by Merry Murder
It was all highly undignified and tedious, and poor old Disaster nearly had a seizure, despite the fact that the police matron seemed a thoroughly nice and kind woman. When it was all over, however, and our persons and clothing had been practically turned inside out, still nothing had been found. The four of us were required to wait in the staff restroom while exhaustive searches were made for both the heroin and the weapon.
Disaster was in tears, Miss MacArthur was loudly indignant and threatened to sue the police for false arrest, and Mr. Harrington developed what he called a nervous stomach, on account, he said, of the way the toy department was being left understaffed and unsupervised on one of the busiest days of the year.
At long last Superintendent Armitage came in. He said, “Nothing. Abso-bloody-lutely nothing. Well, I can’t keep you people here indefinitely. I suggest you all go out and get yourselves some lunch.” He sounded very tired and cross and almost human.
With considerable relief we prepared to leave the staffroom. Only Mr. Harrington announced that he felt too ill to eat anything, and that he would remain in the department. The Misses MacArthur and Aster left together. I put on my coat and took the escalator down to the ground floor, among the burdened, chattering crowd.
I was out in the brisk air of the street when I heard Armitage’s voice behind me.
“Just one moment, if you please, Mr. Borrowdale.”
I turned. “Yes, Superintendent. Can I help you?”
“You’re up at the university, aren’t you, sir? Just taken a temporary job at Barnum’s for the vacation?”
“That’s right.”
“Do quite a bit of fencing, don’t you?”
He had my cane out of my hand before I knew what was happening. The sergeant, an extraordinarily tough and unattractive character, showed surprising dexterity and speed in getting an arm grip on me. Armitage had unscrewed the top of the cane, and was whistling in a quiet, appreciative manner. “Very nice. Very nice little sword stick. Something like a stilletto. I don’t suppose Charlie felt a thing.”
“Now, look here,” I said. “You can’t make insinuations like that. Just because I’m known as a bit of dandy, and carry a sword stick, that’s no reason—”
“A dandy, eh?” said Armitage thoughtfully. He looked me up and down in a curious manner, as if he thought something was missing.
It was at that moment that Miss MacArthur suddenly appeared round the corner of the building.
“Oh, Mr. Borrowdale, look what I found! Lying down in the mews by the goods entrance! It must have fallen out of the staffroom window! Lucky I’ve got sharp eyes—it was behind a rubbish bin, I might easily have missed it!” And she handed me my bowler hat.
That is to say, she would have done if Armitage hadn’t intercepted it. It didn’t take him more than five seconds to find the packages of white powder hidden between the hard shell of the hat and the oiled-silk lining.
Armitage said, “So you were going to peddle this stuff to young men and women at the university, were you? Charming, I must say. Now you can come back to the Yard and tell us all about your employers—if you want a chance at saving your own neck, that is.”
Miss MacArthur was goggling at me. “Oh, Mr. Borrowdale!” she squeaked. “Have I gone and done something wrong?”
I never did like Miss MacArthur.
’TWIXT THE CUP AND THE LIP – Julian Symons
“A beautiful morning, Miss Oliphant. I shall take a short constitutional.”
“Very well, Mr. Payne.”
Mr. Rossiter Payne put on his good thick Melton overcoat, took his bowler hat off its peg, carefully brushed it, and put it on. He looked at himself in a small glass and nodded approvingly at what he saw.
He was a man in his early fifties, but he might have passed for ten years less, so square were his shoulders, so ruler-straight his back. Two fine wings of gray hair showed under the bowler. He looked like a retired Guards officer, although he had, in fact, no closer relationship with the Army than an uncle who had been cashiered.
At the door he paused, his eyes twinkling. “Don’t let anybody steal the stock while I’m out. Miss Oliphant.”
Miss Oliphant, a thin spinster of indeterminate middle-age, blushed. She adored Mr. Payne.
