Had they been removed as the result of a last-minute instruction from the mysterious Max – an instruction that Superintendent Brigham had not considered it necessary to tell him about?
Or had Max ‘taken care’ of the officers because they did not fit in with that part of his plan that he was keeping secret from the superintendent?
Blackstone felt his rage erupting again. One of the most important responsibilities of any high-ranking officer was to protect his men, and if the two constables had been killed because they had not been aware of the danger they might be facing, then Brigham should be punished.
‘And the bastard will be punished,’ Blackstone promised. ‘I’ll see to it myself. I’ll …’
Thoughts of revenge could come later, he cautioned himself. What he had to do at that moment was decide how to deal with this new situation.
There were two alternatives. One was to enter the docks as he’d been instructed and let Max find him. The other was to turn around and walk back to Cable Street.
But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that if Max was intending to simply snatch the money – and he now believed that was exactly what Max was intending to do – it didn’t really matter which of the alternatives he chose, because the German would already have armed men posted along Pennington Road, cutting off his retreat.
‘In which case, we might just as well stick to the plan,’ Blackstone told himself.
The big dock gates were closed, but when he turned the handle, he found that they were not locked. He pushed one of the gates open slightly and stepped inside.
In the pale moonlight, he could see the outlines of the skeletal cranes and the bulky warehouses, and he could hear the water swishing against the sides of the docks. He reached automatically into his jacket and felt his fingers brush against his empty holster.
‘You bastard, Brigham,’ he said aloud. ‘You weak, ineffectual – dangerous – bastard!’
A strong wind blew up from nowhere. It howled around corners and rattled the slates on the dockland roofs. It picked up detritus lying on the ground and sent it manically hurtling through the air. And then, as suddenly as the wind had arrived, it was gone.
Blackstone moved slowly and cautiously towards Wapping Basin. Wherever Max was now, he would not have arrived there from the street, he thought. For safety’s sake, the German would have come by river, and that was how he would make his exit, too.
Blackstone heard a furtive scuttling to his left and again reached for his revolver, even though he knew it was probably a water rat. But the revolver was not there, he was forcibly reminded. It was being held by an inspector in the Special Branch – because that was what Max wanted.
‘You hav’ der money?’ asked a voice to his right.
Blackstone turned and saw the dark outline of a large man.
‘I have the money, and I’ll give it to you the moment you’ve handed me the documents,’ he said.
The other man laughed. ‘Yes, ve could certainly do it that vay,’ he agreed, ‘but I have an alternative plan.’
‘An alternative plan,’ Blackstone repeated. ‘And what alternative plan might that be?’
‘Tell me, Inspector,’ Max said, avoiding a direct answer to the question, ‘how does the thought of one thousand pounds appeal to you?’
The clocks all over London were striking one.
‘He should be back by now,’ Superintendent Brigham said, walking nervously up and down.
‘Yes, sir, he should,’ the inspector agreed.
‘Do you think we should go down to the docks and find out what’s happened?’ Brigham asked.
‘I don’t know, sir,’ replied the inspector, who was far too wily a bird to fall into the kind of trap that would lead to him being held responsible for whatever happened next. ‘You’re the senior man here – it’s your operation – so you’re the one who should take the decision.’
‘If we go down to the docks now, Max may take it as a sign of bad faith,’ Brigham said.
He paused to give the inspector time to agree with him – but the inspector said nothing.
‘But if it’s Max who’s shown the bad faith,’ Brigham fretted, ‘if he’s double-crossed us, then the longer we leave it …’
Another pause.
Another lack of response from the inspector.
‘We’ll give it half an hour,’ Brigham said, on the verge of panic. ‘Whatever problems he’s encountered in the docks, Blackstone must surely be back by then.’
Brigham, his inspector, and his two sergeants, reached the dock gates at a quarter to two, and though the night air was cold – and they had been standing around in it for some considerable time – the superintendent was sweating.
‘There are no constables on duty,’ he said frantically.
‘No, sir,’ his inspector agreed.
‘Do you think they might be helping Blackstone? Or do you think Max might have told them to go away?’
‘I’ve no idea, sir.’
‘Well, for the love of God, let’s get inside there and find out what’s happened,’ Brigham screamed.
They found the two constables – who should have been on duty at the dock gates – behind one of the cranes. They had been securely bound and gagged, but they were still conscious, and the moment they saw their rescuers approaching, they began to kick their legs and grunt as loudly as they could.
‘Get these lads untied,’ the inspector said to the two sergeants.
‘There’s no time for that!’ Brigham screamed. ‘We have to find Blackstone and the money.’
‘It’s below freezing now, sir, and if we don’t untie them, they’ll probably die of exposure,’ the inspector said in a voice as cold as the air – a voice that suggested he was perfectly prepared to disobey his superior, should that prove necessary.
‘Very well, then, untie them – but make it quick,’ Brigham said. ‘And then go and find that bastard Blackstone.’
The constables needed assistance to stand up, but once they were on their feet, they did not seem to be in any danger of falling over.
‘Go!’ Brigham told his team. Then he turned his attention to the constables. ‘What the hell happened here?’ he demanded.
