Panic! (Department Z)

by John Creasey

  The press had not yet been informed.

  ‘You can’t stop them getting the precautions story,’ said Loftus, ‘but they can be asked to repress it. Did you put that up to Wishart?’

  ‘Yes—he’ll do it, provided nothing is yet in print—he won’t risk a sensation by half-suppressing it. Well, Bill …’

  ‘Listen,’ said Loftus.

  He plunged into an account of what had happened and what he had done—and Craigie nodded approval. But:

  ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of getting anything stopped, Bill. It’s nearly one o’clock, now.’

  ‘A lot can happen in twenty-three hours.’

  Craigie’s tired eyes narrowed.

  ‘What’s in your mind?’

  ‘Rogerson almost certainly knows more, or he wouldn’t have gone to those lengths to get the house destroyed. Anson might know. Any one of the seven might yield something. And here’s an idea. Generally speaking, daylight’s the time for terrorism as we know it. More crowds, more to suffer and to see what happens. Why have they chosen midnight?’

  ‘I’d thought of that, but—well, main services might be affected …’

  ‘Not so much as by day.’

  ‘But more easily.’

  ‘Yes …’ Loftus took out his cigarettes slowly—for the first time since the shooting of Anson, he was at half-speed. ‘All the same, I’ve a strong feeling they’re choosing midnight because it’s something which will be more effective when the country’s asleep—the majority of people, anyhow.’

  Craigie drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair.

  ‘Yes … But I’m fogged.’

  ‘Aren’t we all!’ Loftus drew a deep breath. ‘Let’s be fantastic, Gordon. The League wants panic. Destroy a building, say with two or three hundred people in it—sleeping people. Do the same thing in twenty places. Let the country wake up next morning to learn that some thousands of people have been wiped out—in their beds.’

  The tension in the room increased.

  Craigie stared—his eyes filled with horror.

  Loftus said:

  ‘It’s been on my mind, Gordon. It makes everything else unimportant—even finding who is behind the League. If anything like that should happen tomorrow, the country will be in a ferment. Oh, I know it’s wild—but it would be so easy! No precautions could stop it, now …’

  ‘Bill’—Craigie’s voice was strained—’have you the slightest reason for believing this could be? …’

  ‘Operation B should cause the first stages of panic.’ Loftus intoned the words, then went on more normally: ‘General Plan, paragraph 2, Gordon. I tried the old trick. If I were controlling the League, what would I do to create panic—at midnight?’

  Craigie’s face looked grey.

  ‘All right, Bill,’ he said, bleakly. ‘Get busy.’ The telephone rang and he answered it, then turned to Loftus.

  ‘Carruthers wants a word with you.’

  Loftus took the receiver and for once, Carruthers sounded excited.

  ‘Bill, I’ve seen McKenzie, and he didn’t like it. He said definitely that there was no such conference, but he was lying—and badly, at that.’

  ‘Yes, he would keep it close—they all will. What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Simply this: I recognised McKenzie for the first time as a man who was on the Luxa. I’ve an idea that all seven men Anson mentioned were on the houseboat, and I know five of them were. How does it sound?’

  ‘More and more like Nebton,’ said Loftus, grimly.

  He left the Whitehall Office and, not without difficulty, interviewed Lord Hubert Lore, a big, gruff-voiced man who also denied the suggestion of a conference, but too categorically and bluffly to deceive Loftus.

  Next, he interviewed Sir Ronald Frazer-Campbell, the South African armaments manufacturer. There, he received the same denial in a cold, detached voice which appeared at the same time to want to know what the devil Loftus meant by forcing the interview. Sir Ronald was a short, well-proportioned man: grey-haired, aristocratic, authoritative.

  The last of the seven, Mr Matthew Tiarney, was out of town, and his whereabouts unknown …

  Loftus returned to the flat, to find Diana and Fay already back. Fay seemed amused. Mr Eustace Jaffrey had scoffed at the idea of a conference, and assured Fay that she was far too pretty for newspaper work.

  ‘Did he get as far as a dinner suggestion?’ asked Loftus.

  ‘Yes—for the day after tomorrow,’ said Fay, demurely. ‘I told him I was sorry …’

  Loftus gulped.