He had removed his hat to speak to her. Now he clapped it on his head again, cast an appreciative look at the bow window of his shop, which displayed several sets of standard authors with the discreet legend above—Rossiter Payne, Bookseller. Specialist in First Editions and Manuscripts—and made his way up New Bond Street toward Oxford Street.
At the top of New Bond Street he stopped, as he did five days a week, at the stall on the corner. The old woman put the carnation into his buttonhole.
“Fourteen shopping days to Christmas now, Mrs. Shankly. We’ve all got to think about it, haven’t we?”
A ten shilling note changed hands instead of the usual half crown. He left her blessing him confusedly.
This was perfect December weather—crisply cold, the sun shining. Oxford Street was wearing its holiday decorations—enormous gold and silver coins from which depended ropes of pearls, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. When lighted up in the afternoon they looked pretty, although a little garish for Mr. Payne’s refined taste. But still, they had a certain symbolic feeling about them, and he smiled at them.
Nothing, indeed, could disturb Mr. Payne’s good temper this morning—not the jostling crowds on the pavements or the customary traffic jams which seemed, indeed, to please him. He walked along until he came to a large store that said above it, in enormous letters, ORBIN’S. These letters were picked out in colored lights, and the lights themselves were festooned with Christmas trees and holly wreaths and the figures of the Seven Dwarfs, all of which lighted up.
Orbin’s department store went right round the corner into the comparatively quiet Jessiter Street. Once again Mr. Payne went through a customary ceremony. He crossed the road and went down several steps into an establishment unique of its kind—Danny’s Shoe Parlor. Here, sitting on a kind of throne in this semi-basement, one saw through a small window the lower halves of passers-by. Here Danny, with two assistants almost as old as himself, had been shining shoes for almost 30 years.
Leather-faced, immensely lined, but still remarkably sharp-eyed, Danny knelt down now in front of Mr. Payne, turned up the cuffs of his trousers, and began to put an altogether superior shine on already well-polished shoes.
“Lovely morning, Mr. Payne.”
“You can’t see much of it from here.”
“More than you think. You see the pavements, and if they’re not spotted, right off you know it isn’t raining. Then there’s something in the way people walk, you know what I mean, like it’s Christmas in the air.” Mr. Payne laughed indulgently. Now Danny was mildly reproachful. “You still haven’t brought me in that pair of black shoes, sir.”
Mr. Payne frowned slightly. A week ago he had been almost knocked down by a bicyclist, and the mudguard of the bicycle had scraped badly one of the shoes he was wearing, cutting the leather at one point. Danny was confident that he could repair the cut so that it wouldn’t show. Mr. Payne was not so sure.
“I’ll bring them along,” he said vaguely.
“Sooner the better, Mr. Payne, sooner the better.”
Mr. Payne did not like being reminded of the bicycle incident. He gave Danny half a crown instead of the ten shillings he had intended, crossed the road again, and walked into the side entrance of Orbin’s, which called itself unequivocally “London’s Greatest Department Store.”
This end of the store was quiet. He walked up the stairs, past the grocery department on the ground floor, and wine and cigars on the second, to jewelry on the third. There were rarely many people in this department, but today a small crowd had gathered around a man who was making a speech. A placard at the department entrance said: “The Russian Royal Family Jewels. On display for two weeks by kind permission of the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Moldo-Lithu
ania.”
These were not the Russian Crown Jewels, seized by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, but an inferior collection brought out of Russia by the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess, who had long since become plain Mr. and Mrs. Skandorski, who lived in New Jersey, and were now on a visit to England.
Mr. Payne was not interested in Mr. and Mrs. Skandorski, nor in Sir Henry Orbin who was stumbling through a short speech. He was interested only in the jewels. When the speech was over he mingled with the crowd round the showcase that stood almost in the middle of the room.
The royal jewels lay on beds of velvet—a tiara that looked too heavy to be worn, diamond necklaces and bracelets, a cluster of diamonds and emeralds, and a dozen other pieces, each with an elegant calligraphic description of its origin and history. Mr. Payne did not see the jewels as a romantic relic of the past, nor did he permit himself to think of them as things of beauty. He saw them as his personal Christmas present.
