Fear to Tread (23 page)

“Superintendent Huth said something about it.”

“It’s not a non-stop job, you understand. I get an outing from time to time. But by and large you can take it I hold a watching brief on the black market. A lot of these offences aren’t really police matters at all, Mr. Wetherall. They’re jobs for the Food Ministry and their men look after them. ‘Snoopers’ the papers like to call them, but you don’t want to pay much attention to that. They’re good men, most of them, doing a long day’s work and collecting quite a few hard knocks into the bargain. But very often it comes to crime.” Hazlerigg tilted his chair confidentially forward. “You know, there’s something about black market that always brings crime in sooner or later. Maybe it’s a couple of smart barrow boys – one thinks the other is trespassing on his pitch and blood gets spilt. Nothing much in that. Or else it’s something worse, like blackmail.”

“Blackmail?” said Mr. Wetherall sharply.

“Why certainly. There’s a lot of scope for that. A restaurant proprietor, you see, gets short of a line and some smart Alec fixes it for him on the side. All right. Next time the restaurant owner is offered the same commodity and he doesn’t happen to want it. Perhaps there’s no demand for it – or he can get plenty of it honestly. Then the supplier says, “You buy it or else—”

“Or else what?”

“It depends if the buyer has got money or not. If he’s well off he’ll be forced to buy – at a bigger price this time. If he’s a little man, they just run him out of business, as an example to the others.”

“They run him out of business all right,” agreed Mr. Wetherall. He was thinking back to that evening at Luigi’s when it had all started. Less than three weeks ago, actually. It seemed a good deal longer.

“Violence, blackmail,” went on Hazlerigg. “But those are just side-crimes. The root crime is plain stealing. That’s what it always boils down to. An increase in all forms of stealing. It works both ways. First, a man finds a profitable line of scarce goods. I say ‘finds’. Maybe the first time he did get his hands on them more or less honestly. He sells them on the black market and makes a thundering profit. Naturally he wants to do it again. Only this time he just can’t get hold of the stuff. Sooner or later he’ll be buying in the stolen goods market. Stealing for himself, or buying off a receiver, it comes to the same thing in the end. Or just look at it from the other side. You’re not a trader at all. You’re a railwayman or a post office worker or a lorry driver. You’re not overpaid, and goods – valuable goods, some of them – pass through your hands every day. You could steal them – easily – just like that – if you wanted to. What stops you?”

He seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Mr. Wetherall gave his mind to it.

“Discounting,” he said, “the surprising decency and honesty of the ordinary man, I should think the chief preventive is the fear of being found out.”

“All right. But say that you’re pretty certain you won’t be found out. Your experience has shown you that the ordinary checks aren’t going to catch you – or perhaps you know a way round them.”

“Well—in that case I take it the next consideration is, what chance have I got of making a quick, safe profit.”

“Right. That’s where the organisation comes in.”

“And that, I take it,” said Mr. Wetherall slowly, “is where you come in.”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg. “That’s my job.”

He got up, unlocked a filing cabinet, and took out a set of cardboard folders.

“That’s where we come in,” repeated Hazlerigg. “We can’t control the main situation. We’re not a Ministry of Economics. As long as there are shortages there’s going to be a black market. All we can do is to see that the other end of it isn’t made too easy. If individuals cheat a little, and get a little on the side for themselves, we have to leave it to the food officials. But if they sell for profit, that brings it straight to us. And, above all, if they get organised at the selling end.”

“And have they got organised?”

Hazlerigg opened the first folder. “They’re organised all right,” he said. “In confidence, they’re a damned sight too well organised. I had three of the biggest caterers in the country in here yesterday. Bellengers, Hyams and the P.S.D. You’ve probably never heard of them. They’re wholesalers and they supply most of the restaurants in the Metropolitan area. They’re absolutely above-board themselves, of course. But they say they can’t compete. They’re losing customers every day. All right. They’re in it for money. We won’t waste any tears over them. But that’s only one end—”

He opened a second folder. “It’s the other end that’s terrifying. First of all, if I told you how high the railway losses by theft had jumped last year – which I’m not allowed to – I doubt if you’d believe the figure. It’s astronomical. But that’s not the worst of it. I just want to show you a cutting. There’s nothing confidential about it. It appeared the other day in a well-known newspaper and I’ve no doubt it’s absolutely accurate.”

