Vigilantes & Biscuits

by John Creasey

  The words came out in the famous Gideon roar, against which there was no appeal.

  Gideon himself seemed to realise that he was treating Matt with unnecessary harshness.

  In a somewhat modified tone, he growled, “When you’ve time to think it over, you’ll see that I’ve only been talking common sense. You’ll have to excuse me now. Got a lot on my plate at the moment.”

  There was a click as Gideon hung up and the line went dead.

  Matt stood, staring dully at the receiver. He had rarely felt more tired or more angry. He looked up and saw Netta standing beside him.

  “So much for your all-seeing George,” he snarled.

  Not that it was in Matt Honiwell to be a snarler for long. A moment later, he was grunting “Sorry, love”, as he gave her an affectionate peck on the cheek. A few moments after that, he was sitting opposite her in the kitchenette, enjoying ham and eggs. He was grateful for the meal. He needed food inside him before he faced the task of ringing Gordon and telling him that there was nothing whatsoever that the Yard was prepared to do.

  Gideon put down the phone with a needling sense of guilt. He didn’t want to retract a word of what he’d said to Matt; but he needn’t have been so abrupt. Neither was it strictly true that he had “a lot on his plate” here at Wellesley. He had had a lot, but the plate was almost empty now, with only the bare bones left – the final chores of what had been one of the most arduous evenings of his life.

  The two civilian patrols had gone out on schedule, and two constables, under the watchful eye of Gideon himself, had been monitoring their walkie-talkie reports for more than an hour and a half. There had been no hint of trouble, and so far, at least, Riddell’s alarmist forecasts had not developed.

  Riddell himself had been packed off home in a police car, with instructions to get off to bed and to sleep the moment he got home. It had taken a fair amount of glowering and roaring on Gideon’s part to get him to go; but Tom had suddenly found himself swaying on his feet, and seen for himself the sense of Gideon’s order.

  With Riddell gone, Gideon had had to take personal charge of the night’s routine investigations. He had gone down to the cells and spent some time questioning half a dozen troublemakers from the meeting; boys who had been so violent and abusive that they had got themselves locked up for the night. Not that anything had come out of this questioning. He was up against that Wellesley stone wall that Riddell had so often complained about; and he found it every bit as impenetrable as Tom had done.

  Other routine work had been proceeding in the Beresford’s road. Under the supervision of Detective Inspector Dunne, two constables had gone from house to house in the hope of finding an eye-witness to the knifing of Eric Beresford, or at least to the dumping of his body on the pavement. But here, again, no information had been forthcoming.

  A detective constable had also been sent to the house of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Gideon had been told that the gentle schoolmaster had rapidly recovered from his fainting fit in the interview-room, and had been driven home in a police car. It occurred to him that Hopkins would have recovered sufficiently to name those boys in Eric’s form who had also had “See me” scrawled in their exercise books. The detective constable had been told to collect the list.

  But it appeared that Hopkins had gone out somewhere, and his wife, Charlotte, had no idea where. Charlotte Hopkins seemed, in fact, distracted with worry about her husband; he was an inveterate pacer of streets at night, she said, and was simply asking for another attack. And suppose he fainted again?

  The detective constable had done his best to cheer her up. He had told her that every spot on the Estate was now being passed either by a civilian patrol or an area car every nine to eleven minutes. He had then reported the incident by walkie-talkie direct to Gideon.

  Gideon had listened with a groan. It seemed to him that he was getting nowhere. Then he remembered that ninety-nine per cent of routine police work was like that. It was just that he wasn’t usually as directly involved with it as he had been tonight.

  The only hope of making real progress towards cracking the case seemed now to centre round the hospital.

  If Eric survived the operation, there was a chance that he might talk, and what he said could be extremely informative.

  If John Rowlandes was accepted by the gang as a hero, and had callers at his bedside tomorrow, there was a chance that he, too, might learn a lot.

  These were good prospects, but they depended on two very big “ifs”.

