Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens (28 page)

Mr. Behrens’ mind had been moving on a different line. He said, “When they got into the car, and turned the lights on, you’d have been able to see the number plate at the back, I take it.”

“That’s right. I saw it, and wrote it down. I’ve put it here. LKK 910P.”

“Good girl. Now think back. When you were talking about the last man to arrive you called him ‘the one who came on foot’. What made you say that?”

Sheilagh said, “I’m not sure. I suppose because he came from the opposite direction to where the car was parked. So I assumed—”

“I’m not disputing it. In fact, I’m sure you were right. Fallows wouldn’t have driven up in a police car. He wouldn’t even have risked taking his own car. He’d have gone by bus or train to the nearest point and walked the rest of the way.”

Mr. Calder said, “Then the car belonged to the Irish couple. Of course, they might have stolen it, like the one they left on the Heath.”

“They might. But why risk it? It would only draw attention to them, which was the last thing they wanted. My guess is that they hired it. Just for the time they were planning to be here.”

“If you’re right,” said Mr. Calder, “there’s a lot to do and not much time to do it. You’d better trace that car. And remember, we’ve been officially warned off, so you can’t use the police computer.”

“LKK’s a Kent number. I’ve got a friend in County Hall who’ll help.”

“I’ll look into the Fallows end of it. It’ll mean leaving you alone here for a bit, Sheilagh, but if anyone should turn up and cause trouble Rasselas will attend to him.”

“In case there might be two of them,” said Mr. Behrens, “you’d better take this. It’s loaded. That’s the safety-catch. You push it down when you want to fire.”

The girl examined the gun with interest. She said, “I’ve never used one, but I suppose, if I got quite close to the man, pointed it at his stomach, and pulled the trigger—”

“The results should be decisive,” said Mr. Behrens.

Fallows was whistling softly to himself as he walked along the carpeted corridor to the door of his fiat. It was on the top floor of a new block on the Regent’s Park side of Albany Street and seemed an expensive pad for a detective sergeant. He opened the door, walked down the short hall into the living room, switched on the light and stopped.

A middle-aged man, with greying hair and steel-rimmed glasses was standing by the fireplace regarding him benevolently. Fallows recognised him, but had no time to be surprised. As he stepped forward something soft but heavy hit him on the back of the neck.

When he came round, about five minutes later, he was seated in a heavy chair. His arms had been attached to the arms of the chair and his legs to its legs by yards of elastic bandage, wound round and round. Mr. Behrens was examining the contents of an attaché case which he had brought with him. Mr. Calder was watching him. Both men were in their shirt-sleeves and were wearing surgical gloves.

“I think our patient is coming round,” said Mr. Calder.

“What the bloody hell are you playing at?” said Fallows.

Mr. Behrens said, “First, I’m going to give you these pills. They’re ordinary sleeping pills. I think four should be sufficient. We don’t want him actually to go to sleep. Just to feel drowsy.”

“Bloody hell you will.”

“If you want me to wedge your mouth open, hold your nose and hit you on the throat each time until you swallow, I’m quite prepared to do it, but it’d be undignified and rather painful.”

Fallow glared at him, but there was an implacable look behind the steel spectacles which silenced him. He swallowed the pills.

Mr. Behrens looked at his watch, and said, “We’ll give them five minutes to start working. What we’re trying”— he turned courteously back to Fallows —“is an experiment which has often been suggested but never, I think, actually performed. We’re going to give you successive doses of scopalamine dextrin to inhale, whilst we ask you some questions. In the ordinary way I have no doubt you would be strong enough to resist the scopalamine until you became unconscious. There are men who have sufficient resources of will power to do that. That’s why we first weaken your resistance with a strong sedative. Provided we strike exactly the right balance, the results should be satisfactory. About ready now, I think.”

He took a capsule from a box on the table and broke it under Fallows’ nose.

“The snag about this method,” he continued, in the same level tones of a professor addressing a class of students, “is that the interreaction of the sedative and the stimulant would be so sharp that it might, if persisted with, affect the subject’s heart. You’ll appreciate therefore – head up, Sergeant – that by prolonging our dialogue you may be risking your own life. Now then. Let’s start with your visit to Banstead—”

This produced a single, sharp obscenity.

