The Graveyard Shift

by Jack Higgins

  Her face went very white, the mouth slack and she stared stupidly at him. ‘But if I miss my train, Sammy will catch up with me again. He’ll bring me back.’

  Her head moved slowly from side to side and Nick said patiently, ‘All you have to do is tell me where Ben was going when he left here.’

  The strange thing was that she genuinely didn’t know and yet an inner pride, a strength she had never realized she possessed before, refused to allow her to betray the man who had helped her.

  She swallowed the tears and her chin tilted. ‘All right, so we go to the station.’

  Nick sighed heavily and nodded. ‘That’s right, Wilma. The railway station. Come on. I’ll give you a lift in my car.’

  She stared at him incredulously, then snatched up her case and pushed round him. ‘I’d rather ride with the devil.’

  He followed her along the dark passage, down the steps into the yard and reached for her shoulder as she turned into the street beside his car.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Wilma. I can have you there in a couple of minutes. There’s a train at twelve twenty. We’ll just make it.’

  ‘Take your hands off me.’ She pulled away. ‘From now on, I walk alone.’ Her face was yellow in the lamplight and full of hate as she gazed up at him. ‘English police, Gestapo, what’s the difference? You don’t give a damn who gets hurt as long as you find out what you want to know. I hope Ben Garvald cracks your skull.’

  She spat on the pavement at his feet, turned and walked away, the case banging against her leg, her high heels clicking on the hollow pavement, fading into the night. Nick stood there gazing into the darkness. After a while, he got back into the Mini-Cooper and drove away.

  He ran from the car and mounted the steps to the plain white door that was the entrance to Club Eleven, head down against the driving rain. He pressed the bell and looked along the wet pavement to the Flamingo, a bright splash of light in the darkness. That could come later. For the moment, there was nothing he wanted so much as a few quiet words with Sammy Rosco.

  The door opened and he moved in past a uniformed commissionaire and found himself standing in a tiny, thickly carpeted foyer. A young girl in black stockings and not much else, took his coat and a white-haired military-looking type came forward and smiled charmingly.

  ‘Membership card, sir?’

  ‘I haven’t got one, but I’d like to see Miss Ryan. Tell her it’s Nick Miller.’

  ‘A personal friend, sir?’

  ‘I think you could say that. We’ve even pounded the same beat together.’ The man frowned and Nick produced his warrant card and dropped it on to the reception desk. ‘Give her this with my compliments.’

  The man’s face fell, but he picked up the telephone and pressed a button. After a few moments’ muttered conversation he replaced the receiver. When he turned, the smile was back and pasted firmly into place.

  ‘Miss Ryan will be with you in just a moment, Mr Miller. Perhaps you would care to wait at the bar? The floor show is just beginning.’

  ‘I’ll find my own way,’ Nick said.

  He went through a door at the end of the passage and found himself standing at the top of a short flight of steps which dropped into a crowded dining­room. Above the tables was a raised catwalk and scantily dressed show girls were engaged in a dance routine.

  The tables were crowded and the customers were exclusively men, most of them being entertained by the hostesses Club Eleven supplied in such profusion.

  Nick ordered a drink and stood at the end of the crowded bar. After a while, there was a drum roll and a fat and balding comedian came skipping along the catwalk, a mike in one hand.

  His patter was the usual mixture of crude filth and innuendo, but mixed in with it was a genuine acid wit, mostly directed at the customers themselves, a fact none of them seemed to grasp.

  Finally the comedian stood to one side and took up his ancillary role as compère of the big event of the evening and the one for which, to judge from the applause, most of the customers had been waiting.

  It was the usual sort of thing. Famous beauties through the ages. Each time the comedian announced a name, a curtain rose at the back of the room disclosing a nude tableau and various fleshy young women depicting Helen of Troy, Eve in the Garden and so on.

  At various times, the girls paraded along the catwalk, displaying their ample charms in a manner the Lord Chamberlain would have found very difficult to accept. All the time, the comedian kept up a line of patter that verged on the obscene.