  Thinking of the hospital made Gideon remember Marjorie Beresford. And Kate.

  Why hadn’t Kate come through with some news before now? Surely the operation couldn’t still be going on?

  He lunged forward as the telephone rang, tensing as the constable on the switchboard announced, “It’s Mrs. Gideon, sir.”

  Kate sounded strained, but her news was good.

  Eric was out of the operating theatre. The knife had been removed, and no irreparable damage appeared to have been done to the heart. But the boy had lost a lot of blood, and was very weak.

  “He’s been given a sedative, and is expected to sleep all night,” Kate reported. “Marjorie won’t hear of leaving him, so she, too, has been given a sedative, though a lighter one. That seems to leave me with nothing to do but come home.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Gideon heartily. “I’ll come and pick you up myself. I think it’s about time I called it a night. This has been, love, a distinctly busy evening.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Kate said, just a trifle ominously. “Half the hospital has been talking about the way you punched that man in the audience. With all those television cameras focused on you, too.”

  The strain in her voice was now more noticeable than ever. Something was worrying her, and it was something about him. That was obvious. But what –

  “George,” she said suddenly. “The man you punched – his name’s Fenton, isn’t it? – was brought into the hospital hours ago. And – I’m afraid you may have done him more harm than you realised. He’s – he’s been detained for the night.”

  So that was all it was. The relief was so great that Gideon grinned.

  “That was by special arrangement, dear,” he said. “Thanks for worrying, but there’s really no need to. I’ll explain it all on the way home.”

  Explaining everything that had happened that evening took Gideon, in fact, from the time he met Kate until the time they were both in bed. Kate had seldom known him to give so long and detailed an account of his work; but then she realised that this hadn’t been an ordinary evening. It had been a crisis, a major turning-point in his career. He had met the vigilante challenge head-on; had created single-handed a new concept in civilian policing, and had begun to get to the root of the whole Wellesley Estate horror. And he had done all this against every kind of opposition, taking major risks and chances all the way.

  Not often had Kate been quite so proud of her husband, but when she turned to tell him, heavy breathing told her that he was fast asleep.

  For a man with so many responsibilities, Gideon usually went to sleep remarkably easily, and once gone, slept right through to seven a.m. Tonight, though, was an exception. Half an hour later he was suddenly wide awake again.

  The sheets and blankets on his side of the bed were in total disarray, as though he had been tossing and turning in a frenzy.

  He must have had a hell of a nightmare, Gideon thought; and nightmares were an extreme rarity with him, he could hardly remember the last one. Perhaps long years ago, after Kate had lost a child, and he had felt to blame –

  He sat up in bed, trying not to wake Kate, and was astonished to find that his teeth were chattering.

  He struggled to recall the dream, but for a moment, he couldn’t.

  Had it been about Marjorie Beresford? Or Eric? Or Tom Riddell? Or those civilian patrols, still circling the Estate in – if Riddell were to be believed – extreme danger? Or –

  Baffled, confused, Gideon
leant back against the headrest, and closed his eyes.

  And then it happened.

  He did not only remember the dream; he half-dreamed it again.

  He was in a high fever, some kind of delirium – so real that he actually began sweating again from every pore.

  And through that fever, that delirium, he was staring at a beautiful country cottage, halfway up a hill.

  11

  Two O’clock

  A moment later, Gideon was fully and finally awake.

  He remained perfectly still for five minutes, staring into the darkness and thinking deeply.

  A more superstitious man would have assumed that he had had a direct E.S.P. “vision”. A less open-minded one would have put it down to the strain of the evening or Kate’s lobster salad.

  Gideon did neither. He simply concluded that his subconscious was greatly troubled; and it did not take him long to diagnose why. Because of the extreme pressure of events he had been guilty of what to him was a cardinal offence. He had given barely a thought to the mental anguish which Matt Honiwell and Gordon Cargill must be suffering.

