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

by John Creasey

  One factor only had soothed Miller’s ruffled temper. There had been no criticism of his failure. So far as he and Scotland Yard were concerned, the Rensham business was now dead and buried. But with north-country obstinacy, he had disliked the way in which the job had been handled; he did not take kindly to the idea of one law for the rich and another for the poor.

  As he sat in his office and stared at Kenyon it burst upon Miller that although the Rensham affair had been taken from the public eye, the newspapers hushed, and Scotland Yard hampered, the Intelligence had still been doggedly working on it.

  ‘Well,’ he said, in a better humour. ‘I wish you joy of the job.’

  ‘Ever heard a whisper against Serle?’ Kenyon asked him.

  ‘Not a hint. In fact,’ he added, ruefully, ‘when I was told we were to watch him in case of accidents, I believed it.’

  ‘Why? Have there been any previous threats against…’

  ‘Don’t start imagining things,’ said Miller. ‘I believed it because it seemed genuine.’

  ‘Pity,’ murmured Kenyon, with undisguised irony. ‘Well—about the Arab. Have you a report?’

  ‘Yes.’ Miller handed a form across his desk. ‘He talked a bit.’

  Kenyon glanced through the particulars:

  Name: Ahmet AH Bin Fathi.

  Nationality: Arabian.

  Age: 37 years.

  Occupation: Rug and fine art salesman.

  Home Address: 43 Bovingdon Court, Glebe Road, S.W.

  Business Address: 3 Dancer Lane, Oxford Street, W.

  ‘It took us an hour to get even that much out of him,’ said Miller, yawning suddenly. ‘He made the usual protests that he was innocent of everything.’

  ‘And no mention of Serle.’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  Kenyon nodded reflectively. The report was useful, but its usefulness could easily be nullified.

  ‘We don’t want it known that he talked,’ he decided. ‘Give the story out to the Press that he’s unknown—unless there was anything in his pockets?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Miller. ‘And no name tags on his clothes.’

  ‘Fine. If you get the story put about properly, Serle will have no idea that we know the late Ahmet Ali’s business address.’

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ Miller promised.

  ‘Thanks. Now—where’s the body? Here, or…?’

  ‘Westland Hospital,’ said Miller. ‘Forbes is over there.’

  ‘What—Tiny?’ demanded the big man.

  ‘Yes.’ Miller yawned again. ‘Do you want me for anything else tonight?’

  ‘You can go back to bed when you’ve given me a note to Tiny,’ said Kenyon. ‘I haven’t seen him for ages.’

  Twenty minutes later, Kenyon was admitted to the morgue at the hospital. It was a cheerless place, and only two dim lights were burning. Beneath one of them two men were standing, bending over the horribly mutilated body of Ahmet Ali Bin Fathi.

  Kenyon fought against nausea as he approached the stone slab. In different circumstances he might have bandied words with Dr. Horatio Forbes, a small, neatly-dressed, pleasant-looking man with penetrating grey eyes, understandably nicknamed Tiny. He was a police-surgeon, and popular.

  He looked up at Kenyon.

  ‘Hallo, Jim. You in this?’

  ‘Might be,’ said Kenyon, non-committal.

  This is Dickson.’ Forbes indicated the other man: ‘House-surgeon.’

  ‘Autopsy?’ asked Kenyon, nodding.

  ‘Tidying up,’ said Forbes with a grimace. ‘Do you want a P.M.?’

  ‘Miller did say that it would probably have to be done, and I thought that now…’

  Forbes grunted, and talked with Dickson. Most of the conversation was Greek to Kenyon, but he gathered that they were discussing the wisdom of a post-mortem examination so soon after death. Forbes nodded suddenly.

  ‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘Er—can you identify him?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Kenyon.

  Freakishly, the accident had caused no damage to the Arab’s face. Kenyon tightened his lips and turned away. As he did so he caught sight of the man’s left hand lying limply on the bench.

  ‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ he asked the doctors, pointing to the fingers. ‘That black mark…’

  ‘I’d noticed that,’ said Forbes. ‘Maybe we’ll find the cause for it, but it’s certainly unusual.’

