by John Creasey
“Oh, I’m fine.”
She knew she was tantalizing him, that here in broad daylight there was nothing he could do, nothing serious he dared attempt; she knew men. She was twenty-one, and in some ways thought and behaved as if she were seventeen. She imagined the desire that was heating his blood, but it did not occur to her that there was anything wrong about such tantalizing. Her flat was not far away, the moment he so longed for would soon come. It was a good thing to keep a man waiting for a while.
He edged nearer, still looking at her neck. She could feel his breath on her cheeks, and he was panting a little. She wished she could push her fingers through his glossy hair, but that would mean taking a hand from beneath her head. She showed her beautiful teeth in a smile.
“Like me, Frankie?” she whispered.
“Like you. Why, I—”
She was taken absolutely by surprise by the speed with which he moved, the ferocious strength of his body upon hers, the pressure of his lips on her mouth, on her teeth. It seemed only an instant from the moment she had whispered, “Like me, Frankie?” to the moment when she felt as if he would crush the breath out of her body. She could not breathe because of the fierceness of his mouth on hers, and the pressure of his hands about her neck.
She tried to cry out but could not, tried to struggle but could hardly move, tried to turn her head away but was imprisoned. The sky went dark as the blood strained against her eyes, and in that moment she understood what he was doing and felt the fear of death.
They did not see the dog, a wire-haired terrier, which came frisking.
They did not hear the man calling, “Snip, come here.”
They did not see the man push aside the branches of a tree, which concealed them, or hearing him gasp, “My God!” Mayhew was aware only of the yielding softness of the girl’s body, of the sharp grating of his teeth on hers, of the way his fingers sank into her plump white throat. He knew what he was doing and meant that she should die, and yet he did not know what he was doing, and when she was dead he would cry.
He had to go on. He could not stop himself. He–
He felt a blow on the side of his head, another and another, hard and painful, bringing him back into the world about him. The light of the sun and the green of the grass and the barking of a dog, which stood nearby, all merged together. A man’s feet and legs were just in front of him, and there was a grip on his neck as the man dragged him away. He yielded. He was only just aware of Alice, lying motionless, arms by her sides and fists half-clenched, eyes closed and mouth slack.
Then realization of his great danger came to Mayhew’s mind, driving away all thought but of escape.
Swiftly he calculated the odds. There was the man, still heaving at him, and the dog, barking, showing shiny, bared teeth. No one else was in sight. He let his body go, and eased himself up to his knees. The man said:
“If you’ve killed her you’ll hang for it.”
Mayhew shuffled farther away on his hands and knees, as the other man bent over the girl, his back toward Mayhew. Still unsteadily, his body trembling but his mind as cold as ice, Mayhew got to his feet. Now the dog set up a frenzied growling.
“Watch him, Snip,” the man said. He was straightening out Alice’s legs. “Don’t let him go.”
Mayhew staggered forward a pace, the dog still growling, then jerked himself up and kicked. The force of the kick drove the breath from the terrier’s body, and lifted it three feet into the air. The man half-turned, and began to scramble to his feet, but Mayhew kicked him in the small of the back, and he collapsed, suddenly sick with pain.
Mayhew turned and raced away, half aware of a barge full of people passing on the canal and staring toward the scene.
2: Lucci
Gideon’s Number 3 telephone, the direct line one, sounded at the same time as the door opened and a messenger came in with some reports, one marked: All Divisions and Scotland Yard - URGENT. The messenger dumped these in Gideon’s In tray and nodded to Lemaitre as he went out. Gideon said “Gideon” into the mouthpiece, trying to read the urgent message upside down. R-A-P–
“George, I’m sorry to worry you. Is it a bad time?”
“Hallo, Kate! No, perfectly all right.” Gideon stopped at R-A-P to give his full attention to his wife. She had already made it clear that there was no cause for alarm, so this was some domestic trifle. “One of the youngsters coming home, or something?”
