Blood and Judgement

Blood and Judgement

First published in 1959

© Estate of Michael Gilbert; House of Stratus 1959-2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Michael Gilbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

Born in Lincolnshire, England, Michael Francis Gilbert graduated in law from the University of London in 1937, shortly after which he first spent some time teaching at a prep-school which was followed by six years serving with the Royal Horse Artillery. During World War II he was captured following service in North Africa and Italy, and his prisoner-of-war experiences later leading to the writing of the acclaimed novel
‘Death in Captivity’
in 1952.

After the war, Gilbert worked as a solicitor in London, but his writing continued throughout his legal career and in addition to novels he wrote stage plays and scripts for radio and television. He is, however, best remembered for his novels, which have been described as witty and meticulously-plotted espionage and police procedural thrillers, but which exemplify realism.

HRF Keating stated that
‘Smallbone Deceased’
was amongst the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published.
“The plot,”
wrote Keating, “
is in every way as good as those of Agatha Christie at her best: as neatly dovetailed, as inherently complex yet retaining a decent credibility, and as full of cunningly-suggested red herrings.”
It featured Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, who went on to appear in later novels and short stories, and another series was built around Patrick Petrella, a London based police constable (later promoted) who was fluent in four languages and had a love for both poetry and fine wine. Other memorable characters around which Gilbert built stories included Calder and Behrens. They are elderly but quite amiable agents, who are nonetheless ruthless and prepared to take on tasks too much at the dirty end of the business for their younger colleagues. They are brought out of retirement periodically upon receiving a bank statement containing a code.

Much of Michael Gilbert’s writing was done on the train as he travelled from home to his office in London:
“I always take a latish train to work,” he explained in 1980, “and, of course, I go first class. I have no trouble in writing because I prepare a thorough synopsis beforehand.”.
After retirement from the law, however, he nevertheless continued and also reviewed for
‘The Daily Telegraph’
, as well as editing
‘The Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes’
.

Gilbert was appointed CBE in 1980. Generally regarded as ‘one of the elder statesmen of the British crime writing fraternity, he was a founder-member of the British Crime Writers’ Association and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, before receiving the Lifetime ‘Anthony’ Achievement award at the 1990 Boucheron in London.

Michael Gilbert died in 2006, aged ninety three, and was survived by his wife and their two sons and five daughters.

Dedicated to the Divisional Detective,

with admiration and respect

The room behind his shop, where Mr Robins carried on the pawnbroking section of his Jeweller’s, Silversmith’s and Pawnbroker’s Establishment, was lit by half a dozen powerful electric bulbs. This was policy, for some of the goods that Mr Robins handled repaid the closest scrutiny.

He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and said, “Yes. It looks very like it.”

“I’m afraid it is,” agreed Detective Sergeant Petrella, folding up the old pawn list that they had been studying together. “Clasp, white metal filigree with a single white zircon-cut diamond of about two carats set centrally. The filigree’s been hammered flat and given a sort of new look, but there’s no disguising the stone.”

“You’d have to hit a diamond pretty hard to alter
its
shape,” agreed Mr Robins. “Well, it looks as if I’m the mug. Who’s it belong to?”

“Part of a mixed lot lifted three years ago from Colegraves. One of their smaller North London branches. Not far from here, as a matter of fact.”

“And I suppose it’s been sitting for three years – under the floor boards in someone’s back kitchen, waiting for the heat to go off, and some mug to buy it or lend on it.” Mr Robins consulted his great leather-bound, brass-edged ledger. “Forty quid.”

“You’ll get it back from your insurance company.”

“Like getting teeth out of a month-old corpse, I will,” said Mr Robins.

“Who did you say the depositor was?”

Mr Robins again consulted his ledger, the repository of so many family secrets that he never let it out of his sight by day and locked it up each evening with his own hands in the old-fashioned safe which was built into the masonry of the backroom chimney.

“King,” he said. “Albert King. Occupation, fitter. Address, 45 Upper Green. Date of deposit, October 12.”

“I suppose you can’t give me a description?”

“Now, really–”

“Perhaps that is a bit unreasonable.”

“If you ask my honest opinion,” said Mr Robins, “the only bit that’s true out of the whole of that little lot’s the date. I know that’s correct. I wrote it myself.”

“I expect you’re right,” said Petrella. But he put it all down in his book. In police work the first rule was never to neglect the obvious.

“Any idea who pulled this?” asked Robins, closing his ledger.

“We’re not certain. But it could have been one of Ritchie’s jobs.”

“‘Monk’ Ritchie?”

“That’s right.”

“But he’s been inside nearly a year.”

Petrella made a tiny mental note that it might be worth keeping an eye on a man who knew the nickname of criminals and exactly when they went to prison.

“That’s right,” he said. He pocketed the clip, now wrapped in tissue paper, and as he turned to go, added, “He went up for five years, last Christmas. Breaking and entering, and violence. It’s a pity he didn’t qualify for Preventive Detention, then we might have been shot of him for a nice long time.”

