Death Has Deep Roots (6 page)

“Is the five there whether it’s Yes or No?”

“Just the same.”

“All right,” said Gunner. The paper was slid across the table. The photograph was still inside and five pound notes had added themselves to it.

“It’ll take half an hour – maybe more,” said Gunner. “Enjoy yourself. Why not have a nice game of brag with those boys in the corner?”

“My mother told me never to play cards with strangers.”

Gunner showed his few teeth in a smile and was gone.

It was nearly an hour before he returned.

He handed McCann back his folded paper.

“Not known,” he said. “You might try Berty’s.”

“Thank you,” said McCann.

A minute later he was out in the street.

It was seven o’clock and almost dark. There was a nip in the air, which was sharp and grateful after the overheated room. The first mist of autumn was making halos round the street lamps in the Islington Road, and outside the brewery two huge dray horses stood in a cloud of steam and dreamed of nosebags and stable. A trolley-bus swished past him in the mist, its wheels purring on the smooth asphalt.

McCann was a Scotsman but he had spent most of his life in London and he loved every bit of it. He loved the dirty bits and the twisted bits. The nastiness of London was part of its flavour.

He was making for a small public house near the Angel. Here he stopped long enough to spend a further five pounds. After which he returned to his own territory, and put in an inquiry at a theatrical club in Compton Street. It would have been more convenient if he could have made this call first, but the man he wanted was never there until nine. McCann ate some sandwiches whilst he was waiting for him and drank some beer. When his man arrived he handed out more money in return for which he got a glass of apricot brandy.

At half-past nine he set out once more, his objective being a pool room near Fleet Street. At half-past ten he was on his way home to bed.

He had spent twenty pounds of Messrs. Rumbold’s money, but he was not entirely dissatisfied with his evening’s work. He knew for certain now that Mrs. Roper was on the fringe of the law. He knew that her activities, whatever they might be, were not connected in any way with racing or betting, with the food and drink racket, with drugs, or with organised prostitution; which was quite a lot of negative evidence.

He was crossing Kingsway when he saw someone he knew. A small man, who had been walking ahead of him, stopped for a moment under the street light, to let a car go past.

“Blow me down,” said McCann to himself. “I’ve seen that nose before. It’s Mousey.”

Mousey Jones was a small character who made a living by picking up the crumbs which lie round the wainscoting, and in the dark corners, of that big living room of crime, the West End. His staple occupation was the insertion of lumps of putty into the return-coin slots of public telephones—lumps which he would later remove with a piece of wire bringing down sometimes as much as a shilling in coppers, a shilling which should by rights have gone to previous pressers of Button B. Between times he ran errands for almost anyone who would employ him.

McCann had not seen Mousey for a long time. He had no further business that night; all other lines having petered out he thought that Mousey might lead him somewhere. He followed him discreetly.

The little man was clearly up to no good. He sidled along, with his chin on his shoulder, a picture of felonious intent. The appearance of a policeman drove him to take a deep interest in a shop window – a window which contained, as McCann saw when he passed it himself, a large Bible open at the appropriate text of Jeremiah 18:11: “… Return ye now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good.”

Halfway down Long Acre, Mousey disappeared.

McCann was puzzled for a moment, then he saw the dark entrance to the side turning – it was no more than a passageway – and, halfway down it, throwing a fan of light into the gloom, the open door of the King of Norway.

McCann followed circumspectly. He did not at once go in. He first tried a glance through the window but was baffled by the display of stained glass.

He hesitated for a moment. One or two of the Covent Garden pubs, as he knew, had recently been getting a borderline reputation. Also he was out of his own territory.

Finally he went in.

It was a small, quiet bar. Mousey had got his pint and was sitting at one of the tables by the wall talking to a youth with red hair and pimples. Four men were playing nap at another table. Two old ladies dressed in tight black were perched like a brace of crows on the bench by the door, nodding over their Guinnesses.

“Half pint of bitter,” said McCann. “Quiet tonight.”