“No, nothing like that,” Kate replied. “Helen Hobbs would like me to go to a wives’ group meeting at her house there’s a special speaker on Hong Kong. But if you’re likely to get home early I’d rather stay in.”
She meant it.
“As a matter of fact I might be late,” Gideon said. He could spend some time going over those files and weighing up the problems of liaison with New York, and Kate need not know that until that moment he had had no intention of staying. “You go and hear all about the Crown’s ideal colony. Likely to be late?”
“Elevenish.”
“I’ll be home by then,” Gideon promised. He was already at the next letter in the message. R-A-P-E. Suddenly, Kate’s voice seemed to fade and Nielsen’s was superimposed.
“—bye, dear,” Kate said. “Make sure you have a good meal.”
Another phone was ringing.
“’Bye,” Gideon said. “Have a good time.” He rang off almost brusquely and stretched out for the report. His middle telephone was ringing, the one from the switchboard. He let it ring, and read:
Teletype Message from A.B. Division Rape and Attempted Murder - Regent’s Park
At 4:30 p.m. approx. a Mr. CHARLES HISLOP interrupted a man attempting to strangle a young woman named ALICE CLAY by the canal in Regent’s Park. The assailant escaped while HISLOP went to CLAY’S assistance. CLAY is in Marylebone Hospital unconscious. We have an officer by her bedside. HISLOP has been most co-operative. Latter part of attack and rescue was observed by occupants of a barge on pleasure trip on Regent’s Park canal. HISLOP’S description of assailant is appended.
Gideon’s second bell had stopped ringing; Lemaitre was holding a telephone and looking across the room.
“George, can you take this?”
Gideon was reading the description of the assailant: Dark hair, blue-black eyes, lean features . . .
“Who is it?”
“Old Dog’s Collar.”
Gideon’s mind switched from the story of the attack in Regent’s Park to the problem of the Italian, Lucci. At this stage in a case Parsons wouldn’t call unless it was an unexpected development, probably an important one, but the rape case investigation was vitally urgent. What Mayhew would do twice he might do a dozen times if given the chance. Gideon picked up the divisional report and rose to his feet. “I’ll take it. Get busy on this, will you? General call, all divisions, the lot.” He met Lemaitre halfway across the office, and after a single glance at the sheet, Lemaitre exclaimed:
“Blimey!”
As his assistant went out, Gideon stretched across his desk and picked up the telephone. It was so often like this: a period of comparative quiet followed by a burst of activity which allowed no time for thinking, hardly time to distinguish one case from another in his mind. The fact that he could keep a dozen quite separate, and call the details of each to mind at will, explained why he was commander.
“Yes, Vic?”
“George,” said Vic Parsons, “you’re not going to like this.”
Benito Dolci Lucci was baffled and bewildered, even frightened, when he stood in the dock at Bow Street. He had never been in a court of any kind before, had not known trouble with the police since his early youth, when he had been rightly suspected of giving aid to English and American airmen shot down over northern Italy. In those days he had been a rebel against all authority, simply because he was a townsman, unfamiliar with the country, where his parents had sent him to be safe from the bombing of the great cities of the north, Turin, Genoa and Milan.
He had lived and they
had died.
In his early twenties, back in the Milan of his boyhood, he had inherited two million lire from his parents, as well as a small bicycle shop and repair depot. He had been quick to see the prospects for motor-propelled bicycles and started his own factory, giving work first to a dozen, finally to a hundred returned soldiers, girls and youths. Bitterness about Il Duce and fascism was short-lived in those days when obtaining work and food was the all-consuming problem. His “factory” was a collection of dilapidated huts once a German prisoner-of-war camp, his early machines were made of scrap metal, parts from war-damaged jeeps, tanks and cars. In ten years he increased tenfold the fortune his parents had left him.