‘There were these two blokes with guns, sir,’ said one of the constables, rubbing his wrists in an attempt to improve his circulation. ‘They came out of nowhere. They told us that they’d kill us if we didn’t surrender immediately. We didn’t have any choice.’
‘You didn’t have any choice!’ Brigham barked, as a voice in his head screamed that someone would have to take the blame for this fiasco, and that – unfairly – it would probably be him. ‘You didn’t have any choice!’
‘No, sir,’ the constable mumbled.
‘You’re supposed to be members of the finest police force in the world,’ Brigham ranted. ‘You should have used your moral authority to make the men put down their guns. And if that didn’t work, then you should have unsheathed your truncheons and charged them.’
‘But … but if we’d done that, they’d have shot us down like dogs, sir,’ the constable protested.
‘Well, at least then you’d have died with honour,’ Brigham said. ‘As it is, you’re nothing but a disgrace to your uniform.’
It was ten minutes before the inspector and the two sergeants returned.
‘Have you found him?’ Brigham asked.
‘The docks are a big place, sir,’ the inspector said. ‘We’ll have to wait until it gets light before we can carry out a proper search.’
‘In other words, you haven’t found him,’ Brigham said bitterly.
‘No, sir.’
‘Have you found anything?’
‘We found this, sir,’ said one of the sergeants, holding up a warrant card.
‘Is that … is that …?’ Brigham gasped.
‘It’s Inspector Blackstone’s, sir.’
‘So how is it you couldn’t find a big man like Blackstone, but you managed to come acr
oss a small thing like his warrant card?’ Brigham demanded.
The sergeant looked to the inspector for help, and the inspector nodded that he’d be glad to oblige.
‘We don’t think Inspector Blackstone is still here, sir, but the warrant card was lying right there in our path,’ the inspector said. ‘And no doubt the thing that’s concerning you the most at the moment is whether or not there was any blood on the warrant card.’
‘What?’ Brigham asked, as if he had no idea what the inspector was talking about.
‘Blood,’ the inspector repeated. ‘You’ll be eager to find out if an officer under your command has been injured.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Brigham said. ‘Was there any blood?’
‘No, sir, there wasn’t.’
‘Then if he wasn’t hurt, what the bloody hell was Blackstone doing dropping it?’
I’ll put in for a transfer the first thing in the morning, the inspector promised himself.
‘Why did he drop it, sir?’ he repeated innocently. ‘I expect that was because he didn’t think that he’d be needing it any more.’
‘You think … you think he’s done a runner with the money?’ Brigham asked tremulously.
‘It’s certainly looking that way, sir,’ the inspector replied.
THREE
10th December 1916
Had it not been for the steam hammer that was pounding away relentlessly in his head, Blackstone might almost have felt as if he was doing no more than slowly awakening from a deep sleep.
But just where was this slow awakening taking place? he wondered.
He was lying on something hard. That was indisputable – but it didn’t get him very far.
The idea floated through his mind that he was in New York City, working on the case of a murdered stockbroker – the Wolf of Wall Street, they’d called him – with Detective Sergeant Alex Meade …
No, that was years ago.
He was in the English trenches, on the Western Front, investigating the death of Lieutenant Fortesque …
That was closer – much closer than New York – but still some considerable time in the past.
The events of the previous evening slowly began to filter back into his aching brain.
The Western Dock …
A man who called himself Max and was proposing a deal quite unlike the one he had previously made with Brigham …
Blackstone had still not opened his eyes, but now he was becoming more aware of what was going on around him. There was the noise of cart wheels, bouncing off the cobbles. There was a buzz of conversation as people walked past him. And there was the strong smell – the stink – of whisky.
Now he did open his eyes. His vision was blurry at first, but as it began to clear, he saw that he was lying on a bench on the Victoria Embankment, not far from New Scotland Yard.
But how the hell had he got there?
He raised himself on one elbow – taking care not to roll off the bench – and observed two uniformed constables walking quickly (but warily) towards him.
Why should they be wary? he wondered fuzzily.
He had never worked with either of them directly, it was true, but he knew them well enough to exchange a greeting in passing, and – more importantly – they knew him.
As the constables drew closer, they separated, so that the taller one was now approaching him from one end of the bench, and the shorter from the other.
And still Blackstone couldn’t work out what was wrong!
The taller constable came to a halt, three feet from the bench.
‘We don’t want any trouble, now do we, sir?’ he asked, in a soothing yet authoritative tone.
‘Trouble?’ Blackstone repeated, mystified – and was surprised at how weak and cracked his voice sounded.
‘What I’d like you to do now is get into a sitting position and hold your hands out in front of you,’ the constable said.
‘Why should I do that?’ Blackstone asked.
‘So that we can handcuff you, of course,’ the constable replied.
Blackstone was standing in front of Superintendent Brigham’s desk, still wearing the handcuffs. Behind the desk sat Superintendent Brigham himself and ex-Assistant Commissioner Todd.
Blackstone had crossed swords with Todd a number of times in the past. To be fair to him, he had never deliberately gone out of his way to make the Assistant Commissioner look like a fool, but since Todd undoubtedly was a fool, it might sometimes have seemed that way.