“We’re always quiet in here,” said the landlord.

“It’s nice to be quiet,” said McCann.

“That’s what I always say,” said the landlord.

As he said this he smiled. It wasn’t a particularly nice smile.

McCann had picked up his glass when he realised that two men had come in without making any noise. One of them, a tall thin man with a bent nose, was standing just beside him. The other was at the door.

“Were you asking after Mrs. Roper?” said the thin man softly.

Quite suddenly McCann realised that he had been every sort of fool.

He realised that he had been led by the nose to the place where things happened. He knew this from the way the two women had already disappeared, and from the way the landlord kept his eye on the doorway through which he was preparing to disappear (and from a telephone behind which he would, no doubt, in due course, and when it was too late, summon the police). He knew it from the painstaking way in which the card players went on with their game without lifting their eyes.

Meanwhile there was a question to be answered.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t me. Perhaps you were thinking of someone else.”

Considering that this was a flat lie, he managed to work a good deal of conviction into it.

“Like hell I was thinking of someone else,” said the thin man.

“I expect it was the other man,” suggested McCann.

“What other man?”

“The one who went out just now,” said McCann.

“Like hell someone went out just now,” said the thin man.

It seemed to be a deadlock.

McCann saw what was coming – he saw the ugly bulk in the man’s coat pocket. He decided to take the initiative. He shifted his weight on to his left foot and kicked the thin man hard, on the edge of his Achilles tendon.

The thin man gave a scream and lifted his right foot to clutch at the injured member. This was exactly as McCann had planned. The thin man was wearing a pair of those very wide-bottomed trousers. McCann seized firmly hold of the trouser leg with both hands, turned his back, and heaved sharply. Then he lifted and slung his opponent, as a coal heaver heaves a sack of coal.

The thin man flailed through the air, landed on the table, where he considerably deranged the card game, slid across the table top, carrying off four full pints of beer, and came to rest with a satisfying thud against the bar-room wall.

McCann did not waste any time in self-congratulation. The more dangerous opponent, he knew, was the big man at the street door.

Had this second man started a fraction sooner he would have caught McCann off balance and the fight, as a fight, would have ended then and there. He came across the floor in a powerful but controlled rush, but his delay gave McCann time to sweep a table into his way.

This added up to a bare two seconds’ respite; and moving with surprising speed he propelled himself under the bar flap, and was round again facing his opponent with the width of the bar between them.

There, for a moment, they stood watching each other. The next move was far from plain. Clearly the big man could not himself come under the bar, since this would put his head at McCann’s mercy; equally clearly he could not execute the plans he had in mind for McCann with a two-foot mahogany counter between them.

McCann cast a sideways glance at the thin man. He thought it possible, from the angle of his head, that the thin man’s neck was broken.

Taking his eyes off his opponent was a mistake which nearly cost the game. He only just ducked in time, as the big man swung at him, left-handed.

The loaded stick glanced off his shoulder, but missed his head. There was a sharp detonation, and something warm started to run down the back of McCann’s neck. For a wild moment he thought it was his own blood and wondered why he had felt nothing, when the true explanation occurred to him. It was gin. The stick had fractured the bottle which hung, reversed, from a bracket on the shelf.

At the moment the big man jumped.

It was quite an effort. He came clean over the bar, like an athlete diving over a vaulting horse, and he landed in McCann’s arms.

A second later they were both on the ground rolling round in the gin and broken glass in the narrow space behind the counter.

It was only the narrowness of this space that saved McCann. The big man, as he speedily found, was every bit as strong as he was, and a much more experienced fighter.

McCann had caught the man’s left wrist in his own right hand, but the man’s other arm was free. He was unable to swing it. He confined himself, therefore, to an attempt to get his fingers into McCann’s eyes. Unfortunately for him he misjudged the distance and succeeded only in wedging three of his fingers into McCann’s mouth. McCann bit hard. The fingers were dragged out. They brought a couple of teeth with them.