  ‘Fay my sweet, it was exactly what we wanted. I …’

  ‘That I was engaged for the rest of the week,’ Fay went on, her eyes gleaming, ‘but that I was free tomorrow. Jaffrey has cancelled another appointment—it is better before midnight tomorrow, isn’t it?’

  The smile had gone from her eyes, something of the horror which Craigie had shown replacing it. Loftus said, gently:

  ‘It is, Fay—thanks a lot. But be careful, tomorrow night! Any luck, Di?’

  Diana nodded.

  ‘A lot, I think. Mr Benjamin Morely also denied the idea of a conference. He had a lady friend with him, and he addressed her as Dora. Hasn’t a Dora been mentioned before?’

  Loftus snapped.

  ‘By God she has! By Myra, at Bournemouth—bless the Errols—and not forgetting you. What was the relationship?’

  ‘Friendly. She was just leaving.’

  ‘H’mm—did you follow her?’

  ‘No, but I had young Bimbo with me, and he did.’

  ‘The Fates be praised!’ murmured Loftus. ‘It …’

  But Carruthers returned, a Carruthers who was thoughtful, for his second string—Sir Jabez Gorton—while denying the idea of a conference, had seemed a very frightened man.

  ‘He was clinging to a fluffy little creature called Letty,’ Carruthers reported. ‘And Mike Errol said Myra mentioned a Letty.’

  ‘Did she stay with Gorton?’

  ‘No—she left just after I did. But she was too smart for me—I lost her in Piccadilly.’

  Loftus picked up his hat.

  ‘Gorton was scared, you say?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Let’s see if we can frighten him some more,’ said the big man, gently. ‘He might do in place of Neb, for the night.’

  But Sir Jabez Gorton, one of the biggest armament manufacturers in England, virtual controller of the big Gorton-Mayer combine, with branches in ship-building, aircraft-building and explosives, would never be frightened again in this world. For when Loftus and Carruthers reached his Kensington house the lights were blazing, two Flying Squad cars were standing outside, and a Chief Inspector who knew Loftus, was trying to get a coherent story from a hysterical housekeeper.

  He failed, for some time: and when the truth was out, it transpired that Gorton had sent her to bed, and answered a knock at the front door himself. The woman had heard the knock—and the three shots which had followed it.

  And in the armament king’s head were three bullets.

  The question that obsessed Loftus was: which others would die?

  15

  Operation B

  ‘Preposterous,’ said the Home Secretary.

  ‘Absurd!’ said the Minister of Defence.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said the Minister of Labour.

  ‘Quite beyond reason,’ opined the First Lord.

  ‘What kind of evidence is there?’ asked the Rt. Hon. Jonathan Bryce-Scott, the Foreign Secretary.

  ‘Very little,’ admitted Wishart. The Premier’s face looked drawn, his eyes lack-lustre. He was not yet sixty but he seemed to bear a burden far greater than his years could carry. ‘But the very suggestion is frightening, gentlemen.’

  ‘My dear Prime Minister,’ boomed Sir Oscar Willingham, Minister of Transport, ‘Craigie has raised a mare’s nest this time,’ Big, bluff and genial, Willingham shook a large forefinger. ‘Man can’t always be right, after all. Er—is there anyt
hing we can do?’

  ‘We can have all thickly-populated areas watched,’ said Wishart, ‘and of course that is being done.’

  ‘If the public gets this idea’—Bryce-Scott’s downright manner made him the least popular man in the Cabinet, but did not affect his efficiency—’it will cause a lot of trouble. I …’

  ‘I have made the necessary approach to the press,’ Wishart assured him. ‘Well, gentlemen, we can only hope that this is a grotesque blunder, but I shall be happier after midnight. For the moment, however, there is another thing. Just as important, in its way.’ Wishart was right below par, thought Bryce-Scott who liked and pitied the Premier. ‘Despite German denials, official confirmation comes from Lagrade of troop concentrations on the Lagra frontiers. The latest figures are …’

  As Wishart went on, the minds of twenty-two Ministers of State left home affairs for foreign ones—and things happened up and down the country.