He walked out of the department, looking neither to left nor right, and certainly paying no attention to the spotty young clerk who rushed forward to open the door for him. He walked back to his bookshop, sniffing that sharp December air, made another little joke to Miss Oliphant, and told her she could go out to lunch. During her lunch hour he sold an American a set of a Victorian magazine called The Jewel Box.
It seemed a good augury.
In the past ten years Mr. Payne had engineered successfully—with the help of other, and inferior, intellects—six jewel robberies. He had remained undetected, he believed, partly because of his skill in planning, partly because he ran a perfectly legitimate book business, and partly because he broke the law only when he needed money. He had little interest in women, and his habits were generally ascetic, but he did have one vice.
Mr. Payne developed a system at roulette, an improvement on the almost infallible Frank-Konig system, and every year he went to Monte Carlo and played his system. Almost every year it failed—or rather, it revealed certain imperfections which he then tried to remedy.
It was to support his foolproof system that Mr. Payne had turned from bookselling to crime. He believed himself to be, in a quiet way, a mastermind in the modern criminal world.
Those associated with him were far from that, as he immediately would have acknowledged. He met them two evenings after he had looked at the royal jewels, in his pleasant little flat above the shop, which could be approached from a side entrance opening into an alley.
There was Stacey, who looked what he was, a thick-nosed thug; there was a thin young man in a tight suit whose name was Jack Line, and who was always called Straight or Straight Line; and there was Lester Jones, the spotty clerk in the Jewelry Department.
Stacey and Straight Line sat drinking whiskey, Mr. Payne sipped some excellent sherry, and Lester Jones drank nothing at all, while Mr. Payne in his pedantic, almost schoolmasterly manner, told them how the robbery was to be accomplished.
“You all know what the job is, but let me tell you how much it is worth. In its present form the collection is worth whatever sum you’d care to mention—a quarter of a million pounds perhaps. There is no real market value. But alas, it will have to be broken up. My friend thinks the value will be in the neighborhood of fifty thousand pounds. Not less, and not much more.”
“Your friend?” the jewelry clerk said timidly.
“The fence. Lambie, isn’t it?” It was Stacey who spoke. Mr. Payne nodded. “Okay, how do we split?”
“I will come to that later. Now, here are the difficulties. First of all, there are two store detectives on each floor. We must see to it that those on the third floor are not in the Jewelry Department. Next, there is a man named Davidson, an American, whose job it is to keep an eye on the jewels. He has been brought over here by a protection agency, and it is likely that he will carry a gun. Third, the jewels are in a showcase, and any attempt to open this showcase other than with the proper key will set off an alarm. The key is kept in the Manager’s Office, inside the Jewelry Department.”
Stacey got up, shambled over to the whiskey decanter, and poured himself another drink. “Where do you get all this from?”
Mr. Payne permitted himself a small smile. “Lester works in the department. Lester is a friend of mine.”
Stacey looked at Lester with contempt. He did not like amateurs.
“Let me continue, and tell you how the obstacles can be overcome. First, the two store detectives. Supposing that a small fire bomb were planted in the Fur Department, at the other end of the third floor from Jewelry— that would certainly occupy one detective for a few minutes. Supposing that in the department that deals with ladies’ hats, which is next to Furs, a woman shopper complained that she had been robbed—this would certainly involve the other store detective. Could you arrange this, Stace? These—assistants, shall I call them?—would be paid a straight fee. They would have to carry out their diversions at a precise time, which I have fixed as ten thirty in the morning.”
“Okay,” said Stacey. “Consider it arranged.”
“Next, Davidson. He is an American, as I said, and Lester tells me that a happy event is expected in his family any day now. He has left Mrs. Davidson behind in America, of course. Now, supposing that a call came through, apparently from an American hospital, for Mr. Davidson. Supposing that the telephone in the Jewelry Department was out of order because the cord had been cut. Davidson would be called out of the department for the few minutes, no more, that we should need.”
