Ring of Terror

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘In that house in Sidney Street?’

  ‘Right. We pushed two vanloads of men into the street to block it off. After that, things seemed to get stuck. They wouldn’t come out. We couldn’t get in.’

  ‘Couldn’t?’

  ‘One narrow doorway. Staircase with a turn in it. Man waiting behind the bend with a gun. Would have been an easy way to commit suicide. Not surprisingly, after what happened at that jeweller’s shop, no volunteers. So they called out the Army. Scots Guards from the Tower. After that it was a game of ping- pong. Both sides shooting at each other. Two against two hundred. They kept it up for hours. And it was first blood to them. They put a bullet into Sergeant Leeson. You remember Ben? Tall fellow with a squint.’

  ‘Yes, I remember Ben. Was he killed?’

  ‘Next door to it. Had to be got to hospital. The trouble was he was stuck in a doorway opposite number 100. They got him out at the back, ran a ladder up and hoisted him on to the roof of one of the brewery outhouses. Our one and only Fred was helping him up and got stuck on the roof. He was lying in the gutter with the bullets parting his hair, and a rumour got into the papers that he’d had it.’

  ‘But he hadn’t?’

  ‘The old weasel? Not him. Ripped some of the roof tiles up and dropped through the hole.’

  ‘Good for Fred.’

  ‘He came out of it all right. He was about the only one who did. The two Russians copped out. Shot or fried. Not sure which. All the same, not a good result for the home side. The buzz is, Josh has been sent for by the Commissioner. He’s probably getting his balls chewed off right now.’

  Luke said, ‘Good show.’ Joe returned to the pie.

  Winston Churchill looked with satisfaction at the arrangement of the table: sufficiently formal to be intimidating; sufficiently informal to allow for a certain latitude in the proceedings if that seemed called for.

  He was flanked, on his right, by Haldane Parker, in charge of the Home Office Aliens Department and on his left by Vernon Kell, head of the newly created Home Security Section MO5. Aligned opposite him were the heads of the uniformed and the CID sections of the two divisions concerned - Superintendent Stark and DDI Morgan of the City Police; Superintendent Joscelyne and DDI Wensley of ‘H’ Division.

  Neither of Churchill’s supporters was looking entirely comfortable. Vernon Kell was thinking that the Home Secretary looked like a plump schoolboy who finds himself, in the absence of the master, in charge of the class and is enjoying himself. Haldane Parker, a long-established senior civil servant, thought the meeting was irregular and unnecessary. It would achieve nothing that could not have been better achieved by a memorandum in quintuplicate, with one copy to the Prime Minister, as ex officio head of national security, and the other four copies planted where they would be best placed to needle the police.

  Churchill, though exuding his normal bouncing self-confidence, was not, be the truth told, entirely comfortable either. As Home Secretary, he found himself forced to apply the Aliens Act. When in Opposition, he had voted against it and had, on one occasion, succeeded in talking it out.

  A less confident man might have found this embarrassing. Being an experienced politician, he rode over the difficulties with the ease of a practised horseman, taking the jumps as they came.

  He addressed the four policemen in front of him as though they had been a hostile political audience.

  ‘What I said at the time I saw now. Shut out the alien – if diseased – always. If immoral, as soon as you find out. If criminal, after you have convicted him. But do not shut out people merely because they are poor. And do not throw upon police and Customs House officials duties which they are unable properly to discharge.’

  His audience had all read this glib stuff, which had been widely reported in the press, and they were well able to see the weakness in it. Sensing unfriendly reaction he adopted the normal tactics of a politician in a corner. He went over to the attack.

