Petrella at 'Q' (21 page)

One of the policemen on the telephone said, “They seem to be putting up a fight, sir.”

“Splendid,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “I never mind a fight when the odds are three to one in our favour.” The policeman grinned. There was a general relaxation of tension. The Assistant Commissioner seemed to notice Petrella for the first time. He said, “I’m afraid you caught us at a busy moment. Come along to my office.”

When Samuel reached the front door he took the precaution of looking first through the small viewing glass. A large tweedy lady was standing in front of the door with a sheaf of papers in her hand. She put up her hand and rang the bell again with a touch of impatience. Samuel opened the door and had started to say, “What can I do for you,” when the lady placed one of her sensible shoes in the opening to prevent him closing the door and two men, who had been standing flat against the wall on either side of the door, jumped forward, knocked the door open and surged through.

The Assistant Commissioner said, “That job you were watching was at Warfields, the big building contractors. I expect you know their place out on the M4. It would have been a record haul if they’d got away with it. Warfields have a big Middle East job on and the money was to pay off the wages of all the English sub-contractors.”

Petrella said, “It seemed to go very well, sir.”

“Very well indeed. Two of our men were hurt. Four of theirs. Nobody killed. However, that’s by the way. What I really wanted to tell you was why I blocked your request for an all stations call and port watch for Adams.”

Petrella nearly said, “So it was you who blocked it,” but realised, in time, that he was on very thin ice.

“There was no need for anyone to look for Adams. We have him in very safe custody. He’s working for us. I don’t mean that he’s a policeman in disguise. We bought him, three months ago. We had to pay quite highly to secure his allegiance. But I think it was worth it. For instance when he joined us last night he brought with him, from Lloyds’ safe, the total proceeds of the Costa-Cans snatch. A lot of it is new notes and some of the other notes have bank markings on them. First-class evidence.”

Petrella said, “Yes. I quite see that.”

“I’ve read Superintendent Watterson’s report.”

Now for it, thought Petrella.

“I’m always telling our people that you can’t keep criminal investigation in tidy pigeon holes. This sort of thing is always happening. You approach a matter from one direction. The S.C.S. approach it from another. There’s bound to be overlapping. It’s the price we pay for specialisation. However, I think we can clear up both ends now. We’ve not only got Adams’s evidence available to us, we’ve got a very useful statement from Miss Marsh in Liverpool. That’s one of the advantages the S.C.S. enjoy. They aren’t starved of manpower. They had forty men on the job, at one time and another. All Tillotson girls were under constant supervision. That’s how we knew in advance about the Warfields job, of course.”

Petrella said, “I suppose both the Masons were involved in it.”

“Certainly. They had ten men taking part. We had thirty. Now that the Masons are inside, some of the others will start talking. We may even be able to pin the Nicholls and Lloyd killings on to them. It’ll be a long hard fight once the lawyers get going. But I fancy we shall get there in the end.”

This seemed to be the cue for Petrella to leave; but the Assistant Commissioner had something else to say. He seemed to be picking his words very carefully.

He said, “I should not have bothered to explain all this to you personally, Inspector, if I had not had a very good report about you from Superintendent Watterson at Division and Commander Baylis at District. You understand?”

“I understand perfectly,” said Petrella. “And thank you very much.”

As he was walking back across Westminster Bridge he took out two sheets of foolscap paper and tore each of them into sixty-four pieces. Then he threw them over the parapet. A brisk St. Valentine’s Day breeze caught them and fanned them out and the tiny paper snowflakes floated down and landed on the broad bosom of the Thames.

It was the moment when spring turned into summer. The showers of April and the warm sun of May had brought up a bumper crop of weeds along the roadways and wharves of what had once been a busy dock.

“The union found new jobs for the dockers,” said Petrella. “The lesser characters had to shift for themselves. The gatemen and clerks and tea-boys and runners.” He was talking to Detective Sergeant Milo Roughead. Once Petrella had got used to the attitude of disenchantment with which Eton cloaks its pupils, he found himself discussing many of his problems with him. Lower Dock was a problem.

