Young Petrella (19 page)

He was standing in a hollowed-out space in the heart of the shrubbery. And somewhere ahead of him – his nose told him – a wood-fire was burning. He tiptoed forward. Then stopped. He knew that he was being watched. He heard a rustle, swung round, and something hit him on the cheek. It was an iron-hard pellet of folded paper, and it had been shot with such force that it stung like an adder. Then the silence was broken by laughter, and the crackling of running steps. Petrella did not give chase. He followed his nose through the labyrinth, until he found the fire. It was smouldering damply among the moss and leaves, and he stamped it out. Then he returned the way he had come. As he stooped to lift the railing he looked back. A face was watching him from the nearest thicket; a face which split into a grin when it saw it was observed.

“You get out of there,” said Petrella. “And your pals. Before you get into any more trouble.”

Young Maurice continued to grin but said nothing.

Petrella saw Mr. Prentice next morning and warned him to strengthen the defences of Helenwood House. But he knew it was a waste of time. There were a dozen places in the boundary where a determined boy would break through.

“If we blocked one, they’d open another,” said Mr. Prentice. “And that’d mean more damage. Thank goodness it’ll soon be off our hands.”

“How’s the sale going?” asked Petrella.

“A deposit’s been paid,” said Mr. Prentice, cautiously. “And a contract signed. Otherwise we wouldn’t have handed over the keys.” He added that it was not his firm that had the job of showing prospective tenants round. That was done personally by the managing director of the new company.

Petrella was on the point of asking for the name of the managing director, but realised, just in time, that Mr. Prentice would refuse to give it to him. In fact, he need have answered none of his questions. No offence had been committed. A swindle was in the course of being perpetrated in front of his eyes. A swindle in which a number of people, of slender means, were to robbed of their life’s savings; but if it happened to be legal robbery there was nothing to be done about it.

What Sergeant Brennan told him two days later confirmed his first instinctive feeling.

“This company of yours,” said Brennan. “It’s run by a chap called Clark. Neighbour of yours, actually. He’s got an office in Crown Road. Clark’s his present name. He changes it about once a year. All by due process of law. And he must have operated at least a hundred companies. Some have done quite well. Others have gone bust. I guess the Utopia Whatsit & Whatsit is one which is going to fold up.”

“Can’t it be stopped?”

“It’s difficult,” said Brennan. “Here’s this company. The company mind you, not Clark. It says to you, we’re buying certain properties and converting them into flats. As a gesture of good faith it pays a fifty-quid deposit on some old shambles of a property, and gets hold of the keys. Then it starts showing people over it. And collects five hundred pounds from all of them. Ten, twenty, thirty people – or however many it can get interested.”

“It’s clearly a fraud,” said Petrella. “You couldn’t make twenty flats out of Helenwood House.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” said Brennan wearily. “But what’s to prevent the company buying more houses? It might too, if things go well. But sooner or later, and in this case probably sooner, it’ll go bust.”

“This Clark character. He’s got money of his own?”

“You bet he’s got money.”

“Then if I was one of his customers, I’d sue him for my five hundred pounds.”

“You’re not dealing with him. You could sue the company, of course. Only by that time it’s got no money left. What there was has been spent. On management expenses.”

“That means by Mr. Clark on Mr. Clark.”

“Right.”

“God, what a set-up,” said Petrella. He thought of Mrs. Catt, and her daughter and her daughter’s husband, and the money which they had saved.

“What can anyone do?”

“There’s just one chance,” said Brennan. “If you strike the right moment, near the beginning of the ramp, when there
is
a little money in the kitty and all the mugs aren’t in, and slap in a writ, you might get your stake back just to keep you quiet.”

“I’d judge it’s already too late for that,” said Petrella. “This particular racket’s been running for weeks. Would it be any good if I called on him and tried to scare him?”

“Certainly. If you want him to get straight through on the blower to your boss enquiring what authority you’d got for threatening him.”

“I see,” said Petrella.

Nevertheless he made a point of being at the end of Crown Road when Mr. Clark emerged from his office that evening. He saw a small, stout person with a figure like a ripe pear and a face like a frog; if you can imagine a frog wearing rimless glasses. Behind the glasses a pair of liquid brown eyes looked out on the world. Nor did the eyes miss much. Mr. Clark came straight across the road to where Petrella was standing, said “Good evening, Sergeant,” and passed on. Petrella was on the point of departing himself when the door of the office block opened for a second time, and a girl came out. A girl, moreover, whom he recognised.

