John Creasey Box Set 1: First Came a Murder, Death Round the Corner, The Mark of the Crescent (Department Z)

by John Creasey

  Beresford nodded, but was dubious.

  “I don’t say definitely that Gorman’s connected with to-night’s circus, mind you.”

  “I’d fire you if you did. Keep quiet a minute. The Gorman incident made you curious, but it didn’t prepare you for the porch trick, which was a straightforward attempt to kill you. It failed. The men who engineered it knew that it failed. So they—we can assume, I think, that there were two in it—hung about Auveley Street, and kept near enough to your house to see Tricker’s shadow when he went downstairs, and shot him through the letter-box or a broken panel of glass in the door. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

  Beresford said it was. He was watching Craigie intently, and yet the Chief of Department Z had an idea that the big man was thinking about something other than his careful summary of the night’s events.

  “So,” said Craigie patiently, “Leopold Gorman had been looking daggers at you at the Two-Step Club, and then there were two separate but connected attempts to kill you——”

  “What are you doing?” interrupted Beresford, still looking preoccupied. “Trying to make me nervous?”

  Craigie ignored the sally.

  “Now then. Your attackers saw, or heard, the Arrans’ car as it turned into the street. They decided to give up the idea of getting you out of the way——”

  “Only for to-night, mind you,” encouraged Beresford.

  “Maybe only for an hour or two,” said Craigie sardonically. “Anyhow, they went. And as they went, so your policeman came along——”

  “It might have been the bogus bobby who scared ‘em off,” interrupted Beresford.

  “Someone scared ’em, anyway. All right. Now the policeman was interested in you, not enough to——”

  “Kill me,” said Beresford, sotto voce.

  “I almost wish he had,” said Craigie with feeling. “Now we’ve got three problems. Why was Gorman interested in you? Were the efforts to——”

  “Kill me——”

  “Connected with Gorman—he’s capable of anything, and you might be treading on his toes somewhere—and what part does the policeman play? It’ll take some thinking,” said Craigie, stuffing black twist into the meerschaum, “to work those out.”

  “You’ve forgotten the telegram to the man Williams, on my ground floor,” Beresford pointed out. “We can trace back on that, and if whoever sent it’s connected in any way with Gorman, we can guess the porch trick and the shooting was engineered by our Leopold. You’d better telephone the Yard to get on to the telegram right away, hadn’t you?”

  Craigie nodded, and stood up. As he walked across the office—a large barely furnished room, with only a light oak desk, a portable typewriter, a dictaphone on its stand, half a dozen steel filing cabinets and three hardwood chairs at one end of it—Beresford leaned back in an armchair by the fire, and looked thoughtful.

  The office of Department Z needs further description. The walls, it has been said, were made of sliding steel partitions, grained like oak. Three parts of the large room was furnished as an office, but the fourth part, near the fire, might have been taken completely from the living-room of the laziest and most untidy bachelor in London. About the fire were two armchairs, old, disreputable and comfortable, a portable cupboard containing an assortment of eatables and drinkables in half-empty pots, tins and bottles, loose and packet tobaccos, cigarettes, magazines and yellow-backs, and near the cupboard were the rumpled pages of two daily papers, a fine dust of tobacco-ash and an assortment of matchsticks. On the tiled hearth a pair of poplin pyjamas rubbed shoulders with a bath towel and odds and ends of clothing. To anyone who did not know that Gordon Craigie spent most of his time, sleeping and waking, in his office, the fireplace end of the room would have been a thing seen in a nightmare.

  But Tony Beresford was used to the room, and he had no eyes for the paraphernalia about him. Actually he leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, his great legs stretched out in front of him, his lips moving regularly as he inhaled or exhaled smoke from his Virginia 3. He heard Craigie telephoning Scotland Yard on the matter of the wire to Williams at Auveley Street, and heard the Chief replace the receiver, but still he kept his eyes shut.

  “Tired, or just thinking?” asked Craigie as he walked back to his living quarters. Long association with young men whose humour was bluff and whose comments were usually sarcastic had made him fall into their ways when he was with them.