  Oh, he had an excuse. Insofar as he had thought about the Brodnik business, his chief concern had been to protect the C.I.D. from ridicule; to stop thousands of men wasting time on following bogus “psychic” leads. When Matt had tried to point out that Brodnik’s leads had seldom proved bogus in the past, he, Gideon, had simply refused to listen.

  But he had had no right to refuse to listen when he was dealing with the last desperate hope of a man like Gordon Cargill, a man who had trusted the police, and gone on trusting them, all through the horror of a case which one newspaper had described as “the biggest Scotland Yard bungle of the decade”.

  His – Gideon’s – subconscious had recognised this, and was paying him back by impressing on his mind what he had chosen to ignore.

  He could not ignore that damned dream cottage now. His mind was so full of it that everywhere he looked in the darkness, he seemed to see its picturesque thatched roof; its lattice windows; the village street winding on, up the hill; the signpost showing that it was a mile and a half to SW – ; the church with a crooked steeple, the land sloping down to the sea.

  His subconscious had built the picture, of course, from Matt’s description. He wondered how it compared with Brodnik’s pencil sketch. He would get the shock of his life if they were exactly the same …

  Suddenly an idea occurred to him – an idea so simple that he must have been suffering from mental paralysis not to have thought of it before. There was one body of men in England who would be able to say almost at once if such a spot existed, and describe its precise location, if it did. They were the police stationed in the seaside towns. It would be the easiest thing in the world to get the Yard’s Information Room to radio these details to every seaside police station in the country. There would be no need to mention E.S.P., or the Cargill case, at all. A request for information about this place, to be sent as a matter of extreme urgency, was all that was necessary.

  Gideon glanced at the dial of his luminous watch. It was five to two. If Brodnik’s insight into Barbara Cargill’s condition was correct, the poor girl only had a few hours to live. The message should be sent out instantly. There was always a chance that some sergeant or constable on night duty might know the place, and come back with the answer straight away.

  Still careful not to disturb Kate, Gideon slid out of bed, and pausing only to don his slippers, padded noiselessly downstairs, to the telephone in the hall. He was about to ring the Yard when he stopped, changed his mind, and dialled Matt Honiwell’s number instead. Matt had better handle this job himself: only he knew the precise details of all that Brodnik had said.

  The receiver at the other end was picked up instantly.

  Netta Honiwell answered; and when she heard who it was, her voice broke with relief.

  “I kept telling Matt not to worry, George. I knew we’d be hearing from you before the night was out,” she said.

  Leaving Gideon wondering whether the whole world wasn’t suddenly developing E.S.P.

  ‘Two o’clock,” the millionaire Thomas Cargill said. A tough-looking, grizzle-haired man in his middle fifties, he stood, staring at his son with a mixture of acute concern and abject despair. “It is four hours since you left this man Brodnik. Four hours since Honiwell gave you a list of private detectives. And in all that time, you have not rung one of them. Not one. Why? Why?”

  Gordon Cargill faced his father with the over-bright eyes of the hopelessly overwrought.

  “I haven’t rung them because they won’t be any good,” he said. “Scotland Yard is the one organisation that can, and will, help us.”

  “But Honiwell telephoned and said – ”

  “I know, I know, father. But I didn’t believe him.” Gordon was shaking violently. It was obvious that he was barely in his right mind. “Can’t you understand? I just didn’t believe him. He’s been with me all through this thing, every step of the way. He’s not going to quit now. He’s not going to let the Yard quit now, whatever obstacles this bastard Gideon puts up. I tell you, we’ve only got to hang on.”

  He slumped into an armchair in a near-total stupor. The ring of the telephone barely roused him, but at Matt Honiwell’s words of victory his face showed the bewildered shock of a man reprieved.

  “Gideon’s given way,” he whispered. “He – he’s on our side. Barbara – Barbara’s good as found, father – good as found.”

  “God help you – I only wish she were,” Honiwell muttered, on the other end of the line.

  Matt’s own hand wasn’t too steady as he replaced his receiver.

