They Never Looked Inside

by Michael Gilbert

  Surprised and relieved to find the redoubt empty and the road unbreached, McCann had driven on into Marevilly. The Canadian Brigadier was speechless with rage and mortification. He had been looking forward all day to firing the turret gun. It was just like the Goddammed — — Heinies, he opined, to walk out on them like that.

  Marevilly was en fête; and one name was on all lips. Ulysse. He was of that select and formidable band of men, the real heads of the Resistance, responsible directly to General Koenig himself. Hector, Achille, Ulysse, Diomede, Nestor.

  What Ulysse had done at Marevilly was, of course, part of history. A Panzer Grenadier group, about two hundred strong, as yet almost unused in the fight, had been given the job of holding the Issy Approaches. Their commander was a careful soldier with a penchant for spandaus sited in pairs and firing diagonally. Unfortunately for himself he had been carried away by the great strength and convenience of the redoubt. At intervals round its hundred-yard perimeter he had placed most of his men and all of his automatic and anti-tank weapons.

  He had completed his dispositions the night before McCann arrived, and since Marevilly was notoriously a difficult township he had taken the added precaution of rounding up fifty hostages, including the wife and children of the Chef de Commune. He had then taken up his headquarters in the town hall and awaited the coming of the British with some confidence. At first light Ulysse, from his command post in a cellar in the main street, had depressed two electric detonators. These detonators were connected with ten separate charges of cordite, thoughtfully buried by him the month before in the redoubt. The resultant explosion had left very little of the German detachment or its automatic weapons.

  Ulysse had then gathered his picked fighters round him and gone down the main street in the growing light of day with a gun in either hand, openly, like the true gangster he was. He had shot the German Commander with his own hand and the nerve of the remaining Germans had broken. There had been no coherent resistance. Individual soldiers went for shelter and were hunted out like rabbits from a threshed field.

  McCann had seen him that morning, a tall man, but so thick that he looked almost short, with a remarkable shock of hair and a florid, Gascon face. When the British arrived he was almost the only person respectably dressed and not visibly carrying arms.

  A dangerous, passionless, disciplined man.

  This was the face which had looked up for a second in the glare of the spot lamp.

  Another car, turning the corner from the Square, had thrown a more subdued light into the courtyard recess. It was, of course, by this time, empty.

  Next afternoon, about three o’clock, Curly White appeared. McCann recognised his pin-toed walk before he came near enough for him to verify the unlovely face. Curly, as the Major had once told him in a fit of confidence when they were sharing a slit-trench together, not only acted like a bar-room gangster, he even looked like one. He walked down the pavement with the exaggerated dancing walk of a dog looking for a fight. He even had his right hand traditionally in his coat pocket. He turned into the doorway of No. 63.

  McCann moved to the telephone.

  V

  An hour later, when Curly White again stepped out into Flaxman Street, he found it empty. A woman was in sight across the far side of the Square, deep in conversation with the postman.

  Curly turned westwards. The street remained quiet and empty in the evening sun. At the Park Lane corner he almost bumped into a middle-aged lady.

  Park Lane seemed to contain nothing more than its normal evening crowd. After a moment’s hesitation Curly crossed the road and boarded a bus which was on the point of moving The Major had guessed that his quarry would be especially alert at the moment of leaving the house, and had waited at the wheel of his car, safely out of sight in Flaxman Mews.

  Presently Miss Carter, from across the Square, gave him the signal he was waiting for, which indicated that his quarry was turning west.

  He pressed the self-starter. A minute or two later a second signal gave him the all-clear and he was racing up Flaxman Street. Glasgow stopped him short of the corner.

  “He’s not far ahead of you,” she said. “Don’t turn the corner yet. He’s getting on to a bus. All right now, come on – and good luck.”

  Actually McCann found that a bus was not a difficult thing to follow from a private car. He kept well behind it as it moved, only drawing near enough to see who got out at the stops.

  In this manner they proceeded up Park Lane, half-circled the Marble Arch, and turned left into the Bayswater Road. As they passed the bottleneck of Notting Hill Gate the traffic got thicker, and from the lee of a brewer’s dray the Major was able to watch Curly dismount from the bus and turn left into Holland Park Walk, that long and aristocratic thoroughfare which divides the blue-blooded sheep of Holland Park from the lower income group goats of Kensington Gardens.

  Some rapid thought was necessary.

  The Major decided to stake high on his knowledge of that quarter of London. He turned his car skilfully in front of a blaspheming bus driver, went back a hundred yards and took the sharp right hand corner into Campden Hill. A minute’s run and Kensington High Street was ahead. He ran his car into the cul-de-sac behind the town hall, stopped, and got out, locking the car door quickly behind him.

  A brisk walk of fifty yards brought him to the corner of Phillimore Gardens and he stepped into the door of a conveniently placed tobacconist’s shop.

  His manoeuvre, he reckoned, had put him a minute or two ahead of Curly. Provided, of course, that Curly came straight on.

  Minutes passed and his heart sank.

  The lady who owned the shop was fortunately engaged in gossip with a regular customer and took absolutely no notice of him. He abandoned any pretence of being interested in her scanty stock of empty sales cartons, and peered through the misted window.

  At that moment Curly appeared.

  Two things were obvious at a glance. The first was that his man was getting very near his destination, and the second thing, as a corollary to the first, was that he had been absolutely right in not trying to follow him directly down Holland Park Walk.

  Curly would have spotted him at once. Indeed, he had stopped now, on the pretence of lighting a cigarette, and was looking sharply back over his shoulder.

  He was so near that McCann could see the boot-button eyes and the greasy black hair grown long in the few months’ release from the army.

  At last Curly seemed satisfied.

  He straightened up and crossed the Kensington High Street which lay ahead of him.

  McCann gave him the length of a cricket pitch and followed circumspectly.

  The lady in the tobacco shop abandoned her conversation to glare after him. By his abrupt exit he had deprived her of the legitimate pleasure of telling him that she was “out” of all known brands of cigarettes.

  VI

  McCann was looking into a shop window. The contents appeared to interest him intensely, judging from the length of time he had stood there, staring at them. He was waiting for Curly to come out of a newsagent’s twenty yards up on the other side.

  He was in the middle of the maze of solid middle-class streets which lie in the crook of the Cromwell Road and Earls Court. Behind him the backs of the monster Kensington stores shut off the skyline. To the left showed the bulked mass of the Institutes.

  When a full five minutes had run by, McCann began to feel the first faint stirrings of uneasiness. It struck him that some shops had back entrances.

  The newsagent’s into which Curly had vanished stood at the end of a block of five four-storied buildings. In each case the ground floor was let as a shop; he could see signs of a greengrocer’s and a chemist’s, and the third looked like some sort of antique shop. The top stories, he fancied, were residential, though one looked as if it might be an office of some sort.

  After a moment’s reflection McCann entered the chemist’s shop. This was the second one along from the newsagent’s and theref
ore the centre of the block.

  At first inspection one comforting fact emerged. The shop had no visible back exit, and since all five buildings seemed to be of a standard pattern, there must be strong chance that Curly was still in the newsagent’s. Why was he being so long?

  “A packet of cough lozenges, please,” he said to the man.

  Had he gone upstairs? Was his destination, perhaps, the rooms over the shop and not the shop itself?

  “Anything else I can get you, sir?”

  “Half a dozen razor blades, and a small bottle of aspirin, please.”

  He wished he knew more about the interior arrangement of such buildings. In this shop, for instance, there was no visible means of access to the upper storey at all. Presumably the stairs ran from the back room behind the counter; or they might connect directly with the private-looking front door on the right of the shop door.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “Yes,” said McCann, suddenly making up his mind. “I want a bed-sitting-room.”

  “Who doesn’t?” said the chemist, unmoved.

  “I mean,” the Major ploughed on, “do you suppose that any of the upper stories here might be to let? Coming past that newsagent’s on the corner of this block I happened to notice that there were no curtains in the top floor windows. Perhaps you might know of something to let there.”

  The silence that greeted this remark lasted so long that McCann looked up in sudden anticipation. The chemist was smiling at him.

  “I fancy, sir,” he said, “that we have something upstairs that might interest you. Step this way.”

  Out of the corner of his eye the Major saw the figures of two men coming through the shop door.

  5

  An Accomplished Young Man

  At about the same time as the events recorded at the close of the last chapter, Inspector Hazlerigg was sitting in his office.

  Indeed, he seemed scarcely to have moved, or even changed his position, since his interview with Major McCann.

  Standing beside the desk, examining a large-scale map of the West End, was Detective Inspector Pickup, a quiet, sandy-haired, inconspicuous North Countryman. He was, by a head and shoulders, the best detective inspector in the Yard and soon to win recognition and a Chief Inspectorship, when he broke the Harrogate child murder case and apprehended Captain Throat (whose unpleasant habit, as the public will remember, was to strangle girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen).

  “Magnus” Marr, the oldest of the Murder Squad, used to say: “When I get Pickup given to me I know it’s going to be a difficult job.”

  “Go over that last bit again,” said Hazlerigg.

  “It amounts to no more than this, sir,” said Pickup. “Out of a dozen lines we’ve been covering in the last months, five have gone to ground in the Berkeley Square, Shepherd’s Market area. More exactly, in an area bounded by Piccadilly on the south, Park Lane on the west, Bond Street on the east, and Bruton Street-Mount Street on the north.”

  He ran a stubby forefinger round the map.

  “It’s a big area.”

  Pickup accepted the implied rebuke calmly.

  “We ought to have done better,” he agreed. “Even as it is, we’ve got nothing very definite. There was the pedlar we were following – you remember – who gave us the slip in the Curzon Cinema. The stolen car we found in Charles Street. That business with the drunk Italian girl on Hay Hill – I thought that might be promising at the time, but it came to nothing.”

  Hazlerigg nodded. Pickup rarely spoke at random; he knew something more was coming.

  “That man you saw the other day, sir: Major McCann. Sergeant Crabbe followed him for a bit, but you ordered him off. Crabbe mentioned the ‘Dresden Shepherdess’ in his report – that’s a Shepherd’s Market pub. But that’s not all—”

  “Yes?” said Hazlerigg.

  “I didn’t feel too happy about him,” said Pickup apologetically, “so I followed him myself. The next day. Several days after, in fact. It wasn’t difficult. He always went to the same place. It was a flat in a newish block, on the corner of Flaxman Street and Berkeley Square. Nine o’clock sharp he’d arrive, every morning. And left at six o’clock in the evening – or later. Of course, I couldn’t watch the house the whole time, but I didn’t see anyone go in or out of the block – no one to signify, that is. Monsieur Bren will bear me out—”

  Monsieur Le Commissaire Bren (known to the French Resistance and later to the whole of fighting France as “Ulysse”) nodded silent agreement from the leather chair by the window.

  “Then this afternoon,” went on Pickup, “he came out much earlier than usual. I wasn’t there, but Sergeant Crabbe was watching. The Major got into his car – it had evidently been parked handy – and after waiting for about five minutes, he started away. Crabbe says he didn’t seem to be following anyone. Flaxman Street and the Square were both empty when he started.”

  “All right,” said Hazlerigg, “I can guess the rest. Sergeant Crabbe lost him.”

  “I’m afraid he wasn’t expecting the car, sir. Major McCann had always arrived and left before on foot.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” said Hazlerigg. “You’ve done very well. I dropped that trail and you picked it up. We’ll just remember to have a car there next time.”

  “If there is a next time,” said Pickup. “I’ve got rather a nasty feeling about this, sir.”

  “Major McCann I know,” said M. Le Commissaire unexpectedly. “He is a man of some resource and valour. Discretion, too. All may yet be well. As your General Wellington said, ‘Let us not cross our bridges before we arrive at them.’ In truth, a difficult feat to perform, even with the maximum of agility.”

  II

  About this time McCann recovered consciousness. He came to the surface slowly from under the dark waves of pain and oblivion. The clouds thinned, turning first to grey, and then to milky white, and then shredding away altogether. The sun came out about five feet above his head, swinging in great solemn circles, as at the First Creation; then slowing down, and finally stopping and turning into a dusty yellow electric light bulb. McCann moved his head, and immediately wished he had not.

  With infinite care he closed his eyes, laying each lid as gently as a sleeping babe into its downy cot. After a minute he felt better and opened them again. He felt cold, despite the obvious stuffiness of the room, and he was suffering from recurrent attacks of nausea; but his head was clear.

  It was not the first time in his life that he had been knocked out, and he recognised from association most of the distressing symptoms of concussion.

  In a few minutes he either was going to be sick – or he wasn’t.

  A few minutes passed.

  He wasn’t.

  McCann shivered, but in a healthy sort of way, and sat up.

  The first thing he noticed was that his shoes and his coat and waistcoat had gone. Also his braces. He was lying on a camp bed, in the corner of a bare and rather uninteresting little room. An attic, in fact.

  Turning his head to the left he could see the line of the roof and dormer. Turning his head still further he realised, with a certain shock, that he wasn’t alone.

  A white-faced youth, of about nineteen or twenty, was sitting on a wooden chair, its back tilted against the wall, dividing his attention between McCann, a damp cigarette, and a magazine on physical culture.

  McCann had seen the ferret face before, but he was unable for a moment to place it.

  Then recollection came back.

  He remembered his first night of leave, the drinks he had had with Glasgow and Sergeant Dalgetty, the walk home through the quiet streets and squares of Mayfair. This was the youth who had come running past him (and whom, as he recalled now with considerable pleasure, he had tripped up).

  The first step, he felt, towards restoring a moral equality to the situation, was to sit up. He swung his legs cautiously towards the side of the bed.

  The youth spoke.

  “Stay pu
t,” he said.

  The tone which he employed was the tone of a parent armed with both the authority to command and the muscular power to enforce his commands.

  Having said his say, he continued to thumb the pages of his magazine and to draw the last lungfuls of smoke from his dispirited and expiring cigarette.

  For some pregnant seconds silence reigned in the attic. The house below was very quiet too. Then McCann deliberately swung his legs over and sat up on the side of his bed.

  The youth moved with a speed which confirmed McCann’s first idea that he had seen the inside of the professional ring. At one moment he was sitting tilted back in his chair. The next, almost without visible intermission, he was standing three feet from McCann.

  He was smiling.

  His right hand slid gently, almost caressingly, to his trouser pocket, and came out again, holding a cosh. It was quite the nastiest and most efficient-looking cosh that McCann had ever seen, at least ten inches long, and made of plaited leather over some harder core. From the manner in which it hung, its head was heavily weighted.

  The youth said nothing, but continued to smile.

  McCann sat still.

  The youth moved over to the table, without taking his eyes off the figure on the bed.

  “Watch,” he said.

  He picked up one of the playing cards and tossed it fluttering in the air.

  The movement that followed was so quick that McCann hardly saw it.