“So what did they do?” said Milo.

“A lot of them went back to sea. As deck-hands, engine room assistants, stewards, or cooks. It was the family tradition. In their own way, sailors are just as cliquish as miners and dockers.”

“And the ones who didn’t go back to the sea?”

“There was an alternative occupation open to them,” said Petrella sadly. “Crime. Not so much the actual lifting. The disposal of the proceeds. If you hand the stuff over to a fence, what’s the going rate? Twenty-five per cent of the value, if you’re lucky. And always a chance that the fence will shop you, to save his own hide.”

“You sound like a disillusioned burglar,” said Milo. “What’s the alternative?”

“Ship it abroad. You can get good prices in Ostend, Amsterdam and the Hague, for the sort of stuff they were lifting; jewellery, gold, old silver, watches, guns, cameras. And less chance of discovery all round. It only needed organising.”

“Do we know the organiser?”

“I know his name,” said Petrella. “He’s a gentleman called Captain Crabtree. And that’s all anyone does know about him.”

“How do we know that much?”

“About six months ago, someone lifted a collection of gold coins and medals from Carfews. It was shipped abroad, no question about it. The insurance reward was so big that if the stuff had been in this country someone would have ‘found’ it for sure. The night after it happened, three young tearaways got lit up in a pub down by the docks. One of them – his name was Fred Carting – said, ‘No one’s going to see that little lot again. Captain Crabtree’s looking after it.’ One of our snouts was in the bar and heard him.”

“It sounds a bit thin to me,” said Milo.

“You haven’t heard the end of the story. Next day when Fred turned up at work, he had two lovely black eyes and a tooth missing. Now, the point is that Fred is a pretty fair lightweight boxer. To mark him like that would have needed several people. Say, two to hold him and one to hit him.
And Fred never made any complaint to anyone.
He accepted his punishment and he accepted it without a squeak.”

“Just like a public school, really,” said Milo.

Captain Crabtree came under discussion at the conference which was held every Monday at District Headquarters. Chief Superintendent Watterson was in the chair.

“He’s running a regular export agency,” said Petrella. “There are dozens of ways of getting round the Waterguard and the Docks Police. They can’t search every member of the crew every time he goes on board. And if they don’t want to run even that risk, there’s nothing to stop them postponing delivery until the ship’s been cleared and is lying off, waiting for the tide. Run a small boat out to her. If all the crew are in the game, the officers won’t know a thing.”

“What makes you think it’s organised on that scale, Patrick?”

“Our fences are beginning to squeak.”

Watterson guffawed. He found it difficult to get upset over the troubles of receivers of stolen goods.

“They’ve probably got a union,” he said. “Why don’t they go on strike?”

“It’s no laughing matter, sir,” said Petrella. “You know as well as I do there are only two ways we catch thieves. Either someone squeaks and there’s not much chance of that here—”

“They’re a tight-lipped crowd,” agreed Chief Inspector Loveday who looked after the Borough.

“—Or we trace the actual goods back to them. But if the stuffs all going abroad, we lose that chance as well.”

But Watterson was in too good a humour to allow himself to be depressed by Petrella. He said, “There’s a third way of catching them, Patrick. Luck.”

It happened that same evening.

The two boys had taken a lot of trouble over getting into Mr. Plowman’s pawnbroking establishment. Barry had a brother who had worked there for a few months, and had found out all about the alarms on the doors and windows; alarms which sounded in the charge room at Patton Street Police Station, two hundred yards away. Rex had had the idea. There was an empty office above the dry-cleaning establishment two doors along from Plowmans. They had broken into this in the quiet hour before the pubs shut and had then waited patiently. They knew that the police patrol went past at one o’clock and again at five. It gave them four hours.