  * * *

  The Errols found no trace of Myra, Rogerson or Nebton on the Isle of Wight, and the police could not assist them.

  The remaining six men mentioned by Anson steadfastly refused to admit that they knew anything about the coming conference, even when the question was put to them officially.

  Anson hovered between life and death.

  Neil Clarke did not appear at his flat during the night, nor at his office next morning.

  Mr Eustace Jaffrey had broken a dinner engagement with some difficulty, and wondered whether it was worth it, until Fay arrived at his Anne’s Gate house in a wine-coloured evening gown which threw her loveliness into a vivid relief that sent his doubts to the four winds.

  Mr Benjamin Morely, managing director of the biggest firm of armament manufacturers in Canada, who was staying at the Lenster Hotel in Piccadilly, received a visit during the afternoon from a pert, raven-haired, frivolous-looking woman named Dora—a fact which interested Wally Davidson, who was watching the hotel very much.

  Dora had been followed by a young agent named Bramley—otherwise Bimbo—to a two-roomed flat at the top of a Chelsea mansion block, and had not stirred until she had started out again for Morley’s hotel. Wally went into the hotel in her wake and, without arousing her attentions, saw her enter Morley’s rooms without knocking, which indicated a certain degree of familiarity. It was a three-roomed suite, and in the room next that into which Dora had disappeared, Wally found a communicating door. It was locked, and he cursed his luck: he could hear nothing.

  Nevertheless, he waited hopefully.

  Loftus and Carruthers spent one of the grimmest days they had ever experienced, trying to make the wounded Dodge and convalescent Kalloni talk—but they failed, although they knew most things about third degree methods on both sides of the Atlantic.

  The only progress that was made was through the police, who were able to advise Craigie, late that evening, that Cornelius Rogerson had accompanied Lord Nebton-Hart on his round-the-world tour of the previous year, that he was an antiquarian of some distinction, that he was seventy-one years old, and that his past life, as far as the police could find had been blameless.

  ‘Which is a mistake,’ said Loftus to Craigie, just after eight o’clock that night. Loftus looked gaunt, and he felt dismayed, for the idea which had come to him persisted …

  He had spent some time in the streets, and the panic—called ‘anxiety’ in the General Plan— was obvious enough. Trains still travelled with light loads, buses were filled to overflowing, private cars were thicker than ever in London, and taxi-drivers did a roaring trade.

  But the anxiety was there.

  It only needed a touch to bring the panic …

  ‘Short of visiting the half-dozen and threatening them with violence,’ said Loftus, ‘we can’t do a thing. Wally reports that the woman Dora left Morely at half-past four, after she’d been with him three hours, and went back to her flat.’

  ‘Is he questioning her?’

  ‘I told him not to—I can’t imagine she’ll know much. It’s reasonably obvious that she’s another Myra, just there for catching the fools.’ Loftus spoke bitterly. ‘God damn it, Gordon, we’ve got to find what’s coming! In less than four hours …’

  ‘Easy,’ Craigie protested. ‘You’re only guessing, remember.’

  ‘I know, but—oh, well, Di and Carruthers are dining near Fay and Jaffrey. I think I’d better drift along and see what’s happening—they’re at the Éclat. Fay,’ he added, with something like a smile, ‘stood out for the high lights rather than the private apartment. I’ll ‘phone you when I come away.’

  ‘Right,’ said Craigie, and Loftus went out.

  He knew that he was followed by a swarthy-faced man who in turn was followed by the enthusiastic and somewhat tubby Bimbo Bramley. Both followers stayed outside the Êclat, where Diana and Carruthers appeared to be enjoying themselves immensely, So, it seemed, were Fay and Jaffrey.

  Jaffrey, virtual owner of the Jay-Grantham Company, manufacturers of heavy armaments, and managing director of one of the biggest firms of shipbuilders on the Clyde (which had recently started work on two battleships) was a handsome man of middle height, inclined to greyness. In a more subtle way than Richard C. Anson, he created the impression that the world was his own special sphere. He carried his clothes with an air: he wore a gardenia in his buttonhole, and from his lapel there dangled a monocle he rarely used. His features were just a little too regular, but his pleasant, cultured voice was often used with great effect on the political platform as well as in the few remaining saloons of Mayfair. He was interested in the theatre—as Fay was learning.

