by John Creasey
Suddenly Gideon started, and in his excitement, actually brought the pipe out of his pocket and rapped with it on the desk top.
“… where one was seen recently by a young constable. I think it might be an idea to have a word with that man.”
He reached for the telephone, and asked to be put through to Bognor.
Matt was beginning to be infected by Gideon’s excitement.
“He claimed he didn’t remember where he saw it. But it ought to be possible to jog his memory.”
“I should bloody well think it ought,” Gideon said grimly. “No one’s got any business being a police constable if he can’t remember the precise location of things he – Hullo! This is Commander Gideon. I would like to speak to the Detective Inspector in charge, please …”
Within a few minutes, Gideon had had the constable – a young man who rejoiced in the name of Thomas WatsonWright – brought to the telephone. He arrived, breathless and panting. He had been on point duty in a busy shopping street about two hundred yards from the police station; had been informed by walkie-talkie that Gideon wanted to speak to him, and had run back all the way.
He began by insisting that he had no idea where he had seen the painting; but his voice betrayed excessive nervousness, and Gideon wasn’t conceited enough to believe that it could all be caused by talking to the Head of the C.I.D.
His voice rose to the famous Gideon roar.
“Look, Watson-Wright. By reporting this picture in the first place, you made what could be a crucial contribution to a major case. Now you’re messing it up by withholding the one piece of information that really matters. If – as I suspect – you’re doing it deliberately, then God help you! I’m going to ask you once – and only once – again. Where did you see that picture?”
There were not many men in the top echelons of Scotland Yard who could stand up to Gideon when he was in this mood.
The young Bognor constable didn’t even try. He began pouring out an embarrassed and somewhat incoherent story. Gideon listened in silence, then he thanked him surprisingly warmly before he replaced the receiver and turned to Matt. . “Apparently he saw the picture in a Bognor holiday bungalow which he rented for a week last year. It – the picture, I mean – was hanging in a back bedroom.”
“What was all the secrecy in aid of, then?”
Gideon grinned.
“He’s having an affair with a policewoman. They spent the week in the bungalow together, and there’d be hell to pay if their respective section-house sergeants got to hear about it.”
“But why didn’t they pick somewhere farther away for a holiday love-nest?”
Gideon shrugged, then his expression became one of keen urgency as the importance of what he was about to say struck him.
“This particular bungalow is so secluded that they didn’t have to. It stands well back in its own grounds. It is hidden from the road by thick pine trees. The neighbouring bungalows are over a hundred yards away on each side. The place even has its own path down to the beach.”
“My God,” said Matt. “Do you realise that you’ve just described the perfect – ”
“ – kidnapper’s hideout? Yes, I know.” Tensely, Gideon reached out once again for the telephone. “The bungalow is known as Pine Corner, and the estate agents who arranged Watson-Wright’s booking are a firm called Small and Pearson. I’m going to ring them now – and inquire if Pine Corner has been rented by the same person for the past six weeks…”
Three minutes later, Gideon had his answer.
“The bungalow was booked from the twenty-third of July to the sixteenth of September. The sum of £240 paid in advance.”
There was a moment’s silence while Matt and Gideon stared at each other, sharing a sense of rising excitement so intense that it seemed to crackle like an electric charge between them.
“Do you know what I’d do if I were you?” Gideon said at length. “I’d get hold of Cargill and Brodnik, and drive down there with all possible speed. Meanwhile, I will see that the
Bognor C.I.D. go to town on the tenant who booked it. I’ll be very surprised if, by the time you’ve arrived, they haven’t dug up enough suspicious facts to justify a search warrant.”
“But suppose they haven’t?” said Matt. “Will you back me if I decide on the spot to go ahead regardless?”
Remembering all that had gone before, Honiwell expected at best a grudging, hesitant reply; perhaps even another volte face.
But without the slightest hint of a pause, Gideon smiled and said: “Don’t worry. This time the answer’s ‘Yes, Matt.’ Yes to you pulling all the stops out – all the way.”
17
Visiting Hour
Two hours later, another September twilight was beginning. It was a totally different one from the previous night’s. Then, London had been awash in a surrealistic sea of colour. Now, there seemed to be no colour left anywhere in the world. A mass of iron-grey clouds hid the whole sky, bringing premature darkness and a hint of impending thunder. In some people this created a mood of unrest; in others it merely caused a deepening depression.
Gideon, having just seen Kate off to the hospital, was in the kitchen, washing up the few plates they had used during a hasty supper. He looked forward gloomily to an evening alone in the house, struggling with that report for Scott-Marie ..
Excitement, tinged with disquiet, was the dominant mood on the Wellesley Estate. In a dozen different houses their owners were getting ready to set out for the police station, to report for patrol duty sharp at eight. In two dozen other houses, people were telling themselves that they must forget about T.V. and try to snatch some sleep. They were the personnel scheduled to report for the later shifts, between midnight and dawn.
Everywhere on the Estate the talk was of Gideon’s Force. It had brought the first night of peace in two long and weary months, and with it, the first real hope that the lawlessness might have been conquered at last.