A trapdoor at the head of the stairs took them up on to the roof. After they had watched the one o’clock patrol go by, they crawled along the leads, fastened the rope they had brought with them to a pipe and climbed down again to first-storey level. This brought them opposite the window of Mr. Plowman’s office, which was over the shop. They had to take a chance on whether an alarm had been fixed to this window. There hadn’t been one when he was there, Barry’s brother said, and he was usually reliable about things like that. Barry kicked in the glass with his foot, slipped the catch and they climbed through. The door into the passage was locked, but since the lock was on the inside this was no great obstacle. Five minutes later they were in the shop itself.

Here there were drawers and locked showcases to be dealt with. The work was slow because they had to keep out of the direct line of sight from the shop window, which was brightly lit all night; a form of advertisement which Mr. Plowman thought worth the electricity bills he incurred.

It took three hours to fill the satchels they had brought with them. Rex said, “What about that little lot, eh? Just for finishers.”

It was the window display. Engagement rings, ladies’ watches, earrings and brooches. All good stuff, guarded only by a sliding glass panel, held in place by a tiny lock.

“Pity to leave it,” said Barry. It had been half an hour since anyone had gone past in the silent street outside. “Break the glass, grab what we can and scarper. Right?” He swung the heavy case-opener which he had been using.

This was when their luck deserted them. The breaking of the glass set off one of the alarms. They heard the car coming.

“Out,” said Rex.

They raced upstairs, slinging the heavy satchels round their shoulders as they went, climbed out of the office window and dropped into the yard behind the shop at the moment that the police car squealed to a halt in front of it and three men tumbled out.

Sergeant Blencowe, who was an experienced man, said, “Two of you round the back, quick.” He then got busy on the car wireless and called up two more cars.

What followed was a game of chess. The boys knew the board, but Sergeant Blencowe knew the moves. Ten breathless minutes later, one of the three police cars cruising along West Road, spotted two figures scuttling down East Bank Street, alongside the Creek.

“Got ‘em now,” said the driver and spoke briefly on his wireless. The area between the Creek, the river and the abandoned dock was, as he knew, a cul-de-sac. Two of the cars blocked the only two roads in as the third shot down East Bank Street in pursuit.

But the boys had disappeared.

Ten minutes later, when Sergeant Blencowe was scratching his bald head and swearing, a launch of the Thames Division on routine patrol saw two objects bobbing in the water. The Sergeant in charge swung his spotlight and identified them as two sleek heads.

“Odd time to have a bathe,” he said.

“No law against it,” said Barry as he was hauled aboard. They were taken to Leman Road Police Station and searched. Nothing was found on either of them.

“All the same, we’re taking you in,” said the Sergeant. He had been listening in on the “Q” Division net.

On the following afternoon, Petrella strolled down East Bank Street with Milo Roughead.

“We had to let them go,” he said. “No one got a clear identification. All they could be charged with was midnight bathing, which isn’t a crime yet.”

“I suppose they dumped the stuff in a friendly house,” said Milo. “They’d just have had time if they were quick.”

“I expect they did,” said Petrella. “And if we could get two hundred search warrants, we might find it. Or again, we might not.” He stopped to watch a game of hopscotch that was being played on the pavement under the generalship of a red-haired girl of nine. None of the children took any notice of them.

Petrella said, “As a matter of fact, I’m not so interested in where they put the stuff. What I’d like to find out is where they went into the river. They hadn’t got time to do anything elaborate like picking locks or cutting their way through barbed wire. The launch picked them up off the East Quay, a few minutes after they were seen running down this street. They must have gone almost straight into the water and it can’t have been much lower down than this. The tide was on the ebb. They couldn’t fight current and tide. They’d just go down with it and pretty fast. They must have gone in two or three hundred yards
above
where they were picked up.”

“Not many possibilities,” agreed Sergeant Roughead. The strip of ground on their left, between East Bank Street and the Creek, belonged to a marine engineering works. It had a high wall topped with broken glass. When they reached the point where the Creek ran into the river, the road swung to the right. On their left was a line of derelict houses, guarded by a fence of corrugated iron sheets, the tops cut into points, an awkward obstacle to surmount even in daylight and with the help of a ladder. A hundred yards along were the railings of the deserted dockyard, topped by a treble row of barbed wire.