Fifty minutes later, Mr. Behrens switched off his tape recorder. He said, “I think he’s gone. I did warn him that it might happen if he fought too hard.”

“And my God, did he fight,” said Mr. Calder. He was sweating. “We’d better set the scene. I think he’d look more convincing if we put him on his bed.”

He was unwinding the elastic bandages and was glad to see that, in spite of Fallows’ struggles, they had left no mark. The nearly empty bottle of sleeping pills, a half empty bottle of whiskey and a tumbler were arranged on the bedside table. Mr. Behrens closed Fallows’ flaccid hand round the tumbler, and then knocked it onto the floor.

“Leave the bedside light on,” said Mr. Calder. “No-one commits suicide in the dark.”

“I’ve done a transcript of the tape for you,” said Sheilagh. “I’ve cut out some of the swearing, but otherwise it’s all there. There’s no doubt, now, that he betrayed Michael, is there?”

“None at all,” said Mr. Behrens. “That was something he seemed almost proud of. The trouble was that when we edged up to one of the things we really wanted to know, an automatic defence mechanism seemed to take over and when we fed him a little more scopalamine to break through it, he started to ramble.”

“All the same,” said Mr. Calder, “we know a good deal. We know what they’re planning to do, and roughly when. But not how.”

Mr. Behrens was studying the neatly typed paper. He said, “J.J. That’s clear enough. Jumping Judas. It’s their name for Mr. Justice Jellicoe. That’s their target all right. They’ve been gunning for him ever since he sent down the Manchester bombers. I’ve traced their car. It was hired in Dover last Friday, for ten days. The man they hired it from told them he had another customer who wanted it on the Monday afternoon. They said that suited them because they were planning to let him have it back by one o’clock that day. Which means that whatever they’re going to do is timed to be done sometime on Monday morning, and they aim to be boarding a cross-Channel ferry by the time it happens.”

“They might have been lying to the man,” said Sheilagh.

“Yes. They might have been. But bear in mind that if they brought the car back on Saturday afternoon or Sunday, the hire firm would be shut for the weekend and they’d have to leave the car standing about in the street, which would call attention to it. No. I think they’ve got a timetable, and they’re sticking to it.”

“Which gives us three days to find out what it is,” said Mr. Calder. “If the pay-off is on Monday there are two main possibilities. Jellicoe spends his weekends at his country house at Witham, in Essex. He’s pretty safe there. He’s got a permanent police guard and three boxer dogs who are devoted to him. He comes up to court on Monday by car, with a police driver. All right. That’s one chance. They could arrange some sort of ambush. Detonate one of their favourite long-distance mines. Not easy, though, because there are three different routes the car can take. This isn’t the Ulster border. They can’t go round laying minefields all over Essex.”

“The alternative,” said Mr. Behrens, “is to try something in or around the Law Courts. We’ll have to split this. You take the Witham end. Have a word with the bodyguard. They may not know that we’ve been warned off, so they’ll probably co-operate. I’ll tackle the London end.”

“Isn’t there something I could do?” said Sheilagh.

“Yes,” said Mr. Calder. “There is. Play that tape over again and again. Twenty times. Until you know it by heart. There was something, inside Fallows’ muddled brain, trying to get out. It may be a couple of words. Even a single word. If you can interpret it, it could be the key to the whole thing.”

So Friday was spent by Mr. Calder at Witham, making friends with a police sergeant and a police constable; by Sheilagh Finnegan listening to the drug-induced ramblings of the man who had been responsible for her husband’s death; and by Mr. Behrens investigating the possibility of blowing up a judge in court.

As a first step he introduced himself to Major Baines. The major, after service in the Royal Marines, had been given the job of looking after security at the Law Courts. He had known Michael Finnegan, and was more than willing to help.

He said, “It’s a rambling great building. I think the chap who designed it had a Ruritanian palace in mind. Narrow windows, heavy doors, battlements and turrets, and iron gratings. The judges have a private entrance, which is inside the car park. Everyone else, barristers, solicitors, visitors, all have to use the front door in the Strand, or the back door in Carey Street. They’re both guarded, of course. Teams of security officers, good men. Mostly ex-policemen.”

