselves, as the cars bumped across the grass in low gear, closing in on him from every side.