  Beresford blinked.

  “Neither,” he said. “I was trying to see something, Gordon.”

  “Try opening your eyes,” suggested Craigie, sitting down.

  “In my mind’s eye,” said Beresford with dignity. “Listen. As I came downstairs looking for Tricker, I saw him sprawling on the hall floor, and assumed that he’d been shot from the front door. I looked at the front door. I saw the glass panel—a frosted one—and there was no break in it. I saw the coloured glass at the top of the door—and I’m sure all the sections were there. So——”

  “Tricker must have been shot through the letter-box,” said Craigie.

  “That’s just it,” said Beresford, and Craigie saw that the big man’s eyes were bright with excitement. “Tricker was shot in the head. If the bullet was fired through the letter-box it was while he was stooping down. But if he was stooping down, he couldn’t have been seen at all! The glass panel only goes half-way down the door. So it was either a lucky shot through the letter-box, or——”

  Craigie leaned forward, his muscles tight.

  “Or from inside the house!”

  “Exactly!” Beresford boomed the word. “Williams is away, and the top-floor flat’s empty. ‘Phone my place at the double, Gordon, and put the Arrans wide. I’ll get the Yard on another line.”

  Just twenty minutes later two police cars drew up opposite Number 7, Auveley Street, and eight plain-clothes men clambered out. At the same time another carload of policemen drew alongside an alley which led to the courtyards at the rear, the odd numbers of Auveley Street, and went quietly, like ghosts of the night, towards Number 7. By the time the cordon was complete, Beresford and Gordon Craigie had arrived with Super-intendent Horace Miller—a big, bluff, blond man who would have looked completely at home amidst sacks of flour and the rumble of a mill, and therefore looked his name—in a third police car.

  One by one, the rooms in the house were searched, in the empty flat upstairs, in Beresford’s apartment, and in the rooms rented by the absent Williams. There was, remarkably enough, only one door that was bolted on the inside, thus defying the efforts of a police expert with a skeleton key.

  “I suppose it’s asking too much to expect to find anyone now,” muttered Beresford. “All right, Horace—I’ll bust it.”

  Miller motioned his men away from the door which led to the front room from the hall. Beresford stepped a couple of yards away and then hurled his great body against the wood. The door creaked, groaned, and the top bolt was torn from its sockets. A second heave sent Beresford tumbling into the room beyond. Miller and Craigie followed him quickly but more gracefully.

  “Empty,” muttered Craigie, sniffing the air.

  “Empty,” concurred Beresford, recovering his balance and looking round as a policeman switched on the electric light. “But someone’s been here lately, drat it, and they smoked. Damn me for a lunatic! If I’d kept my head and thought harder before, we’d have had the birds.”

  Craigie granted as he picked up a spent match, one of several on the floor, and the butt of a cigarette.

  “Can’t be helped,” he said. “Whoever it was smoked Player’s, and that’s as useful as if he’d smoked Woodbines. I wonder if that wire’s about? Better have a look in the desk by the wall, Miller.”

  Superintendent Miller looked about to demur, but changed his mind. After all, there had been grievous bodily harm and attempted murder—ample excuse for making a thorough search without a warrant.

  “Open that desk,” said the Super to one of his men, “but tre
at it gently.”

  The man stepped towards the desk, but his efforts were not necessary. From the hall there came the sound of voices, some gruff and low-pitched, one of a higher cadence and indignant to an extreme.

  “It’s an outrage,” asserted the man with the high-pitched voice, “a positive outrage, and I shall complain. Am I to be kept out of my own rooms while a flock of muddle-headed——”

  Beresford chuckled.

  “That’s our Mr. Williams,” he said, “of the ground-floor flat.”

  Miller raised his gruff voice.

  “Let Mr. Williams come in,” he called to the policeman on guard at the door.

  “So I should think,” said Williams, hurrying along the passage and turning into his room. “I——”

  And then he saw the wreck of the door, and stood in spluttering indignation, marshalling words which somehow would not come in the presence of the portly Miller, the lean but somehow impressive Craigie, and the grinning Beresford.

