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

by John Creasey

  ‘It could be done,’ Craigie admitted, and Kenyon knew that Craigie believed that to be so. For himself, Kenyon was almost afraid to accept such a possibility. The probable ramifications behind an organisation controlled by a dope-craze were tremendous; appalling.

  ‘Forbes was a clever man,’ said Craigie, ‘and a man who would realise what this meant. He’d be prepared to risk his own life in helping us. Did you notice anything strange about him last night?’

  ‘No,’ said Kenyon, bitterly, ‘he seemed in his usual form. A bit peppery. I was seeing and thinking Dickson. I didn’t see far enough to include Forbes as a possible addict. If I had, I might have…’

  ‘You couldn’t have helped Forbes,’ said Craigie, with quiet conviction. ‘I doubt whether you can help any man who’s been taking the stuff. Your job—our job—is to limit its range. It’s spreading, by the look of it, and spreading fast. The only man we know is helping to do this is Serle. So we’ve got to get Serle.’

  Kenyon nodded.

  ‘And there’s the cricket element in the job,’ he remarked. ‘That might mean two things, I suppose.’

  ‘Being?’ asked Craigie.

  ‘The unlikely one,’ said Kenyon, lighting a cigarette, ‘that Serle’s working some complicated system of smuggling his dope into England. And the probable one that he’s establishing agencies in different countries. Of course, it seems fantastic. Some of the men who’ve been with him, some of those marked off on the evening paper I took from him, are the best fellows in the world. I’ve known many of ‘em for years. They’re…’

  ‘Men like Forbes,’ Craigie supplied, quietly.

  ‘I suppose so. Once they’re used to the stuff they’ll do anything, agree to anything, to get further supplies.’ He stood up, suddenly, and smashed one clenched fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘My God!‘ he muttered. ‘It’s diabolical!’

  ‘Steady,’ murmured Craigie.

  ‘But don’t you see?’ cried Kenyon. ‘Any one of us might fall for it? We might go to a restaurant and find our food doctored. We might go to a pub and find our beer…’ he broke off and grinned, apologetically. ‘But this is no time to go off the deep end. Sorry. Any news from Knight?’

  There had been no news from Agent Seventeen from the time he had left Greylands.

  ‘What do you propose doing?’ Craigie asked.

  ‘I’m thinking of watching every cricketer who has played for Wyett during the season; I’m thinking of watching the players Serle marked off on that evening paper. I’m going to question Wyett and Denbigh Morse until they’ve sweated out all they know.’

  ‘It’ll take a lot of men,’ said Craigie. ‘More than we’ve got.’

  ‘There’s a police force.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Craigie, and his voice was strangely soft. ‘As you say, there is a police force. We’ll ask Fellowes to come over, right away.’

  Kenyon noticed the peculiarity of Craigie’s manner, but he said nothing.

  Sir William Fellowes was in the office within ten minutes. Fellowes, in fact, had shocked many of the sluggish spirits at the Yard and in other places by getting things done with amazing speed and thoroughness. In his work he was a hard-headed, hard-hearted, unhumorous automaton. His face, his mind, were set in rigid lines. The only apparent touch of human frailty about him was the fact that his right leg was stiff, so that he had to throw it forward as he walked.

  When Fellowes talked, however, a different man seemed to emerge. His voice was pleasant, his manner dry—and his humour, if at times caustic, was often kindly.

  He knew Kenyon well, but Craigie far better. And he listened now as Craigie—confiding in him without hesitation—sketched the story briefly. Fellowes was discretion personified, and was not above stretching a point past police regulations.

  ‘Now you know the whole situation,’ Craigie told him, as he finished. ‘We need all those people…’ he pointed to a list of first-class cricketers that Kenyon had prepared while waiting—’carefully watched, and we need daily reports on their progress. And if any of them try to leave the country, we want a temporary hold-up. Will you do it?’

  Fellowes said a strange thing.

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said.

  Kenyon looked down. There was something which Craigie knew and which Fellowes knew; or something they guessed. And they did not feel justified, then, in telling him.

  For a moment the big man’s eyes fell on Fellowes’ hand. Apprehension shot through him; for a moment he fancied that he saw those familiar, nightmare marks of the crescent. And then he laughed, for Fellowes’ hands were clear.

  That was the beginning of the nightmare.

  11

  Nightmare

  The seven days that followed Kenyon’s talk with Craigie and Fellowes were the worst he had ever experienced.

  The one thing that cheered him was that Mary Randall was still with the Chesters. Her father was in Paris; his letters, she told Kenyon, were cheerful and contained no cause for alarm. Mick Randall, tiring of Greylands, came to London to play for the Aqua Club—and at Aubrey Chester’s invitation, made his headquarters at the Regent’s Park house.

  Fear was ever present in Kenyon’s mind that the mark of the crescent would show on the fingers of his friends. He was haunted by the possibility, and it was a nightmare each time he visited the house, each time he looked, each time he kept his fears to himself, for he dared not talk of them.

  Kenyon knew, Miller knew, as well as Craigie and Fellowes. The Department Z agents were on the look out for the marks, but no one else had been told of them.

  That was the nightmare.

  The mark of the crescent was everywhere. In buses, trams, trains, in the streets, in shops, in private houses, those tell-tale marks were seen. Members of the police force, errand boys, dustmen, owners of exclusive shops in the West End, soldiers and sailors had them. Clerks and navvies had them. Friends of the Chesters, honest-to-God folk as Kenyon knew them, had the marks.

  It was nearly impossible to enter a shop without seeing one or more of the assistants with that curious pink crescent. Servants and patrons at the Éclat had them, and at the Carilon Club. Actors and actresses had the marks, as frequently as members of the stalls and hilarious fans in the gallery. There was no distinction between classes or parties. In every walk of life and every section of society, the mark of the crescent could be seen.

  The thing was haunting. Kenyon found himself looking at the hands of every man and woman he passed. Its creeping advance was as insidious as a plague.

  Forbes had said a lot. Other doctors, repeating the autopsies on the two dead men, had confirmed his words—although without Forbes’s underlying emphasis. The two men had been addicted to a drug that was comparatively unknown, but those medicos did not realise the far-reaching effects of it. Forbes had known its full significance, otherwise he would not have spoken as he had.

  The days went by, and nothing happened—beyond the regular reports from the various agents of the widespread influence of the marks. That was no proof, Craigie and Kenyon realised, that there was any actual growth: the reports could mean the thing was merely being noticed more. But the threat it contained was frightening. A dozen times a day Kenyon remembered Forbes’s words.

  ‘The man’s eaten away with poison. He wouldn’t have lasted another month… it’s not cocaine and it’s not arsenic, it’s a combination.’

  The police-surgeon had meant that it was a drug containing a mixture of various component parts of arsenic and cocaine.

  How was the stuff being administered? Was it in food, or in cigarettes? What was the most likely way of introducing it to men and women so far untainted by it? Tobacco was a convenient method; so was food and drink. And what kind of craving was it that had driven Ahmet Ali berserk, and eaten away Wyett’s willpower and intelligence?

  Kenyon shivered.

  It wasn’t like fighting against something that was known. It wasn’t like using guns and knowing the other side was using
them. It was fighting corruption in the dark. Anyone around him could be tainted; as it was, he estimated, at least one in ten of the population of London and the big towns certainly were. Four million addicts, in England alone….

  It was not long before he discovered that Wyett and Denbigh Morse were addicts—and marked with the crescent. But he failed to induce either of them to talk.

  Wyett told him that he was talking out of the back of his neck. The fiery colonel was still drinking more than usual, but managed to keep sober: ‘Imagination, my dear Kenyon, imagination. There’s nothing wrong with me, for instance, nothing. Drugs—pah!’

  His contempt for the very word seemed obvious; if he was acting, he was acting consummately.

  The Rev. Denbigh Morse, Mary’s favourite relative, was quietly sceptical. In neither case, of course, did Kenyon suggest that his men were victims; he introduced the subject baldly and asked whether they had noticed anything which might lend support to the theory that the drug-plague was rife.

  ‘I’ve met nothing at all to suggest it, Kenyon.’ The Rev. Denbigh took a pinch of snuff and sneezed. ‘Tcha! Nothing at all. We’re all behaving quite normally down here. What—er—makes you think otherwise?’

  Kenyon dodged the question, and returned to London after his visit. The men seemed to know nothing, yet Mary had heard Wyett discussing the thing with Arnold Serle.

  So the Colonel had been lying.

  Arnold Serle seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  The Persian Sales establishment continued to thrive. It had many clients, some of whom were drug-marked, others who were free. Wally Davidson and Bob Curtis were tiring of their watch, but admitted that every time they were tempted to call it a waste of time they looked at the next man’s fingers. Very often—too often—they found the mark.

  The light-hearted humour of those two giants faded. The facetious back-biting of the Arrans almost ceased. Among the agents of Department Z there was a tension that had never been reached before. All of them realised that the drug-plague was in their midst. None of them knew how, or why, but all of them sensed the danger.

  They felt as if they were in the grip of a nightmare—and they did not know what would happen when they woke from it.

  12

  Politicians—and a Road Chase

  On the eighth day after the discussion in Department Z, three men sat in a small room in a house in Park Lane.

  The owner of the house, a distinguished statesman with a justifiable pride in his achievements, sat next to an equally prominent politician—whose efforts, mostly frustrated, had at least been sincere. Until that time the two men, friends in private, had been bitter antagonists on the political platform. They were both heralded as coming leaders of their parties. And they were young, in politics: both aged between fifty-five and sixty.

  One was Sir Joseph Scanling, Bart.: the other, Mr. Gowsby-Loam. They were men of medium height, with a similarity of feature, greying hair, and slightly pompous bearing.

  They were sitting opposite a fat man with a red face and penetrating brown eyes. And they were listening to him.

  ‘The time is very near,’ said Arnold Serle, quietly and confidently, ‘when we shall be able to make our first public move. Meanwhile I am asked to warn you of the necessity of having the party machine ready at any moment. Our campaign will be sudden and swift, and it might be necessary to start it at very short notice.’

  Serle smiled, pleasantly.

  ‘Quite understood, quite understood,’ rumbled Gowsby-Loam, taking off his pince-nez and polishing them vigorously. ‘We shall be ready, Serle; we shall be ready. I prophesy a sweeping triumph at…’

  ‘But we can’t just kick the present Government out,’ Sir Joseph Scanling put in thoughtfully. He was one of those rare politicians with a sense of humour. ‘And I don’t anticipate a General Election before November. Do you, Gowsby-Loam?’

  ‘You never know,’ said the other, sententiously.

  There was a gleam in Scanling’s eyes. ‘No,’ he admitted, looking at Serle. ‘I’ve no idea, of course, what our friend has up his sleeve.’

  Serle smiled, deprecatingly.

  ‘The matter is not in my hands, gentlemen. I am merely looking after some of the—er—propaganda.’

  ‘For whom?’ asked Scanling, casually.

  Serle smiled again.

  ‘All in good time,’ he said, suavely, ‘all in good time, Sir Joseph.’

  Scanling shrugged good-humouredly. He was used to subterfuge and mystery, but he was intrigued by Arnold Serle, and he was curious about the identity of the man behind the cricketer.

  His interest had started nearly four years before. He hardly knew why, and occasionally he was inclined to wonder whether he was being wise. But he did know that Arnold Serle had persuaded him very easily that power and office would reward him for his support. Sir Joseph was very eager to secure power and office; indeed, it would be the fulfilment of his life’s ambition. So he had helped inaugurate the New Age Party, which professed to be non-political and non-sectarian….

  Three years before, it had been composed chiefly of the youth of both sexes. At first, it had been largely scoffed at by the stalwarts of the old order. The Junior Imperialists, the Young Socialists, the British Union of Fascists and the League of Young Liberals alike had regarded it as a joke. What was an organisation without politics?

  Nothing. At first.

  But the New Age Party had flourished. Its branches grew strong numerically, and its members were more constant and more sincere. There was no hysteria, no fanaticism. The object of the Party was pleasure rather than politics—which accounted, said the politicians, for its popularity. But it meant, said the politicians, that the enthusiasm would soon die; solid worth would prove itself.

  In the first two years of the Party’s life, a surprising number of secessions took place from the older political camps. Youth certainly seemed more interested in its amusements than in its country’s future. No matter how the politicians scoffed—and, later, pleaded—the ranks of their junior associations steadily thinned. Claims that this was new evidence of the decadence of youth fell on deaf ears. The New Age Party went from strength to strength.

  In the third year of its existence, a subtle change was noticed in its make-up. Its members were not only youths. Sports still flourished, but there was a strong influx of family members. It was, people who thought about it opined, like a masonic lodge without the secrecy.

  Pleasure still apparently remained its chief object. It grew, slowly enough, into a kind of social organisation, with branches in the churches and chapels—Catholic, Church of England and Nonconformist alike.

  There was one remarkable thing, and one which James Kenyon and Gordon Craigie saw, eventually, as significant. Of the older members of the New Age Party, few came from the political camps. Men and women who hitherto had interested themselves only in their homes and their gardens found satisfaction in the various activities of the New Age.

  The growth was strong and the membership considerable, but very little was heard of the movement itself. It presented a phenomenon in that it thrived without publicity. The political parties blared their creeds in various Press organs, by poster campaigns and at loudly-conducted public meetings. But the New Age Party remained in the background, a kind of family group united throughout the length and breadth of the land by the Creed of Pleasure. It opposed no other party, took part in no elections, and comforted those politicians who had viewed with alarm the success of its youth organization.

  Through those years, Sir Joseph Scanling and Mr. Gowsby-Loam had watched its progress with interest amounting, in the case of Gowsby-Loam, to excitement. It was all he could do to repress his feelings; he wanted to shout his knowledge from the house-tops. But Serle, who had interested Scanling as well as Gowsby-Loam, dissuaded him. It was obvious, said Serle, that the party was so strong that once it had become politically minded, it could seriously challenge the established parties—at
which time Gowsby-Loam would be invaluable.

  So would Scanling. Both men possessed the power to move multitudes to tears or laughter. They were just the men needed to launch the New Age Party into the holocaust of party strife. Meanwhile, they retained most of their own political friends.

  On the occasion of the meeting in Park Lane, there had been a certain coolness. Scanling had learned that Serle was wanted by the police. He had challenged Serle, who had convinced him that he was suffering from a persecution inspired by political parties.

  The suggestion was absurd; it would have been absurd if the other parties had known of the significance of the New Age, but they didn’t. And yet, despite the absurdity, Scanling was persuaded.

  He looked down at his fingers as he heard Serle speaking again, and absently he traced the little pink crescent beneath the nail of his forefinger. The pink mark fascinated him. It had been there for a long time, and he sometimes forgot it was there, although he knew that the same kind of marks were on Gowsby-Loam’s square-tipped fingers.

  ‘You understand,’ said Serle, quietly, ‘that you will probably be called upon to make three or four speeches a day during the campaign. We have other speakers, but you, if I may say so…’ He smiled pleasantly, and Gowsby-Loam preened himself: ‘are our stars. And, gentlemen—I hope you will appreciate that it will not be discreet to mention my—er—call, today. As Sir Joseph pointed out, I’m not as popular as I might be.’

  Scanling returned his smile. He felt very good-humoured, very pleased with life. So, by the look of him, did Gowsby-Loam.

  Serle shook hands with both, and left the house.

  A closed limousine was waiting for him, and from the front door to the car itself there was a distance of some twelve feet, a fact which would give him a distance, Serle considered, short enough for him to pass through unrecognised. In spite of the clammy heat of the August day he was wearing a mackintosh, and he turned the collar up around his chin.