But not everybody’s face lit up when the Force was mentioned. Some of them – mostly teenagers, and young teenagers at that – grew sullen and angry, and worried their parents with defiant looks that said clearly enough: “Wait and see.”
In the Wellesley police sub-station, Tom Riddell was staring out of the window at the gathering darkness, more worried than any of the parents. At this rate, it was likely to be pretty dark well before eight; and so many lights on the Estate had been vandalised that on almost every street there would be pools of shadow. If the enemy wanted to attack the members of the patrols while they were walking to the police station, conditions would be ideal. Riddell decided to play safe, and see that all patrol men and women were collected by area car.
In the Fulton North General Hospital, just beyond the borders of the Estate, Kate Gideon was as anxious as Tom Riddell, but for different reasons. She was standing talking to Marjorie Beresford, who had come to the door of the intensive care unit in response to her tap on the glass. Through this glass, which enclosed the unit as completely as though it were a giant goldfish bowl, Kate could just glimpse a deathly-pale Eric.
“He’s getting more colour now, don’t you think?” Marjorie said, with pathetic eagerness.
There was not a vestige of colour discernible on the boy’s face, but Kate could not do anything but agree, as enthusiastically as possible.
“He’s talking quite a bit, too,” Marjorie went on. “Not making much sense, though. He seems to be saying Mr. Gideon’s name over and over again …”
At that moment, Eric turned over, and started muttering something. Marjorie flew back to his bedside. Kate tried to go with her, but a nurse barred the way.
“Only parents are allowed inside I’m afraid – ”
The nurse broke off. Eric was suddenly sitting up, wide eyed with terror; it was exactly as though he could still see his attackers, was still pleading with them for his life.
“I shan’t tell Gideon anything, I swear I won’t. You can’t blame me just because he came to my pl
ace! My Mum called him, I’ll bet. She knows the Gideons personally, see? It’s her fault… all her fault … and theirs …”
If Marjorie had not herself been under sedation, she would surely have broken down. As it was, the remorse on her face was terrible. Kate could only look away, appalled at the realisation that the cost of knowing the Gideons could come so very, very high.
In Ward 3B, two corridors away from the intensive care unit, Frank Fenton, alias the young Detective Constable John Rowlandes, was feeling anything but remorseful. He had just glanced up and seen three faces that filled him with the purest joy.
They belonged to three members of the street gang which he had “joined” the night before.
So the enemy had swallowed the bait at last, Rowlandes told himself. It had all been worth while – his embarrassing twenty-four hours of pretending to be in agony from an almost painless head, and noticeably unbroken jaw …
He grinned, then remembered to wince as though at a sudden spasm.
“Hi, fellers. Thought you were never going to show up.”
They edged forward, awkwardly, to his bedside.
“Hi, Frank,” their leader said. “We’d ‘ave come sooner, only the gentlemen of the press was ‘ere.”
“Treating you like a blooming ‘ero, from the look of it,” one of his companions added.
“As you deserve, Frank,” finished the third. “Seeing you
take on Mr. F g Pig Gideon last night was the biggest treat
we’ve had in years.”
Rowlandes turned his grin into a grimace.
“He f g well got his own back on me, though, the
bastard. I barely touched him – and look what he did to me.”
“Look what he’s doing to all of us, with his bloody Gideon’s Force,” the leader said. “Every square foot of the Estate is crawling with coppers and coppers’ narks from eight o’clock till morning.” Then he dropped his voice to a whisper. “Won’t be for long, though. You can be sure of that.”
Rowlandes, leaning his elbow against his pillow, responded in the same excited whisper.
“We’re going to hit back? How? Where?”
There was an odd silence. Blast! thought Rowlandes, he’d been too eager with his questions; had overplayed his hand.
He contorted his face into another spasm of agony, and burst out angrily: “Aren’t I entitled to know anything – after all I’ve been through?”
That was when the leader made the strangest, perhaps the most revealing, remark of the evening.
‘Take it easy, Frank. We can’t tell you what we don’t know ourselves. We’re all too old to be in tonight’s caper. You’ve got to be wet behind the ears to be allowed a piece of the real action.”
Rowlandes wondered if he’d heard aright. These three all looked to be somewhere between seventeen and nineteen, hardly in their dotage. What were they saying, then? That in this gang, the really rough stuff was literally left to children?
But why? What sort of leadership would entrust the most dangerous work to thirteen or fifteen-year-olds, when there were youths of eighteen and nineteen only too anxious to do it?
He could make no sense of it.
But Rowlandes had no time to pursue his thoughts.
The leader was bending over him, whispering again.
“This much I can tell you, though. There are going to be two Gideon’s Force patrols setting out from the Fuzz-bin at eight o’clock tonight. And if the kiddiewinkies don’t muff it – only one will be coming back.”
It was a good ten minutes after that when Rowlandes’ guests left him. The young D.C. looked at his watch, and saw that it was already a quarter to eight. He slipped out of bed, not even waiting to put a dressing-gown over his pyjamas, and moved down the ward into the nurses’ room.
Two nurses giggled nervously when he came in. They knew he was a mystery patient, pretending to be ill for police purposes. They had also seen his picture in the papers. He represented glamour in a big way.
