by John Creasey
“Not exactly,” Gideon conceded, just as drily. “But some things are related. Am I needed in the round-up of the prisoners, do you know?”
“No. Hobbs and Upway are coping, and of course the divisions and the police courts are the main centres. The problem is how to hold so many prisoners overnight, and the answer seems to be to hold some special courts. Hobbs will be in touch with you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Gideon said. “The next thing is very different. Nigel Simply of the Examiner has probably guessed that I put the Daily News on to the dock business, and is going to write it up.”
“Good!” ejaculated Scott-Marie.
“You don’t mind?”
“Every paragraph we can get about this to our credit is good,” Scott-Marie declared. “If some of them draw attention to you, I shall be very glad. Your light is too often hidden under a bushel.” For the reserved Scott-Marie, this comment was almost skittish, and it told Gideon the measure of the importance of what had been achieved.
“After Simply it may shine too brightly,” Gideon remarked. “He is coming here to see me in the next twenty minutes or so. Is there any particular way in which you would like me to steer him?”
Scott-Marie gave a chuckle of sheer enjoyment.
“George,” he said. “If you can steer Nigel Simply, it will be a greater triumph even than the docks! Don’t worry about what you tell him or what he gets out of you – and least of all, what he publishes.” After leaving time for that to soak in, Scott-Marie asked in a voice and manner more characteristic of him: “Do any other issues worry you?”
“My biggest worry is the illegal immigration,” Gideon replied.
“That I can well understand. Is there anything more we can do, as far as you know? Can do without risking any kind of conflict with the Home Office, I mean.” The Home Office was an ever-present bogey in the face of Scotland Yard and sooner or later all men chafed under the restrictions it imposed, even the Commissioner.
“Not officially,” Gideon answered. “But I am going to try to persuade the Daily Star to take it up as a case and use all the pressure it can as well as arouse public opinion. It will be a confidential attempt, of course, but if it should leak out that I am trying to persuade a newspaper to put pressure on our masters—” He broke off, suddenly aware of the full gravity of what he was doing, and as suddenly aware that on this issue Scott-Marie might think he had gone too far. The silence which followed made this seem even more likely. He sat rigid, rock-like, not knowing what he would do if Scott-Marie virtually ordered: “Don’t do it.”
“George,” the Commissioner said at last; the ‘George’ meant at least that he had not taken umbrage. “Let me have a written note about this, and put in the remark you made when we last talked about this: that you feel this is not wholly a police matter and that in order to resolve it a nationwide survey of immigrant housing, living and working conditions should be made by the Ministry and by local authorities. If anything should leak out about what you’re doing, then I shall be able to show that you had informed me. If challenged I can point out that I had had no time to make any recommendation. So we are both covered from sniping attacks in the House.”
Gideon thought with a rush of emotion: He’s for this as much as I am!
“I’ll do that note right away,” he promised gruffly.
“Thank you,” said Scott-Marie. “Let me know what happens in the morning.”
“I will, sir. Goodbye.” Gideon rang off, and sat back for a moment while a tension he had not been aware of eased from his body. Then he stood up and moved to the window, looking out on the river which was much calmer now, although the sky was overcast and everything looked cold. In the space of half-an-hour he had received more encouragement than he had dreamt possible. Now what he had to do was use it to the best possible advantage. What the devil had been the matter with him – not enough to do! He gave a snort of a laugh and turned away from the window, rang the typing pool and asked for a Miss Sabrina Sale.
“I think she’s free, Commander. Shall I send someone else if she isn’t?”
“Provided whoever comes knows that it’s an urgent job and might mean working late.”
“I’ll see to it, sir.” The manageress of the pool rang off, while Gideon went through a filing cabinet and ruffled through folders until he came to one marked: Immigration Draft Report. He took this out and read it quickly; it carried all the recommendations Scott-Marie had recalled, and there was nothing in it he would change. He picked up a ballpoint pen and wrote in one corner: ‘Copies for the Commissioner, Mr. Hobbs, Mr. Honiwell, Mr. Piluski, two spares’, and finished as there was a tap at the door. On his “Come in” a pleasant-looking, attractive woman came in, with soft greying hair and soft, pleasing skin. She wore pince-nez but they seemed right for her. She wore a plain pink blouse and a knee-length pleated black skirt.
“Commander.”
“Come in, Sabrina” Gideon pointed to a chair. “I want you to go over that draft report on immigration, and put any obvious mistakes right – you know what my syntax is like! – and get me some copies very quickly.”
“Of course,” she promised.
“And there’s just one letter,” Gideon went on, and the woman crossed nice legs and rested her notebook on her knee. “To the Commissioner, copy Mr. Hobbs. Further to the report which I enclose, I should advise you that I have an opportunity of discussing some aspects of this problem with Lord Nagel, Chairman of Unity Press Enterprises, and Mr. Edward Mesurier, of the Daily News. I will report the results of these discussions as soon as practicable.”
He finished.