“I was watching them for a time, first thing this morning,” said Mr. Behrens. “Most people had to open their bags and cases, but there were people carrying sort of blue and red washing bags. They let them through uninspected.”

“They’d be barristers, or barristers’ clerks, and they’d let them through because they knew their faces. But I can assure you of one thing. When Mr. Justice Jellicoe is on the premises everyone opens everything.”

“Which court will he be using?”

Major Baines consulted the printed list. “On Monday he’s in Court Number Two. That’s one of the courts at the back. I’ll show you.”

He led the way down the vast entrance hall. Mr. Behrens saw what he meant when he described it as a palace. Marble columns, spiral staircases, interior balconies and an elaborately tessellated floor”Up these stairs,” said Baines. “That’s Number Two Court. And there’s the back door, straight ahead of you. It leads out into Carey Street.”

“So that anyone making for Court Number Two would be likely to come this way.”

“Not if they were coming from the Strand.”

“True,” said Mr. Behrens. “I think I’ll hang around for a bit and watch the form.”

He went back to the main hall and found himself a seat, which commanded the front entrance.

It was now ten o’clock and the flow of people coming in was continuous. They were channelled between desks placed lengthways, and three security guards were operating. They did their job thoroughly. Occasionally, when they recognised a face, a man was waved through. Otherwise everyone opened anything they were carrying and placed it on top of the desk. Suitcases, briefcases, even womens’ handbags were carefully examined. The red and blue bags which, Mr. Behrens decided, must contain law books were sometimes looked into, sometimes not. They would all be looked into on Monday morning.

“It seemed pretty water-tight to me,” said Mr. Behrens to Sheilagh and Mr. Calder, as they compared notes after supper. “Enough explosive to be effective would be bulky and an elaborate timing device would add to the weight and bulk. They might take a chance and put the whole thing in the bottom of one of those book bags and hope it wouldn’t be looked at, but they don’t seem to me to be people who take chances of that sort.”

“Could the stuff have been brought in during the weekend and left somewhere in the court?”

“I put it to Baines. He said no. The building is shut on Friday evening and given a thorough going-over on Saturday.”

“Sheilagh and I have worked one thing out,” said Mr. Behrens. “There’s a reference, towards the end, to ‘fields’. In the transcript it’s been reproduced as ‘in the fields’, and the assumption was that the attempt was going to be made in the country, when Jellicoe was driving up to London. But if you listen very carefully it isn’t ‘in the fields’. It’s ‘in fields’ with the emphasis on the first word, and there’s a sort of crackle in the tape before it which makes it difficult to be sure, but I think what he’s saying is ‘Lincoln’s Inn Fields’.”

They listened once more to the tape.

Mr. Calder said, “I think you’re right.”

“And it does explain one point,” said Mr. Behrens. “When I explored the area this morning it struck me how difficult it was to park a car. But Lincoln’s Inn Fields could be ideal – there are parking spaces all down the south and east sides, and the southeast corner is less than two hundred yards from the rear entrance to the courts.”

“Likely enough,” said Mr. Calder, “but it still doesn’t explain how they’re going to get the stuff in. Did you get anything else out of the tape, Sheilagh?”

“I made a list of the words and expressions he used most often. Some were just swearing, apart from that his mind seemed to be running on time. He said ‘midday’ and ‘twelve o’clock’ a dozen times at least. And he talks about a ‘midday special’. That seemed to be some sort of joke. He doesn’t actually use the word ‘explosion’, but he talks once or twice about a report, or reports.”

“Report?” said Mr. Calder thoughtfully. “That sounds more like a shot from a gun than a bomb.”

“It’s usually in the plural. Reports.”

“Several guns.”

“Rather elaborate, surely. Hidden rifles, trained on the bench, and timed to go off at midday?”

“And it still doesn’t explain how he gets the stuff past the guards,” said Mr. Behrens.

He took the problem down the hill with him to his house in Lamperdown village and carried it up to bed. He knew, from experience, that he would get little sleep until he had solved it. The irritating thing was that the answer was there. He was sure of it. He had only to remember what he had seen and connect it up with the words on the tape, and the solution would appear, as inevitably as the jackpot came out of the slot when you got three lemons in a row.