Gideon's risk

by J. J Marric

  The driver was staring at him.

  "That's Carslake!" Miles exclaimed aloud, and was so astonished that he lost a moment, and so threw away the advantage of full surprise. For a moment the man on the machine and the man on foot stared at each other.

  Miles moved forward. "Just a minute!"

  Carslake opened the throttle with a jerky movement, and the motorcycle leaped forward. There was hardly room for it to pass between Miles and the hedge. The engine roared. Miles knew that if he flung himself at the man and machine he might be seriously injured; Carslake knew that if he were caught here he would not have a chance. He wanted to strike out, he wanted to kill, he wanted to run this man down. He actually turned the wheel of the motorcycle toward the man—at the precise moment that Miles pulled a whistle from his pocket, blew on it, and then jumped forward. He made a sweeping blow with his right arm, trying to fend off the motorcycle with his left. There was a split second when Miles, Carslake, and the machine seemed to merge into a strange, futuristic, writhing shape; and then the motorcycle toppled over. Carslake went with it, tried to get clear, but felt the weight of it crush his left leg; he screamed with pain and he felt something snap. Miles moved back, left hand cut on the mudguard of the machine, but otherwise unhurt. Men were running, two of them in police uniform, and he knew that there was no risk at all that Carslake would escape.

  Then he realized that the man was badly injured, and he went forward to help him.

  At half-past four that afternoon, Gideon's telephone bell rang, and he stopped pushing the lawnmower over the little patch of grass at the front of his house, drew his white shirt sleeve across his forehead, and went indoors. Kate was out shopping in Fulham Market; all the family was out, too. The bell kept ringing, and for once he almost resented it. He had lost himself in the gardening, but this interruption brought Borgman and the clash with Rogerson back vividly.

  "All right, all right," he said testily, and snatched up the receiver. "Gideon."

  "Hallo, George," said a man in a cheerful Cockney voice. "Didn't spoil your forty winks, I hope. Gotta bitta good for you."

  "Time you had, Lem," Gideon said, and immediately felt better. "What is it? Borgman confessed?"

  "That'll be the day. No, we've got Carslake. He's admitted that he killed Robson, and says that the woman knew nothing about it. We could pull her in, or we could leave her. What do you think we ought to do?"

  "Leave it to Hoppy," Gideon said promptly. "No point in throwing our weight about with him. Anything else in?"

  "I went down two quid on a dead cert at Epsom," the other man, Lemaitre, said. He had once been Gideon's chief aide, but recently had been moved from night duty to a kind of roving commission, and was in charge at the Yard during week ends. "A twenty-five to one outsider romped home. Some people have all the luck. Tell you why I really called, though."

  "Why?"

  "There's that stolen car report. Info's finished it and it's on your desk. Like to have it at home for the week end?"

  "Yes. Anything in about the killer motorist?"

  "I've been studying the reports from the people who've been questioned," Lemaitre said. "Seven think they saw him, and he looked different to each one. We're going to be lucky! Tell you what, though. I've seen the lab report on the cotton from that splinter of glass. Egyptian cotton, almost certainly made in Japan, and they're selling for three and elevenpence in every cheap store in the country. Blood group A. The lab's got a couple of pairs, and they're trying to find out if the strand came out of a finger, a thumb, or the main part of the glove."

  "Good," said Gideon. "That the lot?"

  "No."

  "Remember this is my afternoon off," Gideon said, and hooked a chair near with his foot and sat down.

  "That's why I hesitated to call you, Commander," said Lemaitre, in a tone of highly concentrated sarcasm. "But there was one little thing I thought you'd like to know about, apart from all the jobs you left over for me to do while you were snoozing. The autopsy report's in from the Berkshire boys on the Borgman corpus."

  Gideon caught his breath, and it was nearly half a minute before he said:

  "What is it?"

  "Enough morphine to have killed a dozen people," Lemaitre answered. "Good thing the autopsy wasn't called off."

