Mr. Love and Justice (14 page)

In the next days Frankie took the following precautions.

He visited the Stepney Bengali, told him to draw three hundred pounds for him, bought a single air ticket to Monrovia and checked the validities in his passport.

He had a long conversation with the janitor at the Kilburn flat – who, he’d long discovered, had formerly seen harpooning service upon whalers – made him within the privacy of his quarters at the lodge a comradely gift (for old times’ sake), and suggested it was undesirable to have among them in the block a copper in disguise who’d probably get busted anyway for living with a woman out of wedlock, and that if this copper’s flat by any chance should become vacant somehow, he, Frankie, knew someone who’d be very glad to offer double – maybe more – the usual key-money that he, the janitor, expected.

He then followed Edward’s girl one morning she went out shopping and, choosing his moment in an empty street came up suddenly beside her, immediately said, ‘Give your copper boyfriend this,’ dropped a little package in her shopping-bag, and made off at a steady pace before she could reply.

To round matters off he sent this anonymous telegram, by telephone from a call-box, to the local station of the Force:
WHERE DOES EDWARD JUSTICE LIVE AND WHY.

Finally, to clear the decks for any possible action he sent his girl to spend a short holiday with her faith-healing mum at Walthamstow. She departed reluctantly under protest, and in the taxi said to him, ‘Frankie, you ever thought of getting married?’

‘We’ve discussed that. No.’

‘I mean now. The way things are, and now you’ve saved up a bit.’

Frankie looked at her. ‘Are you trying to tell me, babe,’ he said, ‘you’d consider giving up the game if we got wed?’

‘Yeah. As a matter of fact that’s it.’

‘Well! That’s rather sweet of you! But honest, baby, I’m not the marrying kind.’

‘No, I suppose not. But think it over, will you, when this thing blows over? We could move up north somewhere, one of the ports, and open up a caff or club or something for the seamen.’

‘And the girls!’

‘Well, why not! For the both of them. But on the up-and-up – legitimate.’

He kissed her. ‘I’ll think about it, dear,’ he said.

She reached forward, pulled aside the driver’s window and yelled at his neck, ‘Not that way – that way!’ then took Frankie’s arm again and said, ‘I wish you’d let me handle all this for you, dear.’

‘And what would you do?’

‘Me? Use my fanny for you. I mean, find out why they’re getting at you, and who, and offer him the best time of his life.’

‘Thanks, dear – but no good. A copper wouldn’t know a really good time if he had it.’

Edward was closeted with his girl’s disreputable father: who as Edward’s affairs had grown in their complexity had become, in a sense, increasingly his own. For the older man this new relationship was possible because Edward now stood revealed in spite of his hateful uniform as a creature, like himself, of common clay. Not that the father ever forgot Edward’s status: in spite of their growing intimacy Edward, for him, was still more a copper than a son-in-law-to-be.

Amid the confusion of the father’s workroom with its radios and tellies and cameras and miscellaneous junk, Edward unfolded all the plots and counter-plots by which he was now surrounded. One matter, at any rate, was satisfactorily disposed of – or almost so – between them: the father was willing to go abroad. A sufferer from lumbago, he believed the heat of the
Central African Federation would benefit his condition; and in a land where brains and technical skill were needed (and manual labour which was painful to him would be available in plenty), he thought that he would find his niche. But what, Edward countered, about the immigration regulations? Wouldn’t they check up on his past career?

To overcome this obstacle the older man had imagined a truly Napoleonic solution which he now disclosed to Edward with a crafty smile. He’d not applied for a resident permit but for one for visitors, and had already been sent the appropriate application forms. To Question 18, which asked, candidly, ‘Have you ever been in prison?’ he had simply and boldly written, ‘No’: relying on the magic that a completed form held
in itself
to those who had devised it and who, he imagined, would be most unlikely to check up; anyway, his ‘trouble’ had been a long while ago, and if
they
said ‘No’, well, all right, he’d try somewhere else climatically suitable. If the visa was granted he would go there, look around, establish contacts and, he was certain, make himself useful enough for them to want to keep him in the Federation on a permanent basis. It was really after all, he added, only
political
undesirables they were anxious to exclude from the Rhodesias.

