Criminal Imports

by John Creasey

  “Thief! Stop thief!”

  A little shiny-haired man appeared at the doorway.

  ‘There he goes!” yelled Barney, pointing.

  He rushed past the man toward the corner. Maggie was already pulling out, and he jumped between the taxi and the car behind it and scrambled into the cab with Maggie holding the offside door open. He hooked the door to with his foot. Maggie started off. Barney knew that from this moment on she would be in her element. Driving was second nature to her, and she could weave through traffic skilfully enough to make a taxi driver applaud.

  Absolutely confident in her ability to get them to safety, Barney wriggled out of the big tweed suit and kicked off the boots; underneath he wore a shirt, flannels and thin canvas shoes. He folded the suit and pushed it and the boots into a space under the back seat of the taxi, then he took a black jacket off the seat and shrugged himself into it.

  Maggie was squinting at him over her shoulder. She winked. Good old Maggie! he thought happily. She had shamed him into doing the job, and as always she was seeing him safe.

  That was almost the exact moment that Michael Dunn put seven invoices in the post to Kismet Cosmetics, all genuine; and put three more, all forged, into his briefcase to take to the factory when he next called there.

  He was trembling.

  Cynthia was coughing.

  Parsons heard the crash of glass as he passed the window of Lucci’s apartment. The body was now on a stretcher, ready for the waiting ambulance. Two photographers and a fingerprint man had been over the flat with great thoroughness, and Parsons was sure he had missed nothing. There was a scraping of cigarette tobacco and paper from the carpet, now in a plastic bag; someone had carried it in here on the sole of his shoe, it would never have squashed so flat on a carpet. He had photographs and scrapings from the scratches on the airshaft, too, and felt positive that a man had climbed out the bathroom window recently. He had talked to a tall, middle-aged Italian, Giovanni Mancelli, who had flown from Milan a few days earlier. Mancelli professed to be shocked by the whole affair.

  “What his wife and family will say I cannot imagine,” he had said. “I must fly back to them as soon as possible. Is it in order for me to leave now?”

  Parsons had raised no objection.

  Parsons went to the window and looked out, and one of the photographers joined him.

  “Car crash?” he suggested.

  “I only heard glass,” said Parsons. “What’s going on at the corner?” A crowd had gathered, and a little man in the middle was gesticulating wildly. One of the divisional men had left his position outside the hotel, and two policemen were among the crowd.

  “See that window?” asked the photographer.

  “Smash-and-grab,” decided Parsons. “Nip along and take some pictures. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  The photographer was a middle-aged, prosy man, heavy featured, stocky and grey clad.

  “Two birds with one stone, eh?” He picked up his camera and plodded out.

  The ambulance men took the stretcher toward the small lift; Parsons wondered how they would manage in there. He turned back to the apartment. There were the dead man’s clothes, a few of his better magazines, some cigarettes - and the newspaper and photograph. Parsons studied the face of Maria Lucci, then wondered who would look after Lucci’s things here. He reminded himself that he could treat this as murder, in which case the apartment could be sealed off for as long as he wanted - or he could release it in the hope of convincing White and everyone else concerned that the suicide theory was accepted.

  It was one thing to leave the decision to Gideon, another to shelve the responsibility for carrying it out. Gideon knew that he had really wanted to soft-pedal; had he thought a murder charge would stick, he would have made it. “Two days George gave me,” he mused aloud, and stepped toward the door. As he reached it the telephone bell rang. He went across to the instrument which was by the side of the bed. “Parsons.”

  “Mr. Parsons, please.” It was the girl of the reception desk. “There is a lady here.”

  “Well?”

  “She has come to see Signor Lucci.”

  Parsons said again, “Well?”

  It might be any one of a dozen women who habitually used this hotel, but something in the girl’s voice made him wonder.

  The girl said, “It is . . . the signora.”

  “Signora who?” asked Parsons, but before she answered he realized whom she meant.

