They Never Looked Inside (11 page)

“Well—that’s all there is to it, really,” went on the Chief Inspector. “I can’t offer you police protection. I don’t think you’d accept it—and I don’t honestly think it’s necessary. If they suspect that you’ve been working in with us—that might be different. Then we’ll think again. Come in.”

The door opened and at the sight of the visitor McCann sprang to his feet.

“I see you know each other,” said the Inspector. “Major McCann—Monsieur Bren of the Paris Sûreté, who is assisting us. Monsieur Bren will look after you until it’s time for you to leave. I thought you’d like to talk to Monsieur Bren, Major. I understand you met in France. When you’ve finished, Sergeant Crabbe will take you down to Records. I’ve ordered your ambulance for two o’clock.”

After his visitors had gone the Inspector sat thinking for a long time. He seemed rather pleased. As he thought, he scribbled busily. Sergeant Crabbe, whose job it was to clear the Inspector’s desk every day at lunch time, observed the results of his superior officer’s morning’s work. It was a large sheet of white paper, and it contained no less than a hundred and fifty representations of a gallows.

The year ran on, turned the winter’s solstice, and climbed slowly into spring.

McCann, like a half-million other men, spent his gratuity, wore out his demobilisation suit, and began to get on the nerves of his nearest and dearest. Miss McCann showed no signs of irritation with his growing moodiness. Only once, in fact, during those weeks, did she display any animation at all, and that was when two cast-iron finesses failed and she went three down doubled and vulnerable.

She did, however, at about this time, abandon British Israel (on account of the unwarrantable fuss which the Jews were making over immigration into Palestine), and became instead a keen worker for the Young Conservatives.

Nothing very exciting or unexpected happened – if we except the defeat of Scotland by England at Twickenham – and McCann began to forget the little melodrama in whose opening acts he had been involved. Once, as he passed Scotland Yard in his wanderings, he stopped to wonder how Chief Inspector Hazlerigg and his colleagues were progressing.

He read, and for some time cut out and collected, the numerous accounts of larcenies in shops and burglaries in private houses which were filling the papers, and possibly it was this preoccupation which caused him, one night, to dream rather a disturbing dream. It was one of those curiously realistic dreams in which three-quarters of the sub-conscious does the work while the other quarter remains critical. For instance, he knew perfectly well that he was in his own room, in bed – but at the same time was prepared to accept the fact that a flight of stairs had somehow sprung into existence, ending in a landing outside his window. Footsteps were climbing the stairs, and he realised, with terror, that he would soon be forced to see, through the glass, the face of the man who was climbing up. This, he most definitely did not want to do. “Shut your eyes, then,” said the common sense part of him. Immediately a succession of huge, misty faces began to swim across in front of him. First came his late Regimental Sergeant-Major, followed closely by a boy whom he had once defeated in the finals of the boxing at school – and had not thought about since – and quite suddenly the features dislimned and faded and formed again, becoming the face of a dead German with whom he had shared a slit-trench in Sicily for a memorable forty minutes whilst being shelled by the British Navy.

One of the shells burst very close. McCann heard the crump and actually felt the crash and sat up to find that his reading lamp had fallen on top of him. He cursed, disentangled the flex, and took two aspirins, thereafter sleeping so heavily that his sister had to recook his breakfast.

The manner in which she said nothing about the trouble which this caused her was exemplary.

Rodney Blew lived with his mother, and one elder brother and three younger ones (and two sisters so young that they hardly signified) in a small house in the patchwork of small houses which lies behind the Kennington Oval. The proximity of the famous ground did not cause Rod’s heart to beat any faster. As recorded in the opening chapter of this history, he was of a phlegmatic temperament. Nor did he care for cricket. Like Major McCann, whom he did not otherwise much resemble, his favourite sports were running and swimming. He also fought, when necessary. A solemn, white-faced child, about sixteen years old, he managed to live his own life on that sound principle exemplified by the actions of the destroyer in modern naval warfare. What he couldn’t out-fight he could out-run.