  “Afraid we had a spot of bother,” said Beresford.

  Williams snorted and snapped his fingers.

  “It’s a disgrace,” he said. “I’m surprised to find you here, Beresford—I could understand the police, but when a gentleman sinks to this level I——”

  Miller’s back went up, and he opened his lips.

  “Steady,” cautioned Beresford. “No fighting, sons. Listen, Williams. ...”

  He gave a brief résumé of the affairs of the night—the porch incident and the shooting of Tricker. Williams, a thin, lean-faced man with academician written all over him, let his face drop into lines of incredulous surprise. As Beresford finished, Williams looked at the red-faced Miller.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I withdraw my remarks unconditionally, gentlemen. And these—these outrages serve to explain the remarkable hoax I had played on me to-day. You see this?”

  The scholar flourished a buff-coloured envelope which he drew from his pocket. “The wire,” Beresford thought, and knew what was coming. “Yes,” he said aloud.

  “I received it this morning,” spluttered Williams—”a telegram purporting to come from Mieklejohn, the Oxford Mieklejohn, gentlemen. It asked me to attend a lecture at Trinity College this afternoon—you can read it for yourself——”

  “And there was no lecture,” murmured Gordon Craigie.

  “There was not!” snapped Williams, who had a habit of speaking in italics and exclamation marks when he was annoyed. “And Mieklejohn knew nothing about the wire! It was a senseless hoax, gentlemen, and I hope the police will do all they can to trace the perpetrators of it.”

  Beresford grunted.

  “They’ll do that,” he said. “But I wouldn’t call it senseless, Williams. It was intended to get you away from here this evening——”

  Williams widened his eyes, weak blue eyes hidden by big-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Bless my soul!” he said. “Of course—I didn’t think——”

  Beresford grinned to himself, and told himself that learning meant little compared with common sense. And then he stopped grinning. For the academician claimed that he hadn’t thought of that possibility; yet a few moments before he had suggested that the outrages served to explain the hoax!

  “Now, why,” Beresford demanded of himself, “did he lie?”

  * Redhead. By John Creasey.

  CHAPTER V

  THE STRANGE ILLNESS OF BOB LAVERING

  “BUT did he lie?” asked Craigie. “From the look of him, Tony, I’d say he was a harmless old soul who forgets one moment what he said the last. Do you know him well?”

  “He’s lived here for three years,” said Beresford, lighting a cigarette. “It was a funny thing to say, harmless old soul or not, but I know he’s a queer cuss. And it was a funny wire, too.”

  “How’d you mean?” asked Miller, eyeing not Beresford but a whisky-and-not-much-soda thoughtfully.

  The three men were in Beresford’s living-room, and for the first time since the arrival of the police at Auveley Street were able to talk freely. Hitherto, Doc Little, that giant of a man famous for his treatment of the foibles of London’s rich, had been fussing about the flat, ordering this and ordering that for the comfort and well-being of Tricker, who was conscious now and acutely aware of the fact that he was resting on Beresford’s big bed instead of his own truckle. Beresford, well pleased with the minor nature of Tricker’s injury, which Little predicted would be healed within a week, had told his pale-faced valet not to be chuckle-headed, and had outraged Sammivel by demanding Little to send a nurse for the rest of the night; Sam, said Beresford, wanted attention. While Little had been fussing, Miller had sent the police-party back to the Yard and the protesting Arrans packing, while a fingerprint expert was at that moment going through the still palpitating Williams’ rooms for the prints which were there in abundance. Nothing would be left to chance, but the three men in Beresford’s flat knew that the odds against catching the attackers (they assumed the plural) were heavy.

  Beresford pushed his hand through his hair.

  “I mean,” he said quietly, à propos the telegram, “that if I’d wanted to get Williams out of the way for twenty-four hours, I’d have sent him a telegram from the Scottish Universities, not from Oxford. Our intellectual might have been back here by seven or eight o’clock.”

