by John Creasey
“I think it’s shameful,” Mildred said hotly. “Shameful’s one word!”
“I always thought Commander Gideon was a good sort.”
“There can be a big difference between a man and his reputation,” Cox said sourly.
“I suppose there can,” said Mildred, as if that was a new and profound reflection. After a pause, while she looked up at her husband’s face, she went on: “I know what I would do.”
“Do you?” asked Cox. When his wife made a pronouncement like that he was always mildly amused. Talking had helped a great deal, already, although he did not realize it. “And what would Mildred the miracle-worker do?”
“I’d do the job so well that it would teach Gideon a thing or two,” declared Mildred. “I’d make sure I didn’t put a foot wrong. I’d show them!”
Cox actually laughed.
He was more his usual self with Tom, after homework and before bed; and after Mildred had gone to bed he sat at a desk, outlining his plans for the Visit. Mildred had something there, all right. He’d show Gideon.
Ripple stayed at Gideon’s place until after midnight, long after Kate had gone to bed.
His chief worry was-the tight time schedule. He knew that Gideon had plenty on his shoulders, and his own chief aide would be right on top of the job but would he, Gideon, keep an eye on anything which developed in the next week or ten days, especially in the next two or three days? If there were an influx of Algerians, for instance, they ought to be watched closely, and there was always the risk that they would work through some other groups.
“They might send a group of Algerian colonists over to distract us, and use someone we least expect to make an attempt on the French President,” Ripple said. “Don’t know why it is, George, but I’ve got a nasty feeling about this show. There isn’t enough time to prepare properly. Can’t very well tell Rogerson this, certainly not the Commissioner, but I thought you ought to know.”’
“Thanks,” said Gideon. “I appreciate it.” When he saw that Ripple had said all he wanted to say, he chatted idly for a few minutes, then went on: “What do you think of our Timson?”
“Vi?”
“That her name? I didn’t think she was human enough to have one,” Gideon said, with laboured humour.
“If you ask me,” said Ripple, “Vi Timson’s a bit of a dark horse. Why?”
“Just wondered,” said Gideon, and he had amental picture of ‘Vi’ walking along with the Australian detective inspector, at least ten years her junior. He added casually: “Didn’t you work at J.K. Division with Cox once?”
“Ray Cox?”
“Yes.”
“Touched him on the raw, has it?” Ripple inquired, shrewdly.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I just want to make sure it doesn’t.”
“Ray’s all right,” pronounced Ripple, judicially, “but he’s gone too far too fast. He ought to have had another two years on the beat, way back. Just the man I’d like beside me in a big job, though, provided I didn’t rub him up the wrong way.”
“So, it’s easy, is it?”
“Could be” said Ripple. “You’ll either have to slap him down or give him his head.”
7: The Bomb
“Don’t look now,” said Ricky Wall, “but when you get a chance, tell me what you think of the man dancing with the blonde with the Edwardian hair style. He’s like a big-time criminal who was murdered in Australia two years ago. We never caught the killer.”
“I thought the Sydney police were so much better than ours.”
“Cut that out,” said Wall, with a grin. “Those boys at the Yard really know their job. You could try your well-known charm to find out what they think of the Australian party.”
“Sometimes what I would like to use on the Yard men is not my well-known charm,” said Violet. “Oh, they’re so smug!”
“None of them pinched your bottom yet?” demanded Wall. “Vi, you’re my girl. How about getting shot of this place and seeing how well we can get to know each other between now and eight o’clock in the morning?”
“I have to be at the office at nine o’clock, so I’ve got to be up by half-past seven,” said Violet. “I’ll think about your kind offer at the week end.”
Wall complained: “And I thought I was on a safe bet.”
“Nothing about me is safe,” said Violet, looking at him through her lashes. She wore a cocktail dress, high at the neck, but her arms were bare; she might be nearer fifty than forty, but she looked in the late thirties, and her skin was smooth and without blemish. “When does your party go back, Ricky?”