Edward on his side disclosed the business of the snuff-box, and the hopeful prospects its probable recovery held out of supplementing the nest-egg of the prospective emigrant. Edward did not consider it likely that Frankie, given time to meditate, would refuse to yield it up; and if he
did prove obstinate, that situation could be faced as it arose. To bring pressure on the ponce he had, after reflection, hit on this: he’d called up Frankie’s girl from a public-box (on the number kindly supplied, for a consideration, by the flat janitor – a good friend of his and a special constable, as well as an ex-seaman on a whaler) and the moment the receiver had been raised, had said immediately, ‘Miss, this is a
well-wisher
in the Force to say if Frankie does as he’s asked I promise there’ll be no further trouble,’ hanging up instantly without waiting for a reply.

‘So that leaves us,’ Edward said, ‘with one vital thing outstanding: this visit you had, and who I’ve told you I think is at the bottom of it.’

The ex-criminal reflected. ‘What I don’t fathom yet,’ he said, ‘is this. If as you say it’s a pal of yours in the Force who’s trying to harm you by framing me – and from what I know of you and your pals the thing, in itself, is very possible – why doesn’t he try to plant something on
you
direct? And if he chooses me, why does he come here and not plant anything at all?’

‘Look,’ Edward answered. ‘I love your girl: now, you believe that, don’t you? whatever you think about me and about the Force. Well, this man he’s a clever one. He knows if he can get at you and so get at
her
, he gets at me worse than any other way. Also, he knows I’m on my guard and naturally I’d recognise him if he came snooping around my place at all.’

‘Then why did he just come snooping around mine here and nothing else? Not plant anything, if that’s what you think he’s up to?’

‘Well, it’s a way we have: perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, but it’s this: always reconnoitre, if you can, before you act. It’s laid down in all the manuals.’

‘Is it? Oh, I see.’

‘Besides, he may not have had the right
thing
to plant on you until he saw the situation here: I mean, what sort of item might seem credible.’

Edward realised his girl’s father was looking very hard at him indeed. ‘So you
do
plant things, you bastards,’ the father said.

Edward paused, then answered, ‘Look: do we have to go into all that again?’

‘Sonny boy!’ the father said, ‘let me tell you something. I’m so glad I’m not you: that’s all. You’ve all got minds like mazes: trick upon trick until you tie yourself in knots. Take care you don’t get lost inside your own maze, boy, some day!’

Edward waited patiently for the father’s natural resentment to subside (coppers are used to this – as used as doctors are to pain), then said, ‘Now the thing is, he may come again. And if he does, this time I want to catch him water-tight, report him to my Detective-Sergeant and get him busted, or anyway transferred. My Detective-Sergeant doesn’t like him, you see, and
none
of us likes a man who shops his comrades.’

Now, the father waited silently.

‘So here’s what I suggest. He’ll very probably come here again soon and if he does, this time he’ll have something with him. So we’ve got to catch him in the act. You follow me?’

‘Yeah. I’m listening.’

‘Now, I want to ask my girl – your girl – to come back and stay here with you for a while.’

‘Why? You were anxious enough to get her away from me a time ago …’

‘I know. But I want her out of the flat up there until I get things straightened out with this ponce I mentioned and also – this is the point and hear me out carefully please, don’t raise your voice or be hasty – I want her here
when
this so-called star-sleuth colleague of mine shows up on the premises.’

‘Why?’

‘To fix him.’

‘How?’

Edward looked round the room. ‘Now, you’ve got cameras,’ he said, ‘and flashes. I want you to lock all the rooms every night except where my girl will be sleeping. And I want you, if possible, to snap the pair of them together.’

‘Together doing what?’

‘Nothing! What you take me for?’

‘Well, what you take
me
for?’

‘I said – don’t be hasty! As soon as he’s in the house I’ll tell her she’s to run out to him, even if he doesn’t come into her room at all: you know – dishevelled and distressed and so on: she’ll do it all right for me.’

The father looked at Edward and shook his head. ‘And that’s who my daughter wants to marry,’ he said simply. ‘Well, I give up! And how do we know he’s in the house at all? I didn’t last time …’

‘But you were out. And you weren’t expecting him. Look! He’s not a magician, he can only get in through  the doors or windows … You’ve not got a skylight?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I want you to wire them all: the ones he can get in at, anyway. Can you do that?’

