Hide My Eyes (2 page)

“He did. Not willingly nor without comment exactly. However, pay he did. You didn’t believe he existed, did you?”

“What I believe don’t matter. You get out here with the money. Where are you?”

“St. James’s, in the old man’s club. I’ll be seeing you. Goodbye.”

He hung up and slid down in the booth again to watch the lighted window. After a moment a shadow appeared across it and the blind descended. The man in the telephone
booth
sighed and then, straightening himself, snapped open the catch of the leather case before him. He did not raise the lid high immediately but first thrust in his hand and drew out a small squat gun which he passed through the side-slit in his oilskin into the safety of his jacket within. He then opened the case wide, revealing that it contained nothing but a dark felt hat of good quality and a pair of clean pigskin gloves. He exchanged these for his peaked cap and gauntlets and became at once a different looking person. The long black oiled coat ceased to be part of a uniform and became an ordinary protection which any man might wear against the rain, and, with the removal of the cap, his eyes and forehead came out of their mask of shadow. He looked thirty or a very few years older and his face still possessed some of the secrecy of youth. He was good looking in a conventional way, his features regular and his round eyes set wide apart. Only the heavy muscles at the corners of his jaw, and the unusual thickness of his neck, were not in the accepted fashionable picture. The most outstanding thing about him was an impression of urgency that was apparent in every line of his body, a strain and a determination like a climber’s nearing a peak.

As he slid out of the red kiosk into the pit among the tall houses, the gun in his gloved hand inside his jacket pocket, he was if considered dispassionately a shocking and dreadful thing, as horrible as any other deadly creature moving subtly in the dark places of an unsuspecting world.

He passed round behind the ’bus, empty save for the old people who had not moved, and came down the narrow lane into the sign-lit brightness of the Avenue. It was still pouring, the pavements were almost empty, Wardle was still having his supper, and the Porchester’s Victorian-Byzantine portico remained unattended. Nothing could have suited the man better. He had only to step round the deserted frontage of the closed theatre to gain the comparative darkness of Deban Street itself, where even now Lew was unlocking a deep-set door.

He came into the light swifitly, his head held down, and glanced briefly up the street. The next moment he halted
abruptly
but recovered himself and, pulling his slicker collar round his chin, he stepped under the canopy of the theatre. Directly between himself and the entrance to Deban Street there was a ’bus stop, and beneath it stood an elderly woman, waiting patiently in the downpour.

She stood quite still, looking square and solid in a green mackintosh cape which was dark now in patches where the rain had soaked her shoulders and a crescent above her hips. Her small velour hat glistened with drops and her stout shoes must have been waterlogged.

For the moment there was no one else on the pavement. If he passed her he must run the risk of her seeing him and recognising his back, just as he had hers. He decided against risking it, and turned the other way, back across the entrance to Goff’s Place and on to Molyneux Street where he found, as he had hoped, the remains of a taxi rank. There was one cab left upon it and, keeping his face turned away from the lights of the Avenue, he spoke to the driver.

“There’s an old girl standing at the ’bus stop just round the corner here, Guv,” he said pleasantly. “She lives just off the Barrow Road. At the moment she’s catching pneumonia because she thinks that its a crime to take a taxi just for herself. Here is ten bob. Will you go and take her home?”

The driver sat up among the leather swaddling clothes in which he was enveloped and laughed. He took the crumpled note and started his engine.

“Don’t they make you tired?” he said, referring no doubt to womenkind in general. “Cruel to themselves half the time, cruel to themselves. Shall I tell her your name? She’s sure to want to know.”

The man in the oilskin coat hesitated with what appeared to be natural modesty.

“Oh I don’t think so,” he said at last. “It might embarrass her. Tell her one of her old pals. I shall keep my eye on you from this corner, driver.”

“You needn’t.” The bundle spoke without animosity. “I’m honest. No reason why I shouldn’t be. Goodnight, sir. Stinking, ain’t it? I’ll take ’er along.”

The old cab shuddered and sprang forward and the man
on
foot stepped back into the shadow of a doorway. He counted two hundred slowly before walking out into the rain again. This time the Avenue was safe and the space under the ’bus stop deserted.