“We leave London on Tuesday, go over to Paris for three days, Berlin for three days, spend a week in Scandinavia, three days in Milan and another two in Rome, and then fly back here for a final few days in London. Just in time for the Big Visit,” he went on, and his eyes kindled. “I’ve always wanted to see what London puts on for these occasions.”
“Where would you rather be posted - at the Palace, or at the Houses of Parliament?” asked Violet.
“Which do you recommend?”
“For a colonial,” said Violet, wickedly, “I would think the Palace.”
“We hicks from the Dominions are great royalists but we are also true democrats,” retorted Wall solemnly. “I’ll be at the Houses of Parliament. Can you fix it?”
“Yes,” said Violet, simply.
They went up the narrow stairs to the street, a turning off Bond Street. It was quite chilly. The doorman asked: “Cab, sir?”
“No, thanks,” said Wall. He slid his arms around Violet’s waist and raised his hand to cup her breast. “Change your mind,” he pleaded.
She closed her hand over his.
“We’ll have a wonderful week end,” she said. “But I have a lot to do in the morning, and I won’t be in bed until nearly two o’clock as it is.”
“Now who takes work to bed?” demanded Wall, but he laughed, squeezed, and lowered his hand. “I want you to know something,” he said. “I think you’re quite a girl.” After a moment, he went on: “Do we need a cab?”
“It’s only a five-minutes’ walk,” said the Assistant Commissioner’s new secretary:
They walked, slowly.
Without knowing it, they passed the house where there was a small, empty flat, with Marjorie Belman’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe, her make-up things still on the dressing table, food intended for that day still in the refrigerator.
Wall saw Violet to the front door of her flatlet in South Audley Street and then strolled towards Piccadilly, smiling, half-dissatisfied, half-pleased with himself. He hailed a cab, gave his hotel address and sat back.
As he got out of the taxi and glanced across the Thames, which he could hear lapping gently against the embankment, momentarily he looked straight in the direction of the little house in Streatham, not far from the common, where Matthew Smith was lying next to his wife in the big double bed, thinking of his bomb.
Smith was restless and on edge that night, filled with repressed excitement and impatience. He kept his thin, bony body as still as he could, for he believed his wife was asleep.
She stirred unexpectedly and asked in a clear voice: “Can’t you sleep, dear?”
So she was restless, too - almost as if she sensed his excitement and his tension.
“I’m all right,” Smith answered gruffly.
“But I honestly don’t think you are,” his wife said. “You looked peaky all the evening. Matt, dear, what is it? If I don’t know, I can’t help, can I?’
He felt like striking her fat face, felt like shouting: “I tell you it’s nothing!” Instead, he kept silent.
“Matt, is - is it because of the French - the Frenchman coming? If it is, you mustn’t let it upset you. It’s so long ago, now, it . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said in a hard voice. “If you can’t go to sleep, keep quiet.” He woke early on Saturday morning, in spite of the bad night. He did not go to the office
on Saturdays, and usually spent the morning in the small garden with some fuchsias, his favourite flowers, or weeding the small herbaceous border, or pottering in his little workshop at the end of the garden.
In this workshop he had a carpenter’s bench, a good selection of tools in two wall racks, and always some repairs waiting to be done. It was surprising how skilful he was with his thin, bony hands which looked almost too frail to hold tools firmly. He was a good carpenter and could French polish as well as most professionals. Any work with wood soothed him. All the furniture in the house was in perfect condition; as a handyman, no one could be more efficient. His married daughter often called upon him to do odd jobs. It was a long, long time since his son had died - the eager-eyed fresh-faced lad of nineteen who had gone out to France so happily for a three-months’ training course in Grasse, the French perfume centre in the mountains behind the Riviera. His son - he always thought of the lad as “my son,” hardly ever as Robert - had been keen on chemistry, and had got a job in the research department of a firm of cosmetic manufacturers on the Great West Road. His future had seemed very bright, and would have been but for the awful thing which had followed.