He sold out to a manufacturer of motor scooters, becoming then a wealthy man in his early thirties with nothing to do. He married a girl he had known since childhood and they had soon become the proud parents of two daughters and a son, his precious Antonio. Lucci, wanting to occupy himself and have a business for his son to inherit, bought a small publishing house with a dozen trade magazines - including one ostensibly for the photography trade and one for the art world. These two became phenomenally successful, although there was nothing pornographic about them. Eventually the circulation of the arty magazines became so big that he could no longer keep the business in his own hands, and he relied more and more on managers and assistants. They built up a big export trade, and also widened the scope and extended the range of pictures, mostly nudes. But nudes did not shock an Italian with a love of art in his blood, and in any case he seldom studied the magazines himself; he travelled widely, generally with his wife.
He opened branches in big cities in Europe, usually in partnership with a national from the country concerned. One of the most flourishing branches was in London. He had heard rumours that his partner in London was in some kind of difficulty, sent a representative from the Milan office to investigate, and after a week received an urgent cable:
COME AT ONCE: GIOVANNI
So he had flown here, leaving his wife, his teenage daughters and his ten-year-old son in Milan.
“I will be back in two or three days,” he had promised them.
In three days he discovered a little of the truth. His partner was doing much more than publishing magazines filled with photographs and colour prints of nude men and women. He was doing much more than distributing these pornographic photographs and magazines undercover in London, where they were sold to pimps and prostitutes, to the prurient young and the lecherous old, and where they were used by prostitutes to excite even their most regular clients. The worst was very bad in England; bad anywhere, but especially in England.
Lucci, through his partner’s actions, owned many of the houses which were let off to the girls, room by room. Through a resident manager of each house, the partners took a percentage of the girls’ earnings. Two of the managers were Italians who had lived in London for years, but who visited Milan regularly. These two had given evidence that on each trip they smuggled two or three thousand pounds out of England, and delivered it in person to Lucci. Lucci, they said, knew about everything, Lucci made them take money from the girls.
Most of this Lucci had heard for the first time while in the dock at Bow Street, through a solicitor who translated quickly and unemotionally from English into Italian.
Lucci’s partner had denied all knowledge of the letting-off of the rooms to prostitutes and of the financial transactions. The two managers had exonerated him in their testimony, blaming only Lucci.
“But I know nothing of this!” Lucci had cried.
The cry had seemed to fall on deaf ears; there had been no one to believe him.
Now Lucci stood, immaculate in his beautifully tailored suit, black hair shiny with pomade, face slightly powdered, dark eyes shimmering with fear and bewilderment and the beginning of hatred for his “partner,” an Englishman named White: Percival White.
There had been no trouble in raising the money for bail, of course.
There was anguish in his mind. Until today he had believed he would be found not guilty, that there was a chance to keep this beastly story from his wife and family, but now he knew it would be in the Milan newspapers, Il Giorno would carry his photograph - it was terrible, terrible.
He went back, alone, to his hotel apartment, still only half-aware that it was owned by his company, and that many of the rooms were used for what the police had called “immoral purposes”. His living room was beautifully furnished, on the fourth and top floor, overlooking a narrow street which seemed to be as full of restaurants as the arched gallerias which led off the Cathedral Square in Milan. There was nothing to indicate that in the ceiling there was a one-way mirror, through which one could peer down into this room.
A man was watching him from there. A microphone carried every sound he made to the watcher.
Lucci walked about the living room, then went into the bedroom, where a photograph of plump Maria, his daughters and Antonio stood on the dressing table.
Beside the photograph was a newspaper which he had not seen before and had not placed there himself. He picked up the photograph, and tears stung his eyes until he could hardly see. When he could, he picked up the newspaper and opened it. It was Il Giorno. A copy of this same family photograph was on the front page, with an enlarged photograph of him.
The headlines seemed to scream:
LUCCI ACCUSED OF VICE SCANDAL IN LONDON
Hearing Tomorrow
In Milan, when she had seen the same edition the day before, Maria Lucci had said very simply to her daughters and her servants:
“I must fly to London quickly. Signor Lucci is in need of me.”
