CHAPTER 15
Poor People
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AN UNNATURAL PEACE had settled over the house when late that night Luke sat in the study with Canon Avril. The two private cars had left some time before. Rupert and Lugg, with the dog snoring between them, were making their way towards the sanctuary of Suffolk lanes, while the four treasure-seekers groped through the fog in the other direction in an attempt to catch the first Saint-Malo boat out from Southampton.
The rectory was quiet without them, although it was by no means empty. Sergeant Picot lolled on a hard chair in the front hall, while in the basement two of his men made half-hourly rounds. Under the roof, Sam was still working on the article which must be on his editor’s desk by morning. Emily and her grandparents were asleep in the two little rooms beyond the kitchen, and, in Meg’s elegant bedroom, Miss Warburton, who had been induced to leave her lonely cottage for the night, brushed out her limp hair before the looking-glass.
In the study, where it was warm and the air was blue with tobacco smoke, the coal fire ticked softly as the white ash fell and was audible in the silence which had fallen between the two men. Luke was at the desk. The Canon had insisted on him taking it because the little bits of paper on which he seemed to keep his notes worried him. Avril lost notes himself, often in the pulpit, and he had a very lively appreciation of the nuisance they could become. The Chief Inspector appreciated his motive, because he was setting himself out to understand every minute detail of the man.
As Campion had recognized when he first met him, Charlie Luke was destined to become one of the great policemen. He possessed the one paramount quality which appears in all the giants of his profession quite apart from any other merit which they may display. He had that utter persistence which only derives from an almost unnatural interest. The man was a living question-mark, and he hunted his quarry with the passionate patience of a devotee hunting salvation. After thirty-six sleepless hours, his red-rimmed eyes were bright as a bird’s.
Sergeant Picot and his men had been working on the St Petersgate Square angle all day and they had gleaned only a little. Luke had digested the scraps they had given him and now he was working on them. He had been talking to the Canon about Jack Havoc for a long time, expending the precious minutes deliberately, putting everything he had into the job, feeling his way, watching like a cat, letting his intuition stretch out beyond where the mind could take him.
Old Avril was listening. He sat in the worn chair, his uncunning fingers folded across his black vest. He looked both wise and good, but there was no telling what was going on behind his quiet eyes. Luke found himself hoping he never had to play poker with him. He tried again.
‘Usually, you see, sir, we know these lads like brothers.’ He stretched his left hand out and closed it as if it held another fist. ‘We know their families, and if we don’t exactly love them we are close to them. Havoc is an exception. We know nothing of his life before his first conviction in nineteen thirty-four. He was sixteen then, or so he says, and that seems to be all they ever got out of him. It’s not his real name, of course.’
‘No?’ The old man did not appear surprised, merely interested.
‘It doesn’t sound right to me. Does it to you?’ Luke was appealing. ‘It’s too suitable. I should say he invented that, as a boy might, trying to sound big. We seem to have accepted it. I suppose we had to. Anyhow, it was as Jack Havoc that he went to Borstal, and as Havoc, J., he’s on the C.R.O. files. He said he came from nowhere, no one came forward to claim him, and from our point of view his life started then.’
As Avril did not speak, he spread out his hands to him.
‘All I know about him is what I’ve been able to get from the records. No one has had him on their short list for five years because he’s been safely in jail, and for some time before that he’d vanished, presumably into the army. I’ve come to him fresh, and the outstanding thing about him from my point of view is that, according to listed information, he’s been able to disappear twice before in his life just as he has now.’
The Canon nodded his tousled grey head. ‘I see,’ he said, as if he was reluctantly convinced. ‘You feel that he must have friends among the people the police do not – walk hand in left hand with. I understand.’
