A Scream in Soho (2 page)

Chapter II

Detective-Inspector McCarthy
Discourses of Things and People

“Exactly twenty-two minutes,” the inspector greeted accusingly.

“Eh!” Sir William exclaimed, as he divested himself of his overcoat and hat and handed them over to the second of the small waitresses. “Twenty-two minutes late, I suppose you mean. My dear Mac, you're lucky that it's not forty. With all due respect to the A.R.P. people, the black-out is the very devil.”

The signora came forward from her cash desk to give proper greetings to her second star patron.

“I hope I haven't messed everything up, Signora,” he apologized, “but getting from—from our place of business on the Embankment to here has been an almost impossible job.”

“Ever't'ing weel be-a just ready, Signori,” the signora informed them with her gracious smile. “These-a days I always allowa time for-a da black-out. People, they notta can com' just-a to time.”

“By gad, and that's a fact,” the A.C. exclaimed. “Bally lucky to get here at all if they're in our job. Ready, when you are, Signora—more than ready.”

“I've been that for the last twenty minutes,” the inspector mentioned, more to the ceiling than any particular person present. “A divil of a lot of sympathy I get for it. It's always the way. 'Tis the poor that…”

The Assistant Commissioner smiled.

“…that helps the poor, or perhaps it's that ‘bears the brunt of the burden' this time. One or other of them.”

“Both,” McCarthy returned equably. “Did y' notice that chap who went out as you came in, Bill?”

Haynes nodded. “Couldn't very well help it. Queer-looking bird, rather. Strange eyes—for a moment I thought he was blind. Who is he? One of your Soho clients?”

McCarthy shook his head negatively.

“To the best of my belief I've never set eyes on him in my life before. But he's certainly a bit out of the ordinary rut—to look at, anyhow. I just wondered if you'd run across him before. The West End is full of some queer people, these days.”

Sir William sighed. “You're telling
me
, as the Americans say,” he said feelingly. “I've just been having two solid hours with one of them in my room. A little gent brought in by the S.B. men for questioning.”

“One of the merry little spy lads?” McCarthy asked interestedly.

“Yes; and one of the old hands at that. You've never heard such a convincing rigmarole as he'd got all cut and dried and polished up, ready for English consumption. According to him he was an Austrian Social Democrat and had escaped out of a concentration camp to this country, and what he hadn't been through in the way of physical torture was nobody's business. The only thing against that tale was that, beyond a few old scars, he hadn't a mark on his face, but before we knew where we were he had peeled off his shirt and shown us his back. There were plenty of marks there to bear out his statement, but, unfortunately for him, you didn't need to be a doctor to know that they were of a good many years' standing. Anyhow, I let him go on and go on.”

“Gave him enough rope to hang himself?” McCarthy suggested.

“We didn't need that,” Haynes said. “My memory, plus our excellent
dossier
system, was all we needed. He was about as much Austrian as I am. As it happened, my memory was better than his, for I remembered running the rule over him very definitely in the Great War. He was a much younger man then, of course, and a Belgian refugee from Antwerp in those days. His tale didn't save him then, and let him down again this time. He's at Cannon Street station at the present moment, on his way to an internment camp.” He chuckled at some memory which had evidently amused him.

“What's the joke?” McCarthy asked.

“You should have heard him give us his own private Hymn of Hate when he realized that it was no good and that he was booked.” Sir William laughed. “Man, if everything he promised us comes true there won't be any England left in a fortnight. We're going to be bombed right clean off the map, every man-jack of us, and black-outs and A.R.P. and anti-aircraft defences won't save us. The U-boats are going to put our Navy, as well as our Mercantile Marine craft, down on the bed of the sea inside six weeks—except such cargoes as they'll take into the German ports, of course. Our civil population are going to be taken
en masse
as slaves to Poland, to re-build that devastated country under the lash, and…and the Lord knows what else. It was as good as circus while it lasted.”