“Strike Threat”
the cutting was headed.
“Railmen at Bradstreet Goods Depot threatened to strike at midnight last night in protest against the employment of two men who, they say, gave information to the police and helped them to check pilfering. The strike threat was called off after a meeting lasting more than two hours pending a full station meeting of all the men this morning when further decisions might be reached. Bradstreet Depot is one of London’s chief points for distributing meat and fish.”

“Do you like it?” said Hazlerigg. “Does it amuse you? Nearly a thousand men to go on strike because two of them were honest and had the guts to demonstrate it. That particular strike didn’t come off. As a nation I don’t think we’re quite corrupted yet. But give it a year or two and if this sort of thing goes on we might just as well put the boards up – Final Performance. The Old Firm Going into Liquidation.”

He shut the folder, straightened up, and said with a smile that went straight to Mr. Wetherall’s heart, “That’s why we are not ashamed to ask for any help we can get.”

“Yes, of course,” said Mr. Wetherall simply.

He had told the story so many times that he was becoming good at it. Having a sympathetic listener made a difference.

Hazlerigg did not interrupt him at all, but when Sergeant Donovan’s name cropped up he got out an entirely new and rather bulky folder. He may also have pressed a buzzer, because as Mr. Wetherall finished speaking a sergeant put his head round the door and Hazlerigg said: “Would you get hold of Superintendent Huth please. He’s somewhere about.”

The sergeant withdrew.

“I can’t say how grateful I am,” he went on,” that you should have come forward to tell us this. What you say fills in some big gaps. That item about Crossways in particular. Now if you’ll bear with me for a couple of minutes, I propose to put you further into the picture. It’s not entirely unselfish. As I said I want your help, and if you’re going to help you’ll have to hear things which mustn’t go outside these walls. We’ll start at the bottom. There’s a lot of pilfering going on. It’s uncoordinated at that level. It always has been and, so far as I can see, it always will be. There’s no great master brain organising gangs of looters. It’s haphazard. People like Crowdy think of a bright idea about diverting railway goods. Things are stolen in transit from lorries. Smart types hang around American Air Force stations in Norfolk and get mess waiters to sell them duty-free canteen stock. Men go round the countryside in motor vans lifting chickens and turkeys and slaughtering cattle. The other day they even lifted a dozen ducks from the pond in Hyde Park. There’s another crowd that specialises in forging used coupons, which go to dishonest retailers who sell them rationed food in bulk and use the false coupons to square their accounts with the food office. All well-known, well-tried methods, and if they receive no particular encouragement we can keep them in bounds. In fact, at the beginning of last year I almost thought we were in for a spell of peace and righteousness. The graphs were going down. Now they’re in reverse. And simply because someone has had the wit and the knowledge to organise the distribution end.”

Mr. Wetherall thought about what Todd had told him. It looked as if the fancies of Fleet Street and the facts of Whitehall were marching in step for once.

“That’s the outline,” said Hazlerigg. “They have established receiving centres in different places round London. There are two or three cafes with lorry parks of the ‘Jock’s Pull-In’ type. Those concentrate on food. You know how they work. Then there’s a certain wholesale wine and spirit store in North London that we’ve had our eye on recently. The principle seems to be the same. You go in with what looks like a lot of ‘returned empties,’ money passes across the counter, and you come out carrying two or three wrapped bottles. Nothing wrong with that? Except that the ‘empties’ were really full bottles of scotch or rye and the bottles you came out with were empties or dummies – and you received money instead of paying it. Damned difficult to spot. We only got wind of it when one of our men happened to get curious about the number of vans and cars with Norfolk registration plates that stopped near this particular shop. Then there are the stolen cigarettes.”

“I suppose they run a cigarette shop for those.”

“Too risky,” said Hazlerigg. “Think again. Too many people in and out of a tobacconist’s and no excuse for carrying parcels in and coming out without them. Any ideas? Well, the biggest receiver of stolen cigarettes that we know about is a dry-cleaning establishment in Clerkenwell. So much for the receiving end. Each of these receivers is cleared about once a week. The clearing is done by whichever gang happens to be currently in favour.”