‘I could do …’

‘Something silent: a light comes on in your room – or a faint buzz – then you grab your camera and go into action.’

‘I see. So I go to bed with my camera every night for weeks?’

‘No: a week should be enough. Then the case that we’re both working on is over – anyway, the raid we’re planning will be – and he’ll probably lay off me after that. It’s because we’re together on this job that he’s so riled and jealous. Once it’s over I’ll just warn him off, and tell him I know what he’s been up to.’

‘Why don’t you do that now?’

‘Because I want to compromise him if I can: I mean, turn the tables on him so that he’ll never try anything again! Show him who I am and who he is!’

The father looked at Edward with faint pity. ‘You think the photo you speak of, if I took it, would do that? Do they believe photos at all, then, in your Force?’

‘I won’t even have to show it to them: only to him and say I’ve got the negative.’

‘And you think he’s all that dangerous to you?’

‘He and my Detective-Sergeant are the only colleagues, so far as I can tell, that know about me and my girl. I
think the Detective-Sergeant’s okay – I think he likes me; and if I can shut the other one up, by the time we’ve got you away we can put in the application properly and get married.’

‘When you’ve got rid of me.’

‘Don’t be like that! You know your girl loves me and I do her and this is the only way I can see to fix it!’

The father put his hand in quite a friendly way on Edward’s arm. ‘You know,’ he mildly said, ‘you really are a nasty piece of work – a proper little scheming bastard. Also, I think you’re overwrought and what you’re asking me to do’s a lot of nonsense. Why don’t you take a holiday for a while?’

‘My leave’s not due yet – and I need it for the honeymoon.’

‘Yes. That’s the funny thing – she loves you. She really does: Eve alone knows why. Well, I’ll see what I can do. But I want you to understand there’s to be no funny business with my girl inside my house, and the only
promise
I’m making you is that if you raise the balance of the funds, I’ll go.’

The front bell rang and both men stiffened, as if it were already the star sleuth on the doorstep. But it was the girl: manifestly upset, and bursting with fell tidings.

Getting her story wrong-way-round chronologically (though right way in point of urgency), she began by crying out. ‘It’s disappeared!’ Calm and adroit questioning by Edward extracted the story of Frankie’s alarming deposition of the snuff-box in her shopping-bag, how she’d got home, found out what it was, put it away
safely until Edward should arrive, but that now it had gone from where she’d placed it.

‘And where was that?’

‘Among my lingerie.’

‘And why did you go out again?’

‘Just to the pictures.’

‘For how long?’

‘As long as the big film.’

‘It
must
be him!’ Edward concluded. ‘Well! Now we know what he’s going to try and plant here.’

‘Must be who?’ asked the girl.

But the men ignored her. ‘It couldn’t,’ the father said, ‘be that ponce himself who’s changed his mind and got it back …?’

‘Listen! The man’s not crazy!’

‘But if it’s your colleague wasn’t it enough, if he wanted to compromise you, to find it in your flat?’

‘No. No, because he knew I could say I had it there ready to turn it in. But if it’s found
here
, then it looks black for me –
and
for you: don’t forget that!’

‘I hadn’t,’ the father said. ‘But there’s one more thing. Couldn’t it be he’ll just take it to the Madam and get the reward instead of you?’

‘How does he know she’s offered one?’

‘Well – he might know.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Edward said emphatically, sure of his diagnosis of the star sleuth’s psychology. ‘And what
I
’m going to do is this. Take a big chance, sit tight and wait for him to move: try to plant it here like I’ve explained. Then, if
you
two co-operate like
you’ve promised, I get him
and
I get the box back and the reward!’

‘What have I promised?’ asked the girl with trust and deep anxiety in her eyes.

‘More than perhaps you realise,’ said her father.

Edward enfolded her with a truly loving arm. ‘It’s quite simple to explain,’ he said, ‘and if you come out with me in the garden I’ll put you in the picture and fill in all the details for you. It’s just one or two things that might look wrong, I admit, if it was any other girl than you who did them or anyone else who asked you to do them other than myself. But things, as you’ll see, that are very necessary to us for our salvation.’