“'Tis you that get all the fun while I'm prowling the streets with me little torch,” McCarthy observed. “All the same, Bill, there are plenty of these gentry, and their
femina
—don't forget the ladies—who aren't all hot air, though they've plenty of hate about them, who can do a devil of a lot of mischief if ever they're given the chance.”

“Not a doubt of that,” Haynes agreed seriously. “And the worst of it is, Mac, that the most dangerous of them are of a totally different class and well equipped for their job in every way. They're not snooping round, all ears to hear what they can in cafés, or bars frequented by men of the Services. They're people who are mixing with the higher-ups, the folks who do get odd bits of information out of Whitehall and the Civil Services, generally. The people that you daren't lay a hand on without some bigwig rushing around declaring that it's a scandal, not to say a crime, that such excellent people should have an eye kept on them, not to mention be questioned.”

“Now that's the beauty of my particular ‘clients' in Soho,” McCarthy said with a smile of satisfaction. “If you've the belief that any of them are taking base gold in payment for that sort of work, ye can lug them out and put the fear of God into them without anyone rushing round to the Houses of Parliament, or anywhere else, to put in a good word for them. Which, as half my particular lot would sell their own mothers for a bob, is perhaps just as well.”

As he spoke the door opened and one unmistakable product of Soho entered.

He was a tall, slim, but powerfully built young man, in years anything from six and twenty to thirty, with the dark olive skin, heavily lashed black eyes, and raven-hued, sleek hair which pronounced him instantly to be Soho-Italian—in all probability London-born of Italian parents. His clothes were of the best, though about them, generally, there was a certain raffishness of cut, helped by the black felt hat he wore pulled down over his eyes in a manner that suggested certain mask-like uses when occasion demanded.

There was an expression of predatoriness not to be missed in the black eyes which switched instantly to the inspector, and a tightness about the mouth which seemed to say that its owner, despite his sleek appearance, was a person it was not wise to run foul of. A large and extremely glittering diamond ornamented one finger of his right hand, whilst a similar stone radiated its sparkling light from his tie-pin. Taken all in all the newcomer might have been accepted as typical of the present-day West End gangster, the greater part of whose daylight activities were relegated to the racecourses and kindred pursuits, while his nights were given up to still more unholy activities in and around the cafés and dance-halls of Soho.

With one quick lift of his eye-lids, McCarthy took him in, then went on with the very excellent supper the signora had provided.

But, strangely enough, this colourful young man, although his first glance had been towards the table not so long since vacated by the man with the ice-blue eyes, stopped and markedly divested himself of his hat and overcoat, which he carefully hung up upon the hat-stand which stood but a foot or so from Inspector McCarthy's elbow. As he did so, a tiny ball of paper, so small that it might have been a cigarette paper rolled up, dropped from his hand to the inspector's table where it lay within an inch of that officer's plate. Without as much as a glance in its direction, the young man moved across to the table he had first marked with his eyes; by the time he had reached it, the tiny ball of paper had disappeared.

“Who is the tough-looking laddie?” the Assistant Commissioner asked in an undertone.

“A certain ‘client,'” McCarthy answered in the same way. “Not so tough as he looks, Bill, if it really comes to it—unless of course he has his gang with him, and then he's definitely bad meat. But, like most of them, on his own as harmless as a chicken. A nasty bit of work,” the inspector went on, “in fact, what you might call a messy job altogether. I don't like using such people, and do so as little as I can help it, but there are times when it is absolutely necessary for a man in our game to get what the little birds are whispering in places not so easy to get into. Though there aren't many that I don't breeze into like a brother in full benefit.”

“I see,” Haynes said. “He's one of those ‘little birds' you often quote as whispering things to you. Who is he?”

“His name is Mascagni—Floriello Mascagni,” McCarthy informed him.

“That name is familiar to me somewhere,” Haynes said frowningly.