At this point providence placed a weapon into the big man’s hand. In his groping he found the bottom of the gin bottle. This had come off more or less in one piece and was adorned with half a dozen needle-sharp spikes of splintered glass.

McCann saw the red light; almost literally, in the glare of mingled rage and beastly satisfaction which came into the eyes so close above his own. He moved his left hand instinctively and encountered the big man’s right wrist, as it slid up. He caught it and held it, though awkwardly, and was thus able to inspect at a range of six inches the horrible weapon which it held.

The big man pressed downward, twice, with all his force. McCann exerted himself in an upward direction. The big man reversed suddenly, tore his hand free, and jabbed.

McCann jerked his head aside and the glass cut the lobe off his left ear.

McCann rolled back and grabbed again.

This time he was holding his opponent’s wrist downward and was able to get some of his weight on to it.

The only disadvantage of this change was that it brought their faces even closer together.

The big man started to eat McCann’s left ear.

McCann stood this for some seconds, then raised his head sharply from the floor.

The click which followed suggested that he had broken the big man’s nose.

At this point, and not before McCann was ready for it, a third party appeared.

The space at the top of the bar was blacked out, an arm in blue descended, and a voice said, “Now then, break that up.”

The big man removed himself slowly, and McCann, following, got his head above the counter in time to see the last act. Standing in the middle of the bar was a young and conscientious-looking policeman. In front of him was the big man, who had just got out from under the bar counter.

McCann prepared himself for some rather difficult explanations. The big man thought otherwise. With a speed and power which showed what he could do in the open, he jumped forward, hit the policeman once in the stomach and once under the jaw, jumped his body and disappeared through the door into the street.

McCann got on to his feet shakily.

He found himself in sole and absolutely undisputed possession of the field of battle.

The landlord and the customers had disappeared. The constable lay where he had fallen. The thin man had rolled off the table on to a bench.

In the silence the ricking of the bar clock sounded loud.

McCann picked out a piece of glass which had got between his collar and his neck and straightened the remnants of his tie. He walked over to the thin man who seemed still to be breathing. He put his hand into the thin man’s inside pocket and found a wallet. It was quite a heavy wallet. McCann pocketed it.

It struck him that it was high time to be off.

Twenty minutes later Mrs. McCann was gazing at her husband.

For once all comment seemed to have failed her. At last she said, faintly, “It must have been quite a party. I take it Mrs. Roper is a gin drinker. It looks as if she’s got rather long nails, too.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said McCann. “I never caught up with her. Just two of her friends. And as for the gin, I only wish I had rather more of it in me and rather less of it down my neck. Come up and talk to me in the bathroom and bring the first-aid kit with you.”

Before he went to bed he turned out the wallet he had taken from the thin man.

He found seventeen pounds and ten shillings in notes, which he reckoned would go some way toward buying him a new suit. The only other thing of interest was a letter. A name in it caught his eye, and he showed it to his wife.

“There you are, Kitty,” he said, “that’s his racket all right. And if it’s his racket, then it’s probably Mrs. Roper’s as well.”

“Stimmy,” said Mrs. McCann. “I know I’ve heard the name but I can’t—”

“Gold,” said McCann. “And I don’t mean gold shares, I mean the article itself. He’s the biggest illicit gold dealer in London.”

“I shall have to catch the night boat,” wrote Nap to his wife, “for I shall be busy all this afternoon in London, making the necessary contacts. Unless I can do some really good groundwork at this end I fear my trip will be largely wasted. However, the expenses are falling, in the long run, on public funds, so why worry?

“I ran into Angus McCann this morning in Shepherd Market. He had a beautiful black eye, someone had chewed the bottom off his left ear, and he could hardly speak for a plummy mouth. From what I could understand he’s now got a line on Mrs. Roper. He has found out that she’s connected, though distantly, with the gold smuggling and currency racket. I’m not at all sure how this ties up with our case, but it should make quite good ammunition for Macrea in cross-examination.