The Day of Disaster

by John Creasey

  Craigie shrugged, and went to his desk.

  Bruce Hammond found his way through a labyrinth of sandbags outside the front door of the Whitehall building where Craigie had his office, and stood still for some seconds to accustom himself to the darkness. He heard the tramp of sentries walking up and down, and a mutter of conversation between an A.R.P. warden and a policeman. A taxi and several buses passed him but he preferred to walk to his Jermyn Street flat. The mystery of London in the black-out was all about him, blanketing the capital in a strange, unnatural anonymity.

  Hammond strolled on, turning Craigie’s story over in his mind. It was pleasing to think that Craigie believed he could fill Loftus’s place; Loftus—whose name was legendary throughout the Department.

  Loftus’s grave injury was a bad show for them all. Yet he was not right out of action; somehow this courage to continue as a lesser influence was to be expected of him. He, Hammond, must be careful not to make it seem that he was usurping any of Loftus’s authority—more, that was, than circumstances made absolutely necessary.

  It was difficult to believe that Loftus would be hard to get on with; on the other hand, any man must feel a little sore at taking second place where he had once reigned so superbly.

  Oh, well, said Hammond to himself, I’ll be seeing him tomorrow, and we can size each other up. He whistled under his breath as he went down Haymarket, eventually reaching Jermyn Street a little under half an hour after leaving Craigie.

  There was a strangeness in climbing the two flights of stairs to his flat, for he was so seldom in it. Taking the flat at all had been an extravagance, but a pleasant one. It pleased him to think that he had a piéd-à-terre in the West End, that he could be free of hotels on the short spells he managed to get in London. Now, if things went as he hoped, it would be more or less a permanent home.

  He let himself in with a key, then looked with regretful eye on an easy chair drawn up near an electric fire. He was too tired for a mere rest. All he wanted now was to get into bed quickly, and sleep for twelve hours. Then he would be able to look at the new problems with a clearer mind.

  He was home, this was England; and there was at least a chance that he might stay here. He remembered, with a smile, when he had first joined Craigie’s service, eight or nine years before, and his blinding ambition had been to go abroad and be domiciled in France.

  Now he pushed open the bedroom door, but before he had switched on the light the door sprang back. It startled him, making him aware that someone might be lurking in the flat, on the watch for him.

  He waited before switching on the light.

  It was absolutely dark, and silent. He held his breath, but could hear no sound of anyone breathing. With a sudden movement he pulled the light switch down, and stepped to one side; he would not have been surprised at some form of attack, but none developed.

  ‘I’m getting jumpy,’ he thought, and looked behind the door of the bedroom, to find what had prevented it from opening.

  For a split second his mind and his limbs refused to work, as he stood staring at the body of a woman, a woman hanging from a hook at the top of the door.

  6

  Why Hang the Lady?

  It was not a hallucination.

  It was real, a body which drooped from a hook, a body about whose neck a cord was tied, pulling cruelly. It was of a woman, dressed conventionally enough, except that she wore no shoes or stockings. From the ankles her feet drooped downwards, white and small.

  Faced with a tangible body, however gruesome, Hammond’s tension relaxed and he stepped forward. Attempting to ease her weight from the cord, he saw that one shoulder of her coat had caught against a second hook, so that the full pressure had not been on her neck.

  He unfastened the cord tied about the main hook, then carried her to the bed. She was quite motionless, but he had been wrong to think she was dead; he could see a faintly beating pulse in her throat, and another on her temple. He stared down at her, completely bewildered. This was his flat, no one else had any right to it; nevertheless, that right had, somehow or other, been usurped.

  He wished he were not so tired. He went into the bathroom and filled a bowl with cold water, then returned to the bedroom, and began to bathe her forehead.

  He noticed that her hands were small and well-kept, her clothes of good quality. The only strange thing in her appearance was her lack of shoes and stockings. He searched the room for them, but found no trace. Baffled, he stopped by his whisky cabinet and poured out a stiff finger, then lowered the glass abruptly.

