The Phantom

by Jack Murray

  -

  Three men approached the Rolls Royce as it sat on Waterloo Road. A rap on the window and then the rear passenger door opened as well as the passenger door at the front. Two rough looking men and one dressed in a suit climbed in to join the Ryan brothers and Alfred. Ben Ryan quickly reached inside his pocket for his gun.

  ‘Don’t,’ warned the man in the suit reaching towards Ryan’s arm and putting it in a vice-like grip. ‘My name is Wag McDonald. I presume you know me.’

  The young policeman moved his arm away from his pocket and nodded, ‘Yes. What’s the game here?’

  ‘Look, this isn’t anything to do with us. Wal and me, we run some bookies, fine. You know, we know, punters are safe, everyone’s happy. We don’t kidnap kids, understand?’

  ‘Fine, I understand,’ said Ryan, ‘But someone has.’

  ‘Yeah right. We think we know who it is and where he’s taken the kid. Who’s this by the way?’ asked McDonald, nodding towards Joe Ryan.

  ‘My brother, Joe. The little boy’s father.’

  Joe Ryan spoke up, ‘We have to hurry. My boy needs medicine, he has asthma.’

  McDonald nodded, recognising the urgency. He gave Alfred an address and the car moved off along the road, in the direction of Southwark.

  ‘Nice car you have here,’ said McDonald, looking around the inside of the rolls. ‘Who says crime doesn’t pay?’

  Ryan ignored McDonald’s comment and asked, ‘So who has the boy?’

  McDonald looked at Ryan and replied, Have you heard of Johnny Mac?’

  ‘The name is familiar but don’t know him,’ responded Ryan. ‘What’s his real name?’

  ‘McGuffin. John McGuffin,’ said McDonald, noticing Alfred looking at him in the mirror.

  Chapter 32

  Johnny Mac stared at the telephone. There’d still been no contact. This was not good. In fact, this was a problem. His senses were tingling and the tingle they gave was bugger, bugger, bugger. Rationally, there was no reason to suppose that the girl had the diamonds, although it sure as hell looked that way. In addition, it was possible that she was still out of contact with lover-boy. All of this was possible, but it did little for the big Ulsterman’s peace of mind. He wanted the diamonds, he wanted rid of the little tyke and he wanted all of this to happen immediately.

  None of this was helped by the increasingly unstable Rusk. A few hours spent with the, admittedly, difficult child seemed to have reduced the hard man to a shadow of his former self. Gone was the hoodlum who could intimidate factory workers, women and old men. In his place was an erratic, vacillating cretin who could also break arms. Not a dream combination for a babysitter, reflected Johnny Mac.

  In truth he was spending more time down here to take refuge from the continuous whine of the child. Then he had a brainstorm.

  Food.

  Children liked food, he seemed to remember, at least if he was anything to go by. His experience of children since that unhappy time had been deliberately kept to a minimum, both out of personal choice as well as the desire of the many parents who used to rush their children indoors when he was around.

  He found some milk used for making tea and rich tea biscuits. This was bound to be a success. What child would refuse milk and biscuits? To Rusk, he would appear as nothing less than Santa Claus.

  Mounting the stairs three at a time, courtesy of a six foot stride, he arrived at the top floor as quickly as carrying a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits would permit. Inside the room, the birds flew away as soon as he entered.

  He called out into the gloom, ‘Rusk?’

  No answer.

  ‘Rusk, where the hell are you?’ shouted Johnny Mac walking forward. The sofa was empty. There was no sign of Rusk or the boy. To his right he heard the sound of cooing. ‘Damn birds.’

  Then he heard the sound of a laughter then a child’s coughing. He set the glass and plate down and walked towards the sound of it. It was coming from the other end of the long room. His view was obscured by wooden support pillars.

  And then he saw it. Or him to be precise. The little boy had either crawled or walked towards the open window at the other side of the room. There was no sign of Rusk. The child was standing on a wooden chair looking out of the window. No, correction. The devil child was trying to climb out the window. Johnny Mac’s heart stopped for a moment before he shouted, ‘Stop!’

