They Never Looked Inside (22 page)

“Always the same sort of package?”

“Identically. The same shape, the same weight, and wrapped and sealed in the same way.”

“Did he know the men?”

“No—they were almost always different. One or two of them have done it twice. None more than twice.”

“Incredible. Are we all incurably dishonest?”

“They say that you can bribe anyone,” said McCann, “if you pay enough. I look at it like this. The man coming back from leave was probably hard up anyway. Someone gets hold of him, and promises him twenty pounds for something that’s so easy that it can’t go wrong. Or so it seems. Just take the box and put it inside your battle-dress. No one ever searches soldiers coming back from leave. When you get to the Camp at Dieppe, give it to the Sergeant-cook. It’s money for old rope. Everyone else is doing it. Why not you?”

“Well,” said Major Middleton practically, “the proof of the pudding was in the eating. It must have been a good system, because it worked. It’s been going on for eight months without a hitch.”

“We might catch a few of the carriers now, I suppose, poor beggars. It’s really not them we’re after at all.”

“I’ve promoted Corporal Sutherland to Sergeant Golightly’s place – he’s about the same shape, too. If anyone approaches him with the patter and offers him a package he’ll know what to do.”

“Yes, I think we’ve got that tied up all right. It’s the next step that worries me—there’s a touch of illegality about it that I don’t quite like.”

By Tuesday morning the weather had mended and a notice on the boards warned “Draft X” to parade at 1200 hours and “Draft Y” to stand by for a possible move at 2200 hours.

“Draft X” packed happily and “Draft Y” said: “Just our perishing luck, a night crossing.”

At 1230 “Draft X”, which consisted of about a hundred and twenty men, climbed into six three-tonners and were carried down to the quay. Here they dismounted, formed column of threes, and marched for about four hundred yards along the quay, carrying their baggage, whilst the lorries, now empty, drove beside them. This was such a normal military manoeuvre that it caused no comment.

At the end of the quay was a large shed, and the column was directed behind this, turned left, and told to sit down and wait.

The first ten men, who had formed the leading files and were thus on the right hand end of the line, found themselves fallen out and marched round the corner of the shed, and out of the sight of their comrades.

The older hands began to scratch their heads. This was a variation from the normal, and therefore suspect. How the rumour started no one knew, but it spread with the speed of a prairie-fire, and, as is the way with rumours, it grew in the spreading.

“’Ave you ‘eard what they’re doing? Those ten blokes wot went orf first. Searching ‘em? I’ll say they’re searching ‘em. Stripped to the skin. Yus. There’s about fifty coppers – plain-clo’es men, beside the Customs. What’s it all about? Smugglin’ or somethin’. ‘Eard about Nobby? That gold ring he had off the
signoreena.
‘E’d put it in the middle of a bully-sandwich, in ‘is ‘aversack ration. Artful, he? But you know what happened—they ‘ad a — great magnet. Electromagnet—yus. That hauled it out, quick as a dose of salts.”

Ten more men were led off.

The depression deepened among the remaining hundred. Almost all of them were smugglers in a small way – a hundred cigarettes, a Jerry watch, a bottle of Anisette, a phial of dubious scent from Venice or Milan.

Another quarter of an hour passed, and the Embarkation Officer appeared and gave an order. The remaining men were fallen in and marched on board the waiting transport.

Here they found the first twenty victims, and the general amazement grew. Apparently no one had been searched at all.

“Searched!” said an undersized rifleman. “Whatcher talking about. We bin sitting here kicking our — heels waiting for you—s to come on board.”

“One more M.F.U.,” was the general verdict of the mystified draft.

No sooner had the gang-planks been taken up and the boat warped off than a curious scene was enacted which would have confirmed the soldiery in their opinion of the higher military mind.

A squad of gendarmes, assisted by a number of civilians, and apparently directed by a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, assembled on the spot on which the draft had been so recently seated. Armed with long iron-spiked poles similar to those used by British park-keepers, they prodded and poked in systematic fashion up and down the whole area. Another squad searched under the edge of the shed against which the rear line had squatted.