  ‘I have studied the reports of the Houndsditch jewel robbery. I found them in some respects incomplete, but nothing can alter one astounding, inexplicable fact. A terrorist, mortally wounded, as it now appears, was supported by two other terrorists from Houndsditch to Grove Street, where he finally lay down to die. A distance, gentlemen, of more than half a mile, through the streets of London, without a single policeman taking any notice of them. In the light of this extraordinary episode, you will forgive me if I speak plainly. Nothing which I may have said at any other time is to be interpreted as meaning that the police can relax or rest on the somewhat tarnished laurels they may have gathered from the battle of Sidney Street. We must do better. A lot better. And the first thing is this. Any man with a record of violence in his own country must be watched and put under restraint before and not after he has used guns or explosives. Is that clear, gentlemen?’

  He interpreted four sombre nods to mean agreement and added, in a more conciliatory tone of voice, ‘If we work together, government and police, I am sure we can do it.’

  When the meeting broke up, Vernon Kell collected the two CID men and took them to his own office. As soon as the door was shut Morgan, who had a Welsh temper, exploded. He said to Kell, ‘I gather you’re in Intelligence. Right? And intelligent too, no doubt. Then would you mind telling me how the bloody hell we’re expected to know – by divination, I suppose – that an immigrant who turns up without papers and probably using one of several alternative names, had a record of violence in his own country? Are we supposed to find this record tattooed on his bottom?’

  Wensley grunted agreement.

  ‘All right,’ said Kell. ‘Don’t take it out on me. You’ve been listening to a politician washing his own neck. They all do it. It’s a form of catharsis. Now, let’s consider practicalities. If we can set up some form of liaison between the Home Office and the police, we might be able to tackle the job.’

  Wensley said, ‘What had you in mind?’

  ‘Just at the moment we’re on reasonably good terms with the Foreign Office. A matter of personalities. They could be helpful. As you know, they have so-called military attaches – a polite name for spies – in most of the important countries, including, of course, Russia. They could alert us if any particularly notorious bad hat had slipped out of the country and was heading for England.’

  Morgan said, ‘I’d have thought that if he was all that notorious, his own Secret Police would have stopped him.’

  ‘Yes and no. Sometimes they might stop them. Sometimes they might even send them.’

  The heads of both policemen jerked up. The idea was clearly new to them and disconcerting.

  ‘Why would they do that?’ said Wensley.

  ‘To get them off their hands,’ suggested Morgan. ‘Sound tactics.’

  ‘There is another possibility. I’m working on the matter now. I don’t want to give you theories. Let’s stick to facts. And one deplorable fact is that MO5, being new, is laughably short staffed. I’d hardly be exaggerating if I told you that it started with me and an office boy. So I’ve been poaching. From the Home Office and the Foreign Office. And I’ve picked up some good men. One from the Home Office in particular called Hubert Daines. Now, if either of you happened to have a promising man who could be put in direct touch with Daines, we might be able to organise a useful liaison.’

  Morgan looked doubtful. He said, ‘I’ve got a lot of good policemen, but I don’t see any of them as Intelligence agents.’

  Wensley opened his mouth and shut it again as though to repress something he had been going to say. Kell swivelled round to look at him. ‘Come on, Fred,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it.’

  ‘Well, as it happens, there is one youngster in my Force who’s got what you might call qualifications. He started life as a gamekeeper.’

  ‘Excellent training for all fields of crime.’

  ‘And somehow he’s managed to pick up good French and Russian.’

  ‘Couldn’t be better. So what’s the drawback?’

&nbs
p; ‘The drawback is that he’s young and inexperienced. A year and a bit in uniform in a quiet division and less than two years with me. If he tangles with the sort of men you’ve been talking about, he’ll be out of his class and heading for trouble.’

  ‘I appreciate that. But I’m not asking him to tangle with them. Just to observe them and their friends and contacts. There are plenty of Russians who don’t carry a bomb in each pocket and a knife up their sleeve. Some of them will surely talk to him. Particularly the girls, if he’s young and personable.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s interested in girls. Though they might be interested in him.’

  ‘Girls are like cats,’ said Morgan. ‘Shoo them away and they come climbing back on to your lap.’

  ‘Speaking from experience, Dai?’ said Wensley.