  The marks, almost black, were beneath the nails of each finger about a sixteenth of an inch from the top. At first glance it looked as if the man’s hand had been crushed in a door, so that blood-blisters had formed; but the marks were regular, and clearly defined. There was no lighter shade at the edges, and in shape they were a narrow crescent, very much like a new moon.

  Kenyon rounded the bench and looked at the other hand. The marks were there, too.

  He made for the door.

  ‘Just going to telephone,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long.’

  ‘All right,’ grunted Forbes.

  Kenyon was not sorry to leave the morgue. The air seemed clearer in the wide passage. He rooted for his cigarettes as he asked a porter for the nearest telephone.

  ‘In Dr. Dickson’s office,’ said the man.

  ‘May one smoke?’ asked Kenyon. He had a horror of breaking the regulations of hospitals, schools and churches; a horror which those who knew his cheerful disregard of police regulations found amusing.

  ‘In the office it’s all right, sir,’ said the porter. ‘Just along here.’

  Kenyon was led into a room through a white-painted door marked ‘Dr. Matthew Dickson’, and the porter slipped discreetly away as he picked up the telephone from a small desk.

  He found Horace Miller on the point of leaving the Yard; and he found Horace Miller in a bad temper.

  ‘If you wanted me,’ grumbled the policeman, ‘why the blazes didn’t you…’

  ‘This is very important,’ Kenyon soothed. ‘Just a special effort of memory. Did you notice Ahmet Ali’s hands?’

  Miller’s grumbles stopped.

  ‘Well… Nothing remarkable. Why?’

  ‘The hands,’ Kenyon prompted again. ‘You saw nothing on them—on the fingernails?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Miller. ‘In fact, there was nothing to see. I had to force his hands off the door of the car twice.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ murmured Kenyon. ‘Thanks very much.’

  He leaned back in Dr. Dickson’s chair, thoughtful. For five minutes he smoked, trying to recall a man whose fingers had been similar, in some way, to those of the dead Arab.

  The blackness, obviously, had come after death. Miller was a trained observer, and he would not have missed anything so obvious as those black crescents. But it was still possible that the shape had been there before death, though less noticeably.

  He pressed his fingers hard on the top of the desk. Where the flesh joined the nail there was a little white line, similar in shape to those on Ahmet Ali’s fingers; beneath the white lines the nails looked a deeper pink than usual. It would be possible for such pale-coloured ridges to be on a man’s fingertips without attracting attention.

  He squashed his cigarette into a convenient ash-tray, and went out of the office. As he did so Dr. Dickson hurried along the passage, and on the doctor’s face was an expression of alarm. It was not fear; it was not, in fact, very obvious. But Kenyon was trained in the observance of small things, and he knew that something had disturbed Dickson.

  The big man’s face revealed nothing but its usual amiability. ‘Been using your telephone,’ he explained. ‘How’s the job getting on?’

  ‘So-so,’ said Dickson, with a quick smile. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  As he spoke, he reached up to open the door. The handle was placed unusually high and for a moment Kenyon caught a glimpse of his hand, the fingers wide apart as they spread to grip the knob.

  Something very cold seemed to run down Kenyon’s spine. The crescent shapes were there, on Dicks
on’s hand. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt. They were pink instead of black, but they were unmistakable.

  ‘And that,’ he told himself, ‘is going to take some explaining.’

  It was possible that such a mark would manifest itself if a man was suffering from a chronic but not necessarily dangerous or infectious disease, a symptom similar to a coated tongue or lips that had a bluish colour. But….

  ‘No,’ Horatio Forbes was saying, three minutes later, ‘there’s no way I can account for those marks, Kenyon, unless it’s caused by a drug. I think it might well be. The man’s eaten away with some drug I can’t place. He wouldn’t have lasted another twelve months.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Kenyon, as coolly as he could manage, ‘that he’s a drug-addict?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t like it at all. I don’t recognise the reactions. It’s not cocaine, and it’s not arsenic, but it’s a combination…’

  ‘Cocaine and arsenic?’ Shock made Kenyon’s voice harsh. Forbes seemed to realise, suddenly, that the big man’s interest was more than casual.

  ‘Something that has similar effects,’ he enlarged. ‘I can’t say much, yet. Dickson’s gone to get some stuff to make a test. Will you wait, or shall I report to Miller in the morning?’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ said Kenyon, grimly.

