The Mysterious Commission (13 page)

‘I’ve gathered,’ he said, ‘that this man Crumble is a known criminal. That was the reason of your being able to identify him from my sketch. But is bank robbery his particular line?’

‘Oh, Crumble’s a versatile villain.’

‘I see.’ It appeared to Honeybath that his simple question had produced an unexpected flicker or falter in the confidence which Keybird was now so determinedly radiating. This struck him as curious. ‘At least in the main,’ he persisted, ‘you associate him with other forms of felony?’

‘That’s correct.’ Keybird said this rather shortly. But then he seemed to recall that it was upon his own invitation that Honeybath was sitting in on the present operation. ‘But not even naked felony, as often as not. You might call him a minor intriguer in what have tended to be pretty large-scale shady or borderline enterprises.’

‘A negotiator? Sounding people out?’

‘Very much that.’

‘It was precisely his job with me, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Oh, very obviously. It was simply his assignment to dangle some carrot in front of you and lead you into a conveniently distant paddock.’

‘That’s very well put.’ Honeybath didn’t, in fact, feel that he had just been treated to one of Keybird’s more felicitous speeches. ‘But doesn’t it suggest that, so far as this robbery goes, Crumble’s role may have been as what they call a guest artist? Brought in to do his own characteristic turn, but not bound up with the main show in any close way?’

‘He was there with your friends in the country.’

‘Well, yes – but that, you may say, was to sustain in me the illusion that my commission made sense, if rather odd sense, in itself. And it removed him, just as it removed me, from the scene of the actual robbery. I suppose you hope to work from him, who is known to you, to the others, who are not. But you hardly expect, I take it, to find him actually sitting on the plunder?’

‘We’ll know quite soon now,’ Keybird said. He had glanced at the watch. ‘I expect you understand the conditions of the operation. Each of these possible hide-outs has to be effectively sealed off – and without causing alarm in a single one of them. No getaway by the back, or through an adjoining building, or over the roof. The chap there beside the driver’ – Keybird pointed to the front of the car, where a dimly seen figure appeared to be carrying on a muttered colloquy with the ether at large – ‘is checking off the dispositions one by one. About 200 officers involved, I’d say. When the last of them is in position I give the word to move in.’

‘Most remarkable.’ Honeybath was impressed, or at least felt he ought to be, by this military set-up. ‘And we sit tight here as a kind of HQ?’

‘Not exactly. We’re just turning into Little Porges Street now, and the wharf is at the other end of it. In fact we’re not more than a hundred yards from the river. The disused warehouse ought to be looming up somewhere on the left. Yes, there it is.’ Keybird had been peering out into an East End gloom: a vista of what those not living in them are inclined to call mean streets – most of them feebly and crudely lit as if by some local council anxious to recapture the charms of the Victorian Age, a few of them for unknown reasons deluged in a brutal flood of raw electricity. The pubs had closed long ago, so there weren’t many people about; their place had been taken, here and there by wisps and drifts of dun vapour from the Thames. From the Thames, too, came from time to time mournful nautical noises. Customs launches on the prowl for petty contraband, freighters just turned round and plodding sullenly off to the Antipodes once more, barges whose farthest ambition was the Isle of Dogs: only an expert ear could have discriminated their honks and wails and moanings.

‘Stop and lights out,’ Keybird said, with his habitual affectation of addressing empty air when giving orders. ‘Midway between the next two lamp-posts.’

They glided to a halt in almost complete darkness. Nothing happened for what seemed a long time.

‘Trouble in Hampstead,’ the man in front reported unemotionally. ‘They want another fifteen minutes, sir. Tricky stretch of roof-top in Upper Park Road.’

‘OK. Fifteen minutes isn’t worth a broken neck.’ Keybird opened the door beside him. ‘We’ll stretch our legs.’

Honeybath recalled the last occasion upon which this proposition had been put to him. Out in the murk with his Detective Superintendent, he wondered whether he would presently turn round and find the police car to have vanished. But this was an uncontrolled and idle thought. Their four feet produced an alarming clump-clump in the deserted street.
With cat-like tread
, Honeybath thought to himself, and heard Sir Arthur Sullivan’s tune faintly inside his head.

