Honourable Intentions (16 page)

“I-I-I lent it t-to some chaps,” he stuttered.

“Names?” Ranklin snapped.

“J-just some friends o-of Feodor’s.”

“Gorkin’s?” Ranklin glanced at Jay, who shook his head: no one else in the house. “Look the place over for clothes and luggage.” Back to Peverell. “Where is Gorkin?”

“I-I d-don’t know. I-I’ve been as-sleep. G-got a bit tiddly. Sorry.” He sat down abruptly on the stairs, leaned slowly over and was sick.

Ranklin went back to the policeman standing just inside the front room with Corinna and Venetia Sackfield. “I’ve
got the owner of the Simplex for you. But he’s no idea where it is.”

“Good. The Super very much wants a word with him. It seems there isn’t a telephone here, so—”

“Telephone wire going into the place two doors down,” O’Gilroy told him.

“Oh, splendid. I’ve informed this lady she’s under arrest, so if you’d watch her for me? If she tries to escape, please do not use violence, just follow her.”

“I’m not trying to escape, you nincompoop!” Venetia flared. “I
live
here.”

When the policeman had gone, Ranklin nodded Corinna after him.

“Now hold on, I—”

“Out.” Ranklin jerked his thumb. She flounced, but flounced out. He turned to Venetia and made his voice quiet and reasonable. “We are genuinely worried about the fate of Berenice. It isn’t a question of the police this time, it’s some unknown men that Mr Peverell lent his motor-car to. The police think Guillet, the murdered Frenchman,
may
have got into that motor-car just before he was killed. So I hope you understand our worry about Berenice definitely getting into it. I want you – please – to tell us anything you know about those men and where they’ve taken Berenice.”

“She’s going back to France, of her own free will. That’s all.”

“Too late for a boat today,” O’Gilroy said.

“Of her own free will.”

“One last appeal,” Ranklin said. “Please?” After a moment, he turned to O’Gilroy. “She’s obviously in it with them. Maybe two murders, and I doubt the police’ll be able to prove it. Hardly seems just, that.”

He walked over and snapped the bolt on the door.

O’Gilroy took out his pistol, examined it – then thrust it at Venetia’s face.

Ranklin walked back. “She suddenly produced a firearm–this one.” He took out his revolver. “From under that cushion there. You had no choice.”

“We need her fingerprints on it,” O’Gilroy said, his gun quite steady.

Ranklin seized Venetia’s hand and squeezed it round the revolver. She pulled free and Ranklin shrugged. “I’ll get better ones when she’s dead. Nobody can tell.”

“And mebbe a touch of gun oil on the cushion underside?”

“Good point.” He smiled at Venetia. “You see? It’s the little things that give conviction.” He put the revolver down and his fingers in his ears. “In your own time, Mr Gorman.”

“I don’t
know
their names!” Venetia wailed.

Ranklin shook his head irritably. “Get it over with, man.” He replaced his fingers.

Venetia collapsed into a chair and spoke in one panting rush. “Dr Gorkin met them at the Jubilee Street anarchists’ club. I don’t know their names, honestly. They come from around there, they mentioned a Tarling Street. It’s in the East End, you go down Whitechapel High Street and just after it becomes the Mile End Road—”

By then Ranklin was unbolting the door. Unbelieving, Venetia stared at him. Then she rounded on O’Gilroy, who was calmly uncocking his pistol. “You aren’t police! I’m going to
tell
the police!”

“What’ll ye tell ’em? That ye helped two fellers ye knew was from the anarchist club kidnap her?” He turned away and, when he had turned, swallowed hard. He honestly hadn’t been sure what would have happened next, what was
supposed
to happen next. Ranklin had been so convincing about wanting the woman killed . . .

Well, she had been convinced, and that was all that mattered.

When he got outside, Ranklin and Corinna were standing on the pavement, with her pointing out that it was
her
automobile, God damn it.

“It’ll be the East End, and if we catch up with these men, I don’t want to have to worry about you.”

“But I’ll be driving, leaving you free to—”

“O’Gilroy can drive – and when we get there, I’d like him guarding my back, not staying behind with you.”

That was a low blow and the fury on her face showed it. But it ended the fight: she stood aside, looking daggers. Nasty Eastern curly ones.