  ‘Myself, I’m a happily married man. I was just giving you the fruits of my observation.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kell. ‘That’s settled. Send your accomplished young linguist along. And since we don’t want to mark him out publicly he’d better come by the back door. He goes in through the India Office and there’s a subway under King Charles Street, so he needn’t show up in the open at all. I’ll give him a pass for both buildings. And impress on him, Fred, that we’re looking for observation, not action. He isn’t a player. He’s a spectator, on the side lines.’

  ‘Always supposing he’ll stay there,’ said Wensley gloomily.

  ‘When I was told,’ said Luke, ‘that I had to co-operate with a Foreign Office official, I feared the worst.’

  Daines said, ‘I know. Morning dress, pompous delivery, developing stomach.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘And you were correspondingly relieved when you discovered that it was a man you had last seen with his clothes in tatters and his face painted yellow.’

  Both men laughed.

  Daines said, ‘If we’re going to work together I shall have to start by giving you my personal interpretation of what happened at Houndsditch and Sidney Street last month. It isn’t the popular view. Far from it.’

  ‘I can give you the popular view. In two words – bloody Russians.’

  ‘That’s the view of the man in the street. And we mustn’t sneer at it. The man in the street is often right when politicians are wrong. The only thing is that politicians not only have to know what people are thinking, sometimes they have to tell them what they ought to think. In this case, it’s not difficult. Three policemen dead, three Russians dead. Three all. Not a bad result, for people who think of most things in terms of football.’

  ‘Do you think it’s an over-simplification? Or do you think it’s wrong?’

  Daines said, ‘I think it’s wrong. And I think it’s dangerous.’ He paused to gather his thoughts for the benefit of the serious young man sitting opposite. His room looked out over an enclosed courtyard at the back of the building. In the deep silence, Luke could hear two pigeons quarrelling over a scrap of food three floors below.

  ‘To understand what happened you have to concentrate on someone who hasn’t featured in the published accounts at all. Someone you’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. One Charles Perelman who came over from Russia six years ago. Nothing against him, except that he seemed to change houses rather often. And whatever house he moved to, soon became a home-from-home for other Russians, many of them criminals. He’s a curious character who goes about in a huge cloak and a black sombrero, though it’s far from clear whether he really is a terrorist, or is acting the part to keep in with the boys and take their money for rent, for he’s usually hard up. And here’s the first point to notice. All of the nine men involved in the Houndsditch robbery had lodged with Perelman at one time. Jacob Peters, George Gardstein, Max Smoller, Yourka Dubof, Fritz Svaars, Josef Sokalow, Karl Hoffman, John Rosen and Peter Piatkow.’

  Luke, who had been scribbling desperately, looked up to say, ‘Is that the one the papers call Peter the Painter?’

  ‘That’s the one. For some reason he seems to have appealed to the popular imagination. Right. Consider now what happened to those men. Gardstein was shot, accidentally, in the course of the Houndsditch robbery. Svaars and Sokalow died in the ashes of the Sidney Street house. Peters, Dubof, Rosen and Hoffman are on the run and either have been arrested or will be soon, because the ports are now blocked against them. If you’ve been keeping the score, what’s the answer?’

  Luke looked at his scribbles and said, ‘Two left. Peter the Painter and Max Smoller.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I suppose they’re on the run, too.’

  ‘No amount of running is going to catch that precious pair. They both got across to France, with Perelman’s help, on the night those policemen were shot in Houndsditch. Which makes Perelman more than just a casual associate. A close friend of all the men concerned, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Certainly. A very good friend.’

  ‘Then you could explain why it was it was that Perelman gave away Svaars and Sokalow and led the police to Sidney Street.’

  Luke said, ‘For God’s sake,’ and sat with his head in his hands, whilst facts and figures performed a crazy tango in his brain.