  There was sweat on the faces at the tables in the half light beneath the catwalk, lust and desire and grasping hands that reached up to touch the legs of the girls parading above.

  Finally, there was a sudden gasp as a completely naked coloured girl appeared from behind the curtains and started a slow, careful promenade that reduced the room to silence and awe. She half turned, the room was plunged into darkness and a light bulb flashed between her ample buttocks.

  ‘Ten thousand volts,’ the comedian cried and as the lights came on again, the room rocked with laughter.

  Nick turned to reach for his drink and found Molly standing a few feet away looking at him. She was somewhere in her late twenties, a striking redhead in a green dress that showed off to advantage a figure that was still worth looking at. There was strength in her face, a touch of arrogance, but when she looked at Nick and smiled, there was nothing but warmth there.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Nick.’

  ‘Too long.’ He took her hands and held them tightly for a moment. ‘I’ve been away for a year – on a course.’

  ‘So I heard. Detective Sergeant now they tell me.’

  ‘That’s right. With Central Division. Let me buy you a drink.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not here. This is strictly for the mugs and that goes for the kind of booze we sell them too. Let’s go up to my office.’

  She threaded her way between the tables, dropping a word here and there, mounted a few steps beside the stage and went through a door marked Private. Inside, they passed what were obviously the girls’ dressing-rooms, and finally came to another door which opened into a small and rather severely furnished room with filing cabinets, a desk and several telephones.

  Molly opened a cabinet, took out a bottle of whisky and filled a glass. She handed it to him with a slight smile. ‘Irish, pot distilled. I remember what you like.’

  ‘Aren’t you having one?’

  ‘Straight poison. I’ll never have another drink as long as I live.’ She grinned. ‘Besides, it slows you down.’

  He looked around the room curiously and shook his head. ‘Somehow this doesn’t seem you.’

  ‘This is my office,’ she said calmly and sat down in the chair behind the desk. ‘Strictly business. Isn’t that what you’re here for?’

  ‘You must read me like a book.’

  ‘I should be able to. I’ve known you long enough.’ She chuckled. ‘Remember when we first met? You were a young probationer pounding a pavement and I was a probationer of another sort.’

  ‘Two o’clock in the morning and raining cats and dogs.’

  ‘And we’d both had enough, so I took you back to my place.’ She laughed. ‘You thought I was the original scarlet woman.’

  He shook his head. ‘Never that, Molly. Never that.’

  She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. ‘What do you want, Nick?’

  ‘Ben Garvald for a start. Have you seen him tonight?’

  She seemed genuinely amazed. ‘Have I seen Ben? As far as I know, he’s still doing time.’

  ‘Not any more. Got out yesterday. The word is he’s back and looking for Bella.’

  Molly laughed harshly. ‘Then I hope he finds her.’

  ‘You don’t like her much?’

  ‘She isn’t fit to clean his shoes. In my book, he’s the tops. Oh, he’s hard – hard as steel, but where women are concerned . . .

  She sighed, her face softening, and Nick said: ‘So
you’re on his side?’

  ‘I should say so. When I first came over from Ireland, I was a green kid of eighteen. Didn’t know the form. Before I knew where I was, the wrong mob had me under their thumb and I was being squeezed dry. Ben Garvald got me out of that, free, gratis and for nothing. That’s his one weakness – he can’t resist helping a woman in trouble.’

  ‘All right,’ Nick said. ‘So you haven’t seen him tonight?’

  ‘All it happens, I haven’t. Has Bella made a complaint?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘The cow. I know where I’d like to see her.’

  Nick decided to try another line. ‘Is Sammy Rosco here by any chance?’

  She nodded. ‘He’s on duty upstairs. Don’t tell me you’re looking for him as well?’

  ‘Just a couple of questions. Routine mainly. Can we go up?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  They left the office, moved along the passage and paused outside a door which carried the legend Health Club Section – Members Only.

  ‘A new name for it,’ Nick said, but she ignored the remark, opened the door and led the way in.