  ‘What’s the matter with me?’ he asked abruptly. ‘The ruddy stuff is probably doped.’ He put the glass down and lifted the receiver of the telephone. He called Craigie, but had no answer. Frowning, he ran through the names of the men he knew in the Department, Davidson, Carruthers, Kerr—no, Kerr was with Loftus—the Errols.

  Yes, the Errols.

  He looked up their numbers in the directory, and dialled it. After a pause an easy, masculine voice answered him: ‘Errol speaking.’

  ‘Which one?’ asked Hammond.

  ‘Mark.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hammond. ‘Is Mike there?’

  ‘Who is speaking?’ The voice was still pleasant, but the casual note had gone.

  ‘Hammond,’ said Hammond, and then remembering that only to a few of the agents was his name known well enough to spring to mind immediately, added ‘D-n-o-m——’

  ‘Right! Where are you?’

  Hammond gave his address, and added: ‘Will both of you come round and oh, for the love of heaven, bring some whisky!’

  Something like a chuckle sounded over the wire.

  ‘Do I detect a note of desperation in the last plea? Anything brewing?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Hammond, and added as if to himself: ‘All I want to know is—why hang the lady?’

  ‘A lot of ‘em deserve it,’ said Mark, and rang off.

  Hammond lit a cigarette and went back to the bedroom. The girl was still unconscious, but she was breathing more easily. He wished he could understand the absence of stockings. He examined the soles of her feet, finding no trace of cuts or dirt; clearly the stockings had been taken off in the flat; unless, he thought, she had been brought by car and carried to his room.

  Why his room, of all the places in London? And how had anyone obtained a key? He had been to great trouble to get a special lock made, and as far as he knew only he and Craigie held a key.

  He found his mind clearing, his fatigue battened down as it had so often been in the past. He stepped to the window and pulled aside the curtains, making sure that there were no marks on the frame, and no suggestion that the window had been opened more than the few inches he had left before starting for Craigie’s office earlier in the day. Then he went to the front door, looking for scratches; he saw none. There was no indication whatever that entry had been forced.

  ‘Damn it,’ he muttered, ‘she didn’t come down the chimney.’ His pondering was interrupted by the voice of the girl. It quavered uncertainly from the direction of the bedroom.

  ‘Who—is that?’

  He stepped swiftly back. The girl had eased herself up on the pillows, and was staring round her.

  Hammond said: ‘Hallo, how are tricks?’

  The girl said: ‘Who on earth are you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know, would you? By name, Hammond, Bruce. Bruce is the christian name. Who’re you?’

  She caught sight of her bare feet and jumped convulsively.

  Hammond nodded. ‘I felt puzzled by that, too.’

  The girl looked up at him, apparently as bewildered as he. She put a hand to the bed cover, and rolled part of it between her fingers, dazedly. In a high-pitched voice, she said: ‘This isn’t my room!’

  ‘Well, we’ve got something to start on,’ said Hammond, ‘We agree about that.’

  ‘But how did I get here?’

  ‘We both want to know that, too.’ He put his head on one side and regarded her
with a new interest. ‘Do you feel all right?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Well,’ said Hammond slowly, ‘young ladies who wander into strange bedrooms and go to sleep on other people’s beds might do it all as a matter of course, I suppose, but it doesn’t seem to fit you. Usually——’ he waved a hand in the air, ‘they lose their memory, or sleep-walk.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop talking drivel. Do you mind telling me what all this is about?’

  ‘Mind! I’d love to, but——’

  The girl put a hand to her neck, touching it gently. ‘Will you explain why you brought me here?’ There was an imperious note in her voice, and it was easy to believe that she was used to being obeyed.

  It was strange that she seemed completely unaware of the fact that she had been found hanging behind his door, unconscious and probably not a long way from death. Unless she was acting very cleverly—a possibility he had to bear in mind—she had no idea of her narrow escape.

  ‘How much longer are you going to stand there gaping?’ she demanded sharply. ‘I want to know what this means.’