  “I don’t know,” demurred Miller, who was a ponderous man both physically and mentally, but who knew his job from A to Z. “Put two dons together, and they’ll talk for hours. Whoever sent the wire probably relied on that.”

  Beresford looked dissatisfied.

  “Funny thing to take a chance if they reckoned they would have their shot at me late in the evening, and obviously they were prepared for that. What do you think, Gordon?”

  Craigie was smoking a Virginia 3 and wishing for his meerschaum. He wrinkled his nose.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you,” he said. “The telegram should have sent Williams a couple of hundred miles away, not fifty or sixty. But that’s incidental. It kept the man away while it was necessary. The puzzle is, Tony, why did they go for you? You haven’t been up to any tricks, have you?”

  “What, me?” Beresford looked a picture of outraged innocence. “You ought to know me better than that, old son.”

  “Might be someone with a grudge,” suggested Miller, who had worked several times with Beresford and Craigie, and knew a little of the operations carried out through Department Z.

  “Too elaborate,” said Beresford decisively. “If it’d been a knife in the back or a bullet out of the blue, I’d have said that someone who remembers the past well was trying to get me. But this thing’s been carefully worked out—and then there’s the bogus bobby to account for. No”—the big man sent a perfect smokering ceilingwards, watching it lose its formation in a grey haze—“no, it’s something new, sons, and something nasty, and somehow I don’t think it’ll be long before we know more about it.” He broke off suddenly. “That’s the front door,” he went on, as a piercing ringing sound shrilled through the room. “I’ll hop down.”

  The caller, however, was none other than Samuel Tricker’s nurse, a middle-aged matron who proved to be sharp-tongued, lynx-eyed and uncompromising in her attitude towards Tricker, who wanted to go to his own room.

  “Keep him under your thumb,” grinned Beresford, as he left the bedroom, “and don’t let him get saucy, nurse. Be good, Sammivel!”

  When the big man returned to the living-room, Miller was putting on his coat, a rejuvenated British Warm, still eyeing the whisky thoughtfully. A very thoughtful man was Horace Miller on things alcoholic. He was always asking himself whether he could carry just one more.

  Beresford, who had opened a fresh bottle of Shortt’s XX, thumbed the cork into the neck and handed the bottle to the Super.

  “Take it with you,” he said affably, “and make up your mind when you get to the office. Good night, Horace, and don’t forget to ring me about those fingerprints in t
he morning.”

  Miller grinned, making his rosy face more cherubic than ever, and bade them a gruff good night.

  As the door closed behind the policeman, Beresford looked inquiringly at his Chief.

  “Didn’t you say, earlier on, that you wanted to see me?”

  Craigie, still fidgeting and wishing for his meerschaum, nodded and accepted another Virginia 3.

  “Yes,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about Leopold Gorman.”

  Beresford opened his eyes.

  “Oh-ho! That man’s in the news to-night.”

  Craigie frowned.

  “I’m worried about him, Tony. He’s been over to Paris on some job or other, and I can’t find out what it is.”

  Beresford laughed suddenly.

  “So’s Bob Lavering,” he said. “Perhaps they’re both shaking a leg. Even the great can laugh and have their pleasures.”

  Craigie grimaced.

  “I asked Odell——”

  “The gallant Major?” asked Beresford.

  “Yes, drat him. He was staying at the Splendide and Gorman was next door to him. I asked Odell to keep his eyes and ears open, and he told me to-night—last night that is—that Gorman told him he was spending a couple of days and nights on the tiles.”

  Beresford chuckled again.

  “And Gulliver believed him. So we can take it conversely that whatever Gorman was doing, he wasn’t just having his fling.”

  “We can,” said Craigie grimly. “I knew that, anyhow. Gorman’s staging something big, but I can’t figure what it is.”

  “How did you get on to it in the first place?” asked Beresford.

  Craigie leaned back in his chair.

  “Nevillson, of the Ministry of Transport, told me that half a dozen big North Country road services have changed hands, but he didn’t know whose money was behind it. Nevillson wanted to find out——”

  “The Intelligence,” said Beresford, without much humour, “is going up in the world.”