by John Creasey
The room was only half-filled, with the French security mission in the centre block of seats, the Yard men who would be liaising with them around the perimeter and four German officers by themselves at the back. A senior from Uniform was present; so was Ripple’s deputy. The German security officers had come over from Berlin after Ripple’s visit. Gideon wished that the two Americans were here, but their plane had been delayed, after all, although arrangements for this session had been left to the last minute. Gideon felt the gaze of nearly every one of the Frenchmen as he took up a position at the screen end of the theatre. Mollet, the man in charge of the French mission, came and joined him.
“Gentlemen,” said Gideon, in passable French. “I am very glad to welcome you to London, and I regret only that the average Englishman’s French is so poor. Consequently, I shall have to speak mostly in English, and so will our chief lecturer. I hope you’ll forgive us.”
There was a dutiful laugh.
“I don’t believe there is one of you who doesn’t understand and speak English well,” said Gideon. “Is there?” He looked at the men, noticing the difference in the cut of their clothes and the cut of their hair; hardly one of the Frenchmen could be mistaken for an Englishman, and vice versa. “Thanks. I suggest that you sit one and one - one overseas officer next to one English. If there are any points of clarification needed, it will be easier.” He waited for the men to shift positions, and Mollet, a grey-haired, smooth-faced man in his fifties, with a drooping mouth and rather heavy-lidded eyes, nodded approval.
“What we’re going to do,” said Gideon, “is flash on to the screen in the thirty-five millimetre picture some enlarged maps of the routes from the airport to London, and also of all the other official journeys, as well as the State procession. We shall explain the normal precautions taken, and the special precautions planned for the State procession, when all heads of state will be vulnerable at the same time. The State procession route will be marked into sections and, after that, each section will be shown separately on a much larger scale. All understood?”
There were murmurs of agreement.
“In front of every seat is a booklet showing these same maps, and at the end of the session you will be able to make notes of anything you want to discuss at another meeting. After we have studied the maps on the screen, we shall see two moving pictures of earlier processions. Here you will see not only the places where the crowds are thickest, but how the metropolitan police and different regiments of the Army, Navy and Air Force on the route, making a break-through by an individual from the crowds difficult if not impossible. We will then show the moving pictures in slow motion. The whole procedure this afternoon will take about two hours, after which we shall break up for half an hour for that peculiarly English institution, afternoon tea. After tea, preliminary questions will be asked and answered. Is that all understood?”
There was a chorus of agreement.
“Right,” said Gideon. “Let’s go.” He signalled to the operator, and then went down to a front seat with Mollet to see the whole thing through.
There were a dozen questions afterwards, and it was Bayer, one of the Germans, who asked the last. “The stand for spectators, Herr Commander - how will that be guarded?”
“We will have seats on the middle gangway of every fourth row,”-Gideon answered, and after a moment a diagram of the proposed stand was flashed on to the screen. He pointed to small pencilled numerals which showed in outline. “Here - here - here.” He stabbed at a dozen figures. “Then at the side gangways we shall have four men - one at each side of the top of the stand, another at the bottom. We shall have men at the one entrance - there will only be one entrance although there is the emergency exit. A diagram like this is included in the book in front of you.”
“Thank you, Herr Commander,” said the German. “I ask one more question?”
“As many as you like.”
“It is possible for each nation, the French, the Americans and we we, the Germans, to be represented in this stand, as well as in the streets?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank you, Herr Commander,” the German said, and sat down.
Gideon left the theatre ahead of the others, went back to his office, and found Bell anxious to see him. Webron and Donnelly had been in, and gone almost at once; there was a rumour that a man answering O’Hara’s description had been seen in a hotel in the Strand. “And they’ve gone to watch,” Bell said. “They’ve taken all the files we had for them, to study at the hotel.”
“So they’re bang on the ball,” Gideon remarked. “They’re on the ball, all right,” Bell said. “I’ve sent Chunn over with them. He’ll phone if they have any luck.”
At half-past six, when Gideon left the office, no word had come through, and the two Americans were still at the hotel in the Strand.
In fact, the man O’Hara was in a private hotel, a kind of glorified boarding house, in Kensington. He was officially here on vacation, spent a lot of time out of doors with his movie camera, and was no trouble to anybody. That afternoon, while the two men from Washington were on the false trail, O’Hara, who had a passport under the name of Hann, was putting a new magazine of film into his 16-mm. movie camera. At least, that was what it looked like. The magazine of film was in fact a .22 automatic pistol, operated by the press-button of the camera. O’Hara alias Hann practiced putting it in every day, so that it would give him no trouble when the right moment came. O’Hara did more than practice; he prayed. He was nondescript only in appearance; emotionally he was a man of tremendous power and conviction, and was convinced, within the narrow limits of his religious bigotry, that Roman Catholicism was an evil thing. During the election campaign he had preached this gospel, fighting desperately against the more liberal-minded, and when the President had been elected on a desperately narrow margin, bitterness had turned to hatred.
O’Hara was a kindly man by nature, a good man by training and conviction, but deeply-rooted in him was the belief that men of dark skin were inferior to men of white skin. He had no doubts about this in his own mind, just as he had none about the wrongness of Roman Catholicism.