They stopped giggling as they saw the tense, scared look in his eyes.
Yes, of course he could use the telephone …
Rowlandes dialled the police station, and in a moment was telling Riddell all that he had learned.
The time was now ten to eight. Outside the police station, the area car had just drawn up with the first consignment of patrol personnel. It included Harold Neame, the Wellesley High School headmaster; Mr. Suncliffe, vicar of All Saints, Wellesley; and Mrs. Sylvia Thompson, a councillor and prominent Women’s Lib campaigner.
As Tom Riddell watched them being ushered through the station doorway he felt sweat breaking out on his forehead.
Lambs to the slaughter, he told himself, repeating the phrase he had used the night before.
They were all lambs to the slaughter … unless he could get through to Gideon, and obtain his authority to cancel the eight o’clock patrols. It wasn’t something he dared to do on his own.
He reached for the telephone, and dialled Gideon’s home number.
During the next five minutes he dialled it over and over again but all he could hear was the engaged signal.
Gideon was usually pretty short with everybody on the telephone. Who on earth could be detaining him for this infuriating length of time?
In point of fact, the culprit was Matt Honiwell, reporting from Bognor police station, where he had just arrived with Gordon Cargill and Jacob Brodnik.
“While we were driving down, the local C.I.D. did a superb job checking up on the tenant who took the bungalow. And I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt that he’s our man. His name is Leonard Lacey, by the way, and he was seen to arrive at Pine Corner, late at night, on July 28th – just a few hours after Barbara’s kidnapping! During the next week or so, on several occasions, three other men were seen with him – ”
“Members of the kidnap gang,” Gideon suggested.
“Probably. But whoever they were, they went away. Since very early in August, Lacey seems to have lived at Pine Corner alone. But not quite alone, according to one neighbour, Mrs. Masters – a sharp-eyed old lady of eighty. Mrs. M. swears that on one occasion she saw a girl’s face at the back bedroom window. She couldn’t be sure – her house is a hundred yards away and her eyesight isn’t too good – so she didn’t report it to the police. Neither did she report a scream, coming from the direction of Pine Corner, which once woke her up at one a.m. It could have been a late-night horror film on T.V.; there was one showing at the time.
“There are a lot of other items I could mention. It seems that Lacey has an almost pathological objection to being spied on, and never leaves the premises. He has milk, bread and groceries delivered at the door – ”
“Never mind all that,” Gideon barked. “You’ve obviously got enough evidence to get your search warrant – and even to hold Lacey for questioning. When are you going to start for Pine Corner?”
“Straight away,” Matt said. “Apart from Cargill and Brodnik, I’m taking Constable Watson-Wright, because he knows the house, and two detective sergeants, both armed.”
“And you’ll need them,” said Gideon. “Let’s face it: if Barbara Cargill is alive, that means that Lacey has been standing close guard over her – all by himself – for more than a month. To do that, he’s got to be a psycho. Or if he wasn’t one at the beginning, he’ll have turned into one by now. So there’s no sense in taking chances: he could do literally anything – to Barbara, to himself, or to any of you.”
“I’m not worried about what he may do,” Matt said shortly. “I’m more worried about what he may have already done.”
There was a new note in Matt’s voice. A note of dread.
“Yes?”
“There’s one thing I haven’t told you. Mrs. Masters claims that Lacey was out in the garden of Pine Corner at about five o’clock this afternoon. She couldn’t see much through the pines – but she got the impression that he was chopping up something with an axe. Then later she smelt bonfire
smoke.”
Gideon was beginning to feel uneasy too; but there was no point in showing it.
“People burn rubbish when they’re thinking of leaving a place,” he said reassuringly. “Perhaps Lacey’s just getting ready to clear out.”
“Possibly,” said Matt. “Only it so happens that half an hour earlier, at around four thirty, Brodnik was trying to get a signal from Barbara Cargill.
“For a moment he ‘saw’ the cottage scene, much more faintly than usual. Then suddenly there was a kind of cut-out. The scene went dark, and there has been no signal since. Putting these two things together – ”
“The only things you ought to be putting together,” snapped Gideon, “are Lacey’s wrists and a pair of handcuffs. Concentrate on that, Matt, and don’t get morbid until you’re compelled to. Get going – there’s not a moment to lose.”
He sounded brisk and bracing; it was what Matt needed. But inside him a glacial mixture of eeriness and foreboding seemed to be turning his blood into a sluggish-moving jelly.
He replaced the receiver slowly, and his fingers were still in contact with it when the telephone rang again.
This time it was Riddell, recounting everything that Rowlandes had heard from his visitors, and urgently requesting permission to cancel both of the eight o’clock patrols.
Gideon’s blood no longer felt as though it was congealing. Anger seemed to send it roaring through his veins at twice the usual rate.
“What – and leave the whole Estate at the mercy of these murderous ‘kiddiewinkies’?” he roared. “That’s totally out of the question. As you ought to have bloody well known it would be before you rang!”
The moment he had said that, Gideon’s anger abated. He remembered a sentence he had just been writing in his report to Scott-Marie – a sentence he had included with Riddell in mind, but with which he was nonetheless in wholehearted agreement.