  Daines watched him sympathetically. ‘It’s a devil’s dance,’ he said. ‘They never stand still. Forming and re-forming, swapping partners and then linking up again. When you think you understand what they’re doing, they’re doing something quite different. But one thing’s certain. We may have come badly out of this last round of trouble, but it can hardly have pleased the Ochrana.’

  ‘Sorry. The who did you say?’

  ‘The Administration for the Protection of State Institutions and Public Security, the Okhraneniyu ot Delenya, usually shortened to Ochrana. Formed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. A very powerful organisation indeed. What they were hoping for was that the efforts of this gang would cause such a revulsion of public opinion here that our political masters would be forced to send all or most of the Russian immigrants back to Russia.’

  ‘That’s the street cry. “Send the bastards back where they came from.”’

  ‘Where the Ochrana would have been waiting for them with open arms. Open arms and a quick death in the Lubianka prison or a slow one in Siberia. But in fact all they achieved by their efforts was a public verdict that substantial justice had been done. Three terrorists for three policemen.’

  Luke, who had by this time a fair idea of where Daines was going said, ‘So what you’re anticipating is that next time there’ll be an outrage, or maybe a series of outrages, that will force the British government to act in the way the Ochrana want.’

  ‘That is, indeed, what we fear.’

  ‘And will that bought-and-sold creature, Perelman, be stage- managing the next production?’

  ‘No. He’s exhausted his usefulness. A serious matter like this will be handled seriously. We think that two or three men will be pulling the strings. All I can give you at the moment is their names and a few scraps of information. First, Casimir Treschau, who goes under the name of Otto Trautman—’

  ‘I noticed his name in the papers Silistreau-Morrowitz brought over with him.’

  ‘The more I hear about those papers,’ said Daines sadly, ‘the more I regret that they went into the drink. They might have painted the whole picture for us. At the moment all we know about Treschau is that he had a big name in Russia as a chemist, that he fell into disfavour and was questioned so roughly by the police that they broke his leg for him. He still limps.’

  ‘Yes. It’s an odd dragging limp. I only heard it once, but I think I’d recognise it if I heard it again.’

  He told Daines about his night watch over the widow Triboff’s house and its unhappy outcome.

  ‘Then you never saw his face.’

  ‘I heard him and felt him, but didn’t see him.’

  ‘A pity. Next there’s the hard man, the head of their street gang over here, a lout who uses several names, including Zircov and Zmunstrov. His real
name’s thought to be Molacoff Weil, nicknamed in Russian “Three Times”.’

  Since Daines was waiting for a question, Luke obligingly said, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You may find the story difficult to credit, but the fact that his compatriots do believe it will give you some idea of the man. It seems that one of the procedures of the Ochrana, when looking for information or co-operation, is to strip the prisoner naked and immerse him alternatively in boiling water and cold water. A treatment calculated to unlock the most obstinate tongues.’

  ‘Dear Lord,’ said Luke, ‘I should be talking before they got me near the boiling water.’

  ‘So would most people. Weil is said to have suffered three immersions before he decided to change sides. Hence the nickname. But the third man is the pick of the bunch. The man whose efforts you encountered in Newcastle – Janis Silistreau, currently going under the name of Ivan Morrowitz. Noted in his own country as a poet and a thinker. All that we have on him at the moment are those excellent photographs that Farnsworth took. We missed him on arrival up here. There was some delay in Farnsworth’s message reaching Wensley. But a man of that eminence can’t stay hidden for long.’

  ‘Now that you’ve identified these three men, can’t they be arrested and deported?’

  ‘They could only be deported if they were proved to be involved in criminal activities. Not in political activities. A difficult distinction, as you will appreciate. Also, Treschau and Silistreau are public figures. If we laid a finger on them without full justification, our intellectual lefties would be screaming themselves hoarse. Your job will be to keep your eyes open. If you spot any of the three men, let me and Wensley know at once. And,’ he added with a smile that softened the words, ‘no heroics. If these men catch a spy, their treatment of him is intended as a warning to others.’