  9. Grounds for a Charge

  "It was a bloody silly thing to do, George," Rogerson said, "and it's no use telling me that you forgot; elephants don't. But after this I suppose you'll get your own way." He pushed the pathologist's report aside, and gave Gideon a quick grin. "One in the eye for the Home Office, too. Think anyone's got the story about the exhumation?"

  "It's not in any of the papers," Gideon said. "It was a sleepy little village, remember, and they did it at night. No one picked the thing up for the Press so far. Borgman's still in Paris."

  "Alone?"

  Gideon said, "His secretary, the girl named Clare Selby, isn't at home this week end. Mrs. Borgman is."

  "You may be more right than you know," conceded Rogerson, and looked very thoughtful. "George, you made me feel a heel over the exhumation. Sorry I wasn't a hundred per cent behind you."

  "Forget it."

  "Well, what do you think we ought to do?"

  Gideon said, "I've sent Freddy Lee and Carmichael to Borgman's offices, and they'll be started by now. Borgman isn't due back until tomorrow, although his secretary is on her way back now—he takes the trouble to try not to make the affaire too obvious. What I would do is to let the news of the exhumation leak into the papers tomorrow, so that it will greet Borgman when he gets back—wouldn't be a bad idea to try to get some newspapermen to meet him off the plane, and ask him if he's got any comment to make. When he gets to his office, our chaps will be there. He'll be looking over his shoulder all the time, and wondering what they're really doing—wondering whether we were ever really interested in what Samuel did, or whether we're just after him. Meanwhile, Fred Lee can dig all day about this Clare Selby girl, and anything else on Borgman. I've had a good look at the first reports on Borgman's present wife," Gideon went on. "He used to take her everywhere, but these days he usually travels by himself. She's worth nearly a hundred thousand pounds, too."

  "Borgman must be worth a million," Rogerson pointed out.

  "That doesn't mean that he's got a million of ready money," Gideon said dryly. "Anyway, I'll get everything checked—and then I think we ought to leave Borgman for a couple of days, perhaps the better part of a week, but have him followed wherever he goes."

  "Hmm."

  "If we can make him really nervous, we might get a break quicker than we expect," Gideon pointed out.

  "We'll try it, anyhow," Rogerson said. "I'll put the case up to the Old Man, and leave it to him. But after this report I don't see how anyone could advise us not to charge him, even if we don't find Nurse Kennett. They'll advise caution, but that's what you're advocating anyhow. George, you look ten years younger."

  Gideon smiled soberly.

  "I want Borgman," he said simply. "When that man's off my shoulder, I'll feel better." Sitting on his shoulder, there seemed to be an image of that disappearing nurse. "Got time for the rest of the week-end stuff before you see the Old Man?"

  "I've twenty minutes."

  "It'll do. First there's Carslake. . . ." Gideon talked with his usual deliberation, making full use of every word, drawing a graphic picture of the week end's crime, including developments in the cases which had been held over the previous week. After ten minutes, he said, "There are only two left that matter. Red and Syd Carter are coming up for the second hearing on Friday. I think there's plenty of evidence, and we ought to apply for committal for trial. No point in wasting time, and we could do with a headline or two."

  "Go ahead," Rogerson agreed.

  "Ta. Then there's the car thefts," Gideon went on, and began to drum his fingers on Rogerson's large desk. "There were five from Epsom on Saturday, and seventeen in all from football crowds, seven from greyhound tracks at night
, and four from cinemas."

  "This isn't a crime, this is an industry."

  "That's what's worrying me," Gideon said. "If anything ever gets under my skin, it's when we come across a job which has been going on for months, maybe for years, under our noses. I spent most of Sunday studying the figures—and there are nearly five hundred cars on the stolen list, covering a four-week period. Only two hundred have been recovered, and they were nearly all stripped of accessories, tires, the usual. That leaves three hundred unaccounted for. Most midweek thefts come from the West End, most week-end jobs from the suburbs. Let's say that thirty or forty were just the usual fly-by-night jobs, and we've got the three hundred stolen cars vanishing without a trace in a month. They're being painted all right, so there's your industry. There must be a dozen garages, perhaps more, working on the job."

  Rogerson looked as if he were trying to absorb the full significance of all this.