“If ye're under any impression that he is any connection of
the
Mascagni—Pietro I think the name is, but I wouldn't swear to it—get it out of your mind at once. He's not; far from it. I'm referring, of course, to the one who gave us
Madame Butterfly
, and other beautiful operas. There's nothing of the butterfly about Flo. Mascagni. Divil a bit. In his own way he's about as dirty a tyke as you'd come across in a day's walk, but there are occasions when he is useful to me, and this is one of them.”

“Dangerous game for him, isn't it?” Haynes questioned.

“Not the healthiest in the world, I'll admit,” McCarthy answered placidly. “But if a man is a born crook and double-crosser he's going to sell valuable information to someone, sooner or later, and it might just as well be me as anyone else. But one of these days, Bill, they'll tumble to him and someone will wipe a
chiv
across his throat as sure as we're sitting here. Well, at the worst, it'll get rid of a damn pest, and at the best, it'll save the country the expense of trying and hanging him. Which suits me admirably.”

“It's a strange thing, Mac, that crime and particularly crimes of violence have dropped to practically nothing since war. Just a few hoodlums rough-housing about in the black-out, but nothing serious. In this infernal gloom you'd have thought that they'd have been at it with a vengeance, particularly at this end of the town.”

McCarthy's eyes twinkled. “Most of the younger ones are busy conferring as to the best way to get together and kill the Sergeant Major,” he observed whimsically. “The rest of them are thinking up their spiel for the tribunals, when they appear as Conscientious Objectors to violence of any sort or kind. It's a queer world, Bill, and there's some damn funny folk live in it.”

“And this particular part of it has its fair share of them.”

“As one of the denizens of this particular quarter, being born in it and reared in its gutters, I take exception to that remark,” the inspector said with a grin. “It's no worse, and no better, than any other part of London where you've got a mixed population. There are as many entirely respectable people living in Soho as there are in Streatham—though I'm bound to admit,” he emended, “that they don't take life as seriously there as they do here. And if they're a bit too inclined to say it with a knife, instead of music, or flowers, you mustn't forget that's hereditary, and a strongly-embedded racial characteristic. They can't be altogether blamed for that. Anyhow,” he concluded dryly, “it keeps the police division operating this district well up on their toes, and that's something. Just a minute until I read my mail.”

With a dexterous flip of his fingers which showed how used he was to receiving communications of this kind, and without even glancing at it as he did it, McCarthy opened the tiny slip of paper which had been dropped upon the table by Mascagni. When opened he cast one glance at it, to read, and memorize, a certain name and address. After which he tore the scrap of paper into such tiny fragments that not even the most diligent could ever have put them together again.

“Yes,” he observed almost sadly to his friend, “it will be the
chiv
for our twisty little friend Floriello one of these days. Nothing in the world more certain than that!”

The inspector stood up, and seemingly, fiddled about in his overcoat pocket from which he eventually withdrew his cigarette case. When again he seated himself there, a couple of treasury notes found their way, as though by sleight of hand, into the overcoat pocket of Mr. Floriello Mascagni.

It was very nearly midnight when Sir William Haynes and McCarthy made their way out into the black night again; the latter whistled for a cab, but in vain.

“You won't get one about here, sir, I'm afraid,” a constable who turned up upon the scene informed him. “It takes them all they know to pick up fares in the main thoroughfares.”

“Then there's nothing for it but to grope my way to Bloomsbury,” the Assistant Commissioner said, with a wry smile which no one could see.

“That's the worst of coming out suppering with you, Mac, it's the getting home afterwards, these nights.”

“The Lord be thanked I'm different,” McCarthy said virtuously. “I don't put on dog and live in a mansion in a Bloomsbury square. I live near my food and my ‘clients.' If the worst comes to the worst I can always get home to my bed on my hands and knees.

“And talking about bed,” he observed, “when I get into mine to-night I'm not going to get out of it again for anybody. The spies can go on spying and the murderers can go on murdering, but upon this night Patrick Aloysius McCarthy is going to get his fair share of shut-eye, if he never has it again.”