  They moved along a quiet corridor, passed through a swing door and entered a long tiled room thick with steam. A fat and rather ugly middle-aged man came towards them, swathed in Turkish towels, a young woman in a white nylon smock helping him along. They moved into a cubicle and she pulled the curtain.

  The room was lined with such cubicles and one of them didn’t have its curtain properly drawn. As Nick passed, he glanced in and saw another fat and ageing specimen lying on a couch while a young woman massaged him. She seemed to find a pair of black knickers sufficient garment in the great heat.

  As Molly held open the door at the end for him, she smiled. ‘Strictly legal, Nick. They’ve all got diplomas from an institute of physical culture and massage I know in London.’

  ‘Some institute.’

  The room into which they entered was white tiled with a shower stall in one corner and a padded table in the centre. Sammy Rosco was sitting on a chair in the corner reading a magazine. He wore a white singlet and slacks.

  ‘Very ornamental,’ Nick said. ‘What’s he supposed to be?’

  Rosco looked up with a frown, then threw down the magazine and got to his feet. ‘Who’s the funny man, Molly?’

  Nick turned to her quickly. ‘You can leave us now.’

  ‘Heh, wait a minute,’ she said in surprise.

  ‘I said leave us.’ His voice was hard and with the cutting edge of a razor. She turned and went out almost immediately, her face red, and Nick produced his warrant card. ‘I haven’t got much time, so let’s have some straight answers, Rosco. You hired two men to attack Ben Garvald outside Wandsworth yesterday morning. Why?’

  Rosco looked over his shoulder like a hunted animal. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t waste my time,’ Nick said wearily. ‘I’ve seen your wife. She told me what happened at your place earlier and what Ben Garvald did to you.’ He poked a finger at the livid bruise on the other man’s left cheek. ‘He must be quite a puncher.’

  ‘That lousy rotten bitch. Just wait till I get my hands on her. I’ll make her wish she’d never been born.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait a long time,’ Nick said. ‘She caught a London train about ten minutes ago. I put her on it myself.’ He smiled softly. ‘She’s gone home, Sammy.’

  Rosco shook his head in bewilderment. ‘She couldn’t. She didn’t have the cash.’

  ‘Garvald saw to that. Good of him, wasn’t it?’

  With a cry of anger and frustration, Rosco swung a tremendous punch, that Nick found no difficulty whatever in avoiding. Remembering Wilma, he moved in fast, his left sank in well below the belt, and his right swung to meet the descending face, splintering teeth. Rosco staggered back, cannoned into the padded table and slid to the tiled floor.

  He lay there moaning, blood trickling into his white singlet and Nick crouched beside him. ‘That was from Wilma, Sammy. And don’t let’s have any of that assault by a police officer crap. It wouldn’t get you anywhere, believe me. Not with the kind of form you’ve got behind you.’

  As he got to his feet, the door opened and Molly came in. ‘He slipped and fell,’ Nick said. ‘Better see if there’s a doctor in the house.’

  She looked straight at him, her eyes hard. ‘Don’t come back, Nick. Never again as a friend. I like to know where I stand.’

  ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘The Berlin Wall? Me on one side, you on the other?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Suit yourself. See you sometime.’

  He brushed past her and went out through the steam, past the cubicles and into the corridor beyond, his feet sinking into the thick carpet. Strangely enough, he felt no regret. In fact, already his mind was on his next move.

  It was curiosity more than anything else that took him up the steps of the Flamingo. Manton would certainly deny having had any part in the attack on Garvald outside Wandsworth. Would probably deny having seen Garvald even if he had. Still, it might be worth having a look at him.

  Manton was in the bedroom of his private suite, hurriedly changing out of his wet clothes, when the phone rang. He listened to what the man on the door had to say and nodded.

  ‘Put him in the front office. I’ll be five minutes.’

  He dressed quickly in a clean white shirt and dark lounge suit, his mind racing. Detective Sergeant Miller? A new boy. Certainly no one he’d ever heard of round Central Division. But what did he want, that was the thing? The one comforting thought he carried with him when he left the room was that it couldn’t have anything to do with Brady – there simply hadn’t been enough time.