Then the new President had acted - as well as preached - to give full rights to Negroes. O’Hara, already poised on the “delicate balance between religious fervour and religious mania, began to pray and plan for the death of the President.
He knew what would happen to him if he succeeded, and he did not care. He believed that he had been privileged by the Almighty to strike the fateful blow. As the moment drew nearer, his prayers grew more fervent and his handling of the camera-gun more skilful.
“Now we’ve got to get a move on with this job,” said Reggie Simpson, managing director and chief shareholder in Public Utilities and Car Parks. It was the same afternoon and getting late. “The stand has got to meet the usual London County Council specifications, and if you think you can get away with anything on that, you’re making the mistake of your life, chums.” He was talking with two foremen who would be in charge of the erection of the stand. “I’ve worked out the quantity of tubular scaffolding we need, the unions, the boards; the stairs, and the coconut matting. We want twenty men on the job by Monday morning, that’s the earliest we can start. Gives us just time to get the job done.”
“It’ll be a cakewalk,” one foreman said. “When I see it sold out, I’ll tell you whether it will be a cakewalk,” said Simpson. He was small, perky, and thin-faced, and his Cockney voice could hardly be more nasal. “If you get it done by Saturday night without overtime for the men, there’ll be a fifty quid bonus for each of you. It’s blue ruin if the men have to work on Sunday.”
“It’ll be finished Saturday week,” the “cakewalk” foreman assured him.
“Rosie, ducks,” said Alec Sonnley when he went in to his evening meal that day, “I’ve got a present for you.”
“What is it, Sonny?” asked Rosie, mildly. “It won’t take too long just now, will it? I’ve got a pheasant in the
oven, and if I don’t go and look at it, it’ll be overdone, and I know you don’t like that.”
“And game chips and peas?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Okay, then,” said Alec Sonnley. “There’s a stand going up at the corner of Old Scotland Yard and Whitehall. I’ve got two of the best seats for you, bang in the front row!”
Rosie’s eyes lit up, and her husband was fully satisfied. At that time he had not the slightest inkling of Klein’s experiments with corrosive acid.
“Of course we’re going to buy the seat,” said Gideon. “If I start getting free seats and using them for my family there’ll be a screech about corruption the first time anyone hears. You worry too much about money.”
“I must admit that I’ve wanted to see a big procession,” said Kate.
Michael Lumati, reading in the evening paper that Wednesday of the stand which would be available, wondered whether he would treat himself to a good seat, or whether he would stand in the crowd. London’s ceremonial occasions had been part of his life since he could remember, and he was looking forward to this particular show for its own sake as well as for the great opportunity it would give him.
Lumati was sitting pretty with fifteen thousand pounds of near-perfect currency notes and his only worry was how to get them distributed.
What he needed, he had to admit, was someone with a lot of shops, or a lot of barrows, and someone with a big turnover during the Visit. The real truth was that he ought to use Sonnley, who had already ordered artwork for special souvenir programs for the occasion.
“Mr. Sonnley, I’ve got an idea for a special Visit souvenir catalogue, and another way of making a bit of quick dough,” Lumati said on the telephone. “Could you spare me half an hour? I don’t think we ought to talk about it on the telephone.”
“Let’s have a drink,” said Sonnley. He prided himself that he never missed a chance. “How about the Woodcock? You know it?”
He knew quite well that Lumati knew it and that Lumati was very eager for- the meeting.
Matthew Smith left his desk in the city, not far from the Tower of London, an hour earlier than usual that day, pleading a headache. There was no specific purpose in his mind. He was on edge, and concentration was very difficult. He thought of that buried bomb as a miser thought of a hoard of gold. He travelled by underground, before rush hour crammed Londoners in like placid flies clinging to every available piece of floor or seating space, and had the rare luxury of a seat. On the windows of the train were boldly printed green notices:
CERTAIN STATIONS WILL BE CLOSED BETWEEN MIDNIGHT ON JUNE 1ST AND SIX O’CLOCK (P.M.) ON JUNE 2ND, THE OCCASION OF THE STATE VISITS. TIME TABLES WILL BE VARIED DURING THAT SAME PERIOD, EXTRA LATE TRAINS WILL BE RUN.
LONDON TRANSPORT SERVICE.
Smith thought: “I’ll have to get out at Charing Cross. It makes no difference.”
He kept picturing the Queen’s carriage, kept wondering who would come next, kept seeing the picture of the President of France sitting proud and erect in his gilded coach. He clenched his right hand as if the bomb were in it and, in his mind, went through the motions of tossing it through the air. He could even picture the scene - the panic, the cries, the rush of people. For some reason he did not see the blood or the smashed faces, and he did not hear the screams of the innocent people there to watch the colourful pageantry.
He had never given a thought to escaping, either, and it did not occur to him now. He simply had to throw the bomb.
There was no sign of Grace at home and he was glad; Grace was intolerable these days, always watching him, always asking if he felt all right. It was almost as if she suspected what was in his mind.
Nonsense!