He was aware that Sabrina Sale was looking up at him, smiling very gently. She was an attractive woman, and in different circumstances they might have become close friends. As it was, they knew each other well within the limitations of the Yard. Her grey eyes also smiled, and she seemed to stretch out her right hand.
Then, she drew back, and asked quite briskly: “Is that everything, Commander?”
“Yes. Can you get it done by half-past five?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ll stay as late as necessary to get this finished. Do you – do you really think it possible that you will get some action? If you could, it would be by far the greatest thing even you have ever done.”
He had no doubt at all that she meant every word, and was more affected than he could say. He almost resented the sharp ring of the telephone bell; but it came, and he moved to take it as Sabrina Sale turned away.
Chapter 15
SHIPLOAD ‘DESDEMONA’
Gideon put the receiver to his ear, said “Gideon” and watched the door close on the woman’s surprisingly attractive figure. Next moment a man with a familiar voice said in a tone of controlled excitement: “Ten to one you don’t know what I’ve got, George!” It was Lemaitre in a gleeful mood, and he could often be gleeful and triumphant without good reason. Gideon had to make an effort to humour him.
“What have you found?”
“A cellarful of immigrants!” Lemaitre almost brayed.
The significance, even the actual words, did not strike Gideon at first. The way the phrase was uttered made it sound like the words of a song: ‘A Pocketful of Miracles’. ‘A Cellarful of Immigrants’. Then the meaning dawned on him as if it had been hammered into his mind. Before he could speak, before he really began to feel anger at the flippant way Lemaitre made the announcement, Lemaitre went on in an urgent tone:
“George, I didn’t mean to sound like a cackling old hen. And I mean it. It’s that load from Brighton, I’ll betcha from the Desdemona or some such name. We got a teletype asking us to look out for a pale grey Volkswagen mini-bus with the blinds drawn – Brighton or was it Folkestone sent it out?”
“Brighton,” Gideon answered, his anger fading. There was some indication that a mini-bu
s had left the jetty where the curry- smelling ship was tied-up. “And you found it?”
“Yes. One of our chaps noticed a mini-bus backed up against a door in a house in Quill Street, you know, just behind the Whitechapel Road. Something was being loaded or unloaded in a hurry. He didn’t tackle the van then but sent word back, and the van was picked up, empty, twenty minutes ago. It reeks of curry and pomade. We’ve held the driver, who says he delivered a lot of Pakistanis or Indians to the house, and thought they were going down into the cellar.”
“Thought!” Gideon barked.
“Oh, they’re there all right,” Lemaitre said with scornful confidence. “That bus was crowded – he reckons there were over fifty in it, twice as many as there should be. The question is, do we pick them up now or wait in case the men who fixed all this turn up? Someone’s bound to, even if it’s only a go-between, they won’t leave them to rot.”
Gideon caught himself about to say: “Don’t be too sure,” and replied with brisk positiveness: “Have the place surrounded. Make arrangements in advance for all the immigrants to be taken to a school or a hall where they can be given some food and not frightened out of their lives. Keep me posted stage by stage, I—oh! Don’t collect them in Black Marias, use a couple of buses.”
Lemaitre said, as if puzzled: “Taking a lot of trouble, George, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Fix it, Lem,” Gideon ordered.
“Oh, I’ll fix it, don’t you worry!” Lemaitre rang off as if to impress Gideon with his zeal, while Gideon felt a curious sensation, half-satisfaction, half-nausea. How could human beings be treated like cattle in this day and age? Then with a switch of mood: Well, this lot’s all right, thank God.
He thought of Honiwell, and the shipload of Pakistanis Honiwell believed to be in acute danger. It did not occur to him any more than it had occurred to Lemaitre that there might be danger for the men who had been smuggled into the country from the S.Y. Desdemona on the South Coast. Then the door opened and a messenger said: “You did say Mr. Simply was to be brought straight up, sir, didn’t you?”
Good Lord, thought Gideon. He had forgotten Nigel Simply!
The most bitter and angry, spiteful, vengeful and dangerous man in England, at that time, was a middle-aged Englishman named Winfrith. He was one of the few English people who could trace his ancestry back to the era before the Norman Conquest, but a series of misalliances in his family and the divers wars had so adulterated the Saxon blood that his father had been bitter before him, and had taught his son bitterness.
“We should be able to take our seats with the highest in the land, but when the third baron married that Russian bitch, he began the decline, for the baronetcy died. Don’t be under any illusion, John. The blood of your children should be kept pure. Mixed marriages are made in hell and the children of them live in hell.”
Every single thing that went wrong in the affairs of the country, the father had blamed on to mixed marriages: the marriages of sin. In the son’s youth there had been very few unions between black and white, his early prejudices had been against mixed marriages with Jews and with Europeans whatever their nationalities. But after the Second World War, when the father had died in a bombing raid, John Winfrith had seen the new flood of immigrants from Jamaica, Hong Kong and Singapore, and eventually from India and Pakistan.
He did not, at first, hate the people themselves.
But as the months and the years passed, he grew to hate them.
And as the months and the years passed, a new hatred grew within him: for those who accepted the situation without protest.