“That’s where Red Whittaker and his friends come into it?”

“Yes. It seems to have been Whittaker for some months now. His lot’ll go on doing it until they blot their copy books by getting too obvious or too greedy – or by getting into trouble with the police on some other count. Speaking for ourselves we’d prefer to keep it at Whittaker for the moment – because then we do know where we are.”

“Which was no doubt why you were so unenthusiastic about my charges against Whittaker the other day.”

“Partly,” said Hazlerigg cautiously. “Partly. There were other considerations as well.”

“All right,” said Mr. Wetherall. “Let it go. Where do they take the stuff next?”

“That’s one of the things we would give a good deal to find out. And it’s not going to be easy, without giving our hand away. These boys are expert drivers who know London backwards. They’ve got fast, nippy little vans, and they don’t mind how much time or trouble they take to make sure they’re not being followed. One time, when they got the idea we were following a van, they abandoned it, with all its contents, in a cul-de-sac near King’s Cross. We didn’t touch it. We just put men into a nearby building to watch it.” Hazlerigg grinned. “After a month.” he said, “we gave them best on that one. However, I expect we shall spot the central dump sooner or later – unless they keep moving it round, which is a possibility. When we get there we shall find the answer to one or two further little problems. Among other things I expect to find some sort of printing press.”

“Coupons?”

“No. Too risky. It’s labels. A lot of the stuff they steal is well-known, proprietary stuff. They find it pays to relabel it. Partly to make it difficult for their customers to check back on them, but chiefly, I believe, because some of the restaurants they sell to are of the ‘near honest’ variety. Not jet black, just a shade of off-white. If you present them with what are patently stolen goods they’ll jib – but offer them a case of tinned ham with an unknown label marked ‘Produce of Panama’ and they’ll kid themselves that it’s all right and accept it.”

“There’s a suggestion of psychology at the back of that,” said Mr. Wetherall.

“I don’t know about psychology. But I’d say that there was someone in the background with a detailed knowledge of how the food industry works.”

“All right. What next?”

“The next step, I have no doubt, is Annie. When the boys have sold off the stuff to the hundred and one restaurants and cafes on their visiting list they pack up the cash into sizable bundles and pass it over the counter in the private bar of the Double Four in Lauderdale Street.”

“And she passes it on to Holloman.”

“I think that’s right.”

Mr. Wetherall felt a quickening of excitement, tempered by the thought that he might have delivered Sammy over to the enemy. “Do you think, then, that Holloman is the man who runs the whole show?”

“Could be,” said Hazlerigg. “Could be. And yet, I don’t know. It’s early to say. There’s one thing we’ve got to prove – and I mean prove in such a way that it’ll stand up in a court of law – and that’s the connection between Whittaker and Holloman.”

“Or Annie and Holloman.”

“Yes. That could work either way. Annie could be just a post office, and Whittaker could take his orders from Holloman. Or Holloman could send the orders to Annie, who passes them on to Whittaker. My only objection to that is that I can’t see a tough boy like Whittaker taking his orders from a woman.”

“You’ve haven’t met Annie,” said Mr. Wetherall. “I’ve met her and I can believe that part easily. But I don’t see how you’ll ever prove it. If Whittaker hands the money to Annie and Annie posts it to Holloman and Holloman gets rid of it somehow to someone else—”

“It’s not easy,” agreed Hazlerigg, “but it’s not as difficult as all that. We’re almost ready to pick this particular bunch of wildflowers. And when a big show like this begins to break up, it always breaks up from the bottom. You find a flaw, slip in a wedge and,” Hazlerigg held up one thick hand, “you wham it with a hammer and the thing falls apart – if you see what I mean.”

“Roughly.”

“You’ve got to find the flaw, of course, and pick the right wedge.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Wetherall cautiously.

“In this case, you’ve suggested the answer yourself. Or rather, if what you tell me is right, Sergeant Donovan seems to have it all worked out for us. A minor character in Whittaker’s lot known as Guardsman is the flaw. The wedge is Sergeant Donovan himself. And we”—Hazlerigg heaved himself up to his feet—”are the hammer. Come in, Huth. How are you keeping? You know Mr. Wetherall.”