‘It’s so obvious, isn’t it?’ Weariness was uncovering the Chief Inspector’s vital force and the words came pumping out of him, bright and alive like blood from an artery. ‘Where did he get the suit he’s wearing? Mr Levett says it was made for him, and that’s a thing he’d know. Where did Havoc get it so quickly? Who had it laid out for him? Who was waiting for him to make his getaway?’ He waited himself, his head on one side. ‘It’s significant,’ he went on at last, ‘because the only person known to have been in communication with him whilst he’s been in prison is an old woman in Bethnal Green who keeps a lodging-house he once stayed in. She’s well known to us and the instant we heard of his escape we got on to her, but he didn’t show up there and she and her contacts have been watched ever since. It wasn’t she. Who was it?’
He leant back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.
‘Of course,’ he continued with disarming humility, ‘for all our talk the police are not so blessed thorough. This old girl has two daughters who both work in different West End stores. Although an eye has been kept on the mother, because she was known to be corresponding with a convict, no one has bothered about the daughters. Yet they live in the same house. Anyone at all could have kept in touch with him through one of them. They’re hard-faced pieces, both of them. They’ve been through it today, but they’re not talking. Why should they?’
Avril sighed. ‘Sixteen years old, and no one came forward to claim him,’ he said slowly. ‘How very terrible that must have been.’
His quiet tone had not altered, but pain was conveyed so poignantly that Luke was jerked off his course. He had made up his mind that he was going to hear the argument from the opposite point of view, and had been prepared to listen to the story of the sufferings of a respectable family when one of its sons betrays it. That was the aspect which most appealed to his own imagination, and he had prepared a case against it without much enthusiasm. Now he was doubly put out.
‘Very likely, sir,’ he agreed bitterly, ‘but he doesn’t sound to be my idea of a lovable kid. He and two other boys stole a laundry van, ran over a postman, maimed him for life, and pinched his bag, leaving him in the road. Then they smashed up the vehicle whilst fighting over the mail. One young brute was killed outright, the second was seriously hurt, and Havoc was arrested trying to run away. At the inquiry it was found that the injured youngster had met Havoc for the first time that afternoon, and the parents of the dead boy couldn’t identify him either. All marks had been picked out of his clothes, mind you, so he knew what he was doing. That was in May thirty-four, in Ilford.’
He finished the recital with a certain amount of savage satisfaction and regarded the old man hopefully.
Avril said nothing. His chin had sunk on his chest, and his eyes stared unseeing at the polished wood of the desk pedestal. Luke felt sure that the story was news to him, but he could not tell what effect it had had. He went on very cautiously.
‘Mrs Cash,’ he said, ‘the woman who lends money. We had great hopes of her, you know.’
‘Ah. The sports coat. I thought you might. Where did that lead you?’ Avril’s direct intelligence was comforting.
‘Not very far,’ Luke admitted. ‘Her story, when Picot got her alone, was that a dealer asked her to get it for him, and that was confirmed by the man. He says that Duds came into his shop in Crumb Street and asked him if he could get him an old coat or suit of Martin Elginbrodde’s, and he mentioned this address. He explained that he was an actor and that he was due to give an impersonation of his old officer at a reunion dinner. The dealer saw no harm in it and he knew that Mrs Cash, who did little bits of business of the kind, lived in this square, so he got in touch with her. He sticks t
o that. We can’t shake him.’
Old Avril nodded. ‘Ingenious,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Mrs Cash is not involved.’
Charlie Luke eyed him curiously. ‘I understand you’ve known her for a long time, sir. She told Picot it was over twenty-five years.’
‘Twenty-six,’ the Canon agreed. ‘My wife persuaded me to let her live in that little cottage twenty-six years ago, the Michaelmas quarter.’
‘And she was a widow then with one child, a little boy. Is that right?’
Luke, who was not usually so self-conscious, hoped he was not sounding heavily significant.
‘Perfectly. Did she tell you that?’
‘No. That came from your Mrs Talisman. We haven’t worried Mrs Cash since last night. She made a very full statement to Picot and let him see over the house, which she needn’t have done. Since then we’ve merely kept an eye on the place, as we have the whole square. Not too easy, this weather. She hasn’t been out today.’