Moreover, as the economy of the nation grew weaker and its problems greater he began to hate not only those who came from other lands, but all whom he blamed for the watering down of the greatness of Britain. The Socialists. The Trade Unions. The Workers. There had never been much reason in him, and there was less and less as the years wore on. He had, however, two great assets.
He was wealthy: his father had been most astute on stock exchange dealings and in land speculation and had left him six million pounds after estate duty had been paid. And he was not only wealthy but a clever and shrewd organiser as well as a good judge of men.
Without becoming associated with any political group he gathered about him a number of extreme right-wingers and, for years, organised a constant supply of mercenaries to and from the lands in Africa, the Middle East and South America where they would be hired to fight on the side of right-wing forces, whether in the Government or as revolutionaries. He was well-informed, having built up a system of well-paid spies, and knew whenever a particular war was going one way or the other; if badly, he drew his men out. They were trained, tough, and believers in brute force, which they had seen triumph over and over again.
Slowly he trained them to work in England, for he had always had a dream of serving England and believed he could do this best in two ways:
First: rid the nation of strikes.
Second: rid the nation of coloured immigrants in particular and all immigrants in general.
He believed that once these two objectives could be attained he would have changed the life of the nation. He had no great dreams of political power. He was not a fascist in the sense that he believed in permanent domination by a group of right-wing extremists. He just saw these two factors as cancers in the body of England, and believed that once they were out the body would recover and democracy would become healthy. To achieve this end he believed in might, and also in the power of fear.
It had not occurred to him even in his most pessimistic moments, that the attacks at the docks would lead to such a disaster. He had believed that with a series of ‘commando’ or mercenary raids on the dockers he would frighten them into coming to terms with the employers. He had selected the docks because they were the main artery of trade, and had plans for similar attacks on car factories and other big plants where strikes were commonplace. He had pictured a sensational success at the docks, and when the Strike Breaker actions were under way, he planned to move his main attack on to first the illegal and then the legal immigrants. Quite cold-bloodedly, he planned the sinking of shiploads of Indians and Pakistanis, and to make sure he was fully informed bought his way into the European syndicates which were extorting large stuns on promises of a passage to England and trouble-free entry into the land.
So, he knew about the passengers crowded into the S.Y. Desdemona.
He also knew about the others battened down into the stinking hold of the S.S. Breem in the North Sea.
He knew that the easiest victims, for him, were those on the S.S. Breem, and he did not intend them to land. Already rumours of shiploads of these immigrants being sunk were spreading, and his agents spread them skilfully, so that they caused much alarm in those parts of England where the non-white population was thickest – in some areas, as high as fifty per cent of the total population. Everything was going to plan.
His method with the passengers from the S.Y. Desdemona was different.
He proposed to get them in, deliver them to a rendezvous in London, in fact a cellar which spread under three houses in Whitechapel, and ‘leak’ their presence to the police so that they would undoubtedly be sent back to Pakistan. Now, however, his agents had told him that the police had traced his shipload and the Volkswagen bus and might get on to them – and so on to him – at any time.
He was suffering from the first overwhelming defeat in his life.
He could see his plans crashing about him.
He knew that among the arrested men were over four hundred of his own, who had been trained in all kinds of fighting but had been overwhelmed by the surprise intervention of the police on such a scale.
He hated the police; the dockers; the Pakistanis; he was ablaze with hate.
He was a small man with beautiful fair hair more silver than white, a pink complexion; and he was in hi
s middle fifties although he looked no more than forty. He had clear blue eyes, and could appear as innocent as a boy in the choir stalls. None would have suspected that he was so consumed with hate.
The agent who telephoned him about the passengers from the S.Y. Desdemona was puzzled by his silence after the report – that the police had traced the van to the houses concerned and doubtless would soon stage a raid. So, the agent remarked with a forced laugh:
“They’re as tight-packed in that cellar as they were in the ship.”
“Yes,” Winfrith said. “I know. Where are you?”
“I’m in a telephone booth at the end of Quill Street,” the agent said. “I can see the house from here.”
“David,” Winfrith said, “I’ve some bad news.”
“More bad news?”
“Some of those blacks in the cellar could give the police information which could lead back to us.”
“My God!” exclaimed the man named David. “What are we going to do?”
“The ventilation holes are at the back, aren’t they?” asked Winfrith. “If someone dropped a couple of those old containers of phosgene down one, they wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody. If I were nearer I’d do it myself.”
“Don’t you worry,” David said hoarsely. “I’ll fix those black bastards.”
Chief Detective Superintendent Lemaitre, in charge of N.E. Division of the Metropolitan Police, knew Gideon better, perhaps, than any man in the Force except Alec Hobbs. Lemaitre had been Gideon’s chief assistant during Gideon’s early days as the Commander C.I.D. and had learned to judge his moods and mannerisms extremely well. When he replaced the receiver after talking to Gideon that afternoon, he sat back in his chair, a long-legged, bony-faced man with sparse, sleeked hair and a thin neck; he wore a polka dot red and white tie and a pepper and salt coloured lounge suit.
