by John Creasey
Everyone on the beach had to be questioned.
Had they been there between five and seven o’clock yesterday?
Had they seen the five children? The one child, at the sea’s edge? A dog? A man?
The police worked from the main pier towards the wooded land where the child’s body had been found buried under clumps of bush and bracken. That area was now cordoned off, yet almost besieged by holidaymakers, girls in briefs and youths in loincloths, the very young, the middle-aged and the elderly. All went to gape. A party of police, thirty strong, was going over the two-acre patch of woodland very closely, for the girl’s hair-ribbon had come off somewhere between the beach and the murder spot. They looked for anything else which might be a clue, for footprints, for the pawprints of the dog, and for any apparently trifling thing which might help them to build up the case.
Of course there were the newspaper men, including a dozen photographers.
Hill was in immediate charge of the search, and a tall, lantern-jawed Bournsea Superintendent named Appleton was constantly with him.
The General Post Office had been opened and emergency staff brought in, to check and list everyone who had a dog licence. The records were kept alphabetically; they had to be divided into districts, then lists had to be drawn up and attached to ward maps; very soon the search was likely to narrow down to a specific dog. Then with luck, someone who had seen the man and the dog would be able to give the police a recognisable description.
On the telephone to Hill, who had arranged with the GPO engineers to rig him up a kind of field telephone on the spot, Gideon said:
“Don’t forget to tell your chaps to look out for dead dogs – drowned or buried or burnt. If this chap gets to know we’re looking for a dog, he isn’t likely to be very sentimental. Might be easier in the long run to trace a man who had a dog which has disappeared, than to do it the hard way.”
“I won’t forget,” Hill said.
“How are things down there?”
“Appleton’s having kittens, he’s afraid that if there’s much more of a scare, it might frighten families away from the place for their holidays. His Watch Committee’s on his tail, and the local Publicity Officer seems to think that all will be ruination. The local Hotel Association is putting on the pressure, too.”
“Anything else we can do for you from here?”
“Can’t say there is,” Hill answered, as if reluctantly. “It can’t be for long, but we’ve all the men we can use today. If we pick the chap up by tonight, we can pat ourselves on the back.”
“Any ideas at all?” Gideon urged.
“There are forty-seven thousand residents in Bournsea and there were an estimated twenty-five thousand holidaymakers on Saturday, and I haven’t a clue of any kind,” said Hill, very deliberately. “No one’s come forward, no one’s been found to admit seeing the man, the child and the dog. But it’s early yet, not quite five o’clock.”
“I’ll be at home if you want me,” Gideon said.
“Some people have the luck,” quipped Hill, and then actually chuckled. “There’s one thing, my wife’s decided to stay down here for the next week at least.”
“Tell her to enjoy herself,” Gideon made himself say.
He rang off, spent ten minutes going through all the cases in hand, then left the office, and walked through the nearly deserted building, down to his car. So far, everything else was quiet, the crop of arrests and warnings given by the Divisions was still paying off.
Would it, for long?
“I can understand the holiday town’s feelings,” said Kate, when he got home, complaining. “I wouldn’t like to be down on the beach with the children young again. It’s bad enough wondering if they’re going to drown. To feel that you’d have to watch them on the sand and promenade as well – it would spoil the holiday for me, and for any mother, I should think.”
“That’s what they’re afraid of,” Gideon said. “Did the Old Man tell you anything about his attitude to the staff problem after I’d left?”
“He didn’t say anything in so many words, but he let me know it was all right with him.” Kate was sitting comfortably in an easy chair, her feet up on a pouffe; it was nearly six o’clock. From the front room came the music of piano and violin; Prudence was a violinist in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Penelope hoped to become a professional pianist. “I couldn’t believe you really had anything to worry about, George. He was quite human, wasn’t he? “
“Very.”
“She was charming, too,” said Kate, and her eyes reminiscently lit up.
That luncheon visit was going to linger in her mind for a long time to come, but Gideon gave it very little thought; his mind was grappling with the main problem, with the need to appoint someone who could stand in for him, with anxiety for word from Bournsea, and with that other more vague anxiety which he could not really name but which was there; that the Yard had reached danger-point on the matter of manpower, and that if there were a crop of major crimes it would be very difficult to cope. He kept telling himself that he might be over-anxious, that it was an inverted kind of wishful thinking; but at heart he was sure that he had been anxious about the situation for a much longer time than he had realised; the last few days had simply brought it out.
If Hill could finish down in Bournsea in a day or two, it would help.
Gideon had a bad moment, then. His main thought was for Hill and the investigation and its effect on the Yard generally, not for the murdered child’s mother, or for the general anxiety that so many others felt. This was a factor which he hardly realised existed; the domination of the importance of the job as a job, the organisation for its own sake, over the human factors. Once human understanding and sympathy were blunted, one stopped being a good policeman.
Another George, George Arthur Smith, was on the crowded beach at Bournsea, without his dog; the dog was behind the small corner shop, where he lived with his widowed mother, a very frail old lady who just managed to keep shop and home going. He was not thinking of his mother or the dog as he saw the policeman in uniform and the big men in plain-clothes going from person to person, threading their way over buckets and spades, past deck chairs, sand-castles, little rivers of water running down to the sea, past beach-huts, bathing attendants, the whole colourful variety of the seaside.