  Just half an hour later, he left the hospital with Tiny Forbes. Both men were silent. Not until they had reached Kenyon’s Gresham Street flat did Forbes speak.

  ‘I’ve been handling drugs one way and another for twenty-five years, and I’ve never seen anything like that. Try and imagine it, Kenyon. A drug that induces the kind of craving that cocaine or opium does, with the effects of slow arsenical poisoning. It’s…’ The little man searched for a word, and his expression at that moment made Kenyon realise more than anything else the horror Forbes felt at the discovery. ‘It’s—devilish,’ muttered the other at last. He looked hard at Kenyon. ‘You’re not just doing this for Miller, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Kenyon. ‘Privately.’

  Forbes no doubt had his own opinion of that ‘privately’.

  ‘Well,’ he grunted, ‘if any friends of yours are interested in the stuff that poor devil’s been taking, you can…’

  Forbes stopped suddenly. There was an expression in the big man’s eyes which might have meant anything, but those eyes were as hard as agate.

  Dr. Horatio (Tiny) Forbes had a peculiar idea that he was sitting on the edge of a volcanic crater.

  8

  Death by Violence

  Kenyon poured out two stiff pegs of whisky. It was approaching four o’clock, he had been going hard all day, mentally if not physically, and he was tired. He noticed that the light in the living-room seemed a little duller than usual, but he took no notice of it; the eyes grew tired, and the effects of light and shade were different at seven o’clock from what they were at four.

  Forbes drank deeply. Kenyon grinned.

  ‘Thirsty?’ he said. ‘Well, help yourself.’

  ‘You’ve a particularly infantile sense of humour,’ complained Forbes.

  Kenyon nodded, and apologised.

  ‘And so,’ he went on seriously, ‘you think the black crescents are a result of the drug.’

  ‘I think it’s possible,’ said Forbes, cautiously. ‘I’ll be able to tell you more tomorrow, Kenyon. I’ve brought samples with me.’

  He touched his bag.

  ‘And Dickson’s got other samples at the hospital, eh?’

  ‘No,’ said Forbes. ‘He’s finished all he need do.’

  ‘You’re having the body removed?’

  ‘That’s up to Miller.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Kenyon lit a fresh cigarette. He was abominably tired; the yellow glare from the electric light seemed more pronounced than usual, and his eyes watered a little. ‘Nice of Dickson to lend you a hand. Seemed a pleasant chap.’

  ‘Think so?’ Tiny Forbes was non-committal.

  It occurred to Kenyon, suddenly and forcibly, that Forbes disliked the obliging house-surgeon at the hospital; it also occurred to him that there might be some definite reason for that hostility. Gazing innocently at the tip of his cigarette, he asked:

  ‘What’s Dickson done to annoy you?’

  ‘I’ve nothing actually against Dickson,’ Forbes said. ‘But he’s not a man I care for. Keeps to himself too much. At least, he has friends enough, but…’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me,’ hazarded Kenyon, very softly, ‘that Dickson numbers—shall we say “Orientals”, among his friends?’

  Forbes stared.

  ‘What are you doing? Setting up as a crystal-gazer?’

  ‘So he does,’ murmured Kenyon. His voice was still very soft, and there was a glint in his eyes. ‘We keep learning, Tiny.’

  ‘Must you call me Tiny?’ snapped Forbes.

  ‘Naughty, naughty!’ chided Kenyon. ‘How old is Dickson?’

  ‘About forty. My age.’ Forbes, too, was blinking a lot; his eyes were tired, and the smoke from his cigarette seemed to worry him more than usual. He leaned back in his armchair, his lids slowly closing. ‘I was at Guy’s with him. Even in those days he was the same. And he’s spent some time in Arabia.’

  ‘Any games?’

  ‘Very few. He plays chess, I believe…’

  ‘Chess?’ murmured Kenyon.

  He was thinking: If Dickson is connected with Serle and Ahmet Ali, it’s not through cricket. Then he decided it was too much of a coincidence to find a friend of Serle in the hospital. It was not as if Serle could have known what hospital the Arab was going to. He couldn’t have planted Dickson there just for the occasion.