  “Signora Lucci. Please - what shall I do?”

  Parsons said heavily, unhappily, “Where are the ambulance men?”

  “They are gone now.”

  “Did she see them leave?”

  “No, sir, I do not think so. Please, sir–”

  “I’ll come down,” Parsons said.

  Lucci’s wife was very short, five feet at the most, plump, but not plump enough to be dumpy. In her dark-eyed, olive-complexioned way she was quite a beauty. She was dressed in a smooth-textured chocolate-brown suit trimmed with mink.

  She looked at him apprehensively with huge brown eyes. He was relieved to hear her speak in English, even with a marked American accent. He became the “parson,” the man of understanding and sympathy.

  “Please, I want to see my husband. Where is he?”

  “Mrs. Lucci,” Parsons said, “I am sorry that I have bad news for you.”

  “You have bad news about my husband? You have sent him to prison, then? But that is wrong, my husband knows nothing about such evil things as it says in the newspapers. Please, you must believe me. He is a good man.”

  That was the moment when Parsons felt a sense not only of responsibility but of guilt, and the moment when he drew nearer to Gideon in his concept of his work. When he had pressed for Lucci’s arrest, believing he should seize the opportunity of one of the man’s rare visits to London, he had created the conditions which had led to his death.

  “Please, I tell you he is a good man.”

  Parsons said humbly, “I think we would have proved that, if only-”

  Her eyes flashed.

  “I must see him. Please, take me to him.” She took his hands and gripped tightly. He was aware of her perfume as well as of her terrible intensity. Even then, even with that sense of guilt in his heart, he felt ill at ease because of a kind of theatricality in her manner, common to so many Southern Europeans. There had been nothing at all theatrical about Lucci; he had behaved as if he had been in a state of shock from the moment of his arrest.

  “Please, I wish to see him!”

  Parsons wished Gideon were here to cope with the dead Lucci’s wife.

  “Signora, you cannot see him,” he said slowly, and the tips of his fingers touched. “I have very, very bad news for you!”

  Signora Lucci’s eyes appeared to become huge and luminous. Obviously comprehension grew in her mind and slowly her expression changed to one of horror. For a moment he thought that she would become hysterical. Her lips trembled and she began to cry. Softly, the little Italian girl came forward and began to talk in Italian, and a tall man in a black cassock came in; obviously the girl had sent for a priest.

  He also began to talk in Italian to Signora Lucci, and suddenly she turned from Parsons as if he were unclean.

  In a way he would have felt better if she had stormed at him and blamed him.

  He went out glumly, but soon perked up, for dozens of newspapermen were waiting for him, and he had to “sell” the suicide story. He hoped to God he was right to.

  “How much did you get?” Maggie Barnett asked her husband.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I want to know.”

  “Money and fair words. How about the Ritz, ducks?”

  “So it was a good haul,” Maggie said with satisfaction.

  “Good enough for the Trocadero, anyway,” confirmed Barney.

  “How long will it keep us in comfort and ease?”

  “A month, if my wife doesn’t start throwing the dough abo
ut.”

  “I never have and I never will,” said Maggie. She was sitting in the kitchen, a cup of tea in her hands, slippers on, flowered dress opened at the zip-fastener side for comfort’s sake. “Give, Barney.”

  Maggie held out her hand, rosy palm uppermost. Barney played a little game of indignation, then took a wad of notes from inside his jacket and slapped it into her hand.

  “That’s my boy. How much?”

  “One hundred and forty,” declared Barney.

  She widened her blue-green eyes.

  “Say, you’re learning. Those sparklers must have been worth a thousand quid.” She counted out the notes, some fives, more ones, and tucked some back into his pocket. “Forty for you,” she announced.

  “Ought to be seventy,” Barney argued.

  “Barney,” said Maggie, as if she hadn’t heard him, “how do you know old Adam didn’t cheat you? How do you know there wasn’t two thousand quids” worth in that loot? Did you get another price?”