She was flying over the Alps at the exact moment when Lucci saw the newspaper.
Lucci felt as if the world had crashed down on him. Maria now knew the worst, as did his friends, his priest, his staff, everyone who sold or distributed the magazines. He could never recover from this shame; never.
He picked up a bottle of brandy from a table by the window. As he poured out the sound of glass on glass quivered all the time; and the man above smiled down on him. Lucci tossed the drink down, picked up the photograph, stared, put it down, picked it up again. He went almost blindly to an armchair with a high back and dropped into this, despairingly.
Soon a kind of quiet came over him.
Soon he slept.
When he was fast asleep, the door opened and a man came in. This man replaced the brandy in the bottle with some which was free from poison, replaced the stopper, then pulled the sheets off the bed and stuffed them round the doors. Next he drew the heavy curtains at the windows, stood looking round for fully a minute, and finally bolted the door and turned on the gas fire. Then he went back into the bathroom. He closed that door firmly, and climbed out of a tiny window into an airshaft, and on to a ladder which had been placed there for him.
Maria Lucci was now flying over the valley of the Rhône.
Since the hearing, Superintendent Parsons had been very uneasy indeed. Obviously Lucci had been in abnormal distress in the dock; the guilty sometimes brazened a situation out, or sometimes feigned distress, but Lucci had not been pretending. If he had told the truth, then Percival White had been lying, but White had left London “for a rest” after the committal. He had left his address behind, wasn’t on the run as far as Parsons could judge. As he couldn’t question White, Parsons decided to have another talk with Lucci.
Parsons was a man with a conscience, but not one who often questioned his own competence. He traded on his quite natural but rather unctuous manner, his rather soft looking lips, his habit of pressing the tips of his fingers together as if at heart he thought that all times were times for prayer. Stored up in the brain behind the broad, rather wrinkled forehead, which gave an impression of constant perplexity, was a remarkable store of knowledge about human vice, perversion and frailty. He was the Yard’s expert on vice, and his attitude toward the beastliness he dealt with was coolly objective. He could use four-letter words
and the worst obscenities with absolute detachment, but except in the way of business he neither swore nor spoke obscenely.
He knew he was right about the vice ring built around Lucci’s businesses; he was now far from sure about the Italian’s personal involvement.
He went to the beautifully appointed private hotel in Soho, a place where orgiastic parties were thrown as often as it was safe, where for a large enough sum one could become a Prince of Peeping Toms, and where Lucci had the most luxurious suite. Outside the hotel a divisional sergeant said: “He’s still here, sir.”
“Good.” Parsons went in, determined to test his own new doubts on the Italian, but there was no answer to a call to his room. A girl receptionist with enormous brown eyes gave him a timid smile.
“Perhaps Mr. Lucci, he is out.”
“I’m going up to his room,” Parsons said. He turned on his heel and strode to the self-operated lift. By the time he was banging on Lucci’s door, and calling out, a youthful porter, also Italian, came bounding up the stairs. Parsons stood back, showed his card, and said: “Open the door.”
“But, sir, I cannot–”
“Open it or I’ll break it down.”
The youth tried a passkey, but although it turned the lock the door did not open. Parsons went to a landing window, thrust that open, beckoned the divisional detective and waited impatiently until he arrived. With the porter protesting as if in anguish, the two detectives put their combined weight against the door.
On the third assault the bolt gave way.
“—Lucci was lying in an easy chair with the Milanese newspaper spread over his paunch and his knees. He was as pink as a cherry - must have been dead for half an hour.” Parsons told Gideon over the telephone. “I think we ought to consider murder but we might put White and some others at disadvantage if we pretend we’ve bought it as suicide. I thought you might make up my mind for me about that, George. I don’t want to make any more wrong decisions.”