‘HQ be damned,’ Keybird said suddenly. The suggestion appeared to have irked him. ‘I told you this place was my bet among the whole lot. And I go in first. It’s the drill.’

‘Crumble may be armed?’

‘Lord, no! This isn’t a gangster film.’

‘Then can I come too?’ It was with some surprise that Honeybath (eminent and elderly portrait painter) heard himself utter this small boy’s plea.

‘I’m afraid not. Definitely not. No danger – but too irregular by a long way. The Commissioner himself would hear of it and raise hell. Sorry. But you’ll be all right outside.’

‘I see,’ Honeybath said, and this time heard obtrusive resignation in his own voice. But for his inner ear he murmured: ‘And your Commissioner be damned too.’

It might have been said that the Honeybath blood was up.

Little Porges Street could readily have been taken for a cul-de-sac. It terminated in a high blank wall. But the last of the houses on its east side (which proved to be the house in which it was thought possible that Crumble lurked) incorporated in its structure a tunnel-like passage which gave upon a small wharf. On two sides of the wharf stood the abandoned warehouse, dimly distinguishable as a tall L-shaped building. On the fourth side flowed – or rather slopped and slapped – the river. The small, restless movement of the water round invisible timbers was the only sound to be heard.

‘Contiguous,’ Keybird murmured. ‘It’s probably quite possible to slip from one to the other. Interesting, wouldn’t you say?’

Honeybath supposed it to be interesting – the fact, that is, that house and warehouse must own a considerable stretch of party-wall between them. He supposed, however, that what thieves would be most likely to secrete in a warehouse would be the millions of packets of cigarettes, or the hundreds of crates of whisky, which are constantly being hijacked from mammoth night-travelling lorries – although even more constantly, perhaps, on television than in real life. What you lifted from a bank, even on a large scale, could hardly require accommodation of this magnitude. But perhaps it was the simple getaway potential of the whole layout that Keybird judged to be promising.

Honeybath looked out over the river – itself invisible – and became aware that he was seeing something. His eyesight was good, and practised in fine accommodations. So he saw this dull dark shape seemingly floating in a void, and guessed at once that it was a police launch. The undistinguished dwelling at the end of Little Porges Street, and the warehouse which it adjoined, were really under siege. And so, it seemed, were almost a score of houses in and around London.

The darkness suddenly became alarming and horrible, and he looked up at the sky, as if there would be relief in a lavish, or even a meagre, show of stars. But, of course, there were no stars; there was only the dull angry glow – like the dome of Tophet stretching from horizon to horizon – which is London’s lurid lid at night. Then he saw a light – a quick flash, instant and vanishing – on the roof of the warehouse. Once again, the police.

And, once again, the goggle-box world took hold of him. How many thrillers end up in an abandoned warehouse! The baddies are at bay, and armed. They race up staircases, preferably spiral ones. They shoot as they race. The emissaries of justice fire back, dodge behind vast and precariously balanced crates. The crates tumble; the cops fall deftly on their bellies behind bulging sacks, and continue to shoot. Some of them perform cunning outflanking manoeuvres, involving much personal hazard: they climb from window to window along exiguous ledges, or swing across yawning intervening spaces on conveniently dangling ropes. Some of the ropes end in enormous hooks, potent in hideous suggestiveness. The baddies have a concealed explosive device, conveniently disposed. The chief baddy’s hand is on the plunger when a bullet gets him – probably bang between the eyes. He then – lest this should be judged inconclusive – disappears backwards through one of those upper apertures which, in warehouses, give so usefully upon nothing but a hundred-foot drop. Eventually–

Charles Honeybath realized that this was a foolish fantasy – and that he had been cautiously led back through the tunnel and into Little Porges Street. Keybird’s hand was still on his elbow. And Keybird could just be distinguished as looking at his watch. And just distinguishable, too, was an unimpressive and ancient van drawn up by the kerb. It might have represented the last hope of an indigent itinerant greengrocer. A torch momentarily flickered, and Honeybath saw that the van was loaded not with potatoes but with policemen. Such a huddle of helmeted men couldn’t look other than absurd, and the whole deployment of manpower seemed altogether excessive for the rounding up of the insignificant rascal he remembered as Peach – or even for the rounding up, as it were, of a whole basket of Peaches. One had to assume that Peach’s or Crumble’s conjectured associates were altogether more desperate characters. Presumably the larger the robbery the heavier the penalty if you were caught. (Honeybath found himself – fatefully, as it was to turn out – wondering about the ethics of this.) And these people had achieved an enormous haul. They had to be thought of as playing for high stakes, either way. If there were by chance a number of them inside this dark and silent house, it was possible that one had to be prepared for their trying to shoot their way out.