Later that evening he visited the All Night Cafe in Exeter Street and had a word with its proprietor, Mr. Peggs.

“I never knew your daughter worked locally,” he said. “I thought you told me she’d got a job with some solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn.”

“So she had,” said Mr. Peggs, who was a large man and served large meals to his customers, but himself lived almost entirely off bismuth tablets. “And a good job, too. But I had to fix it so’s she could be home lunchtimes. Her mother’s been bad lately.”

“So she works for Mr. Clark?”

“That’s right,” said Peggs. “He’s in house property. Nothing wrong with him, I suppose?”

Petrella took a deep breath. He liked Mr. Peggs, and had always found him trustworthy.

“If your daughter can turn up anything,” he said quietly, “I’d just like to hear about it.”

“Like that is it?” said Mr. Peggs thoughtfully. “Well, she might be able to help. Between you and me, I don’t think she’s got a lot of use for him. Personally speaking. He keeps her late – after hours – you know.”

“You mean he makes passes at her?”

Mr. Peggs loosed a sudden bellow of laughter which rattled the coffee urn.

“You want to brush up your psychology, boy,” he said. “He keeps her late and
don’t
make passes at her. That’s what makes a girl mad.”

After which a week went by. A week in which Petrella got on with a lot of other jobs and tried to forget about Helenwood House. And was reminded of it every time he saw Mrs. Catt.

He gathered that the conversion had not started yet. “He’s going to have a narkiteck round soon. Measuring up,” said Mrs. Catt, but she didn’t say it very hopefully.

Then, at ten o’clock one night, just as Petrella was leaving the CID room, the telephone rang. It was Mr. Peggs, and even allowing for the distortion of a bad line, Petrella could tell that he was excited.

“Drop in for a cuppa on your way home,” he said. “I heard something that’s going to make you laugh.”

Five minutes later Petrella was listening to Peggs with growing incredulity.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Certain,” said Mr. Peggs. “She’s a good girl. Wooden make a mistake about a thing like that. The switchboard’s in her room. She’s only got to plug in. Listen to everything.”

“And he turned it down?”

“Turned it down flat. You asked for something funny, and if that isn’t funny, what is? He gives five hundred pounds for a rotten old house – and when I say gives it, he hasn’t even done that yet. Just paid fifty for a deposit. And now this woman comes along and offers him three thousand for it. And he turns it down. Flat.”

“Perhaps he really does intend to develop the property.”

“Develop my second-best trousers,” said Mr. Peggs. “From what my girl tells me, it’s a stone-cold ramp.”

“Then why did he turn down a nice quick profit of two thousand five hundred?”

“You haven’t heard half of it. Hour later she rings again. Now she’s offering three thousand five hundred. That’s her last word, she says. Only the way she says it makes it sound as if she might raise a bit more steam if you pushed her.”

“And Clark turned that down too?”

“He’s wavering,” said Mr. Peggs.

“Look here,” said Petrella. “This sounds like a miracle. I want to know the minute Clark says yes. And I want an introduction to the solicitor your daughter used to work for. If what I’ve got in mind comes off, I know someone who’ll buy your daughter a new evening-dress. And I’ll take her dancing myself the first time she wears it.”

“Do what we can,” said Mr. Peggs.

The following afternoon the call came through.

“Old Clark’s done it,” said Mr. Peggs. “After lunch. Four thousand smackers.”

“Is it just talk? Or is it settled?”

“Signed, sealed and delivered. Very business-like lady. Brought round a contract with her, signed it on the spot.”

“Excellent,” said Petrella. “Excellent. The first thing Clark’ll find on his desk tomorrow will be a writ for five hundred pounds. Let’s see him wriggle out of this one.”

“Another funny thing,” said Mr. Peggs. “Guess who the lady was.”

“Whoever she was, she was an angel in disguise.”

“Heavily disguised,” said Mr. Peggs with a throaty chuckle. “It was Bull Meister’s old lady, Annie.”

“Mrs. Meister!”

“S’right.”