He put on the kettle for some tea and, while waiting for it to boil was drawn as if by irresistible force towards the workshop in the garden. He smoothed down his hair as he went towards it, more relaxed than he had been for hours.
Then he reached the window and glanced in. His wife was on one knee, and bricks were out of the floor at the spot where his bomb had been buried. Grace Smith had never been so worried in her life. She was sure that something serious was the matter with Matthew; she had known it for a long time. She feared for his mind. Ever since the death of their son, there had been moments, sometimes whole hours, when his eyes had glazed over and an expression of incalculable pain had tightened his features, drawing them up in a kind of contorted mass of nerves - as if he hated.
His eyes had become feverish for days on end, his manner jumpy, he had shouted at her, had sunk into long periods of silence, and spent a lot of time in his workshop. When this strange manifestation had reappeared, she had tried to remember the exact circumstances of the first occasion, and one thing had been easy to recall. It had been on a great day in London when some big pot from the Continent had visited the Queen. Grace Smith never failed to go and watch the great processions; the displays of England’s pageantry fascinated her. For royal weddings, she would wait all night to get a good view of the happy couple - a view lasting twenty or thirty seconds or so. On the morning when Matthew had turned on her so furiously, Grace Smith had feared the truth with a great and terrible fear.
She had to help Matthew, but she could not allow a terrible thing to happen.
She ought to tell the police . . .
But she might be wrong, she reminded herself; she was only guessing.
It would be a terrible thing if Matthew . . .
She had to find out for sure, and it dawned on her that if she did, if she confronted Matthew with her knowledge, it would be enough to deter him. That was the all-important thing. He would need a weapon, a gun or - or even a bomb. The obvious place to hide it was in the workshop.
And there was something.
It looked like a small vacuum flask, but was lying in a bed of cotton wool, and the bricks she had discovered loose had cotton wool stuck on them, too. Only a high explosive would be so well protected. She knelt by the side of the little hole, staring down, horrified, terrified.
Then she heard a sound, glanced around in alarm, and saw Matthew.
He was coming in. His eyes were staring. His hands were clenched and held some distance in front of him. Sight of him like this should have terrified her, but in fact it did not. She rose from her knees and spoke quite calmly.
“Is this a bomb, Matthew?’
He didn’t answer.
“Are you planning some terrible crime?” She was still calm.
Matthew stopped two yards away from her, staring; lips parted now, breath hissing through them. “Matthew, answer me.” When he did not answer, she went on as if she were talking to their lost son, in those days when he had been changing from boy to adolescent; when she, not Matthew, had realized there was a bad streak in him. She had always believed that he had killed that French girl, although she had never breathed a word of that to Matthew. “Matthew,” she declared, “you’re not well. You’re not well, I tell you. We’ve got to go away together, at once. We . . .”
Then, only then, did she realize her awful danger. A shimmering brightness such as she had never seen made his eyes hideous. His lips twisted, his hands seemed to writhe in front of her.
“Matthew!” she gasped. “Matt . . .”
He sprang at her and carried her back against the bench, then he got his hands about her throat and squeezed and squeezed.
It was a long, back-breaking task to pull up more bricks, dig a deep hole, put his wife’s body in it, then replace the bricks and fill all the cavities between them with dirt. It took almost as long to load a wheelbarrow, after dark, and carry the displaced soil out into the garden.
But the bomb was safe.
15: Vice-Man
Parsons was a funny chap, thought Gideon. He gave the impression of being a bit flabby in body and mind, a bit too facile with words, everything to all men; but he absorbed work like a sponge, did it quickly and efficiently, and came up smiling, asking for more. He also absorbed knowledge abo
ut London’s vice spots, and it had been said that he knew every prostitute by name - much as an earnest curate might when he saw each as a soul to win. There was nothing even slightly sanctimonious about him when he came into Gideon’s office at nine o’clock next morning, even though he wore a pre-sermon kind of smile.
“Morning, skipper.”
“What’s making you so happy?”
“Just being my natural self,” replied Parsons. “Like the Deputy Commander, U.B.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s bending over backwards to be Mr. Efficiency, but he’s got some bee in his bonnet. None of my business, but - may I go on?”
“Yes.”
“He’s not sure whether to hate himself or Commander Gideon,” said Parsons. “He’s got Uniform at his finger tips, though. Joe Bell was saying that he’s asking for trouble. I know, so am I. Will you leave Cox to me for a bit?”
There weren’t two other men at the Yard who would go this far with Gideon. Gideon stared at the half smiling face for a long time before he said “Yes.”
“Thanks, skipper,” said Parsons. “Muchas gracias. I’ve been over the Soho district with him, and I think everything’s laid on. In the big clubs we’ll have two men and a woman, and Uniform will have regular quarter-hour street patrols, in pairs. We won’t stop the vice that way, but we can stop it from becoming too blatant. I drifted in on the strip-club kings and queens, too.”
Gideon was smiling.
“Warned them that we wanted no extravaganzas, no special private exhibitions of sexual peculiarities, a firm bar against all under-ages - they’re to keep ‘em out - and no doorway soliciting. If they’ll play, I said we’ll play. Okay?’
