Seven Days to Death

by John Creasey

  Well, well; a history of violent temper. Dig deeper, and this would probably show that Rose flew into rages, possibly that he had been uncontrollable; a mother wouldn’t be likely to take a six-year-old boy to a doctor unless it was for some quite exceptional tantrums. No wonder Smedd had written N.B. The family doctor’s purpose stood out a mile, of course; he was establishing a history of mental unbalance because he was afraid that young Rose had killed the girl, and that the state of his mind would be of vital importance at the trial. Not good for Pru’s “friend,” or for William Rose. And obviously Smedd had no fresh news about the couple visiting the cinema, or about the “lost” knife.

  In the middle of the morning Gideon sent for Lefty Bligh, who had been up at Great Marlborough Street, and remanded for the constitutional eight days. Now that he was over his shock, he was smiling.

  “Hallo, Gov-ner, now don’t you start,” he greeted.

  “You’re a mutton-headed fool, Lefty,” Gideon said, “but I don’t suppose anything will cure you now. Heard from Syd Benson lately?”

  Lefty’s whole expression changed.

  “Mr. Gideon,” he said earnestly, “I wouldn’t have no more truck with that man for a fortune.”

  “How about making us out a list of his friends? It might help you next week if you did.”

  The little thief’s eyes were filled with reproach which would have made any other man than a policeman believe he was of great virtue.

  “Now would I squeal, Mr. Gideon? Even if I knew any of Benson’s pals, you know I wouldn’t.”

  It had been worth trying; but as an informer, Lefty was a dead loss. So, to Gideon, was the rest of that afternoon. He just couldn’t get the line he wanted so desperately; and each hour that Benson remained free increased his wife’s danger.

  Young Syd Benson saw Abbott outside the house in Muskett Street that afternoon, glared at him, and then walked along the street toward the corner and toward his school for the afternoon lessons. Abbott followed. It was his first experience of watching a youngster, and he was beginning to realize how difficult a strong-willed boy could make the job. Coming from school that morning, Syd had dawdled along, had jeered and derided Abbott in mime, had talked about flaming coppers, narks and flatfoots to his friends, and generally shown off. Annoyed at first, Abbott had gradually become philosophical, accepting this as inevitable.

  He’d already told Gideon that he wasn’t happy about the boy, and at that time Gideon was Abbott’s Hero number one.

  Halfway along Muskett Street on his way back to school, young Syd tried a new dodge: he broke into a run.

  Abbott saw that and hesitated for a split second. The boy was off to a flying start and could run like a hare. Abbott, who hadn’t sprinted for years but who still played a useful game of football, lost time in trying to decide whether he should lose what was left of his dignity by running, or whether he should let the little brute get away.

  He ran.

  There were a dozen or so other children in the street, all heading toward school, several mothers, two men on bicycles, and a milkman’s van. Everyone stopped to stare at the pounding policeman and the running boy. Young Syd reached the corner at least fifty yards ahead, and took time off to turn round and put his thumb to his nose. That started a roar of laughter followed by jeers and catcalls.

  “Hit one your own size, can’t you?”

  “Catch him, cowboy!”

  “How’re your flat feet, copper?”

  Abbott set his teeth and ran on, going very fast now, much faster than the boy could. Provided he was still in the street which bisected this one, Syd wouldn’t get away. Abbott neared the corner and then saw one of the cyclists draw up alongside him. The cyclist was grinning, but he didn’t speak. He passed Abbott and, a yard or so in front of him, his bicycle wobbled. He made it do that deliberately, but no one would ever be able to prove it. As if trying to keep his balance, he crossed Abbott’s path; the detective looked as if he would crash into him.

  Abbott saw the danger in time.

  He pulled himself up, inches from the bicycle, and managed to spin round on one foot, as he would on the football field if the ball ran the wrong way. To save himself from falling, he thrust out his right hand, and caught the cyclist on the shoulder. He felt the man give way, heard him bellow, saw him leap for the pavement. Something clutched at Abbott’s coat, but did no harm. He didn’t look round, but heard the cyclist crash, and then realized that the catcalls had stopped.

  He reached the corner.

  Young Syd was playing marbles with two other boys; he grinned impudently.

  Abbott, gasping for breath, could have wrung the boy’s neck. He stopped, standing by the wall of a house, hearing a gabble of voices round the corner, prom a distance, a uniformed policeman from the Division came hurrying, and if there was anything that a Divisional man enjoyed it was a Yard man being made to look silly.

  The crowd in Muskett Street would be after him for this, too. The cyclist would almost certainly try to make trouble. Abbott, trying to put the detective before the human being, saw through all this to his chief job: keeping an eye on the boy. He would have to leave the constable to make a kind of peace with the crowd, but was afraid that from now on he would be jeered at by everyone in Muskett Street.

  The cyclist turned the corner, back on his machine. His right hand was bleeding from a nasty scratch. He glowered at Abbott, and said roughly. “Why the hell don’t you look where you’re going?” -

  Abbott gaped - and then found the wit to say: “Sorry. Didn’t see you.”

  A woman, just out of sight, laughed - at the cyclist, not Abbott. The man pedalled off; and as he watched him go, Abbott realized what had happened. Just when he’d feared the worst, he’d had a break. If he’d fallen and the cyclist ridden on triumphantly, he would have been the fool; but in Muskett Street as well as in the whole of London there was admiration for the man who got out of a tight corner; and there was an innate sense of fair play.

  Abbott felt on top of the world.

  A woman turned the corner, then. She was middle- aged, dressed in a bright blue dress of some shiny material, and she wore a black straw hat trimmed with bright red cherries. She had a huge, tightly confined bosom and a surprisingly small waist, a red, beery face and little brown eyes. She swept round the corner, spotted Abbott and the young Syd, and strode toward Benson’s son, ignoring the marbles. She caught one with the toe of her shoe, and it went skimming to the other side of the street.

  “Now you listen to me, young Sydney,” she said in a voice loud enough to be heard up and down the street. “If you was my boy I’d give you a clip round the ear and keep on doing it until I knocked some sense into you. The gentleman’s only trying to help you, see? Help you and your Ma and Liz, which is a damned sight more than your father’s ever done. If he’d earned an honest living, instead of taking up with a lot of loose women and neglecting your Ma and then going off to prison and leaving her to look after the pair of you, there’d have been some sense. But he never did have any sense, and by the looks of it you haven’t got much, neither. Don’t you forget it, this gentleman’s only doing his duty, and trying to help you.”

  She stopped, on a high-pitched note.

  Syd’s bright blue eyes were not turned toward her, but toward Abbott.

  “I don’t want his flipping help,” he said, and swung away.

  Young Syd, fuming at the way the woman had talked to him, fuming at the way his mother had rebuked him, hating Abbott, resenting everything that had happened to his father, walked on toward school that afternoon. He was alone except for one boy, a big, gangling lad named Simon who, many people thought, should not be allowed near the school. But he was harmless enough, and had short-lived periods of intelligence. Most of his time he spent in a special school, but at playtime he was allowed in here, with the others.

 
Abbott, following, would not have been surprised had young Syd played truant; but he went on to school. There were only two exits, and the police watched each; it was likely to be a boring afternoon for Abbott.

  It wasn’t boring for young Syd.

  In the playground thronged with a mob of shouting, running boys, he stood watching, brooding, with Simon near him, gawping about with his mouth hanging open. It was one of his bad days.

  Another boy came up.

  No one but the gangling lad was near, and he was out of earshot.

  The second boy said, “Got a message for you, Syd,” in a voice which showed that he was swelling with importance.

  “You can keep it,” said Syd sourly.

  “You’ll wish you hadn’t said that.”

  “Listen, Charlie, I don’t want to talk to you or no one, get to hell out of here, can’t you?”

  “Okay, okay,” said Charlie, and backed away a yard; young Syd could box! “It’s a message from my Dad, though, he says it’s important. He’d have given it to you himself, only he knows the cops are watching you.”