  “Didn’t have time,” said Barney loftily.

  But there had been time, and Maggie was right; he had been in too much of a hurry to sell. Maggie, sensing his mood, planted a kiss on his lips, and said: “What about a little drink, ducky?”

  He had two, but he was thoughtful and quiet when they got ready for the trip to the West End from the little house in Fulham, near the Eelbrook Common. It wasn’t until he had had his second glass of champagne at the Trocadero, not a quarter of a mile from the place he had robbed, that he began to enjoy himself. Next time he would make old Adam pay through the nose.

  Among the other people in the Trocadero dining room was Detective Sergeant Lacey, there to watch a man and woman who were believed to be planning to defraud an old man from the country. The prospective victim hadn’t yet shown up, and the suspects were at the bar. Lacey watched Barney and his wife dancing with the expertise of ballroom professionals. Maggie seemed to have magic in her feet; it was almost possible to forget that she was portly and middle-aged.

  On his general report next day, Lacey wrote:

  Barney and Maggie Barnett were living it up at the Trocadero last night. They had two bottles of champagne between them.

  Cynthia Dunn lay up on her pillows, fighting for breath after another bout of coughing. The television was turned on low, and Michael was watching it and thinking of what he had done.

  “Mike,” she said with an effort.

  “Yes, Cyn?”

  “Mike, can we afford it?”

  “Afford what?”

  “Bournemouth, of course.”

  “Of course we can! And if all goes well we’ll move down there, lock, stock and barrel, before you can say knife.”

  “I’d love that,” she said. “I’d just love it.”

  She did not raise the question of the expense again, appearing to be fully reassured. Dunn, so sensitive because of his guilt, could not understand why she had raised it at all.

  Alice Clay lay awake in the General Ward of the Marylebone Hospital, a little scared and at the same time glad of the shadowy figures in the other beds, the sound of many people breathing, one woman snoring, one whistling reedily. Every now and again she seemed to feel the pressure of Mason’s hands at her throat, and his body on hers, and she felt tears flood her eyes and a kind of panic rise up in her.

  She would never go with a man again.

  Frank Mayhew, alias Mason, was almost asleep in a small hotel in Kensington. He had moved here from his Mayfair hotel during the period of panic that had followed his flight from Regent’s Park. A newspaper with the story in headlines and with a picture of the Clay girl was on the floor by the side of his bed. One of the sub-headlines read: American Wanted for Questioning,

  That was his great hope, the cause of his confidence that he would not be found. He had assumed an Australian accent, which he had acquired on the ship. No one would know he was an American, but no one would be surprised that he didn’t speak quite like an Englishman.

  He was safe enough.

  It was a funny thing though. In the hotel there was a girl who was remarkably like Alice Clay, in the same way as Alice had been like Juanita Candless in New York. Face, breasts, wasp waist, legs - she was almost a carbon copy.

  He wondered what room she was in.

  Her name was Florence Foster. She was fast asleep, in Room 97 of the Rosemount Hotel, one floor down and along a narrow passage. She was alone in London for the first time in her life, which wasn’t so remarkable as she was not quite nineteen years of age.

  Gideon slept soundly, with Kate beside him. She had come home vivacious and talkative, thrilled with the pictures she had seen and the stories she had heard of Hong Kong. The speaker had been a woman C.I.D. officer from the island colony, and the hostess the wife of one of the few ex-public school and university men - Superintendent Hobbs. Gideon had listened with half an ear, while going over the events of the day in his mind. He had stayed late at the office, had a meal at the pub in Cannon Row, two hundred yards away, and walked home through his beloved London, although the word “beloved” would never have occurred to him.

  He had done more.