  ‘I can’t blame you for that,’ said Hammond, ‘since it is a state of mind in which I find myself even more firmly entrenched.’

  She said: ‘Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t know I was here? That you don’t know how I got here?’

  ‘Not only trying, but doing so.’

  ‘You actually expect me to believe nonsense like that?’ she asked flatly. ‘Where are my shoes?’

  ‘Well,’ he began tentatively, but she cut him short.

  ‘If you’ve taken them to make sure I can’t get away——’ Her words were cut through by a loud ring at the front door.

  Hammond said abruptly: ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘Of course I can walk.’ She stood up quickly, uttered a sharp exclamation, and sank back on the bed. For the first time she was frightened. ‘What have you done to me? What are you looking at me like that for?’

  ‘A small matter of precaution,’ Hammond told her. ‘I’m just making sure you don’t try to go out by the window. I’ll be back.’ He went into the hall and opened the door, standing aside as Mike and Mark Errol entered, two large men who were very much alike. As the door closed they stood regarding him intently; it was another absurd episode in a night of absurdity, for in their expressions was an undoubted degree of suspicion.

  Then Mike Errol smiled.

  He was distinguishable from his cousin only because his hair was not quite so dark, for the rest they were astonishingly alike.

  Mike put out a hand.

  ‘Bruce, my son, I apologise.’ He gripped Hammond’s hand firmly, and from beneath his coat produced a bottle of whisky. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Whisky and friends, in that order,’ put in Mark Errol.

  Hammond remembered then that it was their habit, when together, to complement each other’s sentences, to play the fool and to do all they could to confuse their companions into wondering which was Mike and which was Mark.

  Now he said abruptly: ‘Stop fooling, Mike. I can’t take it just now—but one of you might pour me out a drink.’ He did not want to ask them questions, to know why they had regarded him with some suspicion.

  Mark uncapped the whisky, then stopped short.

  ‘Hang it, you’ve a full decanter here!’

  ‘It mightn’t be safe to drink,’ Hammond said.

  Those words did more than anything else had done to make the Errols drop their flippant manner, to send the last rather puzzled gleam from Mike’s eyes, and to make Mark say:

  ‘Oh, that’s the angle is it.’ He poured the drink. Hammond swallowed it slowly. Then he said in a low-pitched voice: ‘There’s a girl in there. I know absolutely nothing about her, or how she got here. There may be a spree of some kind or other before the night’s out, and I sent for you two because I’m so ruddy tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. I got back from Lisbon yesterday.’

  Mike and Mark nodded.

  They had come prepared to find that Hammond was not Hammond, and that the call had been a trick to get them to the flat. Since Emile had uttered the words: ‘Loftus, spell it backwards,’ Craigie had advised his agents that the identification code might be misused.

  Had Loftus been there he could have told Hammond that the Errols were agents who could be relied on to the last degree in any emergency, that they only needed telling what had to be done, and if it were humanly possible, it would be done. A dozen times they had acted as excellent foils to Loftus; and unconsciously Hammond used them as foils then.

  He led the way into the bedroom.

  The girl was now sitting against the head-panel of the bed, her bare legs still uncovered. She stared at them without speaking; all three judged that she was frightened.

  Hammond put a hand in his pocket and smiled. Either the Errols or the whisky had brightened him considerably, and he felt more in control of the situation.

  ‘Friends of mine,’ he said. ‘Now seriously, we ought to get down to finding what you’re doing here, and why.’

  ‘Certainly——’ began Mike.

  ‘Not,’ said Mark.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Hammond. ‘Supposing we start with your name, Miss——”

  She began to speak with a rush.

  ‘I’m Hilary Crayshaw; if you do anything to me you’ll regret it. My father will spend millions to make sure of that. Give me some shoes, let me get away from here. If you don’t I’ll start screaming. I’ll yell for the police. Go away and leave me alone!’ She paused for breath, and Hammond thought that although she was certainly nearer thirty than twenty, she had remained, predominantly, a spoilt child. She uttered her name, and coupled her father with it, as if that would prove the open sesame; and it was true that the name of Crayshaw did stand for something.