The outstanding characteristic of the Blew household, the dominant factor, as it were, in all its activities, was lack of money. It wasn’t just a question of a shortage of money so much as total absence of that commodity. Troop Sergeant-Major Blew, Rod’s father, had died in the service of his country some dozen years before this story opens. (The two tiny sisters were, as you have surmised, nothing to do with him. They were presented to Mrs. Blew as a sort of payment on account by one of her lodgers who had fallen into arrears with his bill).

In those far-off 1930s pensions were not dished out with quite the same freedom as they are today, so Mrs. Blew had been forced to find some work. This she had done unwillingly, intermittently, and only as an alternative to actual starvation.

Considering these circumstances, and the fact that his diet in the home had consisted almost exclusively of bread and margarine, Rod had not turned out badly. He had inherited his father’s tough, well-strung body and not a little of his mother’s Borough shrewdness.

Curiously enough his first decisive steps towards crime had been taken for the most respectable reasons. When he left school on his thirteenth birthday (as the result of some shrewd perjury on the part of Mrs. Blew) the headmaster, who had noted his prowess at running, had presented him with a year’s subscription to one of London’s many excellent South-side Polytechnics. Here, on most weekday evenings, Rod had been absolutely happy for the first time in his life. The fly in the ointment was that everything seemed to cost rather more money than he possessed – the fares to “away” matches, entry fees and subscriptions – even the innumerable cups of coffee in which he and his new friends indulged at the conclusion of a strenuous evening.

Being a direct child Rod had remedied this in a direct way.

His first effort consisted in the removal of the entire slot mechanism from an isolated public lavatory in Battersea Park. This coup had secured him the sum of two shillings and five pence, and from that point he might be said never to have looked back. After serving an apprenticeship on telephone boxes he had just moved up into the more aristocratic shoplifting circles when he came to the notice of “Beany” Cole in the matter of some opportunist “leg-work” in connection with one of Beany’s periodic visits to Hatton Garden.

However, all that was old history. Rod was now a big shot. He “went out” about once a month. He differed only from a great many other enterprising juvenile delinquents in that he kept himself to himself and avoided any undue show of wealth. To his family, who could hardly help observing it, he attributed his periods of affluence to luck “on the dogs”. A curious boy, older than his years, he neither drank nor smoked. Girls, if he thought about them at all, he considered as talkative, and therefore dangerous creatures, people moreover who for some reason expected you to pay for them when they went with you to the cinema.

He had never been in the hands of the police.

One memorable evening in early February Rod was sharing a table with Curly White in a coffee-stall annexe off the Euston Road. Both were silent and preoccupied. They had been sitting there for more than an hour, when a taxi drew up to the kerb. The ancient driver got out, bought himself a cup of coffee and a wedge of cake, and joined the pair at the table. Curly said: “Hallo, Busty,” and Rod nodded quietly and moved along the bench to make room for him. No other conversation passed.

The taxi driver finished his meal and creaked to his feet, said “Coming my way?” for the benefit of the stall-keeper (who was more than half asleep and totally disinterested) and opened the cab door. Rod and Curly tumbled in, and the taxi jolted eastwards with its engaged flag up.

Half a mile further on it turned south, up the Grays Inn Road.

The time was about a quarter to one in the morning.

During the intervening weeks Chief Inspector Hazlerigg and his team had been doing a great deal of work without obtaining anything startling in the way of results. Since this state of affairs was not uncommon at Scotland Yard no one had been unduly worried by it.

M. Bren departed to France, and worked his way steadily southwards down the busy demobilisation route; he had last been heard of at Lausanne. A cable received the week before had announced that he would probably have to extend his journey into Italy. He gave no reasons.

Inspector Pickup had taken charge of “Operation Flaxman” and had haunted the area of Berkeley Square and Curzon Street. Incidentally he and his fellow-workers had secured a great deal of information on the subject of the activities of Saxifrage Lamps, and the London office of that solid Birmingham firm had received a visit from the Inspectors of the Board of Trade. Hazlerigg had advised this raid, since news of it was sure to come to the long ears of Mr. Leopold Goffstein, and if that astute gentleman had noticed any sign of police activity he might reasonably put it down to the misdeeds of his neighbours rather than himself.