‘So she told me. She seems to have a cold.’
Luke sat up. ‘Was that when you called on her this afternoon?’ He was annoyed. He had been saving that and the old man had forestalled him. Avril seemed mildly surprised by his tone.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That was the only time I saw her.’
‘Do you mind telling me why you called?’
‘No. I asked her if she could possibly come and hunt for the minutes of the last meeting of the Diocesan Education Committee. She couldn’t. She said she had a cold.’
Luke sat looking at him blankly. He found that the only certain thing he knew about the man was that he would not lie. Of that one fact he had no doubt in the world.
‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose that like everybody else your work has to go on whatever happens around you.’
The old man smiled at him. ‘It ought to,’ he agreed, ‘but some of it is very trivial, you know. Perhaps paper should be made a little more precious than it seems to be. Those forms we keep sending each other nowadays remind me of an old parlour game we used to play called Consequences, except that the results were very much more humorous, or so we thought.’
Luke grinned. He liked the man.
‘So Mrs Cash has a cold, has she?’ he said. ‘I wonder if it’s in her feet. Did you notice if she looked ill?’
‘I’m afraid I did not. It was dark in the doorway.’
‘I know. And you didn’t stay a minute. I heard that.’ Luke brushed the incident aside and returned to the heart of the business. ‘This son of hers,’ he began without looking up, but raising and lowering his hand as if he were estimating the height of a child, ‘do you happen to remember, sir, exactly when he died?’
Avril hesitated. ‘Not the year,’ he said at last, ‘but it was just after Epiphany – that’s early January. I was in bed with influenza, and the Memorial Service was delayed.’
‘That’s what they told me.’ Luke sounded dubious. ‘Mrs Talisman says it was in January thirty-five. The boy was then fourteen or fifteen, but well grown.’ Now that he was about to test the one and only theory which had occurred to him as being even faintly tenable, its flimsiness dismayed him, but he went on resolutely. ‘My information is that the child died down in the country, where he had been for some time, and his body was brought to his mother’s house for a night on its way to the cemetery up at Wilsford. You were in bed, but your wife, the late Mrs Avril, went in to see the mother for you. Now, sir, this is the only question I have to ask you. Mrs Talisman is certain that when Mrs Avril returned she mentioned that she had seen the body. The child used to sing in the choir at the church, so she knew him well and she said she’d seen him when he was dead. Do you happen to remember that?’
Avril raised his fine head. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My poor Margaret.’ His face changed only for an instant. The grief upon it appeared and passed like the shadow of a leaf in the wind, but its intensity was so great that Luke, who was still a young man, was dismayed to learn that it could exist.
The Chief Inspector was taken aback. The dark colour appeared on his cheekbones and he cursed himself for trying to make bricks without straw. He had no wish to torment his new friend, whose regret for his dead wife was clearly quite terrible. He shelved his ‘substitution of the child’ theory completely. It had been a forlorn hope from the beginning. It had come to him when Picot had been telling him that Mrs Cash was hard. He knew something of the hardness of certain women and it had occurred to him then that a self-centred widow, who was making money in a shady way under cover of great respectability, might have preferred to let her neighbours believe that her son was dead rather than to allow him to become a permanent danger to her, and this more especially if she was then free to do what she could for him secretly.
The actual manoeuvre of substitution would not have been easy, but not, he thought, impossible for a woman with so many impoverished folk beholden to her. It was a peculiar district. He had even known some very shady undertakers in it.
It had been the dates which had interested him most. In May a boy sent to Borstal, and about the same time another boy had been ‘sent away to the country because he was difficult’, and in January he had died. However, if Mrs Avril had actually seen the dead child, then that was the end of it.
He took up the official photographs of the wanted man, which lay before him on the desk. They were not good. Mrs Talisman had not picked them out of a bunch of others, and Picot had not blamed her. The face was wooden and lifeless.