  Anyone more hide-bound by convention would have admitted that it stood for a lot; the names of Crayshaw motor-cars were household words, as were Crayshaw aero-engines which were being fitted in an increasingly large number of bombers and fighters. Crayshaw’s vast combine, devoted to motor-car engines in peace time, had been turned into one of the biggest engine suppliers to the British Forces.

  ‘Hilary Crayshaw,’ Hammond said, and smiled again. ‘The name has its attractions. Now look here, Hilary, will you, can you, get it into your head that we don’t mean any harm to you?’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  ‘I just don’t know,’ said Hammond. He believed that the moment of crisis was over; she would prove amenable now. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or something stronger?’

  ‘I—tea,’ she said. She touched her throat again, gingerly, as Mike and Mark Errol turned towards the kitchen, sensing that Hammond needed a few minutes on his own with the girl.

  ‘They’ll get it,’ Hammond assured her. ‘You won’t feel like a cigarette for a while, then? D’you mind if I smoke?’ He leaned against the foot-panel of the bed, smiling ruefully. ‘It’s taken us a while to get round to this,’ he admitted ‘but do you mind telling me what was the last thing you remember?’

  ‘I was——’ she hesitated. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes, at the Lamplighter.’

  ‘The Lamplighter?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Her voice was tinged with impatience again, the slightly arrogant impatience of the spoilt. ‘You can’t know much about London if you don’t know it, it’s absolutely the latest place.’

  ‘A nightclub?’ Hammond said, almost wonderingly. ‘I thought they’d died with the blitz.’

  ‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’ demanded Hilary. ‘Of course they didn’t. They were closed for a while, but there are dozens of them open now. What else can one do?’

  ‘We—ell,’ said Hammond, ‘there are other things. War work for——’

  ‘Oh, that’s not for people like me,’ said Hilary sharply. ‘Father’s money does a lot more than a hundred girls could do: that’s quite enough for one family.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hammond, w
oodenly. He thought of the girls he had seen in France, of the horrors they were voluntarily enduring there and elsewhere in Europe. ‘Anyhow, you were at the Lamplighter. Don’t you remember anything else?’

  ‘I was a bit giggly,’ Hilary Crayshaw said. ‘I’d been mixing ‘em, and Ferdie got some absinthe from somewhere, it——’ she stopped abruptly. ‘Damn it, where’s Ferdie?’

  ‘Definitely a point,’ said Hammond.

  ‘He always sees me home if I’m tight,’ said Hilary with a frown. ‘I remember him helping me out of the dining-room and then—and then I think I passed right out.’ She brushed a hand across her face, touching the groove round her neck. ‘Where’s a mirror?’ She leaned forward, but Hammond deliberately stopped her.

  ‘It’s nothing, you just had a fall. It’s clear now that you either passed out through mixing your drinks and taking too many of them, or you were drugged. In any case your Ferdie didn’t look after you, and you were brought here. You’re quite sure you don’t remember anything else?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ she said impatiently. She put a hand to her hair, and added: ‘Where’s my handbag? I must do something to my hair.’ She did not add that there was a mirror in the handbag also, but Hammond smiled grimly to himself at the obvious subterfuge.

  Then he frowned.

  ‘Ive searched the flat for your shoes. I would have found the handbag had it been here.’

  He was looking at her all the time. He saw the expression freeze on her face, saw the shadows fill her eyes. She sat upright, staring at him.

  ‘That’s a lie! It’s here, you’ve taken it, that’s what you wanted!’

  ‘Don’t act like a spoiled brat!’ snapped Hammond, ‘I’m tired of it. The handbag’s not here.’

  ‘But it must be; I can’t have lost it.’ She forced herself to move away from the bed, took several faltering footsteps towards the dressing-table, but sank down on a chair before she reached it. Her eyes, wide open now, held real alarm.

  She was looking desperately about the room.

  ‘I can’t have lost it,’ she repeated in a low voice, ‘I can’t have done. Oh, my God, what will he say?’’