Pickup was not quite sure whether Goffstein knew that he was being watched or not. During the past weeks he had received a steady trickle of visitors. These had been picked up by the all-seeing eye of the quiet tele-camera in the shuttered house opposite. “Stills” were taken from the film and enlargements were passed down to the genius who presided over Records – and all with no result at all.

“You couldn’t expect anything else,” said Hazlerigg when he was told. “Leopold is Postmaster-General. His office is the clearing house. The people who go there are only messengers. They get letters and are told where to take them. It’s too easy. You could watch them all day and they could still pass their letters, right under your nose. You could think of half a dozen foolproof ways yourself – meeting in the middle of the rush hour at a tube station, sitting next to one another in a cinema, sharing a table in a restaurant.”

“I’ve no doubt you’re right, sir,” said Pickup, “but I still can’t quite see why they should bother.”

“It has this big advantage,” said Hazlerigg. “It works in both directions. The way that they’re managing it, none of the lesser characters needs to know where the Big Boys live. The chaps who actually do the jobs – they are the ones who are liable to get caught, you know – couldn’t tell us where headquarters is even if they wanted to. They just
don’t know.
If Mr. A. wants to get in touch with young B over a little jewel job in Pimlico he sends a note to Leopold. The messenger who takes it may be quite innocent. Leopold reads the message and gives it to C who knows how to hand it to our young friend B – as I said, he probably meets him in a cinema. And when it comes to the time for B to hand the stuff over—well, vice versa.”

Pickup thought this out for some minutes without comment. At last he said: “If it works that way, how do you explain Curly?”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg, “I see what you mean. Curly was an operative – what you might call an outer-fringe man. He did an occasional job, and he was used as a messenger—”

“Exactly,” said Pickup. “And yet
he knew
where headquarters was. He went straight there after visiting Leopold.”

Hazlerigg looked speculatively at his aide and between them, without speaking, the very first faint glimmer of an idea was born.

“It might be,” said Pickup at last, “that Curly was needed to help in the move – to help in some minor way. I mean as a, look-out or stooge. They may have thought that as they were clearing out anyway, it wouldn’t matter him knowing where the old hideout was.”

“All the same, I should think that he’d have pretty strong instructions not to go straight there from Leopold’s—”

“You remember what the Major said about Curly, sir – lazy and insubordinate.”

“That’s it. He just took a chance. I don’t suppose,” went on Hazlerigg, “that the Big Boy would be very pleased if he knew about it. I mean, if he guessed that Curly had allowed himself to be followed all the way from Flaxman Street to Kensington, incidentally giving away Goffstein as well—”

“No, sir,” said Pickup with a grin, “I don’t suppose he would.”

The shop and dwelling house of Mr. McDowall, Licensed Pawnbroker, lies in a quiet street south of the Pentonville Road. When Mr. McDowall had purchased the house in 1937 it had been described as a “desirable semi-detached business and residential premises”. As the result of a wild night’s work in late 1940 it was now quite definitely “detached”, the remaining three out of the block of four houses having been shorn away by a land mine.

This misfortune accounted for some of the structural oddities of the building and had not made the task of rendering it burglar-proof any easier. However, after suffering the amount of pilfering from his practically defenceless premises usual in a district where no very strong distinction is made between
meum
and
tuum
, Mr. McDowall had effected sufficient repair to enable him to rest tolerably secure o’nights. His immunity, in fact, had lasted for nearly two years and was therefore inclined to be sceptical when he received as a supplement to the
Pawn Brokers’ List
the printed warning which Hazlerigg had been responsible for drafting:

SPECIAL NOTICE TO JEWELLERS AND PAWNBROKERS

There have occurred lately a growing number of instances of burglaries and housebreaking in the above types of premises. In every case in which the proprietor or his night watchman have interrupted the criminals at work they have been assaulted and in most cases rendered unconscious. This is obviously part of a pre-conceived policy.