  "And some of those garages must be run by the same group," Gideon argued. "I can see three or four unconnected garages handling stolen cars, but a dozen or more—there's a tie-up all right. A lot of them are probably under the same management."

  "A chain of garages," Rogerson said heavily.

  "That's right," agreed Gideon. "So I'm having Todd check on all groups with six garages or more—better not start too high, and two small chains might be working together—and he should have a report in a couple of days. There's one other thing I'd like to do, though, if we can spare the men."

  "Don't know that I like the sound of that," Rogerson said. "What is it?"

  Gideon took a small plastic envelope from his pocket and laid it down in front of the Assistant Commissioner. Inside were several strands of gray cotton, and on all the strands little dark brown stains. A label stapled to the envelope read: Cotton strands presumably from glove found on glass splinter in Saige Street, Soho—18.9.19—

  "The killer car job?"

  "Yes. The lab's examined half a dozen pairs of gloves made of the same material—I told you they were Japanese—and they say these strands came from the thumb," said Gideon. "They've got some photo enlargements, showing the curvature of the fabric, how it's stretched, and— "

  "I'll take your word for it."

  "Thanks. If the driver who wore these went to a garage, one of the first things he would do is to take off the glove and have the cut seen to," Gideon said. "If it were badly bloodstained, he might throw the glove away. The lab says that these strands are soaked in one spot and there must have been considerable bleeding."

  "So you want to have all garages visited."

  Gideon nodded.

  "Why ask me?" inquired Rogerson. "You don't often show such consideration, George."

  "Got to get back into your good books somehow!" Gideon said. He stood up. "I'll lay it on right away."

  "Right." Rogerson also stood up and walked with him to the door. "Not a bad week, all in all. The Carters committed for trial, Borgman right under the microscope, Carslake in the bag, Baldy Lock, too—keep it up!"

  Gideon said, "Make sure the Old Man doesn't let the politicians talk him out of Borgman, won't you?"

  "They can't, now," Rogerson said confidently. "But there is one thing, George—I'm not sure you're wise to have him watched wherever he goes."

  Gideon stood solid and massive by the door, fingers on the handle, too experienced a man to reject that comment out of hand, and ready to hear why Rogerson had made it. He himself felt reasonably satisfied with the way things were going, but there was that strangely personal feeling about Borgman, the desire to get the man at all costs; and he knew that it was possible that it disturbed his judgment.

  "Not often you don't jump to it," Rogerson said, and spread his hands. "I may be wrong, but if you're having the offices covered, if you let news of the exhumation get out, if you have him questioned at the airport when he gets back tomorrow, then aren't you taking a risk that he'll try to get out of the country? We've a good case for home consumption, but I wouldn't like to say we could get extradition on it."

  Gideon said heavily, "I didn't even think of that."

  "You would have."

  "Too late, probably," Gideon said. "I'll take the men off him anyhow, and I won't push Fleet Street. But because we don't want them to do a thing, they'll probably do it. I hope that girl won't warn him."

  "The blonde?"

  "Yes," said Gideon, and shrugged his shoulders. "I can't really see Borgman staying out of the country until it all blows over, though. If he stayed away he would be making a kind of confession. He'll be back tomorrow."

  "Of course he will."

  "Unless," thought Gideon uneasily, as he walked along the wide, bare passage to his own office, "I've scared him too much already." There was just a possibility. He pictured Borgman sitting in his, Gideon's, office, the film of sweat on his forehead and his upper lip. He reminded himself that Borgman was both clever and thorough, and that he had agencies and branches in many parts of the world; and funds, too. And there had been that striking change in his manner. If the obsession had made him spring the trap too soon, Gideon thought gloomily, he had only himself to blame. The Home Office was probably already sore about the exhumation, and would want cast-iron proof of Borgman's guilt before they tried to get him from abroad. Only Nurse Kennett seemed to offer that. Where the hell was she? Inquiries about her had been made in all Commonwealth countries, and many others, and there was still no news at all.