  “Not so good,” he said to Netta. “Gordon’s blind drunk – and as far as I can make out, he hasn’t contacted any private eye. Everything depends, then, on George’s seaside coppers getting the sand out of their eyes. And,” he added grimly, “on there being anything for them to see if they do…”

  Still, he reminded himself, Gordon was right on one count. Gideon had come in on their side.

  At that thought, Matt’s hand became steady again. He dialled the Yard, and asked to be put through to Information.

  “Two o’clock!” Charlotte Hopkins greeted her husband. “What time do you call this to come home? Particularly after all you’ve been through. God, darling, what are you trying to do to me? I’ve been beside myself with worry … Karen’s not been able to sleep either. Worry in the house affects children, you know. She’s been bawling non-stop since twelve.”

  Gerard Manley Hopkins smiled regretfully; but it was a distant smile, and when he spoke, he seemed to be delivering a sermon from a great moral height.

  “I’m sorry to have caused you so much distress all round, but do try to understand, dear. I’m deeply concerned about this trouble on the Estate, and must do my bit to stamp it out.”

  Charlotte – a quiet, intellectual-looking girl of thirty, normally rather prim and shy, but far beyond being either of these things now – became witheringly scornful.

  “Do your bit to stamp it out? Heaven send me patience! Aren’t you suffering from delusions of grandeur? Don’t you remember that those vicious pupils of yours nearly stamped you out tonight? And by walking round and round the Estate – totally alone, totally unprotected – you’re simply inviting them to make a proper job of it next time.”

  Gerard Hopkins’ smile faded. He was deeply in love with his wife, and hated upsetting her – not that he let that interfere with any purpose on which he had set his mind.

  “I haven’t just been walking round and round the Estate, my pet. I’ve been visiting one or two boys in their homes. Warning them that the police may be on their tails shortly. Interviewing them – trying to find out what causes this violent resentment against authority, against society … The only hope of curing them is understanding them, you know.”

  Charlotte took a deep breath.

  “So you recognised some of the boys in that mob who attacked you. And inst
ead of reporting them to the police, you’ve actually been calling on them individually, asking them what they meant by it. Is that right?”

  Gerard nodded.

  “That’s more or less right, pet, yes. Of course, I’ve been talking to some of the parents too; that’s what kept me so late. I explained that in my view, all this violence is much better dealt with by quiet, individual discussions, aimed at a fuller understanding of ourselves and the society we live in. If we adults have wronged these children, it is our obvious duty to ask them how and why. Ask for their forgiveness …”

  “Forgiveness! Oh, God, Gerard, you – you make me want to scream. Don’t you realise the risk you’re running? There’ve been terrible things happening on this Estate tonight. One of your boys – Eric Beresford – has been knifed. He’s in hospital, fighting for his life.”

  Hopkins’ dreamy, Utopian gaze dropped violently to earth.

  “Eric? Knifed? But who by? Who could possibly have a motive to – ”

  “Who could possibly have a motive to do anything, according to you!” Charlotte was on the point of tears. “Can’t you see you’re living in a dream world? That you can’t, or won’t, face reality? And – and if you go on pottering round the Estate, asking dangerous questions – and showing that you recognise dangerous people – then it’s not going to be a razor next time. It’s going to be a knife!”

  But Gerard Manley Hopkins was not to be prised out of his cocoon of fantasy so easily.

  “I would rather be a martyr to the cause of understanding than a betrayer of it,” he said grandly. Then he walked past Charlotte into the kitchen, and somehow lowered the tone of the proceedings by adding mildly, “Is it your turn or mine to make the Ovaltine tonight?”

  Two o’clock.

  Vittoria Orsini had no doubt that that was the time. It had been announced clearly enough by the striking clock on the mantelpiece of the bedroom. The clock was one of those elaborate, glass-cased affairs, and the apple of her husband’s eye. Vittoria wished that she could silence the wretched thing. It reminded her that every minute was ticking away Dino’s life; and apart from that, it had tragic associations, because it had been a wedding present from Nicholas and Mario, her two