  Nick was examining a framed historical map of the North of England on the wall when Manton came in and he turned and smiled pleasantly.

  ‘Mr Manton – sorry to trouble you, sir. My name’s Miller. Detective Sergeant, Central Division. I’m trying to locate an old acquaintance of yours, Ben Garvald. I’ve reason to believe he arrived in town today and I thought he might have contacted you.’

  Manton decided to play the honest but puzzled businessman. ‘Everybody wants Ben Garvald. What is all this, Sergeant? As I told Mr Brady earlier I didn’t even know Ben was out.’

  Nick frowned. ‘Jack Brady’s been here?’

  ‘About an hour or so ago.’ Manton hesitated. ‘I hope I haven’t said anything out of turn, but he came in through the front door just like you. Everybody saw him.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Manton,’ Nick said. ‘A misunderstanding, that’s all. So you can’t help me with Ben?’

  ‘As I told Brady, I didn’t even know he was out.’

  ‘Fair enough. I won’t trouble you any more then.’ Nick moved to the door, hesitated and turned. ‘Just one more thing. Does Sammy Rosco work for you?’

  Manton frowned. ‘That’s right, just along the street from here. Why, what’s Sammy been up to?’

  ‘Nothing really,’ Nick said pleasantly. ‘But I’d get rid of him if I were you.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘He tells lies, Mr Manton, mainly about you.’

  Nick smiled and the door closed behind him. Manton stood there behind the desk for a moment, eyes narrowed, and then he picked up the telephone and dialled a number.

  Chapter 14

  Harry Faulkner’s house was in St Martin’s Wood, an exclusive residential area not far from Nick’s own home. It was a late Victorian mansion set back from the road in a couple of acres of ground. The whole place was a blaze of lights and there were so many cars in the drive he found difficulty in parking.

  He mounted the wide steps to the porch and rang the front door bell, but there was no reply. After a while, he tried the ornate bronze handle. The door opened to his touch and he went inside.

  The house seemed to be full of people. The hall was crowded with them and couples sat all the
way up the stairs, most of them with glasses in their hands.

  And every bed occupied, he thought to himself wryly.

  He took off his cap and coat, left them on a walking stick rack in the porch and pushed his way through the crowd towards the sound of a driving piano with rhythm and bass accompaniment that was somehow familiar.

  He found himself in the entrance to a long, narrow room flanked by French windows to the terrace outside.

  It had a beautifully polished parquet floor, ­obviously specially laid for dancing and was as crowded as the hall outside.

  Chuck Lazer sat at a baby grand in a corner opposite the bar at the far end. Nick was just about to push his way towards him, when he felt a tap on the shoulder and turned quickly.

  A tall, heavily built man in his thirties faced him, a polite smile on his face. He wore a dinner jacket that had been cut by someone who knew what he was doing, but the slightly crooked line of the nose and the hard eyes made Nick immediately wary.

  ‘I saw you come in, sir. Is there something I can do for you?’

  ‘And who might you be?’

  ‘Craig, sir. Mr Faulkner’s manservant.’

  Nick almost laughed out loud. ‘I’d like to see Mrs Faulkner. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘She’s rather busy right now, sir. Was it something important?’

  Nick took out his warrant card. ‘I think you’ll find she’ll come running when you tell her who it is.’

  The smile disappeared, the eyes seemed harder than ever. ‘If you’d come this way.’

  Nick followed him through the crowd along the hall. Craig paused outside a door, took a key from his pocket and opened it. ‘Mr Faulkner’s study, Sergeant. If you’ll wait in here, I’ll fetch Mrs Faulkner. I believe she’s in the kitchen checking on the supper.’

  It was a pleasant room, lined with books from floor to ceiling. There was a magnificent walnut desk near the Adam fireplace and a small bar in one corner, carefully designed to stay in character. From the heavy velvet curtains, to the Persian carpet on the floor, everything was perfect. Too perfect. It was as if someone had called in a firm of interior decorators and ordered a gentleman’s study as per the catalogue.