Both parties unearthed a number of things, all of which were brought to the Colonel for his inspection; many of them seemed to cause him amusement.

It was the party searching under the shed who made the find. One of them, feeling with his hands along the central line of piles, felt a place where the sand had been recently disturbed.

He brought his trophy to McCann.

It was an ordinary army water-bottle of painted enamel, brand new.

“Full too, by the weight of it,” said McCann. He jerked out the cork and upended it. No water came out.

“More and more interesting.” He borrowed M. Bren’s knife and cut the stitches of the covering felt, removing it carefully. The secret of the bottle was then revealed. The base had been cut away, resoldered, and carefully replaced; the join in the enamel was patent.

Most of the helpers had stopped work and gathered round in an excited crowd.

“It is, perhaps, an infernal machine,” suggested Monsieur Bren, grasping the base plate firmly.

The crowd receded.

McCann pulled, M. Bren twisted, the crowd held its breath.

The plate yielded with a jerk, and a twist of wash-leather shot out, falling to the ground.

McCann picked it up and again untwisted it. Inside there lay two of the most beautiful diamond bracelets he had ever seen.

“Well now, gentlemen,” said the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, “I think we are in a position to move.”

“From our point of view,” said Colonel Hunt, “the sooner the better.”

“And ours.” Chief Inspector Hazlerigg glanced at Inspector Pickup, who nodded.

Seated on the Commissioner’s right was a pale grey gentleman, clothed in that suit of self-effacing rectitude which seems to be the uniform of all senior civil servants. He was, in fact, a permanent under-secretary from the Home Office, and an Important Person.

“I take it,” he said, “that such a drastic step is ab-so-lutely necessary. We have to consider public opinion, you know.”

Fortunately the Commissioner was well used to dealing with permanent under-secretaries.

“I think,” he observed, “that I will ask Chief Inspector Hazlerigg to run over his conclusions for us, gentlemen, and you will be able to judge for yourselves what the position really is.”

Hazlerigg cleared his throat.

“In my last report, sir, I told you that we had reason to suspect that the stolen property – the result of those burglaries which we were investigating – was being disposed of abroad. At the time, our chief reason for thinking so was a negative one – in other words, we were unable to believe that if the stuff
was
disposed of in England, we should have had no hint of it. We had very full and very accurate descriptions of most of the jewellery, and I need hardly remind you that micro-photography and other methods of comparative analysis make it difficult for the criminal to dispose of known stolen articles, especially where these consist of precious metal or precious stones. The stolen goods were all of this character, ranging from rings, watches and bracelets to ingots and loose coins. The bulk of the metal was gold, with some commercial platinum, and a little silver. Monsieur Bren of the Paris Sûreté, whose valuable co-operation has been much appreciated—”

Here the under-secretary made a sort of humming noise, presumably to indicate that the appreciation was official.

“—Monsieur Bren has been in charge of this side of the investigation. By a process of elimination he was able to convince us that the route by which the goods left the country and the proceeds were brought back, was the leave and demobilisation route from Milan, in Italy, through Switzerland, to Ostend and Dieppe, and so across the Channel.

“Our first notion was simply that the goods were disposed of abroad. After examination, however, we discarded the idea. I’m not suggesting that a ready market could not be found for valuables abroad, but the real difficulty was that payment for them would then have been made in foreign currency – Italian, German or French. This would have presented no obstacle if the gang had been operating from one of those countries, but we were convinced that this was not so. We knew, with practical certainty, that the overall direction was English, and the eventual pay-off was taking place in England, and therefore in English money.

“I won’t bother you with a summary of the arguments bearing on this point, because they are now out of date. We have, I think, discovered the correct
modus operandi
of the group – thanks largely to the efforts of Monsieur Bren and an army liaison officer who was working with him.