George Arthur Smith was rather a small man, very tanned because he spent a great deal of his time on the beach. He saw the crowd at the approach to the woodland, but did not go near it. He saw a big, ugly man approaching him, and felt a tremor of anxiety, but it did not go very deep.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” the man greeted. “I’m from the police. Are you a local resident? “
“Yes,” answered Smith.
“Were you on the beach yesterday, about half past four onwards?”
“No,” said Smith. “I was here a little earlier than that, but not at half past four.”
“Did you notice a child playing alone at the edge of the sea?”
“I dare say I saw twenty children playing there,” Smith answered, and managed to smile. “I’m afraid I don’t take much notice of children, though, being a bachelor. I just came for a swim as I do most Saturdays and Sundays.”
“I see, sir. Did you notice a child playing with a dog?”
Smith stared at him without the slightest change of expression for a moment, and then his lips twisted in a kind of smile, and he replied: “There were several dogs, there usually are, but the only one I noticed was a bulldog. What kind of dog do you mean?”
“I’d like to know about any kind you saw playing with a child,” the detective said.
“I can’t honestly say that I remember anything like that,” said Smith, frowning, as if with the effort of concentration. “And I’d left the beach after my swim by half past three, my mother – I live at home you see – wanted some shopping done, and I always do the shopping for her. I must have been home for tea at five o’clock.” He shrugged, as if that dispos
ed of the question.
His interrogator said: “Thank you for your frankness, sir, you may have been a great help. May I have your name and address? “
Inwardly, Smith’s heart was pounding.
Outwardly, he was very calm.
“Why, what good will that do?”
“It’s often helpful if we can compare two lots of evidence, sir.” The detective was not looking at Smith, but at two plain-clothes men some distance away, who were talking to an elderly woman; she was pointing down to the sea’s edge. “Something you saw may give someone else’s memory a jerk, or something they saw might help yours. It’s not likely we’ll need to worry you, sir, but we might.”
Smith said, reluctantly: “Well, I suppose that’s reasonable. My name is Sanderson, and I live at”—there was the merest moment of hesitation before he went on—”17 Brindle Street. That’s the big estate at the back of the town.”
“I know Brindle Street.” The detective wrote the name and address down, nodded briskly, then went to join the elderly woman, who was pointing again; quite a crowd had gathered round her and the plain-clothes men.
She was saying: “It was a big dog, a bit of a setter but with a spaniel’s ears and face, browny-red in colour, but not a bright red like a red-setter. It wasn’t yesterday but the day before I saw them. The little girl was frightened of the dog, and the man was reassuring her. I thought it was very nice of him to take the trouble. You don’t think—”
“Could you describe the man, madam?” the detective asked.
Smith, just within earshot, stared out to sea and inwardly cursed a child nearby who was crying.
“. . . didn’t really see him, I’m rather short-sighted, you see. The dog was racing about, and it came quite close to me, but the man . . .”
Smith did not hurry away, but walked past the mob of sightseers, saw a big man with a big, heavy jaw not far along, then took the short cut to the town that he usually did. He reached the shop, a mile away from Brindle Street, a little after six thirty. He heard Nicky, his dog, frisking in the kitchen. He went in, and the dog leapt at him, licking his face, pawing his clothes; his voice was sharper than usual when he told it to get down. His mother was out; she was at chapel, and would not be back until nine o’clock or after, for she always went to friends for supper after the service. Smith went to the back of the shop premises, and lit a fire in the hot-water boiler, a small grey stove.
The dog sat and watched him.
Then Smith went to a small shed, took down a tin plainly marked Poison, and carefully shook some of the lumpy white contents on to his hand. He hesitated, and watched the dog staring up at him, head on one side, tail wagging slowly, obviously asking for a walk.
“Won’t be long,” Smith said. “We’ll go down to the beach. That’s right! Down to the beach!”
The dog waved its tail vigorously.
Smith went back to the kitchen, opened a small packet of dog food, and tossed one or two crunchy pieces to the dog; each time, the piece went deep into its throat, and he hardly troubled to chew.
Then Smith tossed the potassium cyanide.
The bones didn’t matter; he could always bury the bones.
At half past ten that night, Hippo Hill telephoned Gideon. Two people had seen a dog answering the same description, a cross between a spaniel and a red-setter, one on Thursday, one on Friday – no one had seen it on Saturday, so far as the police could find out.
“And neither of them can describe the man who talked to the child,” Hill said. “It’s going to be a long job, George.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Gideon said, glumly.
About the same time, a few miles away from Hurlingham, Keith Ryman was at the bar of a little Mayfair night club. His Helen was dancing on a small floor, and Ryman, there with a party of eight, was talking to Rab Stone. The atmosphere was surprisingly clear and clean. The police had never attempted to close this club up, for as West End clubs went, it was as clean as a whistle, and it gave reasonably good value. The only fact which had ever interested the police was that occasionally tricksters and vice men came here, but the types could be found anywhere, and there was no regular clientele of that kind.