  Young Syd’s eyes lost their viciousness in a momentary flicker of interest.

  “What’s it all about?”

  “Dad wants to see you tonight, without the cops knowing, see. Can you make it?”

  “The flippin’ busies watch me all the time!”

  “That’s what Dad said,” went on young Charlie, “but it’s okay. You’ve got to climb over the school wall into the builder’s yard. Someone’ll be waiting in a van, you nip inside the van and you’ll be okay. Dad says it’s important.”

  Syd’s eyes were shining.

  “Okay,” he said, “okay.”

  Abbott didn’t see the boy, after school. The rest of the children came out, but not Syd Benson. The teachers came out, too. It wasn’t until Benson had been missing for over half an hour that another boy was found who had seen him climb into the builder’s yard next to the school.

  There was no trace of him now.

  13. Clues

  Gideon heard Abbott’s voice, low-pitched and completely lacking the bright eagerness which had been there before. From a long-term point of view, this wouldn’t do Abbott any harm; it was never a bad thing to have a job go sour on you in the early days, and too long a run of early successes could do a lot of harm. But it was a thousand pities he had to learn his lesson on this job.

  Obviously, Abbott had done everything that could be done at short notice.

  “All right, and don’t forget it isn’t the end of the world,” Gideon said. “I’ll have a word with the Division. We’ve got a woman watching young Liz, so you switch over to Mrs. Benson and that man of hers, Arthur Small. Know him?”

  “Yes, sir, if you remember, I reported last night...”

  “Oh, yes,” said Gideon. “All right. Good-bye.”

  He rang off, and found himself looking down at a photograph, which had come in only a little while ago, of Arthur Small, who was in charge of the shop where Ruby Benson worked. The shop was one of a chain, with a male manager and female staff; there were three assistants junior to Ruby, as well as Small. Small was in the late forties, rather dapper, and in his way good-looking. He was going a little thin on top, and wore horn-rimmed glasses which gave his face a top- heavy look. Gideon, knowing that it was more than just an affair between him and Ruby, wondered how it would end. Even when Benson was caught, Ruby would be tied to him; she and Small couldn’t get married.

  The reports on Small were all excellent.

  He had been questioned, and had said flatly that he was going to stay at Ruby’s house from now until Benson was caught, and if the police didn’t like it, they could lump it. That showed spirit if nothing else.

  But young Syd ...

  Gideon put everything in hand: a widespread search, photographs of the boy to the newspapers, questioning of the schoolmasters and the other boys; but no reports came in. The builder’s men were questioned, but no one admitted having seen young Syd. It was a complete blank, and Gideon didn’t like it.

  Benson might be in London; might have got hold of the boy; might be within a mile or so of the Yard.

  Benson wasn’t; that night, the third of freedom, he spent lying low in a house on the outskirts of Birmingham, with Freddy Tisdale. It was quite a night, for they had feminine company.

  The body still lay under the little car on the cold ground and so far the snow had prevented any serious degree of decomposition.

  No one else visited the furnished house.

  Reports of the theft of a car from the car park near Millways, and of the theft of a car from a private garage on the outskirts of Stoke, reached the Yard in the usual way. Obviously, it was possible that one of the escaped men had taken these, but a dozen cars or more had been stolen from the same area during the past week.

  Both cars were found within twenty-four hours. There were no fingerprints in either of them; but in the one found in the Stoke car park there was a little roll of parking tickets of the kind used to refill the machines used at Millways Corporation. The fact that the car park attendant was missing had also been reported; the general belief was that he had absconded. During the first and second days of his disappearance, those councillors and Council officials who had opposed the employment of an ex-convict were loud in their righteousness and in the vigour of their “We told you so.”

  Then, on the fourth morning, a dog, howling and sniffing, led an elderly man to the car park attendant’s body.

  “My God,” breathed Gideon.

  Now they had something to get their teeth into. The stolen car was quickly connected with the old lag’s murder; it was clear that a pair of the prisoners had got as far south as Stoke, probable that they had gone farther south. Then a man from the Stoke Police Department’s Fingerprints Bureau, checking the second stolen car, found not fingerprints but glove prints.