With the gun in his hand he bent his head against the rain, passed unnoticed down the lighted way, and turned into Deban Street.

Chapter 2

BIG GAME

JUST ABOUT EIGHT
months after the incident which the newspapers had christened ‘The Goff Place Mystery’ had made a nine days’ wonder in the Press and the Police had endured a great deal of unconstructive criticism with their usual gloomy stoicism, Mr. Albert Campion closed the door of Chief Superintendent Yeo’s room and walked up two flights of stairs to tap on one which belonged to the newest Superintendent, Charles Luke.

Mr. Campion was a tall thin man in his early fifties, with fair hair, a pale face and large spectacles, who had cultivated the gentle art of unobtrusiveness until even his worst enemies were apt to overlook him until it was too late. He was known to a great many people but few were absolutely certain about what it was he actually did with his life. In his youth he had often been described as ‘the young man come about the trouble’, and nowadays he was liable to mention deferentially that he feared he was becoming ‘the old one come
with
it’, but now, as then, he was careful never to permit his status to be too accurately defined.

It was certainly true that he had a private practice but also a fact that he and the present Assistant Commissioner, Crime, Mr. Stanislaus Oates, had been hunting companions in the days when Oates was an Inspector C.I.D. Since then Yeo, who was following Oates’s footsteps, and many other eminent senior men in the service were content to consider him a friend, an expert witness and, at times, a very valuable guide into little known territory.

At the moment he was not very happy. Old friendship has a way of making demands on a man which would be considered unreasonable by the standards of frank enmity. On arriving at Yeo’s office in response to an urgent message it had emerged after a considerable display of bush beating that
what
‘the Guv’nor’ really required from his old chum was a promise that he would ‘drop a hint’ to Charlie Luke.

Mr. Campion, who was very fond of Yeo and even fonder of Charles Luke, whom they both felt to be the most interesting personality the C.I.D. had produced in a decade, found the assignment suspect in the extreme. In the first place Yeo was more than capable of dealing himself with any sort of problem however delicate, and in the second, Luke was Yeo’s own protégé and white hope for the future, the son of his old colleague and an officer over whose career he had watched for twenty years. If Yeo needed help in hint dropping to Luke Mr. Campion felt the situation must be out of hand. Moreover, in his experience, getting a word in edgeways with Luke was a major operation on its own account at the best of times, let alone at the moment when quite a lot appeared to have been said already.

He knocked at the green door and was admitted by a clerk who withdrew as the Superintendent came across the room, hand outstretched.

Mr. Campion thought he had never seen the man in such tremendous form. Luke was a magnificent specimen who looked a little less than his six feet because of the weight of his muscles. He had a live, dark face under black hair which curled tightly to his scalp, nervous energy radiated from him and his narrow eyes under peaked brows were shrewd and amused.

“Hello! Just the man I was hoping to see!” he said with disconcerting enthusiasm. “Come in. I was wondering if I could possibly get hold of you to ask you to drop a hint to the Old Man for me. He thinks I’m round the bend.”

Mr. Campion knew Yeo did, on the very best authority. However he saw no point in mentioning it and Luke gave him little opportunity. His handshake was a minor ordeal and he got his visitor settled in the arm-chair before the desk with the alarming purposefulness of one who perceives a heaven-sent audience.

“I’m on to something pretty hot,” he announced without preamble. “I’m certain of it but at the moment its just a little bit on the vague side.”

“That’s a quality which has disadvantages,” murmured Mr. Campion, who knew what they were rather better than most people. “Authority doesn’t warm to the indefinite.”

“It’s the new rank, I know that.” Luke spoke bluntly. “A Chief can have ideas and a mere D.D.I. is permitted to have a hunch. But a Super is paid to keep his feet on the carpet, his seat on his chair and his head should be a box marked ‘Members Only’. I know that better than anybody and in the ordinary way I believe in it. But just now I really have stumbled on a trail. This is one of my ‘sixth-sense-specials’. I’ve had them all my life. Look, Campion, since you’re here, take a look at this, will you?”