Luke pushed the card across to Avril, who glanced at it and handed it gravely back.
‘That’s the bird we’re after, sir.’
‘And when he is taken, what will they do with him?’ For the first time rebelliousness had crept into the curl of the old man’s mouth and his tone possessed a hint of bitterness. ‘Argue over him, lock him up for three weeks, and finally hang him, I suppose, poor fellow.’
The epithet stung the righteous sheepdog in Luke on the raw, and anger, naked and oddly naive, shone out suddenly from his diamond eyes.
‘That man,’ he exploded, ‘has killed a doctor who was trying to help him, a snivelling caretaker old enough to be his father, an invalid woman in her bed, and a boy I’d give my right hand to have here with me on the job. I nipped in to see his mother today, and I couldn’t look the old girl in the face.’ He was so angry that he came within an ace of tears, but he kept control of his great rackety machine and managed to be impressive in his forcefulness. ‘That man is killing mad,’ he rattled on savagely. ‘He’s knifing right and left as though human life had no value and any poor beast who gets in his way had no right to exist. And what’s he thinking of? Nothing but a parcel of buried treasure out of a story-book, which may well turn out to be nothing more exciting than a bottle of gin. He’s got no right to life. There’s no place for him under the sun. Of course they’ll hang him. Good heavens, sir, wouldn’t you?’
‘I?’ The old Canon sat back in astonishment. He had been watching the other man’s rage with the look of acute apprehension which is usually reserved for the contemplation of some very painful but familiar operation, the extraction of a tooth perhaps. There was sympathy but no sharing of the sensation. ‘I?’ he repeated. ‘Oh no, my boy, not I. I should never have made a judge. I’ve often thought that. What a very terrible job that must be. Consider it,’ he added as Luke sat staring at him. ‘However carefully a judge is protected by the experience and the logic of the law, there must be times – not many, I know, or we should have no judges – when the same frightful question must be answered. Not faced, you see, but answered. Every now and again he must have to say to himself, in effect, “Everyone agrees that this colour is black, and my reason tells me it is so, but on my soul, do I know?”’
The eyes which met Luke’s were frank with dismay at such a prospect.
‘That must be a most dreadful moment,’ said Avril. ‘So much depends on it for himself. If he didn’t consider his own position he’d be inhuma
n, and of course none of us are. I should have failed hopelessly, wouldn’t you?’
Charlie Luke made no comment. It was not a subject he had ever expected to have to consider. It passed through his cheerful mind that the old fellow might as well start talking Greek to him.
‘Well, guv’nor,’ he said, ‘what would you do?’
‘I’ve been thlnking of that all day.’ Avril spoke absently and sat watching the dead fire dropping quietly to dust. His placid face wore the authoritative but withdrawn expression which only appears in a man when he is actively engaged upon his own skilled work. Behind his untidy head the dark book-case made a tapestry of subdued colour, and presently, as the silence lengthened, Luke felt that his inquisitorial desk had gradually become merely one in a classroom. Finally the old man stirred and his delightful smile broke the spell.
‘Mine is a very technical job,’ he said apologetically. ‘I don’t see that there’s anything I can tell you that would be of any great use to you, except perhaps this, if you’ll forgive a great impertinence. I should not dream of mentioning it in the ordinary way, but it comes within my province, and since you may have overlooked it it might be helpful just now. Beware of anger. It is the most difficult to remove of all the hindrances. But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions.’
He spoke so earnestly and with such obvious goodwill that it was impossible to be offended, and Luke, who had expected almost anything else on earth, was startled out of his wits. The eyes which met his were as shrewd as the Assistant Commissioner’s own.
Avril got up. ‘You ought to have something to eat before you go,’ he said. ‘This country seems to be determined to atone for its sins by instituting a perpetual Lent, but there must be something in the pantry. Let us go down and see.’
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