“Who cuts the cord?” Stacey asked.
“That will be part of Lester’s job.”
“And who makes the phone call?”
“Again, Stace, I hoped that you might be able to provide—”
“I can do that.” Stacey drained his whiskey. “But what do you do?”
Mr. Payne’s lips, never full, were compressed to a disapproving line. He answered the implied criticism only by inviting them to look at two maps—one the layout of the entire third floor, the other of the Jewelry Department itself. Stacey and Straight were impressed, as the uneducated always are, by such evidence of careful planning.
“The Jewelry Department is at one end of the third floor. It has only one exit—into the Carpet Department. There is a service lift which comes straight up into the Jewelry Department. You and I, Stace, will be in that. We shall stop it between floors with the Emergency Stop button. At exactly ten thirty-two we shall go up to the third floor. Lester will give us a sign. If everything has gone well, we proceed. If not, we call the job off. Now, what I propose...”
He told them, they listened, and they found it good. Even the ignorant, Mr. Payne was glad to see, could recognize genius. He told Straight Line his role.
“We must have a car, Straight, and a driver. What he has to do is simple, but he must stay cool. So I thought of you.” Straight grinned.
“In Jessiter Street, just outside the side entrance to Orbin’s, there is a parking space reserved for Orbins’ customers. It is hardly ever full. But if it is full you can double park there for five minutes—cars often do that. I take it you can—acquire a car, shall I say?—for the purpose. You will face away from Oxford Street, and you will have no more than a few minutes’ run to Lambie’s house on Greenly Street. You will drop Stace and me, drive on a mile or two, and leave the car. We shall give the stuff to Lambie. He will pay on the nail. Then we all split.”
From that point they went on to argue about the split. The argument was warm, but not really heated. They settled that Stacey would get 25 per cent of the total, Straight and Lester 12½ per cent each, and that half would go to the mastermind. Mr. Payne agreed to provide out of his share the £150 that Stacey said would cover the three diversions.
The job was fixed six days ahead—for Tuesday of the following week.
Stacey had two faults which had prevented him from rising high in his profession. One was that he drank too much, the other that he was stupid. He made an effort to keep his drinking under control, knowing th
at when he drank he talked. So he did not even tell his wife about the job, although she was safe enough.
But he could not resist cheating about the money, which Payne had given to him in full.
The fire bomb was easy. Stacey got hold of a little man named Shrimp Bateson, and fixed it with him. There was no risk, and Shrimp thought himself well paid with twenty-five quid. The bomb itself cost only a fiver, from a friend who dealt in hardware. It was guaranteed to cause just a little fire, nothing serious.
For the telephone call Stacey used a Canadian who was grubbing a living at a striptease club. It didn’t seem to either of them that the job was worth more than a tenner, but the Canadian asked for twenty and got fifteen.
The woman was a different matter, for she had to be a bit of an actress, and she might be in for trouble since she actually had to cause a disturbance. Stacey hired an eighteen-stone Irish woman named Lucy O’Malley, who had once been a female wrestler, and had very little in the way of a record—nothing more than a couple of drunk and disorderlies. She refused to take anything less than £50, realizing, as the others hadn’t, that Stacey must have something big on.
The whole lot came to less than £100, so that there was cash to spare. Stacey paid them all half their money in advance, put the rest of the £100 aside, and went on a roaring drunk for a couple of days, during which he somehow managed to keep his mouth buttoned and his nose clean.
When he reported on Monday night to Mr. Payne he seemed to have everything fixed, including himself.
Straight Line was a reliable character, a young man who kept himself to himself. He pinched the car on Monday afternoon, took it along to the semilegitimate garage run by his father-in-law, and put new license plates on it. There was no time for a respray job, but he roughed the car up a little so that the owner would be unlikely to recognize it if by an unlucky chance he should be passing outside Orbin’s on Tuesday morning. During this whole operation, of course, Straight wore gloves.