“The system is really very simple. The principal object of the burglaries was to obtain gold. Gold or gold alloy. These metals were used here, in England, for the making of
English sovereigns.
It was a unique form of coining since the article which the forgers were producing had probably more gold in it than the standard minted sovereign itself.

“However, as you all know, it is not just the amount of gold in it which gives the sovereign its unique position on the Continent today. Its prime value comes, of course, from its negotiability and its—well, for want of a better term I will call it, reliability. It is hard to strike an exact figure but I see from the latest reports that a sovereign is worth approximately twenty-five pounds in Amsterdam, rather more in Brussels, and thirty pounds in Rome.

“The agent at Dieppe who handled these sovereigns – he’s in the custody of the French police, by the way – tells us that approximately fifty packages, each containing two hundred sovereigns, have been dealt with by him alone. We believe that a similar number may have been carried on the Ostend route.

“In total, gentlemen, this gives the group a purchasing power, on the continental market, of certainly not less than half a million pounds.”

McCann, who had obtained a seat at the conference through the good graces of Colonel Hunt, was interested to observe that, for the first time, a flicker of real animation had passed across the well-schooled countenance of the permanent civil servant. His lips seemed to savour the words “a cool half-million”.

“Our next efforts were directed to discovering what was being purchased with this money, and it is possible that we have not yet got the full answer. One of the lines, however, has now become tolerably clear. They are purchasing foreign jewellery.”

Here the under-secretary was clearly on the point of breaking into coherent speech, but Hazlerigg forestalled him.

“I know what you are going to say,” he said. “Why go to such absurdly roundabout lengths? Why steal jewellery in England, turn it into cash, smuggle the cash abroad, purchase more jewellery, and smuggle it back into England?”

Since this was precisely what the under-secretary had been going to say, he contented himself with a dignified cough.

“The point is this,” went on Hazlerigg. “Having all this money at their disposal the gang were able to purchase not only jewellery, but also the integrity of the jewellery-owner. There was one market above all others which lay wide open to them. The rich and noble of the pre-war period. Men and women whose nobleness was becoming a little part-worn and who were not nearly as rich as they had formerly been. French ‘ducs’ and ‘comtes’ whose conduct during the German occupation had been, to say the least of it, not entirely above suspicion – as Monsieur Bren will tell you, there were quite a number of those.”

“Of a certainty,” said M. Bren. He added a couple of descriptive epithets which fortunately were outside the school-French vocabularies of those present.

“Italian ‘marchesas’ and ‘contessas’, most of whose wealth lay now in family jewellery, carefully hidden, first from the German army and then, I am afraid, from the British and American armies as well. People who were anxious to sell, but deeply mistrustful of the currencies of their own country. People, in short, who would sell only for gold, and above all for gold in the supremely negotiable form of English sovereigns.

“You will see how the system worked if I mention one case which came to our notice. The organisation, by an agent, approached the Contessa di Alto-Cavallo and made a round offer of two thousand sovereigns for the best of her jewellery, including the Prebendini family rubies. The offer was, in itself, an attractive one being equivalent, in Italian currency, to about sixty thousand pounds. But they offered her an additional five hundred sovereigns for a statement sworn before a notary that the jewels had been lodged in England
before the war.
This statement also established that the present beneficial owner of the jewels was an English subject. This removed the last obstacle to their open sale in the English market.”

“Wait a minute,” said the Commissioner. He turned to the man on his left and said: “Can we take it, Sir Charles, that that represents the law on the subject?”

Sir Charles Bladderwick was one of the legal advisers to the Home Office and not to be rushed.

“That would depend,” he said, “on the weight given by our courts to a document sworn before a foreign notary. Without going too deeply into International Law—”

“Quite so,” said the Commissioner, “but supposing the matter never came into court at all?”

“
If
it appeared that the chattels in question were in England at the date of Italy’s entry into the war, and
if
it appeared that they were in the beneficial possession of an English national, and
provided
that there was no question of the bona fides of the transaction, then I do not think that the Administrator of Enemy Property would be able to move—”