  He rubbed his eyes, which felt increasingly prickly and sensitive. It was on the tip of his tongue to say goodnight, or to offer the police surgeon the use of the spare bedroom, when he glanced up at the electric lamp. There was something the matter…

  He stared harder. The lamp was filled with a sluggish-moving, pale yellow smoke, through which the filament was only just visible. Kenyon’s mind seemed to stop for a fraction of a second. Then he leapt out of his chair, bellowing at the top of his voice.

  ‘Stinger! Get out, Stinger, the back door! Can you hear?’

  As he bellowed, he rushed across the room and flung open the door. Bewildered, Dr. Horatio Forbes sprang to his feet. Kenyon jerked his thumb doorwards.

  ‘Get out, quick,’ he urged. Then louder: ‘Stinger, you…’

  ‘I’m going, sir.’ There was a note of weariness in the voice of the servant as it floated into the room, but the sound was all Kenyon wanted. Stinger was going out the back way.

  ‘What’s worrying you…?’ began Forbes, at the door.

  ‘The lamp,’ Kenyon said. ‘Take a look at the lamp.’

  Startled, Forbes obeyed. The bulb was swirling—or the smoke inside it created the impression that the bulb itself was actually moving—and the filament was visible one moment and hidden the next. The light had changed suddenly. The yellow glare was like that of twilight beneath a stormy, cloud-swept sky.

  ‘It’s a blessing that I’m on the top floor. Ah.’ Kenyon seemed to go very still, although he was still hurrying down the stairs, with Forbes a foot in front of him.

  Through the near silence of the night there came a slight rattle, an ominous crackling, like the noise of a brief fusillade of rifle-fire. A split-second later, the explosion came.

  It came with a tremendous roar, shattering through the quiet of the house and the street beyond. It was cavernous, echoing, devastating. The walls of the house shuddered, and the stairs seemed to give way beneath them. Forbes went flying downward, landing head-first. Kenyon’s feet went from under him, and he sat down, with a thud; on each stair he thudded, and with each thud he swore, but inside him there was a deep, lasting satisfaction.

  Forbes picked himself up, rubbing his head tenderly. From upstairs there came the sound of splintering glass, and from the ground-floor flat the cry of a frightened woman. Kenyon’s downstairs neigh
bour, a portly man, poked a night-capped head our of his door.

  ‘Did I—did I hear something?’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Kenyon, heavily. ‘I think so. Get some clothes on, Mr. Pengley, and warn your wife.’

  Pengley’s head withdrew from sight. Forbes said, absurdly: ‘It’s lucky you noticed it.’ Kenyon opened the street door as an elongated shadow of a helmet shone on the frosted glass panel, and a policeman demanded to know what was going on. And from the outside there came a sudden cry of ‘Fire!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jim Kenyon, just twelve hours later, ‘but I shall weep no tears and send no flowers for Ahmet Ali’s funeral. If ever a man deserved what he got…’

  ‘All this,’ suggested Toby Arran, ‘because he nearly caught you, Jim.’

  ‘You be quiet,’ said Kenyon.

  He was with the twins in the sitting-room of their Auveley Street flat. Since the explosion in Gresham Street he had slept well and eaten heartily. He looked, and was, physically fit. He looked, but was not, at peace with life.

  ‘I saw the fellow go into the flat,’ he growled. ‘Actually saw him go there, and thought he was just looking round. I expected to find my flat in a bit of a tangle, but that…’

  ‘You’ll learn,’ said Timothy, soothingly. ‘It comes to everybody when they’ve been in the game long enough. Just because Craigie’s been short-sighted enough to make you O.C….’

  Kenyon did the only thing possible: he ignored Tim.

  ‘It’s new and it’s clever,’ he said. ‘They must have a number of those electric lamps ready for emergency. No one normally looks twice at a lamp.’

  ‘As I was saying,’ drawled Timothy, ‘you’ll learn to look at everything.’

  ‘What was it filled with?’ demanded Toby.

  Kenyon shrugged. ‘Search me. A nitro-glycerine byproduct, I fancy. It’s probably in liquid form at the bottom of the bulb, and the heat of the filament eventually creates the explosion. If Serle’s other little playthings are on a level with that….’