  “Pigskin or imitation pigskin, with a cut in the thumb and worn on the inside edge of the thumb,” he said in his report, which reached Gideon on the afternoon of the fourth day.

  Soon reports began to flow in.

  The police knew what they were looking for, had confirmation from Alderman and Hooky that the other four had gone off in pairs, knew that one of the two wore pigskin gloves, and realized that meant that they had probably got hold of other clothes. A Millways’ C.I.D. man, trying to find out if clothes had been taken from the scene of any local burglary, learned instead that some food had been stolen from a grocery shop near the canal. The shopkeeper and his wife were quite sure, because they had been taking stock on the night before they’d made the discovery, arid had counted the half-pound packets of butter and some packets of biscuits. They had suspected a sneak thief, and hadn’t reported the missing food until they’d heard that the police were anxious to know about every kind of theft on the night of the big prison break.

  Two glove thumbprints, identical with those discovered on the stolen cars, were found on tins of soup and beneath a shelf in the shop. Immediately, the news brought a concentration of police to the canal area. A sergeant who took the routine in his stride collected all the keys of nearby furnished houses from the agents.

  Benson’s first hiding-place was found, and the report sped to London.

  “Now we’re really moving,” Gideon said, and he felt a fierce excitement. “Benson’s prints were all over the house, so were Tisdale’s. We’ve a list of the clothes that have been stolen, size of shoes, hats, everything. There was a careful inventory made before the owners left the place empty; we’ve got the description down to the last detail.”

  “Spread ‘em around,” said Lemaitre, and rubbed his hands together. “We’ll soon pick the swine up now.”

  They were not picked up that night, for they were in Birmingham, revelling.

  Young Syd wasn’t
found either.

  The Assistant Commissioner, often a late bird, looked into Gideon’s office about half past nine that night, and found Gideon there alone. That wasn’t unusual. Gideon had a mass of reports in front of him, and looked up from the one he was reading: a psychiatrist’s report on William Rose, the same psychiatrist who had attended him in his childhood. Gideon put it aside, stretched back in his chair, and then bent down and opened a cupboard.

  “I know what you’re after,” he said. “One of these days I’m going to put a fresh item on the expense sheet - one bottle of whisky for official consumption!” He put a bottle on the desk, then a siphon, then two glasses. “If you want to know what I think,” he went on, “I think this is one of the lousiest weeks I’ve ever had at the Yard.”

  The A.C. looked at the gurgling whiskey.

  ‘They all seem like that,” he said. “Don’t let it get you down, George.”

  Gideon pushed a glass toward him.

  “Oh, it’ll pass, but it’s like seeing a blank wall every way you look. I did think we’d get something when we found out where Benson had been and what clothes he was wearing, but – well, mustn’t expect miracles, I suppose.”

  “What’s really upset you?” the A.C. asked. “Not the newspaper?”

  “If I had my way, I’d dump all crime reporters in the sea,” growled Gideon, and then unexpectedly he laughed. “Oh, we can’t blame ‘em! Four violent criminals still free, then Edmundsun, and then young Benson. No wonder we’re making headlines. Chap I’m sorry for is Abbott,” he went on. “Seems to think it’s nobody’s fault but his.”

  “Like Gideon, like Abbott,” the A.C. said, and gave his quick grin. “Funny thing about that boy, though. No sign of him?”

  “No. I’m as worried as hell.”

  “Think someone’s hiding him?”

  “He could have found a spot to keep undercover by himself, I suppose,” said Gideon thoughtfully, “but as far as his mother knows, he had only about sixpence on him, and kids get hungry. If I had to bet, it’d be that he went to a place where he knew he’d be looked after. We’ve checked all of Benson’s friends, and haven’t got anywhere at all. He nipped over into the builder’s yard, and just hasn’t been seen since. The yard opens onto the Mile End Road, dozens of people pass it every hour of the day, and we haven’t picked up one who saw the kid.”