  ‘My dear,’ he assured her with a quick, charming smile, ‘your talents, as I suggested last night, are wasted—entirely wasted. The stage …’

  He smiled, and Fay jumped to the bait—as he expected. Her eyes widened. She said:

  ‘The stage? Me? Oh, but that’s nonsense!’

  ‘I’m not flattering you, my dear Fay.’ Jaffrey had taken for granted permission to use her Christian name, and Fay was wondering just when to try a gentle ‘Eustace’. ‘Looks, a figure, if you’ll forgive me saying so, that could hardly be bettered—personality …’

  It was nearly nine o’clock before Fay felt she could safely try a minor question. By then, Jaffrey had primed himself well with champagne, but he was only a little brighter about the eyes, a little more careless with his ‘dears’ and ‘darlings’.

  ‘It’s a wonderful idea,’ she admitted demurely, ‘but I don’t understand, I thought you were only interested in ship-building and …’

  Jaffrey laughed lightly.

  ‘That’s the serious side, my pet—we needn’t worry about that, tonight. The theatre …’

  ‘I warned you,’ said Fay, ‘that I wanted a story from you tonight. If I tell my editor you talked all the time about theatres, I’ll be out of a job.’

  ‘Not for long Fay, don’t be foolish—and don’t worry about your editor …’

  ‘I must live.’

  ‘I’ll look after that …’

  A waiter came up and Fay shook her head slightly, for Carruthers’ benefit, to indicate that she was not progressing. There was time, for the evening was young—but she knew how desperately results were wanted—in time to let Loftus and company get to work before midnight. The devil of it was that there was no certainty that Jaffrey knew anything …

  The waiter said:

  ‘He is waiting, sir …’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Jaffrey looked annoyed, but smiled at Fay. ‘My secretary is on the ‘phone, my dear: I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘Don’t hurry.’ Fay radiated forgiveness.

  Loftus, drinking alone at a bar which commanded a good view of the dining-room, hid his face as Jaffrey appeared and hurried to the telephone. Loftus shifted to another convenient bar, where he could watch the man clearly, through the glass.

  He saw the man’s lips widen, saw the expression of alarm on his face—even heard the barked:

  ‘W
hat?’

  Never before had Loftus been more anxious to get at close quarters, but for the moment he could do nothing. Jaffrey lowered his voice. He spoke for nearly a minute without pausing, and when he stepped out of the booth his face was pale, his eyes glittering.

  ‘Get my hat and coat, please.’

  A passing attendant hurried off, and Loftus disappeared towards the cloak-room. He came out after the attendant, and saw Jaffrey put his coat on and hurry from the hotel—without a word of explanation to Fay.

  He hailed a cab, and Loftus had no trouble getting another to follow.

  Wally Davidson, no longer watching Dora, was in his Frazer Nash outside the Éclat, and he followed Loftus.

  The first cab drew up at Jaffrey’s St John’s Wood home, and both men saw him hurry inside. Loftus alighted a hundred yards further down the road, and Wally drew up beside him.

  ‘A man,’ he said, ‘who can leave Fay flat, is capable of anything. What happened?’

  ‘He had a ‘phone call that worried him. I—Lord, that’s quick work!’

  For a Rolls-Royce had suddenly pulled up outside Jaffrey’s house, and they saw a servant bring three large suitcases to the car. Within three minutes of entering the house, Jaffrey was coming out again.

  ‘Ready for a long journey,’ murmured Loftus. ‘I’ll follow with you, Wally, but no further than the outskirts of London. He might make a call on the way.’

  ‘Yes …’ As the big car passed the Frazer Nash, it went under a street lamp, and Jaffrey’s face was visible. It looked deathly white, and Loftus was sure, now, that he had received inordinately bad news.

  The Rolls sped through Marylebone, into Edgware Road, Park Lane, Grosvenor Place, Victoria, Sloane Square—gathering speed wherever possible. Chelsea, Fulham, Fulham Palace Road and then left, towards Putney Bridge …

  By making judicious use of traffic lights, Davidson had made reasonably certain that they were not observed. But now there was less chance of it, and he said so.