No police watchers were here tonight.
Ryman was saying, very quietly: “I told you before and I’ll tell you again, Rab, this is the time all right. Hit ‘em hard in four or five places at once, to distract them, and then stage the big show. And there’s a sure-fire way of distracting them just now.”
“What way?”
“We want to pick up a couple of kids – like the Bournsea job.”
Stone exclaimed: “Gawd?”
“Don’t you like the idea?” Ryman glanced round, to make sure that no one was within earshot.
“It would work all right,” Stone agreed.
“Can you get the job done?”
“I dare say,” Stone said, “but—”
“Getting cold feet?” Ryman demanded.
“It’s not that, Keith, but I wouldn’t like anything to happen to kids.”
“Of course we can’t kill any kids, we don’t want to be caught on a murder rap, but we could snatch two or three, couldn’t we?” Ryman said. “There’s that case up in Scarborough, in the papers this morning. Kids are always being kidnapped, and it won’t do them any harm if they’re not hurt. Only got to feed ‘em for a day or two.”
Stone was still uneasy.
“It might be difficult, Keith, I don’t know anyone who could handle that kind of job.” When a man came up to the bar, he stopped talking and sipped his drink. Helen passed again, still grimacing; the stout man had her tightly in his arms. Ryman and Stone moved farther away from the bar.
“I could lay on holdups, smash and grabs, even—”
He broke off.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got an idea,” said Ryman, a little sardonically.
“There’s something good we could lay on,” said Stone, so softly that Ryman could only just hear him. “We could fix one or two attacks on coppers, that always draws ‘em – like wasps round a honey-pot they are if one of their own chaps gets hurt. I was talking to Si Mitchell this morning – we were having a pint together – about that copper who was killed. Si was saying there were one or two coppers he’d like to dig a grave for. Now we could work out something on that, Keith, find two or three chaps who’ve got it in for the coppers and fix it up.” He was talking as the thoughts entered his mind, and there was a glitter in his eyes; and there was a sharp interest in Ryman’s. “Why not two one day, two the next? Different parts of London, too. Keith, that’s a stroke of genius, that is – an absolute stroke of genius!”
“Could be,” Ryman conceded.
“Don’t be modest, it was really your idea, I’ve only dressed it up a bit. One in the East End, say, one right on the doorstep here – Soho, I mean, not this doorstep – why not come out Greenwich way, and another to Hammersmith or Ealing. Each job would be done by a different individual, that’s the beauty of it. Even if the cops got all four, they couldn’t trace it back to us. All we do is to get Si to—”
“It’ll take some working out,” Ryman interrupted, an edge of excitement in his voice. “I’d say we’d better do a job with two coppers and two kids, but you may be right. The only important thing is to get it laid on properly, so that the cops are stretched so tight they’ll snap if they get another big job. Rab, we’re on to something, and when you come to think about it, it’s damned funny. Gideon of the Yard gave us the idea!”
Stone laughed, immoderately.
The music stopped, and Helen disentangled herself from the fat man except for her hand; he held on to it tightly. The two couples on the floor headed for tables or the bar.
“What about Helen, is she going to be okay?” Stone asked, checking his laughter.
“Don’t worry about Helen,” Ryman said. “Do you know what she’s got for a heart?”
“I give up.”
“A diamond, Rab, that’s
all, a bloody great diamond. And she wants to get bigger and bigger-hearted every day!”
“So long as you can trust her.”
“I can trust her with everything except thinking, if she has to think, she gets in trouble,” Ryman said, and stretched out his hands for his Helen; the stout man relinquished her with obvious reluctance, and gave a jerky bow. Helen took Ryman’s hand, and looked up at him with beautiful eyes; eyes which really looked starry, and on which the eye shadow hardly showed.
“He was beastly, darling, do I have to be nice to him anymore?”
“He’s a very wealthy man,” Ryman told her, solemnly.
“It looks as if it would take dynamite to separate him from any of his wealth,” Helen said.
“Just a beautiful woman, my pet!”
“Well, next time he wants to dance with me, tell the band to make it a quickstep. Even he couldn’t get that hold with a quickstep.” Helen squeezed Ryman’s fingers. “Are we going to stand at the bar all night, or are you coming to the table?”
She led the way to the table.
“Rab,” said Ryman on the telephone next morning, “Helen’s going out to Elstree. She thinks she may have a part. How about coming round for a drink? Twelve o’clock, say. Don’t try anything on Si yet, let’s give it plenty of thought. There’s no hurry.”
“You seen the morning papers, too?” Rab Stone asked, and laughed. “Okay. I’ll be there.”
Gideon had been in his office for two hours when Stone and Ryman made their appointment, and for one of these hours had been preoccupied with the Bournsea job. There had been no further developments, and there was no reasonable hope of quick results. The visit to every householder who held a dog licence was being planned; in Bournsea and the surrounding district from which bathers at the beach could be drawn, there were eleven thousand dog licences.