  At one year of age, young Ben’s vocabulary was still some way short of Shakespeare’s. An Ulsterman shouting at him to stop climbing immediately made as much sense as the pigeons cooing nearby. Moments later, after having successfully opened the window, baby Ben found himself being lifted bodily from this fun activity and carried back into the other room.

  Young Ben Ryan wasn’t going to take this kind of treatment without protest. He remonstrated in the only way he could: a combination of tears, shouting and, fairly effective, kicking. Tempting as it was to throw the little monster out the window, Johnny Mac kept his mind focused on the prize. However, the appeal of the prize in question was beginning to dim with every howl from the hateful child. In addition, and more worryingly, he had a strong feeling that his getting hold of the diamonds was becoming more and more unlikely.

  Now a new problem had presented itself, where was Rusk? It was criminally stupid to leave the child on its own, even if he did need to answer the call of nature. Johnny Mac planted the crying child back on the seat and showed him the milk and biscuits. This heralded hurricane-force howling from the toddler.

  Johnny Mac was officially at his wit’s end, which in truth wasn’t the longest of journeys. The end of his tether, a similarly limited voyage, had also been reached and he shouted back at the child in language more traditionally associated with working men’s clubs in Belfast than child care.

  Incredibly the child stopped crying immediately. Both child and adult were shocked by the intensity of Johnny Mac’s incandescent impotence. Using the window of silence, Johnny Mac shoved the glass of milk towards the child’s mouth in the hope that it would drink. He tipped the glass towards Ben’s mouth and, at last, the child began to drink the milk greedily.

  ‘There,’ said the Ulsterman, ‘what was all that crying about?’

  Silence.

  He, Johnny Mac, had mastered the art of parenting. Feed the child. Show it who is boss. It really was that simple.

  Or so he thought.

  And then two things happened that undermined his, recently obtained, sense of achievement. Far from solving the problem of baby Ben’s misery, the milk only served to hasten a further fit of coughing. All of a sudden the baby looked as if its head was going to explode such was the intensity of the red and, of more concern, the seeming asphyxiation. The child was unable to breathe, and panic had set in, for Johnny Mac also.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ screamed Johnny Mac, lifting the child up in the air and patting its back. As he did this the coughing seemed to ease and he held the child up in front of him to get a better look at his handy work. This coincided with Ben choosing this moment to expel the contents of his stomach with the force of a bullet into the poor giant’s face.

  Momentarily blinded, Johnny Mac staggered towards a small hatch which opened into a chute leading down to the factory floor. Still holding the child he wiped his face with his right bicep. Eyesight restored, he heard a noise from the corridor. He held his breath. So did Ben. Then the door to the room flew open. Johnny Mac was confronted by a sight that was certainly not Rusk, nor any more welcome.

  -

  The prison was relatively close to the factory. No more than a couple of miles. Traffic was light ,and they made good time. As they drove down the road leading to the factory, Kit looked around him at the desolate buildings either side of the road.

  ‘Nice area,’ he commented.

  A few toughs looked at the police car speeding past and made obscene gestures.

  ‘Nice people,’ replied Jellicoe.

  Kit smiled and then he saw it up ahead.

&nb
sp; ‘I think we’ve arrived.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Jellicoe.

  ‘I can see my Rolls,’ pointed out Kit.

  Not quite the answer Jellicoe was used to in crime cases but it, at least, meant they were closer to their quarry. The police cars pulled over and the men streamed from the two cars through the factory gates, much to the confusion of the workers sitting outside taking a fag break. One or two looked at the sight of the police nervously before realising that they were not of interest. One of the policemen came limping towards them. As detectives went, he looked a bit better dressed. His voice, when he spoke to them, was certainly not typical of a rozzer.

  ‘Hello gentlemen. Would any of you be so kind as to take me to Johnny?’ The man held out a few five pound notes. The three men leapt to their feet in moment.

  -

  The arrival at the factory had presented Alfred with a dilemma. He wasn’t sure if he was enjoying the experience of chasing down a notorious criminal. He unquestionably wasn’t enjoying chauffeuring, what sounded like London gang members, in pursuit of said criminal.

  At the same time, he was excited. Nervous, yes, but excited also. Perhaps he could use this in his art. When the crunch came at the factory gates, taking his life and future in his hands, he followed the passengers into the factory. They split up into groups. The Ryan brothers went to the offices at the side of the factory floor. The gang members chose, instead, to head upstairs. And here was the dilemma. To go with the brothers or with the hoodlums?

  The brothers both looked well able to handle themselves, but Alfred’s decision was almost instantaneous. He followed the gang members, at a safe distance. By the time he arrived, they would hopefully have matters in hand. More practically, Alfred was not able to keep up with them.

  Wag McDonald led his men through a door at the back wall of the factory floor. When Alfred went through the same door he realised it was a stairwell leading up several flights. This made him pause to think. The stairs were wooden and appeared to be far from safe and it looked a long way up for someone not in the peak of condition, which Alfred would have been the first to concede he was not.

  The other men were already two flights up when Alfred, with no little amount of internal grumbling, began to follow them up at a more leisurely clip. He was two flights up when he heard the shouting. He looked down, which was mistake. For it was at this moment, he realised he suffered from vertigo. Looking up it dawned on him that there was another couple of flights to go. A glance back down decided him. Staying close to the wall, he started his descent.

  It was with something approaching ecstasy that Alfred reached terra firma once more. He pushed the door he had originally entered through and realised he may have jumped out of the frying pan into a stampede.

  -

  ‘His office is over here,’ said Joe Ryan sprinting through the factory.

  Ben Ryan, weighed down by his heavy overcoat, struggled to keep up. Up ahead he saw Joe burst through a door. He was with him moments later, inside an empty office. Fear gripped Joe Ryan. Then a thought struck him.

  ‘Upstairs. I haven’t been up there but there’s a big space on the top floor of the building that’s not used.’

  Both men rushed out of the office. They found Jellicoe and Bulstrode accompanied by several constables arriving the in the corridor outside the office.

  ‘We think he’s on the top floor,’ said Ryan to Jellicoe.

  Jellicoe nodded and said, ‘Which way?’

  Ben Ryan turned to his brother.

  ‘There are two stairwells,’ said Joe Ryan pointing to a door at the end of the corridor, ‘this one and one on the back wall of the factory floor.’

  Jellicoe turned to Bulstrode, ‘Go with Ryan here to the other stairwell. Ben you come with me.’ The two men and a constable immediately ran to the end of the corridor. Ryan, meanwhile, led Bulstrode and another constable back out to the factory floor.

  Joe Ryan rushed past confused factory workers towards the back wall, near to the packing section of the factory where once he had stood with Abbott. The sound of the machines was, as ever, close to deafening and he had to shout to make himself heard.

  ‘This way,’ said Ryan pointing to a door at the end of the factory floor. As they sprinted towards the door, it burst open. The portly chauffeur appeared. He looked out of breath and then his red face seemed to turn white in the blink of an eye.

  Then Ryan saw why. He sprinted forward. Wellbeloved and Bulstrode followed. At a discreet distance.

  -

  Wag McDonald burst through the door followed by his two men, Dan ‘haymaker’ Harris, a former middleweight boxer whose ranking had never reached the dizzy heights of the top ten, and Chris ‘Crazy Bastard’ Christie a man who had spent his life fighting anyone who laughed at his name, which he was, oddly, proud of. How often in his life had the words, ‘Chris Christie, what kind of a stupid, f___’ resulted in a swinging left hook that usually started from somewhere around Alaska?

  Johnny Mac looked, in shock, at the appearance of McDonald. Meanwhile, McDonald was equally shocked at Johnny Mac’s appearance. His face was dripping with, what looked like, an unpleasant cocktail of white glue and something green which McDonald really didn’t want to know more about. Then McDonald glanced down at Johnny Mac’s arms and saw the toddler.

  Perhaps the effort expended in forcing the contents of his stomach so prodigiously over the Ulsterman had exhausted the poor child or it was just simple curiosity. But for the first time that morning, seemingly, he had stopped crying and was dividing his attention between Johnny Mac and the new arrivals.