  Was Rogerson simply being bloody-minded? Was there really any likelihood that Borgman would stay out of the country? Wasn't Rogerson's reasoning a kind of justification for his earlier attitude?

  Bell was in the office, on the telephone. He rang off as Gideon sat down, glanced up, and said:

  "Smash and grab out at Putney, nothing much taken."

  "Hm."

  "Rogerson still a bit sore?"

  "No," said Gideon. "No. That blonde of Borgman's back yet?"

  "Arrived at London airport half an hour ago."

  "Something," said Gideon. He sat back in his chair, knowing that Bell was puzzled, and then lifted the internal telephone and said, "Ask Mr. Appleby to come in." He waited, and Bell's telephone went again; this was one of the mornings when everything was non-stop. Bell took a message, made notes, and rang off, and the door opened and Appleby arrived.

  "Want me, George?"

  "Jim, your French is better than anyone's here," said Gideon. "Call one of your Paris pals, will you—LeClerc if you can get him—and ask him to have a quick check on Borgman. Borgman's at the Vido Hotel. Find out if he's been to his bank, or if there's any indication that he might have been planning a long flight."

  "Gawd!" Appleby breathed. "Okay, I'll fix it."

  Word came in, twenty minutes later, that Borgman's movements were quite unsuspicious. All the week end a blonde young woman had occupied a room on the same floor as Borgman's, at the Vido, which was near the Champs-Elysées, and Borgman had had several meals in his room; obviously he was being as discreet as ever. Gideon felt easier in his mind, laid on the calls on all garages in the search for the Japanese cotton glove, checked through more reports, and sent for sandwiches from the canteen. Bell went out to lunch, and Gideon was there alone when the door opened and Fred Lee came in.

  "Hallo," Gideon greeted. "Didn't expect you yet. Any trouble?"

  "Wouldn't say it's trouble," Lee said, and obviously he was feeling quite pleased with himself. "I haven't been able to dig very deep yet, but Samuel was small time. I doubt if the total defalcations are more than three thousand pounds over the whole period he was at the job. Everything else is in apple-pie order—I should be surprised if you could find anything that would help to fix Borgman from the accounts. They've a good chief accountant even if he was fooled by Samuel."

  "And you don't think that's trouble," Gideon remarked heavily.

  "Not really, George." Lee sat on a corner of Gideon's desk, hugging his knees, and there was a little color in his cheeks, a glint in his eye
which told Gideon that he was feeling more himself—and if Lee thought that he had discovered something to help put Borgman away, it really would be a tonic. "Borgman has a slap-up office, paneled walls, desk to match, old masters—the millionaire's dream. The desk's full of trick drawers, sliding panels, you-know-what."

  Gideon went very still.

  "Lucky thing I had Carmichael with me," Lee went on serenely. "Good chap, Carmy. As Borgman and the blonde were away, I got him to take that desk apart. In one of the secret compartments were some powdered morphine and a morphine solution, as well as a hypodermic syringe."

  Gideon thumped his desk with a great surge of excitement.

  "Then we've got him!"

  "Can't imagine he'll ever get away with this," Lee agreed smugly. "Got a little problem though, George. Can't let anyone think we'd do such a thing as that without a search warrant, can we?"

  "I'll get a warrant for tomorrow morning, and search the desk while Borgman's there," Gideon said. "This is one time when I can't wait."

  He had not felt so excited for years.

  Reggie Cole was telling himself that he couldn't wait for the next job; anything which earned him fifty pounds as easily as that was something to pray for. After the first few minutes, he had not really been scared; and he had not had one moment's compunction, no feeling of shame or guilt. Any job which won him the kind of reward he wanted from Ethel was worth ten times as great a risk, anyhow. He was happier than he had ever been driving his delivery van, and he called—as usual—at the garage where he had first met Ethel, to get the tank filled up and the oil checked. He always hoped that he might see Ethel there again, and on one occasion he had.

  Ethel wasn't there this morning.

  There seemed to be trouble of some kind. Two men were inside the littered office, talking to Bennett, the manager, a square-shouldered, stocky man whom he did not greatly like. A youth came up to serve Reggie, and he asked: