What he had not heard—because this man wore heels of rubber—was the taxi driver’s descent from his driving seat. So that, rolling himself with caution off the unkind iron, he was shocked to find himself, as he rose to his feet and began painfully to ease his aching muscles, regarded by a burly person with arms akimbo and menacing stance. . . .
12
The two dark limousines from Scotland Yard sped westward down the Cromwell Road. Anthony sat beside the driver of the first and spoke to Pike over his shoulder.
“Five minutes start,” he said. “Too much.”
Pike said: “Maybe, sir.” And then, uneasily: “And how do we know Mr Garrett’s on the right tack?”
Anthony exploded: “God damn it, man! Isn’t it enough that he’s on a tack at all! We’ve got nothing—except Van Renseler with his head bashed in and a broken collarbone!
“That’s all very well, sir.” Pike was stubborn. “But I’m afraid it’s a wild-goose chase, as you might say. Don’t forget, Mr Garrett had that crack on the head himself. And if he’d been—well, normal—why should he go running off and taking a whip-behind ride on some taxi without telling anyone? If that young constable hadn’t happened to see him——”
Anthony interrupted. “Yes, yes! Quite, and all that! . . . But don’t forget, his hunch was right and we were wrong. What he probably did was to see something that we didn’t—and have no time to do anything except what he has done.” He went on, half to himself: “Hope to God enough people ’ve seen him.”
Almost as he spoke the driver swung the car into the curb and pulled to an abrupt halt with a screeching of brakes. At the curb stood a tall and massive and helmeted policeman.
Pike was out of the car almost before it had stopped moving. He ran round the front of the car and talked to the policeman. He ran back again and got into his seat and snapped at the driver:
“First to the right. Cranbrook Street. Keep your eyes open for constables.” He said to Anthony: “That man saw him. Said he couldn’t believe his eyes. Only hope, sir, we can keep on the trail.”
The police cars—for the second had halted beside the first—moved on, swinging to the right at the next corner. London—even off the Cromwell Road—is not so lawless as it had seemed to the Garrett who had clung to the back of a taxi.
13
“But I tell you,” said Garrett between his teeth, “that it’s a police matter! Scotland Yard——”
The driver interrupted. His hands had come away from his hips and turned themselves into fists. He said:
“P’lice matter, is it? Tell yer what, cock, that’s the first bleedin’ truth that’s passed your bloody mouth.” He came closer.
“Aw, the hell with it!” said the Sheldon Garrett who once had been the best light heavyweight his university had ever produced.
His right foot drew back; his left foot went forward. His right fist, moving not more than nine inches, met the chin of the driver with a crisp and smacking sound.
The man’s knees buckled and he fell forward—a sure sign of complete unconsciousness.
Garrett jumped away from the falling bulk; and then, without so much as a glance at it, stepped onto the pavement. He glanced apprehensively up and down the length of the dismal street. But no one met his gaze and there was no sound of footsteps. He looked next up at the house into which the man with the bag must have gone. There was one light visible—from a small window on the second floor. There was no sound.
On tiptoe he crossed to the spear-shaped railings of rusty iron which bounded the patch of mildewed garden before the house. His eyes strained upwards at the lighted window. He tried to see whether or not it was open and could not. He was obsessed by the fear that his quarry had heard his altercation with the driver.
His heart beat fast, with irregular thumps. His head hurt him, but he did not know it. His mouth was dry—and still within him was an ever-increasing certainty; a certainty like a sword blade. On tiptoe still he went along the railing to the gate whose hinges he had heard creaking. He set his hand upon this to open it; then changed his mind.
He thought: “If I go in and ring the bell and spin some sort of a yarn—well, I won’t be any place. They’ll either get me—or I won’t find out anything. Maybe I ought to scare up a bobbie. But if I leave he may get out while I’m gone—and then where are we?”
He took his hand from the gate and once more looked up and down the road. One way—eastward—it stretched on interminably; but a hundred yards away in the other direction was a turning with a lamppost at its corner.
With long, loping strides he ran silently towards this corner. As he went he counted the houses so that, when he was behind them in the next street, he could tell which one of the ugly brethren was his goal. . . .
14
The two quiet police cars surged in file up the dark, straight inevitability of Derby Street.
The leading car came to a crossroad and stopped. A street named Paignton ran off to the right; to the left there curved away into obscurity something called Biddlecombe Avenue.
Again Pike shot out. He ran back to the second car. He said:
‘Take the left. We’re going right. Ask all constables.”
15
In a drab, unfurnished, maculate room upon the second floor of Number 17 Paignton Street a man and a woman talked. The woman knelt. The man sat upon a carpetless floor with his back against the wall and fumbled over a black bag upon his knees.
The woman, looking into the bag, drew in her breath with a sharp and sensually gratified hiss. She said after a moment:
“So we’ve done it!”
The man nodded.
He closed the bag, snapping its locks. He looked up at the woman over his shoulder. His mouth smiled and he said:
“Yes. And we’ve only just begun.” He got to his feet, the bag in his left hand. “But we’re not taking any chances. We’re going, now!”
The woman looked at him. “Chelsea?” she said.
The man nodded, turning away.
The woman put her hand upon his arm. She said with a backward jerk of her head to indicate a room behind her:
“How do we take it? Open or trunk?”
16
“Easy there!” said Anthony to the driver, and pointed.
The police car lights swung a little to the right—and in the white beam there showed clearly the back of a shining dark blue cab. And something else—the huddled figure of a man who lay upon the road behind the cab.
The light seemed to rouse him. He stirred. His eyes opened. Groaning, he struggled to a sitting posture and put a hand to his head. Like a sleepy, peevish child he turned his head away from the white glare of the lights. He mumbled to himself and set a hand upon the edge of his cab’s bumper and tried to pull himself to his feet. He was aware of the car with the lights stopping, and men getting out of it. He tried to stand without support and his knees buckled.
He would have fallen had not the adequate arm of Superintendent Arnold Pike come about his shoulders. A voice said to him, seeming to come to his ear from far away:
“Take your time and tell us about it.”
His strength coming back to him with every moment, the man began to talk. . . .
17
Roughly, efficiently, the woman pulled down the single garment which she had slipped upon the inert body of the child. Now she began to pull stockings onto the straight small legs. This done, she looked down for the shoes—and saw only one. She frowned and called over her shoulder in her deep, harsh voice:
“Bring in that other shoe, will you?”
She was answered immediately—but not in the way she had expected. The man to whom she had spoken came swiftly through the door. His movements were tight and quick and soundless. There was that about them which made her look suddenly into his face, the colour ebbing away from her own. She would have spoken, but he silenced her with a quick movement of the hand. His strange eyes, normally colourless, seemed now to have a reddish glow
behind them. He said: “Quick. Back way. There’s a car in front. Looks like busies.”
The woman’s hand flew to her mouth. She said hoarsely: “But how . . . ?”
The man paid no attention. With an ease which told of a strength not promised by his build, he picked up the flaccid, stertorously breathing body of the child and hung it like a sack across his shoulder.
18
The street which runs parallel with Paignton Street, to the south, is called Beckford Place. It is like Paignton Street but, incredibly, yet more dismal.
The house which backed onto Number 17 Paignton Street was, by divine grace, untenanted. In its weed-choked patch of back garden Garrett stood beneath a seven-foot wall of brick which now was all that separated him from his goal.
At some time or another, for some reason quite possibly disreputable, someone had made a door in this wall. It was, as he stood, some few feet to the right of him. He had tried its handle but with no success. Now, crouching, he suddenly sprang upwards—and his crooked fingers caught the top of the wall. With an ease which would have been greater had he not for the past days been a sick man, he levered himself up to sit astride the rough brickwork.
It was very dark. Above, the black vault of the sky showed no moon; and such stars as were visible at all could only be seen through the high, dark grey pall which London so often throws around herself. In the gloom the twisted shapes of drab persistent trees seemed to Garrett’s straining eyes to thrust themselves upward like ugly hands. In the windows of houses to his right and left showed occasional dingy lights—but the house which he watched was unrelieved black.
He swung his right leg over the top of the wall so that now both his feet hung over the terrain of 17 Paignton Street. He made ready to slip down; then suddenly checked.
He had heard a door—or perhaps it was a window—being softly opened. And it had seemed to him that the sound had come from the blank black face of the house he watched. But he could not be sure. He thought, too, that he had heard other sounds; these coming from the far side of the house; from Paignton Street itself.
He lay now along the top of the wall flat upon his belly. He made himself small. And he held his breath as he listened.
Now he heard the door again; definitely it was a door. It was, he saw with that inner eye which translates sound into pictures, being opened more widely than before. Something came through it. There was a little scraping of footsteps and a sort of soft, shuffling bump as if something heavy had struck against the doorjamb.
And then, suddenly waking thunderous and unexpected echoes, came the sound of a door knocker vigorously wielded. It thundered against a door in Paignton Street; the door, it seemed, of Number 17.
The sound ceased, and Garrett heard other and nearer and softer sounds—footsteps which ran softly over the tangled, dusty growth of neglected garden; ran towards the wall upon which he lay.
He heard, too, other footsteps which followed. They were lighter yet less feline. They were short striding and quite definitely a woman’s. He strained his eyes down into the darkness and saw indistinguishable shapes approaching, one some fifteen feet in advance of the second.
And then the knocker began again. This time its thunder was Olympian. Garrett, tense and still like a crouching animal, found time for brief and amazed wonder. Could it be that Gethryn . . . ? It could not; not possibly; this noise was mere coincidence; he was alone—and must end this thing alone.
Below him the first running figure had arrived at the wall and was stooping beside the door. Now, even through the darkness, Garrett could see that this figure was a man’s; could see also that over its left shoulder another, far smaller figure was limply draped. . . .
The continued thunder of the knocker drowned the footsteps of the second figure—but it came into Garrett’s ken behind the first; the tall, slim figure of a woman.
The man was fumbling at the lock of the door with something he had taken from his pocket.
In one movement Garrett got to his knees and leapt downwards. He landed, as he had hoped, upon the left shoulder of the man.
They fell and rolled. And the small, inert figure which had been over the man’s other shoulder fell away from their struggling bodies and lay inert as sod. . . .
The sound of the knocker, which momentarily had ceased, now was clamorously renewed—but through it came the sharp, immediately stifled sound of a woman’s scream.
In the darkness, upon foul and dead and slimy-feeling soil, Garrett and his adversary fought in a silence as rapt as their thoughts.
There was a strength entirely unexpected, Garrett found, in his enemy. But he himself was the heavier, and though his breath came in hard rasping gasps and there was searing pain in his head, he found himself at last astride of the other’s body and caught the throat with his left hand while he drove short, heavy punches at the dimly seen head.
A savage flush of victory warmed him—and a pair of arms locked themselves about his neck from behind. They were soft arms, but there was a steely core to their softness. Garrett, choking, was forced to take his hands from the man beneath him. As he flung them up and backward in an attempt to snatch at this new assailant there was a violent and titanic heave beneath him and an upthrust knee came with sickening force into the pit of his stomach. He was flung backwards and sideways. He rolled in agony, fighting for air. . . . Two figures stood over him, and the small pointed toe of a woman’s shoe cracked against his cheek.
The man was fumbling at his pockets. He said hoarsely:
“Take the kid and get out. Quick! I’ll be with you!”
Like a guardsman the woman obeyed. In a stride she was beside the small, motionless bundle and had gathered it into her arms.
Garrett conquered the momentary paralysis of his lungs and drew in a whistling gasp of air and moved as if to struggle to his feet.
The child in her arms, the woman reached the door and, after bending over its lock, swung it open.
Something shone with a dull gleam in the hand of the man who stood over Garrett. He raised his arm.
With her burden the woman ran through the door in the wall.
Garrett, sensing a descending and fatal blow, put up a weak arm—and from the other side of the wall came a high-pitched scream, long drawn out. In the dank darkness it was animal, filled with panic and rage and frustration.
The upraised weapon of Garrett’s enemy was checked in its movement as the man turned involuntarily to look in the direction of the sound. Garrett, now standing, flung himself with his last ounce of strength at his adversary’s knees—and once more the two rolled upon the unkempt earth. . . .
And now came more sounds from the other side of the wall . . . men’s voices . . . running footsteps. . . . And then the white, knifelike beams of electric torches as men came running through the door and threw themselves upon the struggling pair and tore away from Garrett a man who snarled at them and raved and fought—and was at last subdued.
Garrett felt a strong arm about his shoulders and found himself looking into the face of Anthony Gethryn. He giggled weakly.
“That’s the boy!” he said and giggled again. “That you knocking?”
“Take it easy,” Anthony said. “Take it easy. . . . Yes, knock at the front and you push ’em out at the back. . . . It’s a rule of nature. . . . Here! Where ’re you going?”
For Garrett, with a sudden jerky twist, had pulled himself away from the encircling arm and now, on legs which were a little unsteady, was moving at a shambling run towards a group who knelt beside something upon the ground.
He, too, threw himself upon his knees and found himself shoulder to shoulder with Pike. He tried to say something, but only a foolish little rattling noise came from his throat.
Pike said: “All right, sir. All right. Just doped, that’s all.”
Garrett shouldered him aside and, still on his knees, shuffled to the little body and raised its head and shoulders in his arms. He looked down at the small white face of Pa
tricia Van Renseler.
Its eyes opened, very slowly. In them, even through the darkness, Garrett could see the sudden fire of panic, and against him the body stirred with a quick constriction of every muscle. He held it tightly, and words came from him.
The fear went out of the eyes and the tenseness from the limbs. The eyelids began to droop again and the head fell against his shoulder.
“Oh,” said Patricia Van Renseler. “You’re nice!”
EPILOGUE
PAIGNTON STREET by daylight is no less dismal than at night. Indeed, it is more so, as was apparent to Anthony as he stood in a bare room upon the ground floor of Number 17 and looked out at a street bathed in remorseless sunshine He saw dusty pavements; squalid gardens whose untamed, soot- stained growths seemed more unnatural than any brick; blistered paint and peeling stucco and windows of grimy glass. . . .
He shuddered and turned to Pike, who sat at a table set in the middle of the room and pored over tidy little piles of such ill-assorted matters as ancient envelopes, tins of foodstuffs, cheap and dirty and unmarked handkerchiefs, an incongruous—and empty—magnum of Perrier Jouet ’29, a heap of newspapers.
Pike looked at him. “Not much here, sir.” His tone was dejected, and a corner of his mouth pulled down.
Anthony stood over the table, looking down at the heterogeneous mixture. He said after a moment:
“What did you expect? Pretty good worker, Evans. Not the sort to leave his card.”
Heavy footsteps sounded overhead, and others upon the stairs. A large man in clothes of the plainest came into the room and set down upon the table a blanket and some shreds of sacking. Pike looked at them; then at their bearer.
Warrant for X Page 29