He turned to a chart which hung on the wall behind him and Mr. Campion, who had heard about it already from Yeo, saw that it was a large-scale street map of a part of the Metropolitan Police District in west London where Charlie Luke had served as a Detective Divisional Inspector for several adventurous years. The thin man remembered most of the areas as a labyrinth of Victorian middle-class stucco which had degenerated with the wars into alarming slums and was now on the upgrade once more, but the portion shown here was new to him. It was a circle, some quarter mile across, in the north of the district and sported a crop of coloured flags as on a battle map. The centre of the round was an irregular patch, coloured green to indicate an open space, which lay in the angle made by the junction of two traffic ways, Edge Street running south to the Park and the long Barrow Road going west. He leaned forward to read the large print across the space.

“Garden Green,” he said aloud. “I don’t know it, I’m afraid. I thought it was Goff’s Place you were worrying about.”

Luke cocked an eye at him.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You had a word with the Guv on the way up. Did he tell you that I’d got a delusion that Jack Havoc or the Reddingdale Butcher had come back to haunt me because I didn’t bring either of them to trial?”

“No.” Mr. Campion hoped sincerely that he was lying in a good cause. “I merely gathered you were inclined to link
three
or four of the unsolved cases of the last three years and to attribute them to the same unknown man.”

“Huh,” said Luke. “So I am.” He perched himself on the edge of the desk and looked, as Campion had so often seen him, like some huge cat, lithe and intent. “Goff’s Place and the corpse who went by ’bus. Put everything you’ve ever heard about that business out of your mind and listen to me.”

It was one of Charlie Luke’s more engaging peculiarities that he amplified all his stories with a remarkable pantomimic sideshow which he gave all the time he was talking. He drew diagrams in the air with his long hands and made portraits of his characters with his own face. Mr. Campion was not at all surprised therefore when he hunched himself, drew his lips over his teeth to suggest age and altered the shape of his nose by clapping his fist over it.

“Poor old Lew,” he said. “A decent, straight little chap with more patience than sense until the end of it was reached of course, when he was firm as a moneylender has to be. He had a pawn shop in Deban Street and when he shut it in the evening he used to nip upstairs to his office and get out his ledgers on the usury lark. His interest was stiff but not over the odds and he’d traded there for years without a complaint.” He paused and fixed his visitor with a baleful eye. “Someone took him for a ride and made a mess of his office first. There was blood all over the floor, at least half a dozen vital books were missing and the trail led down the stairs at the back to a door which opened into Goff’s Place and no one has seen little Lew since. There was a lot of excitement at first but since there was no corpse to show, it petered out.”

Mr. Campion nodded. “I remember it,” he said, “It was a very wet night and nobody noticed that it was curious that a country ’bus should have been waiting in the yard at a time when there was no performance on at the Duke of Grafton’s. The police decided the body must have been taken away in the ’bus.”

“The Police had to decide something,” said Luke bitterly. “We had to make up our minds if we were going or coming for one thing. But it must have been done that way otherwise we should have been able to trace the blessed vehicle.
We
advertised all over the home counties, every police force was alerted, we inspected close on seven hundred garages. Old Lew
must
have gone in the ’bus, but in that case what was the explanation of the two old dears who were already sitting in it? That was the item which shook me. Who were they? What happened to them? Why did they keep silent and how sound were they sleeping?”

Mr. Campion’s pale eyes grew thoughtful behind his spectacles. It was very difficult not to be moved by Luke’s forceful imagination which re-created a picture grown faint in his mind.

“Ah yes,” he said at last. “The old man with the round beard and the old lady with the beads in her bonnet who were dozing on the front seat. Some witness described them, I fancy.”

“We had five,” Luke said. “Five people came forward to swear that they’d glanced into Goff’s Place that night at varying times between nine-forty and ten-five and had seen the ’bus waiting there. They all remembered the old folk and hardly seem to have noticed anything else, let alone the number or the colour of the coach. Even the waiter who passed the mouth of the yard when the ’bus driver was actually climbing into his seat didn’t glance at him twice but could paint a picture of the passengers in oils. He was the chap who swore he’d seen them before.”