The bowler-hatted policeman appeared again. “Superintendent Mockford’s on his way. He wants you to—”

“Save your breath,” Corinna advised, as the Daimler pulled away behind the Commander’s Rolls-Royce. “No women or policemen allowed.”

Perhaps traffic was lighter in the City, but the roads there were narrower. Then suddenly they were out on the broad highway of Whitechapel High Street and though neither the Commander nor O’Gilroy knew this territory, all they had to do was follow the tram-lines and scatter the queues coming out to board a tram.

By now the Daimler was leading, Ranklin in the front seat and reading from a London map. Having located Tarling Street, he directed O’Gilroy down the Commercial Road.

“Are we looking for this club place?”

“No, they’d tell us nothing. Also, I forgot to ask whereabouts in Jubilee Street it is and it’s nearly half a mile long. We’ll try Tarling Street; it’s shorter.”

He had O’Gilroy turn down Sutton Street East and stop, then walked back to the Rolls-Royce. “Tarling Street’s the second on the right,” he told the Commander. “D’you want to give any orders?”

“You carry on, you’re doing fine.”

Ranklin nodded. “Our one hope is finding that Simplex. We’ve got no proper address, no description, nothing but that motor-car. And it may not be parked outside the right house. Down here . . .” He gestured: down here, a private motor would stand out like a lighthouse; the locals had as much chance of owning one as they did a holiday home on the moon.

“So if you spot it, knock on doors and ask questions.” And Jay, who would be sent to do the knocking and asking, nodded unenthusiastically.

“You take the next right and work your way down,” Ranklin
told the Commander. “We’ll go down to the railway –” it crossed Sutton Street on arches two hundred yards ahead “– and work our way up.”

Already the sight of two big shiny motor-cars had brought an audience to the nearer doorsteps. The women all wore aprons and kept their arms folded except when they were cuffing their children. Ranklin felt like an explorer meeting an alien tribe and wasn’t sure how they’d answer if he tried speaking to them.

The whole area was alien, dreary, shabby and above all featureless. Just rows of terraced houses, as small as they could be and packed as tight as they could be. These streets lacked even the small, starved shops and sad little pubs of the Commercial Road. Here and there a scrubbed doorstep and shining-clean windows stood out, but such signs of determined hope were rare. And if Ranklin had thought brickwork was just brickwork, he learnt that here it wasn’t: it could be unskilled and careless, with rotting mortar.

And it was so
small,
everything so Lilliputian – except in area. They had passed miles of such streets and he knew there were more miles all around.

They trundled slowly down Sutton Street: there were no side streets on the left, and nothing parked anywhere on the cobbles except for an occasional hand-cart and a couple of horses and carts delivering things. They turned right alongside the railway and there was a motor by Shadwell station, but it was the wrong make and colour and had someone in it obviously waiting for a train passenger.

Right again up Watney Street, which would bring them past the other end of Tarling Street. But first there was a Congregational Church on the corner of a small cross street, and outside was parked the Simplex. It was empty.

O’Gilroy stopped in front of it and they got out and, for want of something to do, peered into the motor. A couple of small boys, in trousers chopped off around the knees, sidled from an alleyway opposite and walked quickly towards the corner, glancing across at them furtively.

O’Gilroy was the one to catch on. He waited until the boys were out of sight, then ran. Bemused but trusting, Ranklin followed. At the corner of the church O’Gilroy stopped, crouched and peered from an unexpected height.

“What are we doing?” Ranklin asked.

“They’d paid those kids to guard the motor, of course. And warn ’em when the likes of us arrived.” And the kids, lacking the Bureau’s deductive reasoning, were instead leading them to the right address. Simple. Except that Ranklin would have missed it.

O’Gilroy hurried across the road. Ranklin saw the Rolls-Royce and waved it towards him. O’Gilroy was peeking round into Tarling Street. Then he ran around the corner.

As the Rolls-Royce came up and turned, Ranklin jumped on the running-board, and they accelerated after O’Gilroy. The two boys scattered from a front door halfway down a terrace of two-storey houses. A man stuck his head out, saw the might of the Secret Service Bureau at full charge, and slammed the door in O’Gilroy’s face.

He didn’t bother with it. He tried the front door next along – it wasn’t even locked – and plunged in. Ranklin reached the shut front door just ahead of Lieutenant Jay. He tried one push, fired his revolver twice into the lock, then stab-kicked the door. It tore open – and he hesitated before barging into the dark hallway ahead.

From next door came a wave of outraged yells and children’s screams charting O’Gilroy’s route through to the back yard. Ranklin said: “Oh, bugger it. Cover me,” and charged ahead in a crouch. He must remember he had only three shots left.

He threw open a door on his right, got no reaction, and saw it was dim but empty. Jay had rushed past, holding some long cowboy pistol from the Commander’s collection. Suddenly there was uproar from a closed door at the end of the hallway, perhaps including Berenice’s voice.

Jay kicked in the door and ducked. Past him, Ranklin saw a man dragging Berenice out into the back yard. Then, from next door’s back yard, O’Gilroy shouted: “Yer surrounded!”
The man part-loosed his grip on Berenice to raise an odd-shaped pistol at O’Gilroy’s voice. Berenice wrenched free and went sprawling.

Four guns went off in a mixture of cracks, bangs and the boom of Jay’s cowboy weapon. The man staggered, tried to correct his balance, and died trying. He fell like a puppet with its strings cut.

Thinking back afterwards, Ranklin wondered if, after days of tiptoeing around with legalisms and delicate questions, there hadn’t been a subconscious desire to
do
something.

11

The average policeman looked very big in that small, low, narrow house, and this many looked like a Derby Day crowd. By the time Superintendent Mockford arrived, Ranklin had tidied matters up a bit. A second man had been found hiding under a bed upstairs, with a jammed pistol nearby. Questioning him had been delegated to Jay and O’Gilroy. Meanwhile the Commander had been persuaded (it hadn’t taken much effort) to go away.

And Ranklin had talked to Berenice. She was badly shaken, shivering and pale under her grubbiness, but he had found a man’s topcoat to wrap around her while she told of being taken “to see Dr Gorkin“, which hadn’t happened, and gradually coming to the conclusion that she was going to be killed.

“Oh, you were, you were,” Ranklin said as convincingly as possible. The last thing he wanted was her saying she’d been having a wonderful time until the Bureau arrived.

And now it was just after sunset and Mockford and the three agents were standing in the little paved area by the corpse, watching a police doctor decide he was dead and a photographer set up his camera and tripod.

The doctor stood up and washed his hands under the tap against the house wall. “He’s got at least five bullet holes in him – I wouldn’t be surprised to find more when I get him stripped down – and very little bleeding. I think you can say death was instantaneous, if that’s of any help.”

Mockford asked: “And where do you think his one shot went?”

O’Gilroy waved his hand towards the chest-high garden wall to the right. “Somewheres over there.”

Mockford looked at the darkening eastern sky and grunted. “You can have him when the photographer’s through, doctor,” and turned back into the house.

It was full of policemen, making laborious lists of things found and wrapping some of them in brown paper for fingerprint tests later. In the hallway two constables were waiting with a well-worn coffin to remove the deceased, and they had to ease their way past them to reach the front room. Another constable came through the broken front door with a billycan, a handful of enamel mugs and enough sense to offer tea to the Super first.

Ranklin had never seen a police investigation in action before and was struck by how slow, how mills-of-God it seemed, in contrast with the few seconds of action that had caused it. Like gravediggers on a battlefield, perhaps.

“Have you found anything?” Mockford demanded of a searcher in the front room.

“Nothing much, sir, but—”

“Then probably there’s nothing here. Try again later.” He took a spindly chair, shook the heaviest dust off it, and sat down. They all found places to sit, and the four of them filled the room nicely. So then they had to have a fifth, a sergeant with a notebook who looked carefully at the wall before leaning on it.

The single gas lamp had been lit and curtains, only thick enough to blur the vision, pulled shut.

“First, sir, can you tell me why you didn’t just watch this house and the motor-car, and send word for us?”

“Not that easy,” Ranklin said. “We didn’t know which house except by following the kids who were to tip them off that we’d arrived. Then we either had to charge in at once or lose surprise. Basic military tactics.”

“This was not a military exercise – sir.”

“I don’t know . . . it might be best if it somehow was. You’re going to meet a lot of pressure not to say who we really are.”

“Don’t write that down, sergeant,” Mockford said quickly, then sighed. He was used to being told “your superiors won’t like this”, but not to its being true. And certainly not to Ranklin’s sympathetic tone, as if the whole thing had been just an incident that was nobody’s fault. “You could still have just set a watch on the house – sir. Even if they knew you were out there.”