  He had geared his mind for the tasks of tomorrow which would be born out of the events of this day. The feeling of responsibility for preventing some threatening crimes was still on him. He was afraid that he might have missed a key factor in the day’s reports, and had fallen asleep wondering about the man Schumacher on the Queen Elizabeth, hoping that his subconscious mind would succeed where his conscious mind had failed.

  Lucci’s widow did not sleep at all.

  She had been comforted, but felt no comfort. Her grief was so great that it stifled the other emotion within her - one of anger. Now and again it burst out in an anguished cry: “Not my Benito” Her Benito had been a good man, a religious man. He would never have taken his own life. He would never have trafficked in young girls, the thought was hideous. It was a wicked lie. Yet he was dead, and shame smeared his memory.

  A thought flashed across her mind. I must not allow it, I must clear his name!

  5: Dockside

  “What a sight!” exclaimed Lemaitre. They can say what they like, but the old Q.E. is still the finest ship afloat. Ain’t she a beauty?”

  “Lovely,” said Chloe, his wife.

  “They knew how to make ships when they made her. These post-war crates - just sheets of metal riveted together.”

  The United States looks lovely, too,” Chloe ventured.

  It was one of those days when two great transatlantic liners passed close by each other in the Solent. The fastest and the largest passenger ships afloat, each in its way majestic, steamed through a sea as calm and blue as the Mediterranean on a day when the South Coast of England and the green slopes and tall cliffs of the Isle of Wight looked as serene as if no gales had ever whipped the sea to dark grey fury.

  The Lemaitres were standing in the thwarts of the cutter taking the port medical officer, the immigration and customs officials aboard. Most of the work for both immigration and customs departments had been done on the ship but there was no end to formality. The sides of both ships were lined with passengers, the United States was bedecked with a thousand flags, the Queen Elizabeth flew the Union Jack on the foremast, the blue ensign, the Cunard Line flag on the aftermast, and pilot’s red and white flag between the mast and the nearer funnel. The sirens boomed out across the water, the passengers waved almost frantically.

  As the cutter drew near, the ships passed. The white side of the Queen Elizabeth loomed huge over the tiny ship. Lemaitre looked at his wife, half afraid that clambering up the rope ladder would scare her. She was his second wife, married three years ago after long years of marriage to a harridan. Chloe was like a dream wife. He was apprehensive that something might smear the marriage, some accident, some trick of fate, some idiocy of his own. She was very blonde, very small, big-breasted, slim-legged. He kept on making new discoveries about her. He made one now. She swung herself on to and
up that ladder with the agility of a cabin boy. At the ship’s rail she turned to ask: “Want any help, Lem?”

  “Just carry me.” Lemaitre grinned. In the grand hall he was anxious again. “Don’t lose yourself, Chlo-ee. This is a big ship.”

  “And I’m a big girl now,” Chloe retorted.

  He left her at the windows of the closed shops, already wistful.

  Lemaitre knew the liaison man on board the liner, Jack Simmons, who had once been at the Yard but retired early to take up this job with the steamship company. He was nominally assistant chief steward, and yet his work had more to do with the master-at-arms. He kept a watchful eye on the passengers of the ship much as a hotel detective did in a hotel. Like many men trained at the Yard he had an almost photographic memory; it was he who had reported that George Snider, the cracksman, had travelled first class on this ship to America.

  Lemaitre met him in his cabin.

  “Don’t give you much room, Jack, do they?” He looked round, only half-approving.

  “Room enough for a bottle or two,” retorted Simmons. He was young-looking for his fifty-six years, sleek, well groomed, tubby. He poured out whiskey, added soda from a small bottle, and raised his glass.

  “Here’s a toast to getting the man you’re after.”

  “A Yank named Schumacher.”

  “Not surprised,” said Simmons promptly. “He’s got a funny look about him. I thought he was card-sharping, but my tame budgerigar could beat him at anything from penny-nap up. Hangs around the middle-aged socialites but they don’t like him much. He’s seen a lot of one American couple - the Hendersons.”