A girl had been murdered, and the French police had accused the boy.
Even today, twenty-five years afterwards, at the thought of the trial, at the thought of that awful slicing smash of the guillotine, Smith would feel his blood going hot and his hands clenching and unclenching, and sometimes he would break out into cold sweat. Ever since that awful day, Smith had hated France and the French with unreasoning, venomous hatred. Whenever the French were in trouble, Smith was elated. The political crises, the economic crises, the damaging strikes, the Algerian revolts - all of these were simply a vengeful fate. Years ago, when France had collapsed under the Panzer divisions and the Stukas, he had screamed aloud that the English were fools for ever trusting Frenchmen. He hated, hated, hated them.
His wife knew this. From the beginning, she had tried to soothe him, saying that it wasn’t just the French, it was the law everywhere. Anyone could make mistakes, and this had been an awful one; that was the way to look at it. Smith had soon learned that she had no hatred in her heart for the French murderers, and that had been the beginning of his antipathy towards her, a slowly increasing, deepening, bitter dislike.
Only when driven by physical need, did he touch her. Sometimes he wished her dead. He did not fully realize that his hatred had swollen to hideous size and shape. One day a dark-skinned Frenchman had got into conversation with him on a bus, and started to damn his own country folk as colonialist aggressors, sadistic brutes, decadent morons in sex and art. Before long, Smith had been talking more freely to the dark-skinned man than to anyone he knew. All his hatred for France and the French had come out.
The man had asked if he would do anything to help the Algerian colonists’ cause. In his work as a shipping clerk Smith handled bills of lading, invoices, all kinds of things to do with imports and exports, and he often went on board ships in London docks with these papers. Would Smith act as a messenger? the man had asked. Sometimes it was useful to pass small packages, letters and secret information - it would be invaluable to the nationalist cause if Mr. Smith would help. And, of course, he would be paid for taking risks. It wasn’t very much money; just five pounds a week, every week. But it increased Smith’s income by nearly a half. He told his wife that he had been given a raise with a more important job, and as far as he knew, she believed it.
It was three years since the suggestion that he should take another, this time drastic step; that of assassinating General de Gaulle on a State Visit in 1959. “For no one in Algeria believes that he wants to end the war and make peace . . . His spies are everywhere . . . He will cheat us, like all the other leaders ... See what happened to the real friends of the nationalists. ... See how slow he is in redeeming his promises . . . We must shock the French nation and strike a great blow for the freedom of Algeria.”
Matthew Smith had grown into the acceptance of the belief that this was exactly what he should do. It would be the ultimate act of vengeance for his dead son.
“.. . and the best way is to throw a bomb, which we will provide for you. In London it is easy for you to be at the front of a crowd during a procession, and you can be within a few feet of the carriage in which de Gaulle will ride.”
Smith went along to his workshop on that Saturday morning remembering that the great chance had been lost in 1959. Everything had been ready, the bomb had been in his possession, he had known exactly where he was to stand, and a few white sympathizers with the Algerian nationalist cause had been primed to help him to get away by causing confusion in the ranks. Then, on the day before the great opportunity, he awoke with a terrible headache, aches and pains all over, and a matter-of-fact wife had called the doctor. His temperature had been a hundred and four. He had not even been able to stagger across the room. Luckily, he had been able to satisfy the others that it hadn’t been last minute fright.
He had never really recovered from the disappointment. He ate very little and was terribly thin; the knowing ones among his fellow workers murmured: “T.B. or cancer.” But there was surprising strength in his frail-looking body; it was his hatred which burned up his flesh.
He went into his tiny workshop. It had a brick floor, and underneath four loose bricks, deep in a little cavity close to the wall, was the bomb. The Algerians had assured him that it would keep for ever.
He stared at the spot and planned how he would take up the bricks and put the bomb in his pocket. He began to wonder where he would stand during the procession. Suddenly, he heard a sound and glanced around. His wife was in the doorway, staring, and he saw fear in her eyes.