But it was precisely the complete absence of any sign of such preparation that struck Honeybath in the next ten minutes. The policemen had debouched from the van, and gave the effect of filling the narrow street. There was another batch on the wharf, and there were certainly several on the roof. A couple of Radar-like dogs were also in evidence. But the equipment of this assault force appeared to consist entirely of electric torches and walkie-talkies. Perhaps the constables concealed, presumably down a trouser-leg, truncheons not much modified since the age of Dogberry and Verges. But of fire-arms there wasn’t a sign. An odd tradition, Honeybath thought. And he suddenly felt rather proud of mucking in with Keybird and his crowd, even if as a mere indulged spectator.

The house was no longer in complete darkness. A dim and respectable light had appeared behind a curtained upper window; what it somehow suggested to Honeybath was the aged widow of some blameless petty shopkeeper in the district betaking herself to bed. Probably this whole foray would prove a farce, and Crumble turn out to be anywhere but in this particular hypothetical retreat.

Keybird was on the doorstep, flanked by two constables – and with one of these was one of the dogs. A position on the pavement had been indicated to Honeybath; and he supposed that from its security he was to continue his passive participation in the affair. Keybird looked at his watch for the last time, raised a hand, and knocked on the door. It was a loud knock, but there was nothing dramatic about it. And, having knocked, he patiently waited. The place was a sealed box, after all. Nothing happened.

Keybird knocked again. This time, and presumably as a consequence, the light in the upper room went out. Whereupon Keybird spoke – again undramatically, and with what might have been termed only a token or ritual loudness.

‘We are police officers,’ Keybird said. ‘Open the door.’ In the same instant that he produced his injunction the two constables hurled themselves forward with staggering momentum. The door gave way before them with a splintering crash. Honeybath felt that he was at least learning all the time.

Keybird, the two mobile battering-rams, the deutero-Radar: these all disappeared together into a darkness rendered only the more confusing by a sort of maniacal torchlight ballet. Honeybath, watching his chance on the pavement, saw that there was in fact no choice before him. A solid mass of policemen was now hurtling forward; he was caught up in it regardlessly and swept along like a bathing child overtaken by a wave and tumbled on the beach.

One resents being jostled. But this jostling had inadvertently got Honeybath precisely where he wanted to be: in on the final act of an undeniably exciting drama. It was therefore illogical of him to feel resentful. But the surging policemen had been so big and so young and so little inclined to notice him that he did find himself nourishing the emotion, midway between irritation and anger, which it has more than once been necessary to record him as subject to. It didn’t last long. But it lasted long enough to produce what was certainly the most startlingly aberrant piece of conduct his entire course of life had produced as far. (Others lay ahead.)

There was a narrow little hall, with a narrow little staircase running straight up one side of it. There were doors to right and left, and ahead there was a glass door, displeasingly coloured, which must lead to such domestic offices as a miserable dwelling of this order might boast of. So much Honeybath could distinguish by torchlight – as also the fact that the whole area afforded singularly little space for manoeuvre. Several policemen had plunged at a rapid lumber into the room on the left; it was observable that they all wore stiff and cumbersome greatcoats which gave their movements an impeded and robot-like air. Moments later they lumbered out again; and it was now that one of them, a sergeant, for the first time remarked Honeybath’s unauthorized though not exactly voluntary presence. He stared in horror.

‘In here,’ the sergeant said peremptorily. ‘And don’t stir again until you’re told to.’ And he actually took Honeybath (schoolfellow of the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury) by the shoulders and propelled him into the room. He then banged the door shut on him, and left him to his own devices.