“But if he’s inside–” said Mr Robins.

“He isn’t. He got away when they were moving him from the Scrubs in August. There was a lot about it in the papers at the time.”

“I expect that’s where I saw the name. You picked him up again?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Petrella, “we haven’t. He got across to France, and that’s where he’ll stop if he knows what’s good for him. And if Mr Albert King should turn up looking for his property, you get in touch with your local station.”

“All right,” said Mr Robins. He didn’t sound as if he expected it to happen.

Petrella went out into streets, which were pearly grey with mist. It was the pleasant mist of early November, which comes up from the river after a warm autumn day, and bears no resemblance to the sour London fog, which rolls in, later in the year, from the North Sea, saturated with filth and sends Londoners coughing and choking to their twilight homes.

This mist was a feathery outrider of winter, with implications of football, open fires, and hot toast; a fairy godmother of the good-natured type, who veiled all the street lamps in gauze, softened the angular austerities of brick and slate, and doubled the attraction of little, red-curtained bow windows of the pubs.

Petrella lengthened his stride, like a horse that senses the stable. If he cut through College Crescent and used the maze of connecting streets and alleys beyond, it would take him about fifteen minutes of hard walking to get back to Highside. Then home, a bath, if Mrs Catt’s married daughter hadn’t used up all the hot water, and a long, luxurious, leisurely evening with a book on the “Tactics of Advanced Squeeze Play” which he had bought for twopence that morning from a barrow in the Farringdon Road.

He was on the point of crossing into Q Division – he recognized the invisible boundary, because Q was his own division – when something made him check his pace very slightly, and then cross the road to the pavement on the other side. He had seen, ahead of him, a figure that he thought he recognized.

Up Carrick Street, right at the top, and into Pardoe Street. By this time he was almost certain. It was the way the man walked, with a curious lurch to the right at each step. There was no suggestion of stumbling or weakness in it. Rather the contrary, of strength and purpose, as a well-found ship will butt its way forward, with the wind across and abeam, dipping to each successive trough.

“It’s Boot, all right,” said Petrella to himself. “I wonder what he’s up to now.”

There was no real reason that he should be up to anything but there were a few men, not more, perhaps, than one or two in any division, who were automatically observed wherever they went. “Boot” Howton was one of them. As Petrella watched, he lurched rather farther than usual to the right, executed a stalling turn, and pushed open the saloon-bar door of the Punchbowl public house.

Petrella hesitated. The Punchbowl was not a pub he knew well and, inside his own manor, he was careful to drink only in the two or three houses where he knew the landlord and was known and accepted by the regulars. Then he pushed open the door marked “Private Bar. Jug and Bottle” and went in.

It was a cold, beer-smelling bulkhead in which he found himself, its sides enclosed by head-high wooden partitions, its walls and floor bare. It was furnished with one long table and one very hard bench, and was shut off from the warmth and light of the saloon bar by a row of pivoting shutters of ground glass, which added to this unpromising apartment the suggestion of an ante-room to some discreet seraglio.

However, though it had drawbacks as a place of entertainment, it formed an ideal observation post. Petrella moved one of the glass shutters a few inches and found himself looking directly into the saloon. In the foreground he had a fine view of the mirror-like seat of the landlord’s trousers as he stooped to pull at a beer lever. In mid-vision was a lady with a startling carbuncle on her nose addressing herself to a glass of stout. And in the background, sure enough, was Boot Howton.

The nickname was thought to be a contraction of “Beauty”, and to have been used on the well-known principle on which a twenty-stone man is called “Tiny”.

Boot’s face had started off some yards behind scratch, and this handicap had been increased, in early life, by the total loss of his left eye, and later by a fight in which he had been rash enough to fall down, allowing his opponent to stamp on his nose. What was left was really hardly a nose at all, more a casual accumulation of flesh in the lower middle of his face.

Boot was talking to a very tall, very thin man in a checked suit, a Cambridge-blue waistcoat and drainpipe trousers. Petrella now became aware that the landlord had turned around and was looking at him.

“A pint of mild.”

“I wooden chance the mild,” said the landlord.

“Bitter, then.”

When it came, Petrella said, “That man in the corner with the squashed nose. He’s Howton, isn’t he? Do you happen to know the name of the tall man he’s talking to?”

The landlord’s small bright eyes flickered up and down, weighing up the strange young man in the raincoat.

“I dunno,” he said. “I could ask him, I suppose.”

“No. Don’t do that. But see if you can find out quietly. I’d really like to know.”

The landlord gave him his change, served two railwaymen who had come in on their way home off shift, and disappeared out of the bar. His place was taken by a middle-aged woman with her hair in a net.

Petrella drank his bitter slowly. If it was better than the mild, the mild must have been sensational.

The street door of the private bar swung open and Boot appeared.

“You asking for me?” he said.

Petrella awarded the landlord a black mark for treachery and himself a bigger one for stupidity.

He said, “Yes, I was.”

“Orright,” said Boot, coming in and slamming the door behind him. “Here I am. In person.” The ghost of all the whisky he had been drinking came in with him. “You’re a bogey, ent you?”

“I’m a detective sergeant.”

“I heard they were getting short of recruits. I diddun realize they’d started taking ’em out of the nursery.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Petrella, amiably. “I’m older than I look.”

“I’ve a bloody good mind to give you a bloody good hiding,” said Boot. He was so close that Petrella could see that his single eye was deeply bloodshot. He seemed to have some difficulty in focusing it.

Petrella was cursing his own folly. He reckoned that if it came to a pinch he was quick enough and strong enough to knock Boot down, provided none of his friends butted in. But there was neither pleasure nor profit in hitting a man who was three parts drunk.

He turned on the landlord, who was leaning over the bar, his mouth half open.

“Have you been serving this man with drink?”

The landlord gaped.

“If you have,” said Petrella, “you’d better look out for your license. Can’t you see he’s drunk?”

“Drunk your —ing self,” said Howton. He whipped up one of the bottles from the table and threw it. It missed Petrella by a clear yard, sailed onward in a lazy curve, and struck one of the square glass shutters fair in the middle. The shutter disintegrated.

“Hey!” said the landlord.

“All right,” said Petrella. “Come and help put him out.”

“Put out your —ing grandmother,” said Howton, picking up a second bottle and swinging it. Petrella moved in under the blow, grabbed the big man by the arm six inches above his left elbow, swung him round, and, with his free hand, smacked him sharply in the small of the back. The landlord appeared through a door in the partition and grabbed his other arm expertly. As they reached the street door, it opened.

The newcomer apparently grasped the situation, for he stood smartly aside. Petrella and the landlord released their holds simultaneously, and Howton shot out into the street, staggered a few paces in an attempt to catch up with his legs, tripped, and sat down.

When he got up, the night air and the shock seemed to have driven out some of the whisky. Petrella thought he had never seen an uglier face.

“Having trouble?” inquired the newcomer, who was Detective Sergeant Gwilliam. Sergeant Gwilliam spoke in the soft accent of the valleys. There was sixteen stone of him, and he had played Rugby football for the Metropolitan Police and for Wales.

“Not really,” said Petrella. “Gentleman throwing his weight about.”

“He was surely doing that.”

“’Slucky for you,” said Howton, fixing his single red eye on Petrella, “you’ve found a friend. If you’d been alone, I’d have opened you up.”

He pivoted on his heel and tacked off down the street.

So Petrella and Gwilliam finished the walk home together. The mist was a little thicker now, and through it there appeared the reflected glow of flames. Something sailed through the air and exploded with a crack at their feet.

“Kids,” said Gwilliam.

“Good heavens,” said Petrella. “I’d forgotten. This is Guy Fawkes night, isn’t it?”

“Once a year, and quite enough.”

They stopped for a moment on the railway bridge and looked about them. A dozen fires were visible. The flames of the nearest leapt up, yellow and cheerful in the darkness. The light of the others was filtered by successive layers of mist from bright orange to deep rose-red. In the distance a fire-engine bell started to sound.

“Some year,” said Sergeant Gwilliam, “the Fire Brigade’s going on strike, and we’ll wake up on November 6th and find London burned down, and serve us right.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Petrella. “I think it looks rather fine.”

The mixture of feathery grey with every tone of red would have ravished the eye of an artist.

“The Harringtons,” he said, “have been collecting for months. They got their guy out soon after midsummer and Micky tried to stick me up for a subscription. I said, surely it isn’t November yet, and Micky said ‘Garn, Sarge,
this
isn’t Guy Fawkes, it’s Father Christmas.’”

Gwilliam grunted. He did not share Petrella’s enthusiasm for the Harrington family. They walked the rest of the way to Crown Road in silence, went in under the archway, crossed the courtyard where the police wagons stood, climbed an outside iron staircase, and went through a door which badly needed a coat of paint.

On the left was the room which served Superintendent Haxtell as an office. Considering that the superintendent was responsible for all criminal investigation in a division which stretched from its southern point just above King’s Cross clear up into open country between St Albans and Cheshunt and contained more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, it might seem odd that he had been provided with a room rather smaller than that occupied by a clerical civil servant of the third grade and furnished in a manner which would have brought a protest from the most junior subeditor in Fleet Street. However, the superintendent was quite used to it. Under normal conditions he spent as little time as possible in his office.

Conditions were not normal at the moment, owing to the discovery, a week before, in an empty shed under the railway arches at Pond End, of the misused body of nine-year-old Corinne Hart. Until Corinne’s killer was discovered the superintendent was tied fast to his telephone, and the tiny room was further overcrowded by the addition of a camp bed in one corner.