Petrella said “Good God” softly and put down the telephone. Up to that point he had been obsessed with the personal aspect of his battle of wits with Mr. Clark. Now, quite suddenly, he forgot about Mr. Clark and Mrs. Catt and Mrs. Catt’s married daughter and Utopia Developments, and started thinking like a policeman again.

And as he did so, a pattern came to light. A pattern of startling simplicity.

The redoubtable Bull Meister, perpetrator of the mail-van robbery, earns himself a three-year sentence, which still has a month or two to run. Bull’s own share of the robbery, between twenty and thirty thousand old, but still quite serviceable, pound notes, is never recovered. And now Mrs. Meister is prepared to lay out four thousand hard-earned pounds, and for what? For an ancient and decaying building like Helenwood House. A building in whose grounds, moreover, he had himself caught young Maurice Meister, only a day or two before.

“It’s a snip,” he said enthusiastically to Chief Inspector Haxtell. “And what brought Mrs. Meister finally out into the open?”

“You tell me,” said Haxtell.

“Why, the fact that Clark announced that he was going to put an architect in to measure up for conversion. He probably didn’t mean it. It was done to keep his subscribers quiet. But it produced Mrs. Meister, in a sweat, with four thousand pounds in her pocket.”

“Yes,” said Haxtell. “It looks as if you could be right. What do you suggest?”

“I’d suggest,” said Petrella, “that we borrow a couple of professional searchers from Central and go right in tonight. Unofficially. If anyone makes a fuss we can always say we were looking for tramps.”

Haxtell considered the matter carefully, from all possible angles, and then said, “Do you know, I think I’ll come with you myself. It’s a long time since I’ve been on a treasure hunt.”

They found Bull Meister’s hoard, packed in biscuit tins, sealed with adhesive tape, and stacked in an old recess beside the chimney front in the best bedroom. It was a neat job. The recesses on both sides had been masked with plywood and covered with distemper. The cache came to light only when the professional searchers, one of whom was a qualified architect, had made certain measurements and deductions. On Haxtell’s suggestion they replaced the plywood as carefully as they had removed it. So far as they were aware no one observed them either coming or going.

“There’s no problem about the notes,” said Haxtell. “We’ll tell the bank they’ve been recovered and they can continue quietly on their journey to the pulping mill. The real question is, what else do we do?”

“I don’t really see, sir,” said Petrella slowly, “that we need actually do anything at all. My landlady’s married daughter got a cheque for five hundred pounds this morning. And the rest of the business looks like sorting itself out very satisfactorily. Really, very satisfactorily indeed.”

“What’s in your mind?”

“Well,” said Petrella, and there was an almost ecstatic note in his voice, “don’t you see? Bull’s due out very shortly, and he’s bound to think that Clark found the notes and removed them. And not only removed them, but sold the house to Bull’s wife for four thousand pounds. I should think he’d cut off
both
his ears, wouldn’t you?”

During his tour of duty at Highside, Detective Sergeant Petrella encountered quite a number of memorable people, but he never remembered anyone quite like Judge Vereker.

James Vereker was an official of the Colonial Service and had held judicial office in Palestine, in Kenya and, more recently, in Cyprus. He was a small, cheerful, birdlike person who dragged a clubfoot behind him, and possessed the whole of a right hand and part of a left hand – the missing fingers had been blown off by an ingenious greetings telegram sent him on his fiftieth birthday, by Irgun Zvai Leumi. Vereker was a bachelor; which may have been as well in all the circumstances. When Petrella encountered him, he was under sentence of death.

The Judge told him so himself, perched on the fender seat in his cosy, second-storey flat in the new block on Heath Hill, while Petrella sat, ill at ease, in the single armchair.

“They’re an offshoot – a sort of foreign working party – of Anorthotikou Komonia Ergezonienou Laou. That’s really another name for the local communist party.”

“Just why should they want to kill you, sir?”

“Expediency,” said the Judge. “Of course, that’s not what they say. The ostensible reason is revenge. I sentenced one of their members, George Antinas, to death for terrorism. They made a terrific fight to save him. It was last year. You may have read about it.”

Petrella nodded. Like everyone else in England, he had read about it. Half the Press had made out that George, who had spent most of his life in England, was a young William Tell; the other half had presented him as a vicious paid-assassin. Overpaid, apparently, for he had badly bungled his last job, which was the blowing up of a police station, and had fallen alive into the hands of the men he had set out to destroy.