Now, the rumours buzzing around the Yard had it, Todd was dying of cancer, and looking at him, Blackstone had no doubts that the rumours were true.
Todd’s skin was yellow, and he had lost some control over the muscles in his cheeks. But though he probably knew he had only weeks to live, there was a look of triumph on his face.
‘We know now why Max wanted you to deliver the money, don’t we?’ Brigham demanded.
‘I don’t know anything,’ Blackstone said. ‘Somebody in the dockyard knocked me unconscious, and everything’s a blank after that.’
‘Somebody knocked you unconscious,’ Brigham repeated, his voice heavy with contempt. ‘And then what did he do? Did he carry you to a bench on the Victoria Embankment?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘But I’m pretty certain that he drenched me in whisky.’
‘Would that be before or after you made your deal with Max – before or after he had given you the one thousand pounds that we found in your pocket?’ Brigham asked.
‘Do I look like an idiot?’ Blackstone demanded. ‘If I’d really had a deal with Max, don’t you think the first thing I would have done would be to get the hell out of London?’
‘A greedy man, who suddenly finds himself in possession of one thousand pounds, will often behave stupidly,’ Brigham said. ‘Shall I tell you what actually occurred?’
Blackstone shrugged. ‘Will it make any difference to you if I say no?’ he asked.
‘No, it wouldn’t!’
‘Then, by all means, please feel free to go ahead.’
‘I’m now inclined to think your friend Max is not the master spy I once assumed him to be,’ Brigham said. ‘The truth is probably that he’s no more than a minor official in the German navy, who, purely by chance – or the carelessness of others – found himself in possession of a secret document. His first thought was to sell it to us, but because it was so limited in its scope, he realized he would never get more than a thousand pounds for it. And since there was no prospect of him acquiring any more documents, a thousand pounds was all he’d ever get. Then he came up with a brilliant idea – he’d give us that document for nothing and offer to sell us much more of the same for a considerable sum.’
‘Yes, that probably is what happened,’ Blackstone agreed.
‘So you admit it!’ Brigham said, pouncing like an overeager cat.
‘Of course not! I had nothing to do with any of it, and I warned you yesterday that the whole idea was crazy.’
‘Max needed an accomplice for his plan, and he chose you,’ Brigham continued, as if Blackstone hadn’t spoken. ‘Together, you ambushed the two constables on the dock gate—’
‘They’d already gone when I arrived,’ Blackstone interrupted.
‘All right, then,’ Brigham said, impatiently waving the objection aside. ‘Max and some other accomplice tied up the two constables—’
‘So they’re still alive,’ Blackstone interrupted. ‘Thank God for that!’ And then the policeman in him took over his mind, and he continued, ‘But why didn’t he kill them?’
‘You’d have liked him to have killed them, wouldn’t you?’ Todd asked, with another badly timed pounce.
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Blackstone said seriously. ‘I’d have been appalled if he’d killed them. But in his position, that would have been the safest thing to do – and since, if he’s caught, he’ll probably hang anyway, he had nothing to lose by it.’
‘We are not here to debate what Max
did or did not do,’ Brigham said. ‘This interrogation is solely concerned with your part in the affair.’
‘Apart from obeying your orders to the letter, I had no part in the affair,’ Blackstone protested.
‘To continue,’ Brigham said firmly. ‘You met Max at the docks. You handed him the money, and he gave you back your share, as you’d previously arranged. You knew that you’d have no trouble making your escape, because there were no policemen in the area except for my team – and we wouldn’t come to investigate what had happened for at least an hour.’
‘The reason there were no coppers anywhere near the docks was because of the agreement you had with Max,’ Blackstone pointed out.
‘And that agreement was a consequence of the arrangement that you made with him earlier,’ Brigham said.
‘So if, according to you, I’d set the whole thing up for making my escape, why didn’t I escape?’ Blackstone asked.
‘You were fully intending to flee London – perhaps you had a car waiting somewhere – but before you left, you thought you might as well have a little drink to celebrate. But one drink didn’t seem quite enough, did it? So you had another and then another. And by the time you were halfway down the bottle, you’d almost forgotten who you were or what you’d done.’
Brigham had been trying to make him angry from the very start of the interrogation, Blackstone thought, because the superintendent knew – as did all policemen – that an angry man had no control and would reveal things that a calm man would wisely keep to himself.
But the ploy hadn’t worked so far, and there was no reason why it should start working now.
‘Yes, those people who think you’re a good copper are quite wrong,’ Brigham taunted him. ‘All you really are is a drunk.’
There was a click in Blackstone’s brain – as if a trap had been sprung or a trigger squeezed.
‘Talk to the people who know me,’ he heard himself say. ‘They’ll tell you I care far too much about being on top of the situation to ever drink half a bottle of whisky.’
‘No doubt they would tell me that,’ Brigham agreed, savouring his triumph, ‘but, you see, they only know the old Sam Blackstone, not this new one, with a thousand pounds in his pocket.’
Blackstone and the Endgame Page 3