“Matt . . .” she began, chokily.
“What the devil are you doing here?”
“Matt, I - I saw you come out before breakfast. I didn’t want you to catch cold. I . . . “
“You lying fool, you’re spying on me! Go back into the house, put some clothes on, and staythere until I come back. Stay indoors! Do you understand?”
“I - I didn’t mean to upset you dear,” his wife muttered, but she continued to stare. He did not realise how glittering her eyes were, or how her lips were drawn back over her teeth.
That had convinced her beyond doubt that something was hidden in the workshop. She has suspected it for a long time.
And she was more frightened than ever of her husband.
8: Saturday Roll-Call
On that same Saturday morning, Gideon was in his office a little after eight o’clock. Saturday was always the odds-and-ends day, a kind of roll-call of unsolved crimes. Gideon liked to go over all the jobs on which there had been no progress during the week, to see if he or the men in charge had missed anything obvious. “Did you get hold of all the provincial supers I asked you to?” he asked Bell.
“Yes, George.” Bell put his hand on a sheaf of letters. “They’ll all play. They want someone to go and brief them on our bad boys, though, and I said we’d send someone up. Our chap can pick up a lot of information, too.”
“Let me see the reports,” Gideon said.
He read them closely, and by the time that and the morning’s briefing was done, it was ten o’clock. “Going to have a breather for five minutes?” suggested Bell. “Lemaitre’s coming at a quarter past, Evans is due from London airport, and Abbott said he’d like to see you at half-past eleven.”
“Anything from Cox?”
“Not a squeak.”
“Hmm,” said Gideon. “All right, Joe, send for a cuppa.” He got up, went to the window and looked out, stretching himself and yawning. His collar was done up and his tie in position, for it was chilly. The windows were closed against a wind which seemed to have come in mistake for March and was whipping up the surface of the Thames. He had been wrong as a weather prophet!
At a quarter-past ten exactly there was a bang at the door, and Superintendent Lemaitre came in. For years Lemaitre had sat where Joe Bell did
now. He was an old friend of Gideon’s, a senior detective with one big fault which somehow showed in his alert, thin featured face and sounded in his Cockney voice, with its overtone of slick confidence.
“Hiyah, George!” He came in briskly, waved to Bell and added: “Joe,” and shook Gideon’s hand. “Just thought I’d come and put you out of your misery.”
“What misery?”
“You won’t have to come to Cornwall to do my job for me,” announced Lemaitre. He sat on a corner of Gideon’s desk, bony hands clenched, a confident and happy-looking man given to taking too much for granted and jumping to conclusions. “All natural causes - I mean, all accidental drownings, George.”
“Sure?”
“Yep. And I’m back full of the joys and ready for anything. Just had ten days down by the briny, all expenses paid - got in a couple of dips every day. My wife’s so brown you wouldn’t think she’d been decent! She wants to know if you and Kate can come round to tea or supper tomorrow.”
“If Kate hasn’t booked anything, we’d like to,” said Gideon. “Then you can make your wife a police widow for a week or so.”
“What’s all this? I’m just the man you want for the Big Visit.”
“So you are. Visits to Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and the rest, to check whether any of their boys are planning an offensive in London during the Visit.”
“Okay, okay,” said Lemaitre, without a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll go. Heard anything about Sonnley, or Benny Klein?”
“Dimble of Manchester said he’d heard that Klein was up there,” Bell put in.
“Buying the Manchester mobs off,” Lemaitre guessed. “When do you want me to go?”
“Tuesday.”
“Right-i-ho!” Lemaitre slapped his hands together. “Won’t be sorry to get out of this den of vice for a bit. Don’t forget to ask Kate about tomorrow.” As he went out, Abbott came in, looking rather overeager; quite obviously he thought he had something to report and couldn’t wait. Lemaitre’s footsteps clap-clapped down the corridor as the door closed.