  Time was on the point of standing still when young Ben did something completely unexpected. He began to laugh. Wag McDonald, who had been about to request the child be handed over looked at the youngster in utter confusion.

  This was nothing compared to Johnny Mac’s reaction. He glared at the child which only provoked further howls of mirth. Perhaps it was an appreciation of his handy work on the features of the big Ulsterman or the excavation of his stomach, but something had clearly done wonders for the mood of young Ben.

  Johnny Mac walked backwards towards the hatch. His face and eyes, at least the parts that were visible under the dripping contents that formerly occupied the child’s stomach, displayed signs of mania.

  ‘Give me the child Johnny. You don’t want to do this,’ said McDonald fearfully, when he, at last, found his voice.

  Harris and Christie fanned out either side of McDonald. Each tensed their muscles, ready to spring forward if Johnny Mac did anything.

  And he did.

  All the while Johnny Mac had, either through instinct or, well, instinct, been manoeuvring himself closer to the hatch that led to the laundry. Now, standing directly in front of it, he reached a decision.

  ‘Catch,’ he shouted, and hurled the child through the air, in the direction of McDonald. Years spent playing goalkeeper on the streets of Lambeth meant McDonald’s reaction was as quick as it was agile. He leapt forward and caught the delighted youngster, who was enjoying this new game immensely, in mid-air, a foot from the ground and serious injury.

  Harris and Christie rushed Johnny Mac, but he disappeared backwards and down the chute.

  Harris looked in. It was an uninviting black. He turned to the other two men and said quite accurately, ‘He’s disappeared.’

  -

  The conversation with the three men accompanying Kit was convivial. None of the men particularly liked the Ulsterman and the prospect of a fiver each turned vague uneasiness in the big man’s presence into active antipathy. They walked at good pace through the factory floor, but they seemed to understand intuitively that walking too fast would not be possible for the gentlemen with a pronounced limp and a stiff wooden walking cane.

  ‘Do you see the door over there, sir?’ said one of the men to Kit.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve seen Johnny go up there a few times this morning and Rusk also.’


  ‘Rusk.’

  ‘Johnny’s right hand man.’

  ‘They’re both there now you think?’

  Another man piped up, ‘Not Rusk. He left twenty minutes ago out the factory gates. Didn’t see him return.’

  Kit nodded and put held out three crisp five pound notes, to the men, who grabbed them hastily.

  ‘Thank you gentlemen

  As he said this there was a strange sound emanating from a nearby hatch. And then a crash. Kit looked at the three men who, almost as one, shrugged, clearly mystified by the sound. The three men approached the hatch. Someone was inside trying to get out. The banging increased in intensity until finally the door burst of its hinge.

  Out stepped one of the tallest and meanest men Kit had ever seen. To his side, Kit was aware of his three companions beating a rapid retreat. The man meanwhile, still unaware of Kit’s presence, patted himself down and tried to stretch the pain in shoulders and back away. The tumble down the chute had been at the cost of several bruises and, what felt like, a cracked rib.

  Kit sensed immediately he was looking at Johnny Mac. There was no sign of the child. Finally the hulking hoodlum looked up and perceived a tall, well dressed gentleman looking at him. The man smiled spoke casually.

  ‘I presume I’m addressing Johnny Mac. May I ask what you’ve done with the child?’ Johnny Mac watched as the man calmly removing his gloves, placing them in his pockets, before looking him directly in the eye.

  The man, unusually, did not seem afraid. In fact, there was a hint of malice in the eye, if Johnny Mac read him correctly. There seemed little point in trying to intimidate him. In fact, there was probably not much time to do so, anyway. Johnny Mac recognised he needed to make a swift exit. These thoughts flew through his mind in a split second. His reaction to them was immediate.

  Years of boxing at school and then university, as well as a painful lesson handed out by the great lightweight boxer, Jem Driscoll meant that Kit easily sidestepped the first clubbing right hand, aimed by the Johnny Mac, at his temple. The punch had upset the balance of the Ulsterman which Kit took full advantage of by smacking him with his cane a stinging slash across his cheek.